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  1. Mortal Questions.[author unknown] - 1979 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 43 (3):578-578.
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  • The Manipulation Argument.Kristin Mickelson - 2017 - In Kevin Timpe, Meghan Griffith & Neil Levy (eds.), Routledge Companion to Free Will. New York: Routledge.
    "The Manipulation Argument has recently taken center stage in the free-will debate, yet little else can be said of this newcomer that is uncontroversial. At present, even the most fundamental elements of the Manipulation Argument--its structure, conclusion, and target audience--are a matter of dispute. As such, we cannot begin, as we ideally would, with a simple and relatively uncontroversial overview of the argument. Instead, clarifying the debate over the basic structure and general conclusion of the Manipulation Argument will be our (...)
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  • The Zygote Argument is invalid: Now what?Kristin Mickelson - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (11):2911-2929.
    This paper is based on the comments I gave to Alfred Mele regarding his original Zygote Argument during my presentation at a small workshop on manipulation arguments in Budapest back in 2012. After those comments, Mele changed the conclusion of his original Zygote Argument and redefined 'incompatibilism' so that it would refer to the conclusion of his new Zygote Argument (Mele 2013+). Yet, over the last decade, Mele has made no comment in print about the changes he made nor the (...)
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  • On an argument for the impossibility of moral responsibility.Randolph Clarke - 2005 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1):13-24.
    Galen Strawson has published several versions of an argument to the effect that moral responsibility is impossible, whether determinism is true or not. Few philosophers have been persuaded by the argument, which Strawson remarks is often dismissed “as wrong, or irrelevant, or fatuous, or too rapid, or an expression of metaphysical megalomania.” I offer here a two-part explanation of why Strawson’s argument has impressed so few. First, as he usually states it, the argument is lacking at least one key premise. (...)
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  • Improving the Metaphysical Argument Against Free Will.Noel Hendrickson - 2007 - Philosophical Papers 36 (2):271-294.
    Galen Strawson and Saul Smilansky have offered a well-known argument that free will does not exist because the control involved is so robust that it would require influence over an infinite series of prior decisions. (Strawson 1986, 1994, 2002, Smilansky 2000, 2002) Unfortunately, while this metaphysical argument has attracted widespread attention, it has garnered few adherents. Thus, in order to improve the metaphysical argument against free will, I offer a new interpretation of the argument, its fundamental principle, and its relationship (...)
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  • Free will.Galen Strawson - 1998 - In Edward Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge.
    ‘Free will’ is the conventional name of a topic that is best discussed without reference to the will. It is a topic in metaphysics and ethics as much as in the philosophy of mind. Its central questions are ‘What is it to act (or choose) freely?’, and ‘What is it to be morally responsible for one’s actions (or choices)?’ These two questions are closely connected, for it seems clear that freedom of action is a necessary condition of moral responsibility, even (...)
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  • The Bounds of freedom.Galen Strawson - 2001 - In Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 441-460.
    The shortest form of the Basic Argument against free will and moral responsibility runs as follows: [1] When you act, you do what you do—in the situation in which you find yourself—because of the way you are. [2] If you do what you do because of the way you are, then in order to be fully and ultimately responsible for what you do you must be fully and ultimately responsible for the way you are. But [3] You cannot be fully (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility.Matthew Talbert - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral responsibility.
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  • Moral Responsibility: An Introduction.Matthew Talbert - 2016 - Malden, MA: Polity.
    Most people would agree that a small child, or a cognitively impaired adult, is less responsible for their actions, good or bad, than an unimpaired adult. But how do we explain that difference, and how far can anyone be praised or blamed for what they have done? In this fascinating introduction, Matthew Talbert explores some of the key questions shaping current debates about moral responsibility, including: What is free will, and is it required for moral responsibility? Are we responsible for (...)
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  • Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.Bernard Williams - 1985 - Cambridge, Mass.: Routledge.
    With a new foreword by Jonathan Lear 'Remarkably lively and enjoyable…It is a very rich book, containing excellent descriptions of a variety of moral theories, and innumerable and often witty observations on topics encountered on the way.' -_ Times Literary Supplement_ Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Drawing on the (...)
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  • Luck: Its Nature and Significance for Human Knowledge and Agency.E. J. Coffman - 2015 - New York, USA: Palgrave Macmillan.
