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  1. (1 other version)An Essay on Free Will.Peter van Inwagen - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    "This is an important book, and no one interested in issues which touch on the free will will want to ignore it."--Ethics. In this stimulating and thought-provoking book, the author defends the thesis that free will is incompatible with determinism. He disputes the view that determinism is necessary for moral responsbility. Finding no good reason for accepting determinism, but believing moral responsiblity to be indubitable, he concludes that determinism should be rejected.
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  • The Significance of Free Will.Robert Kane - 1996 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
    Robert Kane provides a critical overview of debates about free will of the past half century, relating this recent inquiry to the broader history of the free will issue and to vital currents of twentieth century thought. Kane also defends a traditional libertarian or incompatibilist view of free will, employing arguments that are both new to philosophy and that respond to contemporary developments in physics and biology, neuro science, and the cognitive and behavioral sciences.
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  • Living Without Free Will.Derk Pereboom - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Most people assume that, even though some degenerative or criminal behavior may be caused by influences beyond our control, ordinary human actions are not similarly generated, but rather are freely chosen, and we can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for them. A less popular and more radical claim is that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform. It is this hard determinist stance that Derk Pereboom articulates in Living Without Free Will. Pereboom argues that our best scientific (...)
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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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  • .Peter van Inwagen - 1988
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  • (1 other version)Living without Free Will.Derk Pereboom - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):308-310.
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  • (1 other version)Moral responsibility and determinism: The cognitive science of folk intuitions.Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe - 2007 - Noûs 41 (4):663–685.
    An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.
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  • Causation and Free Will.Carolina Sartorio - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK.
    Carolina Sartorio argues that only the actual causes of our behaviour matter to our freedom. The key, she claims, lies in a correct understanding of the role played by causation in a view of that kind. Causation has some important features that make it a responsibility-grounding relation, and this contributes to the success of the view. Also, when agents act freely, the actual causes are richer than they appear to be at first sight; in particular, they reflect the agents' sensitivity (...)
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  • Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about free will and moral responsibility.Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer & Jason Turner - 2005 - Philosophical Psychology 18 (5):561-584.
    Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Living without Free Will.Derk Pereboom - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2):494-497.
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  • The Significance of Free Will.Robert Kane - 1996 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 60 (1):129-134.
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  • An essay on free will.Peter van Inwagen & A. Phillips Griffiths - 1985 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 175 (4):557-558.
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  • (1 other version)Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?Jason Turner, Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris & Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1):28-53.
    Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...)
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  • How Physics Makes Us Free.Jenann Ismael - 2016 - , US: Oxford University Press USA.
    In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of (...)
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  • My Compatibilist Proposal.Alfred R. Mele - 2006 - In Free Will and Luck. New York, US: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter defends a history-sensitive compatibilist view of free action and moral responsibility against various criticisms by compatibilists. It constructs a new argument for incompatibilism that makes vivid a problem that luck poses for compatibilism: the zygote argument. It is argued that the zygote argument is much more powerful than more familiar arguments for incompatibilism, and that, even so, compatibilism may survive the attack.
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  • The Lesson of Bypassing.David Rose & Shaun Nichols - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (4):599-619.
    The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivators for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane Journal of Philosophy 96:217–240 1999, Strawson 1986). And a number of recent studies find that people give apparently incompatibilist responses in vignette studies. When participants are presented with a description of a causal deterministic universe, they tend to deny that people (...)
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  • A Hard-line Reply to Pereboom’s Four-Case Manipulation Argument.Michael Mckenna - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1):142-159.
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  • (1 other version)Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions.Shaun Nichols & Joshua Knobe - 2008 - In Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  • Defeating Manipulation Arguments: Interventionist causation and compatibilist sourcehood.Oisín Deery & Eddy Nahmias - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (5):1255-1276.
    We use recent interventionist theories of causation to develop a compatibilist account of causal sourcehood, which provides a response to Manipulation Arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Our account explains the difference between manipulation and determinism, against the claim of Manipulation Arguments that there is no relevant difference. Interventionism allows us to see that causal determinism does not mean that variables outside of the agent causally explain her actions better than variables within the agent, whereas the causal (...)
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  • Bringing moral responsibility down to earth.Adina L. Roskies & Shaun Nichols - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (7):371-388.
