Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Brian Leiter
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Philosophy Of Action ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Moral psychology, for purposes of this volume, encompasses issues in metaethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action, including questions concerning the objectivity of morality, the relationship between moral judgment and emotion, the nature of the emotions, free will, and moral responsibility, and the structure of the mind as that is relevant to the possibility of moral action and judgment. Nietzsche’s “naturalism” is introduced and explained, and certain confusions about its meaning are addressed. An overview of the volume follows

The Fragmented Mind

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Implicit Attitudes ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Belief State ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Mental fragmentation is the thesis that the mind is fragmented, or compartmentalized. Roughly, this means that an agent’s overall belief state is divided into several sub-states—fragments. These fragments need not make for a consistent and deductively closed belief system. The thesis of mental fragmentation became popular through the work of philosophers like Christopher Cherniak, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker in the 1980s. Recently, it has attracted great attention again. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the topic of mental fragmentation. It features important new contributions by leading experts in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Opening with an accessible Introduction providing a systematic overview of the current debate, the fourteen essays cover a wide range of issues: foundational issues and motivations for fragmentation, the rationality or irrationality of fragmentation, fragmentation’s role in language, the relationship between fragmentation and mental files, and the implications of fragmentation for the analysis of implicit attitudes.

This Isn’t the Free Will Worth Looking For

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew E. Monroe ◽  
Garrett L. Brady ◽  
Bertram F. Malle
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Behavior ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Perceived Choice ◽  
The Relationship

According to previous research, threatening people’s belief in free will may undermine moral judgments and behavior. Four studies tested this claim. Study 1 used a Velten technique to threaten people’s belief in free will and found no effects on moral behavior, judgments of blame, and punishment decisions. Study 2 used six different threats to free will and failed to find effects on judgments of blame and wrongness. Study 3 found no effects on moral judgment when manipulating general free will beliefs but found strong effects when manipulating the perceived choice capacity of the judged agent. Study 4 used pretested narratives that varied agents’ apparent free will and found that perceived choice capacity mediated the relationship between free will and blame. These results suggest that people’s general beliefs about whether free will exists have no impact on moral judgments but specific judgments about the agent’s choice capacity do.

Humility, Free Will Beliefs, and Existential Angst

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nadelhoffer ◽  
Jennifer Cole Wright
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Existential Anxiety ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Shed Light

In Chapter 15, Thomas Nadelhoffer and Jennifer Cole Wright investigate the relationship between free will beliefs (or the lack thereof) and existential anxiety. In an attempt to shed light on this relationship, they set out to test whether trait humility can serve as a “buffer” between the two—that is, are people who are high in dispositional humility less likely to experience existential anxiety in the face of skepticism about free will? Given the perspectival and attitudinal nature of humility, Nadelhoffer and Wright predict that humble people will be less anxious in the face of stories about the purported death of free will (or the reduction of the mind to the brain). In a series of four studies, they test their hypothesis, with mixed results.,The findings, however, tell us something important about the current use of primes in studies designed to manipulate people’s belief in free will (usually to measure their pro- or antisocial effects).

The Limits of Free Will

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Russell
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moral Capacity ◽  
Selection Of

This volume contains a selection of chapters concerning free will and moral responsibility. The problems arising in this field of philosophy, which are deeply rooted in the history of the subject, are also intimately related to a wide range of other fields, such as law and criminology, moral psychology, theology, and, more recently, neuroscience. The chapters included in this collection were written and first published over a period of three decades, although most have appeared in the past decade or so. During this period this area of philosophy has been particularly active and it continues to attract a great deal of interest and attention. Among the topics covered, as they relate to these problems, are the challenge of skepticism; moral sentiment and moral capacity; necessity and the metaphysics of causation; practical reason; free will and art; fatalism and the limits of agency; and our metaphysical attitudes of optimism and pessimism.

Oxytocin influences intuitions about the relationship between belief in free will and moral responsibility

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Goodyear ◽  
Mary R. Lee ◽  
Martin O’Hara ◽  
Sergey Chernyak ◽  
Henrik Walter ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
The Relationship

scholarly journals VI—Panpsychism and Free Will: A Case Study in Liberal Naturalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Philip Goff
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Agent Causation ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Liberal Naturalism ◽  
The Mind

Abstract There has been a resurgence of interest in panpsychism in contemporary philosophy of mind. According to its supporters, panpsychism offers an attractive solution to the mind–body problem, avoiding the deep difficulties associated with the more conventional options of dualism and materialism. There has been little focus, however, on whether panpsychism can help with philosophical problems pertaining to free will. In this paper I will argue (a) that it is coherent and consistent with observation to postulate a kind of libertarian agent causation at the micro-level, and (b) that if one if believes in libertarian agent causation at the macro-level, there are significant advantages in also postulating its existence at the micro-level.

Desire, Foresight, Intentions, and Intentional Actions: Probing Folk Intuitions

2006 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 133-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nadelhoffer
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Philosophy Of Action ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Folk Intuitions

AbstractA number of philosophers working under the rubric of "experimental philosophy" have recently begun focusing on analyzing the concepts of ordinary language and investigating the intuitions of laypersons in an empirically informed way. In a series of papers these philosophers – who often work in collaboration with psychologists – have presented the results of empirical studies aimed at proving folk intuitions in areas as diverse as ethics, epistemology, free will, and the philosophy of action. In this paper, I contribute to this research program by discussing the results of some new experiments that further probe folk intuitions about the relationship between desire, foresight, intent, intentional action, and moral considerations.

Neuroimaging, Uncertainty, and the Problem of Dispositions

2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
GARDAR ÁRNASON
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Entire Range ◽  
Brain Research ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Brain research in neuroscience and related fields is changing our understanding of the brain and its relation to the mind and to human behavior, giving a new impetus to the problem of free will and moral responsibility. The reactions have covered the entire range, from claims to the effect that neuroscientific research is showing that our folk–psychological understanding of conscious free will and moral responsibility is deeply mistaken to claims to the effect that neuroscientific research is irrelevant to moral issues of free will and responsibility. In any case, neuroscience is posing some serious challenges to our conceptions of free will and moral responsibility.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document