    As thinkers in the market for knowledge and agents aspiring to morally responsible action, we are inevitably subject to luck. This book presents a comprehensive new theory of luck in light of a critical appraisal of the literature's leading accounts, then brings this new theory to bear on issues in the theory of knowledge and philosophy of action.
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  • A Minimal Libertarianism: Free Will and the Promise of Reduction.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2018 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    In this book, Christopher Evan Franklin develops and defends a novel version of event-causal libertarianism. This view is a combination of libertarianism--the view that humans sometimes act freely and that those actions are the causal upshots of nondeterministic processes--and agency reductionism--the view that the causal role of the agent in exercises of free will is exhausted by the causal role of mental states and events (e.g., desires and beliefs) involving the agent. Franklin boldly counteracts a dominant theory that has similar (...)
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  • The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays.Paul Russell - 2017 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    The Limits of Free Will presents influential articles by Paul Russell concerning free will and moral responsibility. The problems arising in this field of philosophy, which are deeply rooted in the history of the subject, are also intimately related to a wide range of other fields, such as law and criminology, moral psychology, theology, and, more recently, neuroscience. These articles were written and published over a period of three decades, although most have appeared in the past decade. Among the topics (...)
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  • Luck and moral responsibility.Michael J. Zimmerman - 1987 - Ethics 97 (2):374-386.
    The following argument is addressed: (1) a person is morally responsible for an event's occurring only if that event's occurring was not a matter of luck; (2) no event is such that its occurring is not a matter of luck; therefore, (3) no event is such that someone is morally responsible for its occurring. Two notions of control are distinguished: restricted and complete. (2) is shown false on the first interpretation, (1) on the second. The discussion involves a distinction between (...)
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  • Responsibility, Freedom, and Reason. [REVIEW]John Martin Fischer - 1992 - Ethics 102 (2):368-389.
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  • Freedom within Reason by Susan Wolf. [REVIEW]Bernard Berofsky - 1992 - Journal of Philosophy 89 (4):202-208.
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  • Character and Responsibility.Susan Wolf - 2015 - Journal of Philosophy 112 (7):356-372.
    Many philosophers have been persuaded that if we don’t create our own characters, we cannot be responsible for acts that flow from our characters; they also raise doubts about whether acts that do not flow from our characters can fairly be attributed to us. Both these concerns, however, reflect a simplistic and implausible conception of character and of its relation to our actions and our selves. I suggest a different relationship between character and responsibility: We can be responsible for acts (...)
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  • Moral Luck.B. A. O. Williams & T. Nagel - 1976 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 50:115 - 151.
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  • Moral Luck.B. A. O. Williams & T. Nagel - 1976 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 50 (1):115-152.
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  • Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.Alan Gewirth - 1988 - Noûs 22 (1):143-146.
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  • Ethics and the limits of philosophy.Bernard Williams - 1985 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    By the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Presenting a sustained critique of moral theory from Kant onwards, Williams reorients ethical theory towards ‘truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life’. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy (...)
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  • 4. Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme.Gary Watson - 1987 - In John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza (eds.), Perspectives on Moral Responsibility. Cornell University Press. pp. 119-148.
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  • Freedom within Reason.Gary Watson - 1992 - Philosophical Review 101 (4):890.
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  • Review of R. Jay Wallace: Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments[REVIEW]John Martin Fischer - 1996 - Ethics 106 (4):850-853.
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  • Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments.R. Jay Wallace - 1994 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    R. Jay Wallace argues in this book that moral accountability hinges on questions of fairness: When is it fair to hold people morally responsible for what they do? Would it be fair to do so even in a deterministic world? To answer these questions, we need to understand what we are doing when we hold people morally responsible, a stance that Wallace connects with a central class of moral sentiments, those of resentment, indignation, and guilt. To hold someone responsible, he (...)
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  • Précis of Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments.R. Jay Wallace - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (3):680-681.
    Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments offers an account of moral responsibility. It addresses the question: what are the forms of capacity or ability that render us morally accountable for the things we do? A traditional answer has it that the conditions of moral responsibility include freedom of the will, where this in turn involves the availability of robust alternative possibilities. I reject this answer, arguing that the conditions of moral responsibility do not include any condition of alternative possibilities. In the (...)
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  • Agent causation and the alleged impossibility of rational free action.Chris Tucker - 2007 - Erkenntnis 67 (1):17 - 27.
