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  1. Freedom within Reason.Gary Watson - 1992 - Philosophical Review 101 (4):890.
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  • (1 other version)Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1969 - Journal of Philosophy 66 (23):829-839.
    This essay challenges the widely accepted principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. The author considers situations in which there are sufficient conditions for a certain choice or action to be performed by someone, So that it is impossible for the person to choose or to do otherwise, But in which these conditions do not in any way bring it about that the person chooses or acts as he (...)
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  • Difficulty and Degrees of Moral Praiseworthiness and Blameworthiness.Dana Kay Nelkin - 2016 - Noûs 50 (2):356-378.
    In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the (...)
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  • Masked Abilities and Compatibilism.M. Fara - 2008 - Mind 117 (468):843-865.
    An object's disposition to A in circumstances C is masked if circumstances C obtain without the object Aing. This paper explores an analogous sense in which abilities can be masked, and it uses the results of this exploration to motivate an analysis of agents' abilities in terms of dispositions. This analysis is then shown to provide the resources to defend a version of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities against Frankfurt-style counterexamples. Although this principle is often taken to be congenial to (...)
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  • Book Review: Unprincipled Virtue by Nomy Arpaly. [REVIEW]Manuel Vargas - 2003 - The Journal of Ethics 8 (2):201-204.
    Nomy Arpaly rejects the model of rationality used by most ethicists and action theorists. Both observation and psychology indicate that people act rationally without deliberation, and act irrationally with deliberation. By questioning the notion that our own minds are comprehensible to us--and therefore questioning much of the current work of action theorists and ethicists--Arpaly attempts to develop a more realistic conception of moral agency.
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  • Reasons-responsiveness and degrees of responsibility.D. Justin Coates & Philip Swenson - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):629-645.
    Ordinarily, we take moral responsibility to come in degrees. Despite this commonplace, theories of moral responsibility have focused on the minimum threshold conditions under which agents are morally responsible. But this cannot account for our practices of holding agents to be more or less responsible. In this paper we remedy this omission. More specifically, we extend an account of reasons-responsiveness due to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza according to which an agent is morally responsible only if she is appropriately (...)
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  • Semicompatibilism and Its Rivals.John Martin Fischer - 2012 - The Journal of Ethics 16 (2):117-143.
    In this paper I give an overview of my “framework for moral responsibility,” and I offer some reasons that commend it. I contrast my approach with indeterministic models of moral responsibility and also other compatibilist strategies, including those of Harry Frankfurt and Gary Watson.
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  • What Makes a Manipulated Agent Unfree?Chandra Sekhar Sripada - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (3):563-593.
    Incompatibilists and compatibilists (mostly) agree that there is a strong intuition that a manipulated agent, i.e., an agent who is the victim of methods such as indoctrination or brainwashing, is unfree. They differ however on why exactly this intuition arises. Incompatibilists claim our intuitions in these cases are sensitive to the manipulated agent’s lack of ultimate control over her actions, while many compatibilists argue that our intuitions respond to damage inflicted by manipulation on the agent’s psychological and volitional capacities. Much (...)
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  • (1 other version)Responsibility and Globally Manipulated Agents.Michael McKenna - 2004 - Philosophical Topics 32 (1-2):169-192.
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  • Constitutive Luck.Andrew Latus - 2003 - Metaphilosophy 34 (4):460-475.
    ‘Constitutive luck’ refers to luck that affects the sort of person one is. This article demonstrates that it is a philosophically troubling sort of luck, causing problems in, at least, ethics and political philosophy. Some, notably Susan Hurley, Nicholas Rescher, and Daniel Statman, have argued that such trouble can be avoided, by pointing out that the notion of constitutive luck is incoherent. The article examines this claim by means of a discussion of the idea of luck in general, settling on (...)
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  • Unprincipled virtue: an inquiry into moral agency.Nomy Arpaly - 2003 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Nomy Arpaly rejects the model of rationality used by most ethicists and action theorists. Both observation and psychology indicate that people act rationally without deliberation, and act irrationally with deliberation. By questioning the notion that our own minds are comprehensible to us--and therefore questioning much of the current work of action theorists and ethicists--Arpaly attempts to develop a more realistic conception of moral agency.
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  • (1 other version)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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  • Goal-directed processes in biology.Ernest Nagel - 1977 - Journal of Philosophy 74 (5):261-279.
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  • Responsibility and manipulation.John Martin Fischer - 2004 - The Journal of Ethics 8 (2):145-177.
    I address various critiques of the approach to moral responsibility sketched in previous work by Ravizza and Fischer. I especially focus on the key issues pertaining to manipulation.
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  • (2 other versions)Reflection, planning, and temporally extended agency.Michael E. Bratman - 2000 - Philosophical Review 109 (1):35-61.
    We are purposive agents; but we—adult humans in a broadly modern world—are more than that. We are reflective about our motivation. We form prior plans and policies that organize our activity over time. And we see ourselves as agents who persist over time and who begin, develop, and then complete temporally extended activities and projects. Any reasonably complete theory of human action will need in some way to advert to this trio of features—to our reflectiveness, our planfulness, and our conception (...)