    Thought experiments have played a central role in philosophical methodology, largely as a means of elucidating the nature of our concepts and the implications of our theories.1 Particular attention is given to widely shared “folk” intuitions – the basic untutored intuitions that the layperson has about philosophical questions.2 The folk intuition is meant to underlie our core metaphysical concepts, and philosophical analysis is meant to explicate or sometimes refine these naïve concepts. Consistency with the deliverances of folk intuitions is a (...)
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  • Free actions as a natural kind.Oisín Deery - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):823-843.
    Do we have free will? Understanding free will as the ability to act freely, and free actions as exercises of this ability, I maintain that the default answer to this question is “yes.” I maintain that free actions are a natural kind, by relying on the influential idea that kinds are homeostatic property clusters. The resulting position builds on the view that agents are a natural kind and yields an attractive alternative to recent revisionist accounts of free action. My view (...)
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  • Defusing Existential and Universal Threats to Compatibilism: A Strawsonian Dilemma for Manipulation Arguments.Andrew J. Latham & Hannah Tierney - 2022 - Journal of Philosophy 119 (3):144-161.
    Many manipulation arguments against compatibilism rely on the claim that manipulation is relevantly similar to determinism. But we argue that manipulation is nothing like determinism in one relevant respect. Determinism is a "universal" phenomenon: its scope includes every feature of the universe. But manipulation arguments feature cases where an agent is the only manipulated individual in her universe. Call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents "existential manipulation." Our responsibility practices are impacted in different ways by (...)
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  • Manipulation and the Zygote Argument: Another Reply.Markus E. Schlosser - 2015 - The Journal of Ethics 19 (1):73-84.
    Alfred Mele’s zygote argument is widely considered to be the strongest version of the manipulation argument against compatibilism (about free will and determinism). Opponents have focused largely on the first of its two premises and on the overall dialectic. My focus here will be on the underlying thought experiment—the Diana scenario—and on the second premise of the argument. I will argue that reflection on the Diana scenario shows that the second premise does not hold, and we will see that my (...)
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  • A new approach to manipulation arguments.Patrick Todd - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 152 (1):127-133.
    There are several argumentative strategies for advancing the thesis that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism. One prominent such strategy is to argue that agents who meet compatibilist conditions for moral responsibility can nevertheless be subject to responsibility-undermining manipulation. In this paper, I argue that incompatibilists advancing manipulation arguments against compatibilism have been shouldering an unnecessarily heavy dialectical burden. Traditional manipulation arguments present cases in which manipulated agents meet all compatibilist conditions for moral responsibility, but are (allegedly) not responsible (...)
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  • The Zygote Argument remixed.J. M. Fischer - 2011 - Analysis 71 (2):267-272.
    John and Mary have fully consensual sex, but they do not want to have a child, so they use contraception with the intention of avoiding pregnancy. Unfortunately, although they used the contraception in the way in which it is supposed to be used, Mary has become pregnant. The couple decides to have the baby, whom they name ‘Ernie’. Now we fill in the story a bit. The universe is causally deterministic, and 30 years later Ernie performs some action A and (...)
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  • The Threat of Effective Intentions to Moral Responsibility in the Zygote Argument.Robyn Repko Waller - 2014 - Philosophia 42 (1):209-222.
    In Free Will and Luck, Mele presents a case of an agent Ernie, whose zygote was intentionally designed so that Ernie A-s in 30 years, bringing about a certain event E. Mele uses this case of original design to outline the zygote argument against compatibilism. In this paper I criticize the zygote argument. Unlike other compatibilists who have responded to the zygote argument, I contend that it is open to the compatibilist to accept premise one, that Ernie does not act (...)
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  • (1 other version)Manipulating Morality: Third‐Party Intentions Alter Moral Judgments by Changing Causal Reasoning.Jonathan Phillips & Alex Shaw - 2014 - Cognitive Science 38 (8):1320-1347.
    The present studies investigate how the intentions of third parties influence judgments of moral responsibility for other agents who commit immoral acts. Using cases in which an agent acts under some situational constraint brought about by a third party, we ask whether the agent is blamed less for the immoral act when the third party intended for that act to occur. Study 1 demonstrates that third-party intentions do influence judgments of blame. Study 2 finds that third-party intentions only influence moral (...)
