24 found
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  1. A Unified Account of the Moral Standing to Blame.Patrick Todd - 2019 - Noûs 53:347-374.
    Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: -/- 1. One’s blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent’s wrongdoing. 3. One must be warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the (...)
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  2. Future Contingents are all False! On Behalf of a Russellian Open Future.Patrick Todd - 2016 - Mind 125 (499):775-798.
    There is a familiar debate between Russell and Strawson concerning bivalence and ‘the present King of France’. According to the Strawsonian view, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is neither true nor false, whereas, on the Russellian view, that proposition is simply false. In this paper, I develop what I take to be a crucial connection between this debate and a different domain where bivalence has been at stake: future contingents. On the familiar ‘Aristotelian’ view, future contingent propositions are (...)
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  3. The paradox of self-blame.Patrick Todd & Brian Rabern - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2):111–125.
    It is widely accepted that there is what has been called a non-hypocrisy norm on the appropriateness of moral blame; roughly, one has standing to blame only if one is not guilty of the very offence one seeks to criticize. Our acceptance of this norm is embodied in the common retort to criticism, “Who are you to blame me?”. But there is a paradox lurking behind this commonplace norm. If it is always inappropriate for x to blame y for a (...)
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  4. Critical Notice: The Modal Future: A Theory of Future-Directed Thought and Talk.Patrick Todd - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (3):1026-1035.
    At least since Aristotle's famous discussion of the sea-battle tomorrow in On Interpretation 9, philosophers have been fascinated by a rich set of interconnecte.
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  5. Future Contingents and the Logic of Temporal Omniscience.Patrick Todd & Brian Rabern - 2019 - Noûs 55 (1):102-127.
    At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...)
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  6. The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False.Patrick Todd - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This book launches a sustained defense of a radical interpretation of the doctrine of the open future. Patrick Todd argues that all claims about undetermined aspects of the future are simply false.
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  7. Strawson, Moral Responsibility, and the "Order of Explanation": An Intervention.Patrick Todd - 2016 - Ethics 127 (1):208-240.
    P.F. Strawson’s (1962) “Freedom and Resentment” has provoked a wide range of responses, both positive and negative, and an equally wide range of interpretations. In particular, beginning with Gary Watson, some have seen Strawson as suggesting a point about the “order of explanation” concerning moral responsibility: it is not that it is appropriate to hold agents responsible because they are morally responsible, rather, it is ... well, something else. Such claims are often developed in different ways, but one thing remains (...)
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  8. Manipulation Arguments and the Freedom to do Otherwise.Patrick Todd - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (2):395-407.
    I provide a manipulation-style argument against classical compatibilism—the claim that freedom to do otherwise is consistent with determinism. My question is simple: if Diana really gave Ernie free will, why isn't she worried that he won't use it precisely as she would like? Diana's non-nervousness, I argue, indicates Ernie's non-freedom. Arguably, the intuition that Ernie lacks freedom to do otherwise is stronger than the direct intuition that he is simply not responsible; this result highlights the importance of the denial of (...)
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  9. Does God Have the Moral Standing to Blame?Patrick Todd - 2018 - Faith and Philosophy 35 (1):33-55.
    In this paper, I introduce a problem to the philosophy of religion – the problem of divine moral standing – and explain how this problem is distinct from (albeit related to) the more familiar problem of evil (with which it is often conflated). In short, the problem is this: in virtue of how God would be (or, on some given conception, is) “involved in” our actions, how is it that God has the moral standing to blame us for performing those (...)
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  10. Let's See You Do Better.Patrick Todd - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    In response to criticism, we often say – in these or similar words – “Let’s see you do better!” Prima facie, it looks like this response is a challenge of a certain kind – a challenge to prove that one has what has recently been called standing. More generally, the data here seems to point a certain kind of norm of criticism: be better. Slightly more carefully: One must: criticize x with respect to standard s only if one is better (...)
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  11. The problem of future contingents: scoping out a solution.Patrick Todd - 2020 - Synthese 197 (11):5051-5072.
    Various philosophers have long since been attracted to the doctrine that future contingent propositions systematically fail to be true—what is sometimes called the doctrine of the open future. However, open futurists have always struggled to articulate how their view interacts with standard principles of classical logic—most notably, with the Law of Excluded Middle. For consider the following two claims: Trump will be impeached tomorrow; Trump will not be impeached tomorrow. According to the kind of open futurist at issue, both of (...)
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  12. On The Open Future: Replies to Rhoda and Rubio.Patrick Todd - forthcoming - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.
    These are my materials (a short precis, and replies to Alan Rhoda and Daniel Rubio) for an invited symposium on my book _The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False_ (OUP, 2021) in IJPR. [The commentaries from Rhoda/Rubio are available on their respective PhilPapers profiles.].
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  13. (1 other version)Geachianism.Patrick Todd - 2011 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 3:222-251.
    The plane was going to crash, but it didn't. Johnny was going to bleed to death, but he didn't. Geach sees here a changing future. In this paper, I develop Geach's primary argument for the (almost universally rejected) thesis that the future is mutable (an argument from the nature of prevention), respond to the most serious objections such a view faces, and consider how Geach's view bears on traditional debates concerning divine foreknowledge and human freedom. As I hope to show, (...)
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  14. Introduction.Patrick Todd & John Martin Fischer - 2015 - In John Martin Fischer & Patrick Todd (eds.), Freedom, Fatalism, and Foreknowledge. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 01-38.
