P. F. Strawson’s Free Will Naturalism

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Rational Justification ◽  
The Core ◽  
Free Will Skepticism

This is an explication and defense of P. F. Strawson’s naturalist theory of free will and moral responsibility. I respond to a set of criticisms of the view by free will skeptics, compatibilists, and libertarians who adopt the core assumption: Strawson thinks that our reactive attitudes provide the basis for a rational justification of our blaming and praising practices. My primary aim is to explain and defend Strawson’s naturalism in light of criticisms based on the core assumption. Strawson’s critiques of incompatibilism and free will skepticism are not intended to provide rational justifications for either compatibilism or the claim that some persons have free will. Hence, the charge that Strawson’s “arguments” are faulty is misplaced. The core assumption resting behind such critiques is mistaken.

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.

scholarly journals Free Will Skepticism and Personhood as a Desert Base

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Vilhauer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ethical Theories ◽  
Substantial Role ◽  
Free Will Skepticism ◽  
Will Theory

In contemporary free will theory, a significant number of philosophers are once again taking seriously the possibility that human beings do not have free will, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. (Free will is understood here as whatever satisfies the control condition of moral responsibility.) Free will theorists commonly assume that giving up the belief that human beings are morally responsible implies giving up all our beliefs about desert. But the consequences of giving up the belief that we are morally responsible are not quite this dramatic. Giving up the belief that we are morally responsible undermines many, and perhaps most, of the desert claims we are pretheoretically inclined to accept. But it does not undermine desert claims based on the sheer fact of personhood. Even in the absence of belief in moral responsibility, personhood-based desert claims require us to respect persons and their rights. So personhood-based desert claims can provide a substantial role for desert in free will skeptics’ ethical theories.

Free Will Skepticism, Freedom, and Criminal Behavior

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farah Focquaert ◽  
Andrea L. Glenn ◽  
Adrian Raine
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Criminal Behavior ◽  
Moral Enhancement ◽  
Public Health Perspective ◽  
Immoral Behavior ◽  
Free Will Skepticism

In Chapter 13, the authors address the issue of free will skepticism and criminal behavior, asking how we should, as a society, deal with criminal behavior in the current era of neuroexistentialism and if our belief in free will is essential to adequately addressing it, or if neurocriminology offer a new way of addressing crime without resorting to backward-looking notions of moral responsibility and guilt. They argue for a neurocriminological approach to “moral answerability” and forward-looking claims of responsibility that focus on the moral betterment or moral enhancement of individuals prone to criminal behavior and on reparative measures toward victims, placed within a broader public health perspective of human behavior. Within this framework, neurocriminology approaches to criminal behavior may provide specific guidance within a broader moral enhancement framework. Rather than undermining current criminal justice practices, the free will skeptics’ approach can draw on neurocriminological findings to reduce immoral behavior.

Free Will Pessimism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Russell
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Sources Of Resistance ◽  
The Core ◽  
Free Will Skepticism

The core aim of this paper is to articulate the essential features of an alternative compatibilist position, one that is responsive to sources of resistance to the compatibilist program based on considerations of fate and luck. The approach taken relies on distinguishing carefully between issues of skepticism and pessimism as they arise in this context. A compatibilism that is properly responsive to concerns about fate and luck is committed to what is described as free will pessimism, which is to be distinguished from free will skepticism. The conclusion reached is that critical compatibilism and free will pessimism should not be understood as providing a solution to the free will problem but rather as a basis for rejecting the assumptions and aspirations that lie behind it. This approach reveals not a (skeptical) problem waiting to be solved but a (troubling) human predicament that needs to be recognized and acknowledged.

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.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document