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 (...) does. In such situations the person may well be morally responsible for what he chooses or does despite his inability to choose or to do otherwise. Finally the author considers certain suggestions for revising the principle he rejects or for replacing it with a principle of an altogether different kind. (shrink)

This provocative book refurbishes the traditional account of freedom of will as reasons-guided "agent" causation, situating its account within a general metaphysics. O'Connor's discussion of the general concept of causation and of ontological reductionism v. emergence will specially interest metaphysicians and philosophers of mind.

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.

In a detailed and careful manner, Taylor sets about an analysis of the notions of causation, human action, purpose, and a whole host of other conceptions such as deliberation, willing, mental acts, and reasons that relate to these key concepts in the philosophy of human action. The issue is, of course, what sort of explanation is suited to grasping the inherent intelligibility of human action. Having argued his way through to a notion of agent causality, which differs little from that (...) of Aristotle, and having concluded to the irreducibility of purpose that this conception implies, Taylor maintains that logical reductionism, behaviorism, and/or mechanism are logically deficient and leave human action unexplained; however, the non-reducibility of common sense, teleological and free will concepts does not imply, for Taylor, a dualism Taylor does leave it open as a matter to be empirically decided whether or not ontological reductionism is a viable alternative. While the book is an extraordinarily skillful and dialectical handling of current discussion in the philosophy of action, there is distressingly little mention of the sources and supports of this discussion. The effect is to make some of Taylor's more controversial pronouncements appear a bit more dogmatic than should be the case; but in the end, content triumphs sufficiently over style to make this book important reading for anyone interested in having some clear light thrown on the thorny problems surrounding the philosophy of action.—E. A. R. (shrink)

A great deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the function- al roles of intentions in intentional action. In this paper we sketch and defend a position on this issue while attacking a provocative alternative. Our position has its roots in a cybernetic theory of purposive behavior and is only part of the larger task of understanding all goal-directed behavior. Indeed, a unified model of goal-directed behavior, with appropriate modifications for different types of systems, is a long-range (...) ambition. (shrink)

... or engenders a tradition of philosophical reflection, questions will arise about the relation between divine knowledge and power and human freedom. ...

Background: Locke's Conception of Freedom For how can we think any one freer than to have the power to do what we will. — John Locke n his chapter on power ...

In what follows, I will contend that the commonsense view of ourselves as fundamental causal agents - for which some have used the term “unmoved movers" but which I think might more accurately be expressed as “not wholly moved movers” - is theoretically understandable, internally consistent, and consistent with what we have thus far come to know about the nature and workings of the natural world. In the section that follows, I try to show how the concept of ‘agent’ causation (...) can be understood as a distinct species (from ‘event’ causation) of the primitive idea, which I’ll term “causal production”, underlying realist or non-Humean conceptions of event causation. In section III, I respond to a number of contemporary objections to the theory of agent causation. Sections IV-V are devoted to showing that the theory is compatible with ordinary reasons explanations of action, which then places me in a position to respond, in the final section, to the contention that we could never know, in principle, whether the agency theory actually describes a significant portion of human activity. (shrink)

In The Emergent Self, William Hasker joins one of the most heated debates in contemporary analytic philosophy, that over the nature of mind.

This paper first distinguishes three alternative views that adherents to both incompatibilism and PAP may take as to what constitutes an agent''s determining or controlling her action (if it''s not the action''s being deterministically caused by antecedent events): the indeterministic-causation view, the agent-causation view, and "simple indeterminism." The bulk of the paper focusses on the dispute between simple indeterminism - the view that the occurrence of a simple mental event is determined by its subject if it possesses the "actish" phenomenal (...) quality and is undetermined by antecedent events - and Timothy O''Connor''s agent-causation view. It defends simple indeterminism against O''Connor''s objections to it and offers objections to O''Connor''s view. (shrink)