    Galen Strawson has claimed that "the impossibility of free will and ultimate moral responsibility can be proved with complete certainty." Strawson, I take it, thinks that this conclusion can be established by one argument which he has developed. In this argument, he claims that rational free actions would require an infinite regress of rational choices, which is, of course, impossible for human beings. In my paper, I argue that agent causation theorists need not be worried by Strawson's argument. For agent (...)
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  • The unhelpfulness of determinism. [REVIEW]Galen Strawson - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1):149-56.
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  • The impossibility of moral responsibility.Galen Strawson - 1994 - Philosophical Studies 75 (1-2):5-24.
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  • Free Will, Art and Morality.Paul Russell - 2008 - The Journal of Ethics 12 (3-4):307 - 325.
    The discussion in this paper begins with some observations regarding a number of structural similarities between art and morality as it involves human agency. On the basis of these observations we may ask whether or not incompatibilist worries about free will are relevant to both art and morality. One approach is to claim that libertarian free will is essential to our evaluations of merit and desert in both spheres. An alternative approach, is to claim that free will is required only (...)
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  • Living without Free Will.A. R. Mele - 2003 - Mind 112 (446):375-378.
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  • Moral responsibility and the continuation problem.Alfred R. Mele - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 162 (2):237-255.
    Typical incompatibilists about moral responsibility and determinism contend that being basically morally responsible for a decision one makes requires that, if that decision has proximal causes, it is not deterministically caused by them. This article develops a problem for this contention that resembles what is sometimes called the problem of present (or cross-world) luck. However, the problem makes no reference to luck nor to contrastive explanation. This article also develops a solution.
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  • Free Will and Luck.Alfred R. Mele - 2006 - New York, US: Oxford University Press.
    Mele's ultimate purpose in this book is to help readers think more clearly about free will. He identifies and makes vivid the most important conceptual obstacles to justified belief in the existence of free will and meets them head on. Mele clarifies the central issues in the philosophical debate about free will and moral responsibility, criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will, and develops two overlapping conceptions of free will--one for readers who are convinced that free will is incompatible (...)
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  • Moral ignorance and blameworthiness.Elinor Mason - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (11):3037-3057.
    In this paper I discuss various hard cases that an account of moral ignorance should be able to deal with: ancient slave holders, Susan Wolf’s JoJo, psychopaths such as Robert Harris, and finally, moral outliers. All these agents are ignorant, but it is not at all clear that they are blameless on account of their ignorance. I argue that the discussion of this issue in recent literature has missed the complexities of these cases by focusing on the question of epistemic (...)
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  • Free Will and Ultimate Explanation.Boris Kment - 2017 - Philosophical Issues 27 (1):114-130.
    Many philosophers and non-philosophers who reflect on the causal antecedents of human action get the impression that no agent can have morally relevant freedom. Call this the ‘non-existence impression.’ The paper aims to understand the (often implicit) reasoning underlying this impression. On the most popular reconstructions, the reasoning relies on the assumption that either an action is the outcome of a chance process, or it is determined by factors that are beyond the agent’s control or which she did not bring (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility and Foundationalism.Stephen Kershnar - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (2):381-402.
    If an individual is morally responsible, then there is a responsibility-foundation that makes him morally responsible, but there is no responsibility-foundation that makes him responsible. This rested on the notion that if there were a responsibility-foundation, it would be either an ungrounded choice or an ungrounded character state and that neither can serve as the foundation. The paper then considered three types of objections. First, moral responsibility does not require a responsibility-foundation. Second, a character state can serve as the foundation. (...)
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  • The Significance of Free Will.Robert Kane - 1996 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 60 (1):129-134.
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  • Libertarianism.Robert Kane - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 144 (1):35-44.
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  • Morality and bad luck.Judith Jarvis Thomson - 1989 - Metaphilosophy 20 (3-4):203-221.
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  • A second paradox concerning responsibility and luck.John Greco - 1995 - Metaphilosophy 26 (1-2):81-96.
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  • Concerning the resilience of Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument.Michael Anthony Istvan - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 155 (3):399-420.
    Against its prominent compatiblist and libertarian opponents, I defend Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument for the impossibility of moral responsibility. Against John Martin Fischer, I argue that the Basic Argument does not rely on the premise that an agent can be responsible for an action only if he is responsible for every factor contributing to that action. Against Alfred Mele and Randolph Clarke, I argue that it is absurd to believe that an agent can be responsible for an action when no (...)