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  • (3 other versions)The impossibility of moral responsibility.Galen Strawson - 1994 - Philosophical Studies 75 (1-2):5-24.
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  • Neuroscientific challenges to free will and responsibility.Adina Roskies - 2006 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10 (9):419-423.
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  • (1 other version)Defending hard incompatibilism.Derk Pereboom - 2005 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1):228-247.
    In _Living Without Free Will_, I develop and argue for a view according to which our being morally responsible would be ruled out if determinism were true, and also if indeterminism were true and the causes of our actions were exclusively events.1 Absent agent causation, indeterministic causal histories are as threatening to moral responsibility as deterministic histories are, and a generalization argument from manipulation cases shows that deterministic histories indeed undermine moral responsibility. Agent causation has not been ruled out as (...)
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  • (1 other version)A critique of Pereboom's 'four-case argument' for incompatibilism.Alfred R. Mele - 2005 - Analysis 65 (1):75-80.
    One popular style of argument for the thesis that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility features manipulation. Its thrust is that regarding moral responsibility, there is no important difference between various cases of manipulation in which agents who A are not morally responsible for A-ing and ordinary cases of A-ing in deterministic worlds. There is a detailed argument of this kind in Derk Pereboom’s recent book (2001: 112–26). His strategy in what he calls his ‘four-case argument’ (117) is to describe (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Freedom of the will and the concept of a person.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1971 - Journal of Philosophy 68 (1):5-20.
    It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person's will. Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "first-order desires" or "desires of the (...)
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  • Humean compatibilism.Helen Beebee & Alfred Mele - 2002 - Mind 111 (442):201-223.
    Humean compatibilism is the combination of a Humean position on laws of nature and the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. This article's aim is to situate Humean compatibilism in the current debate among libertarians, traditional compatibilists, and semicompatibilists about free will. We argue that a Humean about laws can hold that there is a sense in which the laws of nature are 'up to us' and hence that the leading style of argument for incompatibilism?the consequence argument?has a (...)
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  • Frankfurt’s Unwilling and Willing Addicts.Chandra Sripada - 2017 - Mind 126 (503):781-815.
    Harry Frankfurt’s Unwilling Addict and Willing Addict cases accomplish something fairly unique: they pull apart the predictions of control-based views of moral responsibility and competing self-expression views. The addicts both lack control over their actions but differ in terms of expression of their respective selves. Frankfurt’s own view is that—in line with the predictions of self-expression views—the unwilling addict is not morally responsible for his drug-directed actions while the willing addict is. But is Frankfurt right? In this essay, I put (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Metaphysics of Free Will: an Essay on Control.John Martin Fischer - 1997 - Philosophical Quarterly 47 (188):373-381.
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  • (1 other version)Intention,--Plans,--and--Practical--Reason.Michael E. Bratman - 1988 - Mind 97 (388):632-634.
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  • Intention and Weakness of Will.Richard Holton - 1999 - Journal of Philosophy 96 (5):241.
    Philosophical orthodoxy identifies weakness of will with akrasia: the weak willed person is someone who intentionally acts against their better judgement. It is argued that this is a mistake. Weakness of will consists in a quite different failing, namely an over-ready revision of one's intentions. Building on the work of Bratman, an account of such over-ready revision is given. A number of examples are then adduced showing how weakness of will, so understood, differs from akrasia.
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  • Causal-explanatory pluralism: how intentions, functions, and mechanisms influence causal ascriptions.Tania Lombrozo - 2010 - Cognitive Psychology 61 (4):303-332.
    Both philosophers and psychologists have argued for the existence of distinct kinds of explanations, including teleological explanations that cite functions or goals, and mechanistic explanations that cite causal mechanisms. Theories of causation, in contrast, have generally been unitary, with dominant theories focusing either on counterfactual dependence or on physical connections. This paper argues that both approaches to causation are psychologically real, with different modes of explanation promoting judgments more or less consistent with each approach. Two sets of experiments isolate the (...)
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  • Review Essay: The Metaphysics of ControlThe Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control.David Shatz & John Martin Fischer - 1997 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (4):955.
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  • (1 other version)The problem of action.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1997 - In Alfred R. Mele (ed.), The philosophy of action. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 157-62.
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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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  • Deviant causal chains and the irreducibility of teleological explanation.Scott R. Sehon - 1997 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78 (2):195–213.
    We typically explain human action teleologically, by citing the action's goal or purpose. However, a broad class of naturalistic projects within the philosophy of mind presuppose that teleological explanation is reducible to causal explanation. In this paper I argue that two recently suggested strategies - one suggested by Al Mele and the other proposed by John Bishop and Christopher Peacocke - fail to provide a successful causal analysis of teleological explanation. The persistent troubles encountered by the reductive project suggest that (...)
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  • Luck and history‐sensitive compatibilism.Neil Levy - 2009 - Philosophical Quarterly 59 (235):237-251.