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  • What Am I?J. T. Ismael - 2016 - In Jenann Ismael (ed.), How Physics Makes Us Free. , US: Oxford University Press USA.
    Dennett’s story “Where am I?” is used to set up the difficulty of locating the self in the natural world. The story is told from a first-person point of view in which the narrator maintains his identity across exchanges of brain and body, but there is no physical thing in the story that can act as bearer of his identity. The story seems to present a dilemma between Cartesian dualism and Dennett’s a “no-self” view. This chapter argues for a third (...)
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  • Incompatibilism and "Bypassed" Agency.Gunnar Björnsson - 2014 - In Alfred R. Mele (ed.), Surrounding Free Will: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience. New York: Oup Usa. pp. 95–112.
    Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray have recently argued that when people take agents to lack responsibility in deterministic scenarios, they do so because they take agents’ beliefs, desires and decisions to be bypassed, having no effect on their actions. This might seem like an improbable mistake, but the Bypass Hypothesis is bolstered by intriguing experimental data. Moreover, if the hypothesis is correct, it provides a straightforward error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. This chapter argues that the Bypass Hypothesis, although promising and (...)
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  • Resisting the Manipulation Argument: A Hard‐Liner Takes It on the Chin.Michael McKenna - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2):467-484.
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  • Effects of Manipulation on Attributions of Causation, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility.Dylan Murray & Tania Lombrozo - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (2):447-481.
    If someone brings about an outcome without intending to, is she causally and morally responsible for it? What if she acts intentionally, but as the result of manipulation by another agent? Previous research has shown that an agent's mental states can affect attributions of causal and moral responsibility to that agent, but little is known about what effect one agent's mental states can have on attributions to another agent. In Experiment 1, we replicate findings that manipulation lowers attributions of responsibility (...)
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  • The Conceptual Impossibility of Free Will Error Theory.Andrew J. Latham - 2019 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 15 (2):99-120.
    This paper argues for a view of free will that I will call the conceptual impossibility of the truth of free will error theory - the conceptual impossibility thesis. I will argue that given the concept of free will we in fact deploy, it is impossible for our free will judgements - judgements regarding whether some action is free or not - to be systematically false. Since we do judge many of our actions to be free, it follows from the (...)
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  • Pereboom and premises: Asking the right questions in the experimental philosophy of free will.Adam Feltz - 2013 - Consciousness and Cognition 22 (1):53-63.
    Sommers (2010) argues that experimental philosophers of free will have largely been asking the wrong question – the question whether philosophically naïve individuals think that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. The present studies begin to alleviate this concern by testing the intuitive plausibility of Pereboom’s (2001) four case argument. The general pattern of responses from two experiments does not support Pereboom’s predictions. Moreover, those who were high in the personality trait emotional stability tended to judge that (...)
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  • Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will and Moral Responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson & Derk Pereboom - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 142–157.
    The chapter begins by introducing the problem of free will and moral responsibility and the standard terminology used to frame it in the philosophical context. It turns to the contributions of experimental philosophy and the prospects for the use of this methodology in the area. People believe that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates. The chapter discusses an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy nahmias and colleagues, and the role that empirical studies might have in the (...)
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  • Manipulation Arguments, Basic Desert, and Moral Responsibility: Assessing Derk Pereboom’s Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life.Michael McKenna - 2017 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (3):575-589.
    In this paper I critically assess Derk Pereboom’s book, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. In it, I resist Pereboom’s manipulation argument for incompatibilism and his indictment of desert-based accounts of moral responsibility.
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  • (1 other version)Manipulating Morality: Third-Party Intentions Alter Moral Judgments by Changing Causal Reasoning.Jonathan Phillips & Alex Shaw - 2015 - Cognitive Science 39 (6):1320-1347.
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  • The mad scientist meets the robot cats: Compatibilism, kinds, and counterexamples.Mark Heller - 1996 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (2):333-37.
    In 1962 Hilary Putnam forced us to face the possibility of robot cats. More than twenty years later Daniel Dennett found himself doing battle with mad scientists and other “bogeymen.” Though these two examples are employed in different philosophical arena, there is an important connection between them that has not been emphasized. Separating the concept associated with a kind term from the extension of that term, as Putnam and others have urged, raises the possibility of accepting counterexamples to compatibilistic analyses (...)
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