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  • Is responsibility essentially impossible?Susan L. Hurley - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 99 (2):229-268.
    Part 1 reviews the general question of when elimination of an entity orproperty is warranted, as opposed to revision of our view of it. Theconnections of this issue with the distinction between context-drivenand theory-driven accounts of reference and essence are probed.Context-driven accounts tend to be less hospitable to eliminativism thantheory-driven accounts, but this tendency should not be overstated.However, since both types of account give essences explanatory depth,eliminativist claims associated with supposed impossible essences areproblematic on both types of account.Part 2 applies (...)
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  • Is Responsible Essentially Impossible.S. L. Hurley - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 99 (2):229-268.
    Part 1 reviews the general question of when elimination of an entity orproperty is warranted, as opposed to revision of our view of it. Theconnections of this issue with the distinction between context-drivenand theory-driven accounts of reference and essence are probed.Context-driven accounts tend to be less hospitable to eliminativism thantheory-driven accounts, but this tendency should not be overstated.However, since both types of account give essences explanatory depth,eliminativist claims associated with supposed impossible essences areproblematic on both types of account.Part 2 applies (...)
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  • In Defense of Moral Luck: Why Luck Often Affects Praiseworthiness and Blameworthiness.Robert J. Hartman - 2017 - New York: Routledge.
    There is a contradiction in our ideas about moral responsibility. In one strand of our thinking, we believe that a person can become more blameworthy by luck. Consider some examples in order to make that idea concrete. Two reckless drivers manage their vehicles in the same way, and one but not the other kills a pedestrian. Two corrupt judges would each freely take a bribe if one were offered. By luck of the courthouse draw, only one judge is offered a (...)
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  • Character-development and heaven.Luke Henderson - 2014 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 76 (3):319-330.
    Numerous philosophers in recent decades have argued that a partial explanation for how the blessed in heaven are impeccable while remaining free and responsible is that they have cultivated or developed such a virtuous character prior to heaven that once in heaven they are incapable of acting contrary to their virtuously cultivated characters. Further, because the agents are at least partially responsible for the construction of their characters, they can be considered free and responsible with regard to the choices or (...)
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  • Moral Luck and The Unfairness of Morality.Robert J. Hartman - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (12):3179-3197.
    Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Kinds of moral luck are differentiated by the source of lack of control such as the results of her actions, the circumstances in which she finds herself, and the way in which she is constituted. Many philosophers accept the existence of some of these kinds of moral luck but not others, because, in their view, the existence of only some of them would (...)
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  • Responsible Belief: A Theory in Ethics and Epistemology.Rik Peels - 2016 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA.
    This book develops and defends a theory of responsible belief. The author argues that we lack control over our beliefs, but that we can nonetheless influence them. It is because we have intellectual obligations to influence our beliefs that we are responsible for them.
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  • The Physiognomy of Responsibility.John Martin Fischer & Neal A. Tognazzini - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (2):381-417.
    Our aim in this paper is to put the concept of moral responsibility under a microscope. At the lowest level of magnification, it appears unified. But Gary Watson has taught us that if we zoom in, we will find that moral responsibility has two faces: attributability and accountability. Or, to describe the two faces in different terms, there is a difference between being responsible and holding responsible. It is one thing to talk about the connection the agent has with her (...)
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  • The Cards that are Dealt You.John Martin Fischer - 2006 - The Journal of Ethics 10 (1-2):107-129.
    Various philosophers have argued that in order to be morally responsible, we need to be the "ultimate sources'' of our choices and behavior. Although there are different versions of this sort of argument, I identify a "picture'' that lies behind them, and I contend that this picture is misleading. Joel Feinberg helpfully suggested that we scale down what might initially be thought to be legitimate demands on "self-creation,'' rather than jettison the idea that we are truly and robustly responsible. I (...)
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  • The Cards that are Dealt You.John Martin Fischer - 2006 - The Journal of Ethics 10 (1-2):107-129.
    Various philosophers have argued that in order to be morally responsible, we need to be the "ultimate sources'' of our choices and behavior. Although there are different versions of this sort of argument, I identify a "picture'' that lies behind them, and I contend that this picture is misleading. Joel Feinberg helpfully suggested that we scale down what might initially be thought to be legitimate demands on "self-creation,'' rather than jettison the idea that we are truly and robustly responsible. I (...)
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