    Libertarianism seems vulnerable to a serious problem concerning present luck, because it requires indeterminism somewhere in the causal chain leading to directly free action. Compatibilism, in contrast, is thought to be free of this problem, as not requiring indeterminism in the causal chain. I argue that this view is false: compatibilism is subject to a problem of present luck. This is less of a problem for compatibilism than for libertarianism. However, its effects are just as devastating for one kind of (...)
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  • The Intentionality of Human Action.John Martin Fischer & George M. Wilson - 1984 - Philosophical Review 93 (3):483.
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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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  • A Partial Defense of the Actual-Sequence Model of Freedom.Carolina Sartorio - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (1-3):107-120.
    Over the years, two models of freedom have emerged as competitors: the alternative-possibilities model and the actual-sequence model. This paper is a partial defense of the actual-sequence model. My defense relies on two strategies. The first strategy consists in de-emphasizing the role of examples in arguing for a model of freedom. Imagine that, as some people think, Frankfurt-style cases fail to undermine the alternative-possibilities model. What follows from this? Not much, I argue. In particular, I note that the counterparts of (...)
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  • Reactive attitudes, reactivity, and omissions. [REVIEW]Alfred R. Mele - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2):447-452.
    Regarding a recent book of mine, John Fischer wrote : “I am faced with the difficult task of doing a critical notice of a book, with almost all of which I agree!” I face a similar task here. Fischer and Ravizza’s Responsibility and Control is an excellent book. It develops, in admirable detail, an attractive compatibilist position on moral responsibility in a trio of related spheres—actions, consequences, and omissions—and it presents powerful objections to leading arguments for incompatibilism. Incompatibilists undoubtedly will (...)
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  • The Significance of Free Will.Carl Ginet - 1998 - Philosophical Review 107 (2):312.
    If among the spate of books on free will in recent years there are any that a philosopher concerned with that topic should have handy, this is one of them. Its coverage of the free-will issues debated in the philosophical literature of the last twenty years or so is penetrating, instructive, and by far the most thorough I’ve seen. Kane defends his own positions, but he is unusually fair, even generous, in expounding opposing views. And, while the book is not (...)
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  • (1 other version)Responsibility and Control. [REVIEW]Michael McKenna - 2001 - Journal of Philosophy 98 (2):93-100.
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  • Sensitive and insensitive causation.James Woodward - 2006 - Philosophical Review 115 (1):1-50.
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  • (1 other version)Mortal Questions.Thomas Nagel - 1983 - Religious Studies 19 (1):96-99.
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  • (1 other version)Defending Hard Incompatibilism.Derk Pereboom - 2005 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1):228-247.
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  • Control variables and mental causation.John Campbell - 2010 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (1pt1):15-30.
    I introduce the notion of a ‘control variable’ which gives us a way of seeing how mental causation could be an unproblematic case of causation in general, rather than being some sui generis form of causation. Psychological variables may be the control variables for a system for which there are no physical control variables, even in a deterministic physical world. That explains how there can be psychological causation without physical causation, even in a deterministic physical world.
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  • Fischer and Ravizza on Moral Responsibility.Alfred R. Mele - 2006 - The Journal of Ethics 10 (3):283-294.
    The author argued elsewhere that a necessary condition that John Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer for moral responsibility is too strong and that the sufficient conditions they offer are too weak. This article is a critical examination of their reply. Topics discussed include blameworthiness, irresistible desires, moral responsibility, reactive attitudes, and reasons responsiveness.
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  • Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. [REVIEW]J. David Velleman - 1991 - Philosophical Review 100 (2):277-284.
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  • (1 other version)A Hard‐line Reply to Pereboom’s Four‐Case Manipulation Argument 1.Michael Mckenna - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1):142-159.
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  • (1 other version)Free will.G. E. Moore - 1912 - In Ethics. New York [etc.]: Oxford University Press.
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  • Global control and freedom.Bernard Berofsky - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 131 (2):419-445.
    Several prominent incompatibilists, e.g., Robert Kane and Derk Pereboom, have advanced an analogical argument in which it is claimed that a deterministic world is essentially the same as a world governed by a global controller. Since the latter world is obviously one lacking in an important kind of freedom, so must any deterministic world. The argument is challenged whether it is designed to show that determinism precludes freedom as power or freedom as self-origination. Contrary to the claims of its adherents, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Free Will and Illusion.Saul Smilansky - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (1):222-229.
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  • (3 other versions)Living without Free Will.A. R. Mele - 2003 - Mind 112 (446):375-378.
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  • (1 other version)Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility.John Martin Fischer - 1998 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 61 (2):459-466.
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  • Decision-Making and Self-Governing Systems.Adina L. Roskies - 2016 - Neuroethics 11 (3):245-257.
    Neuroscience has illuminated the neural basis of decision-making, providing evidence that supports specific models of decision-processes. These models typically are quite mechanical, the realization of abstract mathematical “diffusion to bound” models. While effective decision-making seems to be essential for sophisticated behavior, central to an account of freedom, and a necessary characteristic of self-governing systems, it is not clear how the simple models neuroscience inspires can underlie the notion of self-governance. Drawing from both philosophy and neuroscience I explore ways in which (...)
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