    This Introduction has three sections, on "logical fatalism," "theological fatalism," and the problem of future contingents, respectively. In the first two sections, we focus on the crucial idea of "dependence" and the role it plays it fatalistic arguments. Arguably, the primary response to the problems of logical and theological fatalism invokes the claim that the relevant past truths or divine beliefs depend on what we do, and therefore needn't be held fixed when evaluating what we can do. We call the (...)
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  15. Foreknowledge requires determinism.Patrick Todd - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):125-146.
    There is a longstanding argument that purports to show that divine foreknowledge is inconsistent with human freedom to do otherwise. Proponents of this argument, however, have for some time been met with the following reply: the argument posits what would have to be a mysterious non-causal constraint on freedom. In this paper, I argue that this objection is misguided – not because after all there can indeed be non-causal constraints on freedom (as in Pike, Fischer, and Hunt), but because the (...)
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  16. On behalf of a mutable future.Patrick Todd - 2016 - Synthese 193 (7):2077-2095.
    Everyone agrees that we can’t change the past. But what about the future? Though the thought that we can change the future is familiar from popular discourse, it enjoys virtually no support from philosophers, contemporary or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that the thesis that the future is mutable has far more going for it than anyone has yet realized. The view, I hope to show, gains support from the nature of prevention, can provide a new way of responding (...)
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  17. Strawsonian Moral Responsibility, Response-Dependence, and the Possibility of Global Error.Patrick Todd - forthcoming - Midwest Studies in Philosophy.
    Various philosophers have wanted to move from a (P.F.) “Strawsonian” understanding of the “practices of moral responsibility” to a non-skeptical result. I focus on a strategy moving from a “response-dependent” theory of responsibility. I aim to show that a key analogy associated with this strategy fails to support a compatibilist result. It seems clear that nothing could show that nothing we have been laughing at has really been funny. If “the funny” is similar to “the blameworthy”, then perhaps it would (...)
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  18. The Replication Argument for Incompatibilism.Patrick Todd - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (6):1341-1359.
    In this paper, I articulate an argument for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism. My argument comes in the form of an extended story, modeled loosely on Peter van Inwagen’s “rollback argument” scenario. I thus call it “the replication argument.” As I aim to bring out, though the argument is inspired by so-called “manipulation” and “original design” arguments, the argument is not a version of either such argument—and plausibly has advantages over both. The result, I believe, is a more convincing (...)
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  19. The Consequences of Incompatibilism.Patrick Todd - 2024 - In Maximilian Kiener (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Responsibility. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
    Incompatibilism about responsibility and determinism is sometimes directly construed as the thesis that if we found out that determinism is true, we would have to give up the reactive attitudes. Call this "the consequence". I argue that this is a mistake: the strict modal thesis does not entail the consequence. First, some incompatibilists (who are also libertarians) may be what we might call *resolute responsibility theorists* (or "flip-floppers"). On this view, if we found out that determinism is true, this would (...)
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  20. It Would be Bad if Compatibilism Were True; Therefore, It Isn't.Patrick Todd - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):270-284.
    I want to suggest that it would be bad if compatibilism were true, and that this gives us good reason to think that it isn't. This is, you might think, an outlandish argument, and the considerable burden of this paper is to convince you otherwise. There are two key elements at stake in this argument. The first is that it would be ‐ in a distinctive sense to be explained ‐ bad if compatibilism were true. The thought here is that (...)
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  21. Manipulation.Patrick Todd - 2013 - International Encyclopedia of Ethics.
    At the most general level, "manipulation" refers one of many ways of influencing behavior, along with (but to be distinguished from) other such ways, such as coercion and rational persuasion. Like these other ways of influencing behavior, manipulation is of crucial importance in various ethical contexts. First, there are important questions concerning the moral status of manipulation itself; manipulation seems to be mor- ally problematic in ways in which (say) rational persuasion does not. Why is this so? Furthermore, the notion (...)
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  22. Defending The Open Future: Replies to MacFarlane, Green, Wasserman, and Bigg & Miller.Patrick Todd - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    These are my materials (a short precis, and replies to John MacFarlane, Mitchell Green, Ryan Wasserman, and Anthony Bigg and Kristie Miller) for a symposium on my book, _The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False_ (OUP, 2021) in *Analytic Philosophy*. [The contribution from MacFarlane is available on his website, those from Wasserman and Green are on their Academia profiles, and the contribution from Bigg and Miller is on Miller's PhilPapers profile.].
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  23. Resisting the epistemic argument for compatibilism.Patrick Todd & Brian Rabern - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (5):1743-1767.
    In this paper, we clarify, unpack, and ultimately resist what is perhaps the most prominent argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism: the epistemic argument for compatibilism. We focus on one such argument as articulated by David Lewis: (i) we know we are free, (ii) for all we know everything is predetermined, (iii) if we know we are free but for all we know everything is predetermined, then for all we know we are free but everything is predetermined, (...)
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  24. A puzzle about scope for restricted deontic modals.Brian Rabern & Patrick Todd - 2023 - Snippets 44:8-10.
    Deontic necessity modals (e.g. 'have to', 'ought to', 'must', 'need to', 'should', etc.) seem to vary in how they interact with negation. According to some accounts, what forces modals like 'ought' and 'should' to outscope negation is their polarity sensitivity -- modals that scope over negation do so because they are positive polarity items. But there is a conflict between this account and a widely assumed theory of if-clauses, namely the restrictor analysis. In particular, the conflict arises for constructions containing (...)
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