Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Alfred R. Mele
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Harry Frankfurt ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Robert Kane ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
Technical Terms

This chapter introduces the book’s central question: What can we learn about the nature of moral responsibility from thought experiments involving manipulation and related thought experiments featuring designed agents? Various alternative positions on that question are described, and some of the key terms of the discussion are defined, including compatibilism, determinism, incompatibilism, and libertarianism. Guidance is offered on how the author uses some other key terms, including free will, intuition, and moral responsibility. The technical terms internalism and externalism are introduced, and various kinds of internalism and externalism are distinguished. Work by Harry Frankfurt and Robert Kane is discussed to help set the stage for subsequent chapters.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Evan Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Agent Causation ◽  
The Right

This chapter lays out the book’s central question: Assuming agency reductionism—that is, the thesis that the causal role of the agent in all agential activities is reducible to the causal role of states and events involving the agent—is it possible to construct a defensible model of libertarianism? It is explained that most think the answer is negative and this is because they think libertarians must embrace some form of agent-causation in order to address the problems of luck and enhanced control. The thesis of the book is that these philosophers are mistaken: it is possible to construct a libertarian model of free will and moral responsibility within an agency reductionist framework that silences that central objections to libertarianism by simply taking the best compatibilist model of freedom and adding indeterminism in the right junctures of human agency. A brief summary of the chapters to follow is given.

scholarly journals Agency without Avoidability: Defusing a New Threat to Frankfurt's Counterexample Strategy

2011 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Shabo
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Harry Frankfurt ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Original Argument ◽  
Per Se

Many believe that we are not morally responsible for what we cannot help doing. Call this ‘the Traditional View of Responsible Agency.’ Some forty years ago, Harry Frankfurt (1969) challenged this view, thereby initiating a new stage of the free-will debate. In contrast to the previous stage, in which debate centered on how best to accommodate the Traditional View, contemporary theorists have focused on whether this view should be accepted at all. If the link between moral responsibility and avoidability is severed, an important threat to compatibilism is neutralized.In the wake of Frankfurt's challenge, a tremendous literature has sprung up, with many ingenious responses matched by equally thoughtful extensions of Frankfurt's original argument. Quite recently, an altogether new line of response has been proposed. This new approach, versions of which have been advanced by Maria Alvarez (2009) and Helen Steward (2009), attempts to support the Traditional View indirectly, by appealing to the conditions for action, rather than to the conditions for moral responsibility per se.

Must Compatibilists Be Internalists?

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Alfred R. Mele
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Harry Frankfurt ◽  
Original Design ◽  
Gary Watson

This chapter identifies three lines of thought that build bridges from compatibilism to internalism about moral responsibility and argues that all three are seriously defective. The three lines of thought are due to Richard Double, Harry Frankfurt, and Gary Watson. Thought experiments discussed include radical reversal stories and an original-design story in which a goddess creates a zygote and implants it in a certain woman at a certain time because she wants it to grow into a being who will perform a certain deed thirty years later. Differences between these two kinds of thought experiment are discussed.

Nietzsche’s Theory of Agency

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-146
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Harry Frankfurt ◽  
Derk Pereboom ◽  
Gary Watson ◽  
The Will ◽  
And Control ◽  
Galen Strawson ◽  
Alternate Possibilities

Nietzsche’s repudiation of free will and moral responsibility is documented throughout his corpus, and his arguments for this conclusion—arguments from his distinctive kind of fatalism, his skepticism about the causal efficacy of the will, and his particular brand of epiphenomenalism about the conscious mental states crucial to deliberation—are shown to undermine both compatibilist and incompatibilist views about free will and moral responsibility by engaging the views of many contemporary philosophers working on these topics, including Harry Frankfurt, Galen Strawson, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, Gary Watson, and others. In particular, the chapter argues that both “alternate possibilities” and “control” views of free will are vulnerable to Nietzsche’s critique. Some empirical evidence is adduced in support of Nietzsche’s view.

Reactive Attitudes Revisited: A Modest Revision

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deigh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Reactive Attitudes

The essay offers an interpretation of P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” on which attributions of moral responsibility presuppose a practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions, and what explains the practice is our liability to such reactive attitudes as resentment and indignation. The interpretation is offered to correct a common misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay. On this common misinterpretation, attributions of moral responsibility are implicit in the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation, and consequently our liability to these attitudes cannot explain these attributions. The reason this is a misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay is that Strawson’s compatibilist solution to the free will problem requires that our liability to the reactive attitudes be conceptually prior to our attributions of moral responsibility.

Compatibilist Alternatives

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Keim Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Alternative Possibilities ◽  
Traditional Theory ◽  
Van Inwagen ◽  
Source Theory

This paper is a defense of traditional compatibilism. Traditional compatibilism is, roughly, the view that (a) free will is essential to moral responsibility, (b) free will requires alternative possibilities of action, or alternatives for short, and (c) moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Traditional compatibilism is a version of the traditional theory of free will. According to the traditional theory, a person S performed an action a freely only if S could have done otherwise, that is, only if S had alternatives. The traditional theory is often contrasted with the source theory: S performed a freely only if S was the source of a (McKenna 2001; Pereboom 2003). One may adopt a combined view of free will that sanctions both the traditional and source theories (Kane 1996, 72-3; van Inwagen 1983). As I use the terms ‘source theorist’ and ‘traditional theorist,’ the former refers to folks who accept the source theory and reject the traditional theory; the latter refers to folks who accept the traditional theory whether or not they accept the source theory.

Why C-luck really is a problem for compatibilism

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-69
Author(s):  
S. B. Schoonover ◽  
Ivan Guajardo
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Fundamental Challenge

AbstractSome philosophers have recently argued that luck at the time of decision is a problem for compatibilists and libertarians alike. But conceptual ambiguity regarding deterministic luck at the time of decision – henceforth C-luck – has obscured recognition of the problem C-luck poses to compatibilism. This paper clarifies C-luck and distinguishes it from present luck, showing that the former arises from contingent factors at the time of decision instead of presupposed free will requirements. We then argue that empirical findings confirm the existence of C-luck thereby raising a fundamental challenge to compatibilist accounts of moral responsibility.

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