*As mentioned in Peter Coy's NYT essay "When Being Good Is Just a Matter of Being Lucky" (2023) -/- ----- -/- How is the problem of free will related to the problem of moral luck? In this essay, I answer that question and outline a new solution to the paradox of moral luck, the source-paradox solution. This solution both explains why the paradox arises and why moral luck does not exist. To make my case, I highlight a few key connections (...) between the paradox of moral luck and two related problems, namely the problem of free will and determinism and the paradox of self-creation. Piecing together intuitions, arguments, and insights from recent work on each of these three problems, I argue that the type of control necessary for moral responsibility can only be had by someone who is a genuine source of his own actions, but the relevant notion of sourcehood admits no coherent characterization. If our commonsense view of moral responsibility is incoherent, it is unsurprising that our commitment to the existence of morally responsible agents commits us to some paradoxical things—e.g. to both the existence and impossibility of moral luck. To touch base about this article, please write to: mickelkm[@]colorado[DOT]edu. (shrink)

The terms ‘compatibilism’ and ‘incompatibilism’ were introduced in the mid-20th century to name conflicting views about the logical relationship between the thesis of determinism and the thesis that someone has free will. These technical terms were originally introduced within a specific research paradigm, the classical analytic paradigm. This paradigm is now in its final stages of degeneration and few free-will theorists still work within it (i.e. using its methods, granting its substantive background assumptions, etc.). This chapter discusses how the ambiguity (...) of the terms ‘incompatibilism’ and ‘compatibilism’ took root as the classical analytic paradigm declined and why this matters to the contemporary debate. Among other things, I explain why the ambiguity of these anachronistic terms, though relatively innocuous when they were first introduced, is now encouraging theorists to tolerate and perpetuate serious philosophical errors (e.g. to conflate relations as different in kind and importance as correlation and causation, to promote uncontentiously invalid arguments, and to equivocate in ways that keep the free-will debate mired in pseudo-stalemates). I also suggest a new framework for anyone looking for relief from the confusion and deadlock created by quixotic attempts to redefine classical narratives and jargon so that they adequately describe the dialectical contours of the contemporary free-will debate. In addition, this new framework allows philosophers to start cross-pollinating work on free will and other famous problems of luck and control, e.g. the paradox of moral luck. (To see the distinctions applied to the philosophical problems of causal luck, constitutive luck, and moral luck, please see my essay "Free Will, Self-Creation, and the Paradox of Moral Luck" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2019) and the case for the internal inconsistency of hard incompatibilism in "Hard Times for Hard Incompatibilism" (manuscript)). -/- . (shrink)

In this essay, I explain why Gabriel De Marco's attempts to "solve" the invalidity problem for the Zygote Argument were non-starters. The first solution he describes was originally developed by Mickelson (2012/2015) and already adopted by Mele (2013), but De Marco presents it as his own using an idiosyncratic labelling system. [[In recent work, De Marco has abandoned the tripartite taxonomy on which "compatibilism is false" and "incompatibilism is true" name different doctrines. Following Mele 2013, De Marco now uses the (...) revisionary definition of 'incompatibilism' on which this term refers to mere incompossibilism; he provides *no name at all* for the explanatory thesis that he formerly called incompatibilism (following standard practice and the original meaning of the term). Given that De Marco's revisionary labelling strategy was the only novel component of his first "solution", it seems that even De Marco doesn't want to use his idiosyncratic labelling strategy -- presumably because the strategy isn't viable (see De Marco, Gabriel & Cyr, Taylor W. (2024). Manipulation Cases in Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Part 1: Cases and Arguments. Philosophy Compass 19 (12):e70009.]] De Marco's second response fails because it is grounded in a patently invalid argument. Most importantly, De Marco (like Mele before him) fails to even mention that Mickelson wasn't interested in the Zygote Argument per se, nor did she have the quixotic aim of providing "correct" definitions of anachronistic jargon like 'compatibilism' and 'incompatibilism' (for reasons explained in Mickelson's 2015 critique of Vihvelin's three-fold classification). Mickelson's invalidity objection served to highlight several novel and dialectically significant lessons, such as: it is surprisingly difficult to close the "explanatory gap" between incompossibilism and the standard causal-factors (causal luck) explanation for incompossibilism. Historically, this gap has been closed with question-begging assumptions (e.g. free is an ability to do otherwise) and invalid reasoning (e.g. the original Zygote Argument). Pereboom is one of the only philosophers to confront the challenge of closing this gap directly, but the best-explanation reasoning he uses to close the gap is incomplete and arguably incorrect (Mickelson, "The Problem of Free Will and Determinism: An Abductive Approach" and "Hard Times for Incompatibilism"). Indeed, there appears to be no argument in the free-will literature which closes this gap in a philosophically acceptable way. Quite literally, there appears to be NO logically viable, non-question-begging argument for the "incompatibilist" view that deterministic causal factors undermine (vitiate, destroy, are antagonistic to) free will in the history of the free-will literature as a whole! Unfortunately, some philosophers prefer to focus on the definitions of jargon and don't want to "fuss" over fundamental philosophical errors and oversights--and no one else should fuss over such things either. This paper was written for fussier philosophers who are attracted to the idea of exploring the new avenues of research that have opened up by exposing the explanatory gap between incompossibilism and rival explanations for the truth of incompossibilism. [] *My thanks to the referees and editors at Philosophia for publishing this corrective when Phil Studies would not. [] -/- . (shrink)

"We wish this volume to be a sure companion to the study of free will, broadly construed to include action theory, moral and legal responsibility, and cohort studies feathering off into adjacent fields in the liberal arts and sciences. In addition to general coverage of the discipline, this volume attempts a more challenging and complementary accompaniment to many familiar narratives about free will. In order to map out some directions such accompaniment will take, in this introduction we anchor the thirty (...) contributions to this volume in some common history from which they arise, and attempt to indicate where future work in free will and moral responsibility will–and has already begun to–depart from that history." -Excerpt from Introduction. ... ... (shrink)