In this article I review the core elements of Carolina Sartorio’s actual causal sequence account of free will and moral responsibility, and propose two revisions. First, I suggest replacing the contested notion of absence causation by the relatively uncontroversial notion of causal explanation by absences. Second, I propose retaining explanation by unreduced dispositions, of which Sartorio appears to be wary. I then set out a response to her critical treatment of manipulation arguments against compatibilism. Lastly, I point out that Sartorio’s (...) reasons-sensitivity condition on moral responsibility is amenable to a conception of moral responsibility that, unlike the one she endorses, dispenses with basic desert. (shrink)

This critical notice highlights the important contributions that Eric Watkins's writings have made to our understanding of theories about causation developed in eighteenth-century German philosophy and by Kant in particular. Watkins provides a convincing argument that central to Kant's theory of causation is the notion of a real ground or causal power that is non-Humean (since it doesn't reduce to regularities or counterfactual dependencies among events or states) and non-Leibnizean because it doesn't reduce to logical or conceptual relations. However, we (...) raise questions about Watkins's more specific claims that Kant completely rejects a model on which the first relatum of a phenomenal causal relation is an event and that he maintains that real grounds are metaphysically and not just epistemically indeterminate. -/- . (shrink)

In this book, Derk Pereboom explores how physicalism might best be formulated and defended against the best anti-physicalist arguments. Two responses to the knowledge and conceivability arguments are set out and developed. The first exploits the open possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental properties as they are in themselves; specifically, that introspection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, which these properties might actually lack. The second response draws on the proposal that currently unknown (...) fundamental intrinsic properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and would also yield an account of consciousness. While there are non-physicalist versions of this position, some are amenable to physicalism. The book's third theme is a defense of a nonreductive account of physicalism. The type of nonreductivism endorsed departs from others in that it rejects all token identity claims for psychological and microphysical entities. The deepest relation between the mental and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity. (shrink)

Most people assume that, even though some degenerative or criminal behavior may be caused by influences beyond our control, ordinary human actions are not similarly generated, but rather are freely chosen, and we can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for them. A less popular and more radical claim is that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform. It is this hard determinist stance that Derk Pereboom articulates in Living Without Free Will. Pereboom argues that (...) our best scientific theories have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform, and that because of this, we are not morally responsible for any of them. He seeks to defend the view that morality, meaning and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible, and furthermore, that adopting this perspective would provide significant benefit for our lives. (shrink)

This paper features Derk Pereboom’s replies to commentaries by Victor Tadros and Saul Smilansky on his non-retributive, incapacitation-focused proposal for treatment of dangerous criminals; by Michael McKenna on his manipulation argument against compatibilism about basic desert and causal determination; and by Alfred R. Mele on his disappearing agent argument against event-causal libertarianism.

Review of Derk Pereboom, Living Without Free Will.

A unique anthology featuring contributions to the dispute over free will from Aristotle to the twenty-first century, Derk Pereboom's volume presents the most thoughtful positions taken in this crucial debate and discusses their consequences for free will's traditional corollary, moral responsibility. The Second Edition retains the organizational structure that made its predecessor the leading anthology of its kind, while adding major new selections by such philosophers as Spinoza, Reid, John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Galen Strawson, and Timothy O'Connor. (...) _Hackett Readings in Philosophy_ is a versatile series of compact anthologies, each devoted to a topic of traditional interest. Selections include classical, modern, and contemporary writings chosen for their elegance of exposition and success at stimulating thought and discussion. (shrink)

This dissertation is an interpretation of Kant's theory of mental representation, and an attempt to elucidate this theory by viewing it from both historical and contemporary perspectives. After an exposition of Kant's notions of intuition, sensation, and concept, I argue that the theory as a whole can be seen as an Aristotelian reaction against Leibnizian rationalism and Humean empiricism and naturalism. As in Aristotelian theories, Kant argues that there are two distinct types of mental representation, and two distinct types of (...) processes involved in cognition. ;I construe the Transcendental Deduction and the Second Analogy as a series of arguments against Hume for the thesis that our mental repertoire contains conceptual as well as passively received representations. The division of the anti-Humean arguments I find to be most fruitful is the division into arguments from above and arguments from below. I find it illuminating to view several aspects of Kant's anti-Humean arguments from the perspective of contemporary concerns in the theory of intentionality. Some of Kant's contentions against Hume can be seen as an attempt to resist a tendency to redescribe intentional relations so that the resulting description is extensional. Kant can be viewed as trying to preserve the idea that sentences describing intentional relations from the perspective of the subject are irreducibly intensional. ;I argue that the chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason entitled 'The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection' together with portions of a later work, On a Discovery, contain an argument against Leibniz or the Leibnizians of Kant's day for the thesis that nonconceptual elements, as well as concepts, are required for the cognition of physical objects. Questions arise here about the relation between Kant's views on this issue and modern studies of indexicality. My view is that Kant can be construed as providing a theory about what underlies the irreducibly indexical element in our cognitions of physical objects. Kant's idea of passive receptivity, closely tied to the notion of what the experience of a quality is like, is relevant to this, as is the notion of an external or relational quality developed in the Amphiboly. (shrink)

As philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism continue to gain traction, we are likely to see a fundamental shift in the way people think about free will and moral responsibility. Such shifts raise important practical and existential concerns: What if we came to disbelieve in free will? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some (...) maintain or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of belief in free will? In this chapter we consider the practical implications of free will skepticism and argue that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe. We argue that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for example, would not be threatened. On treatment of criminals, we argue that although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, preventive detention and rehabilitation programs would still be justified. While we will touch on all these issues below, our focus will be primarily on this last issue. -/- We begin in section I by considering two different routes to free will skepticism. The first denies the causal efficacy of the types of willing required for free will and receives its contemporary impetus from pioneering work in neuroscience by Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and John-Dylan Haynes. The second, which is more common in the philosophical literature, does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that whether this causal efficacy is deterministic or indeterministic, it does not achieve the level of control to count as free will by the standards of the historical debate. We argue that while there are compelling objections to the first route—e.g., Al Mele (2009), Eddy Nahmias (2002, 2011), and Neil Levy (2005)—the second route to free will skepticism remains intact. In section II we argue that free will skepticism allows for a workable morality, and, rather than negatively impacting our personal relationships and meaning in life, may well improve our well-being and our relationships to others since it would tend to eradicate an often destructive form of moral anger. In section III we argue that free will skepticism allows for adequate ways of responding to criminal behavior—in particular, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alternation of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justified and sufficient for good social policy. We present and defend our own preferred model for dealing with dangerous criminals, an incapacitation account built on the right to self-protection analogous to the justification for quarantine (see Pereboom 2001, 2013, 2014a; Caruso 2016a), and we respond to recent objections to it by Michael Corrado and John Lemos. (shrink)

Transcendental freedom consists in the power of agents to produce actions without being causally determined by antecedent conditions, nor by their natures, in exercising this power. Kant contends that we cannot establish whether we are actually or even possibly free in this sense. He claims only that our conception of being transcendentally free involves no inconsistency, but that as a result the belief that we have this freedom meets a pertinent standard of minimal credibility. For the rest, its justification depends (...) on practical reasons. I argue that this belief satisfies an appropriately revised standard of minimal credibility, but that the practical reasons Kant adduces for it are subject to serious challenge. (shrink)

This article sets out a forward-looking account of moral responsibility on which the ground-level practice is directly sensitive to aims such as moral formation and reconciliation, and is not subject to a barrier between tiers. On the contrasting two-tier accounts defended by Daniel Dennett and Manuel Vargas, the ground-level practice features backward-looking, desert-invoking justifications that are in turn justified by forward-looking considerations at the higher tier. The concern raised for the two-tier view is that the ground-level practice will be insufficiently (...) responsive to the forward-looking aims that are held to justify it. On the single-tier alternative, forward-looking considerations can more readily motivate substantial revisions, which the practice, due to serious and pervasive deficiencies, requires. (shrink)

The claim that moral responsibility for an action requires that the agent could have done otherwise is surely attractive. Moreover, it seems reasonable to contend that a requirement of this sort is not merely a necessary condition of little consequence, but that it plays a decisive role in explaining an agent's moral responsibility for an action. For if an agent is to be blameworthy for an action, it seems crucial that she could have done something to avoid this blameworthiness. If (...) she is to be praiseworthy for an action, it seems important that at least she could have done something less admirable. Libertarians, in particular, have often grounded their incompatibilism precisely in such intuitions. By contrast, I shall argue that the availability of alternative possibilities is in a significant sense irrelevant to explaining an agent's moral responsibility for an action. At the same time I do not want to disavow incompatibilism, but rather to defend a version in which the pivotal explanatory role is assigned to features of the causal history of the action, and not to the availability of alternative possibilities. (shrink)

I have presented a Frankfurt-style argument (Pereboom 2000, 2001, 2003) against the requirement of robust alternative possibilities for moral responsibility that features an example, Tax Evasion , in which an agent is intuitively morally responsible for a decision, has no robust alternative possibilities, and is clearly not causally determined to make the decision. Here I revise the criterion for robustness in response to suggestions by Dana Nelkin, Jonathan Vance, and Kevin Timpe, and I respond to objections to the argument (...) by Carlos Moya and David Widerker, in the process of which I refine the Tax Evasion example. (shrink)

In a recent article Gary Watson instructively distinguishes two faces or aspects of responsibility. The first is the self-disclosing sense, which is concerned centrally with aretaic or excellence-relevant evaluations of agents. An agent is responsible for an action in this respect when it is an action that is inescapably the agent’s own, if, as a declaration of her adopted ends, it expresses what the agent is about, her identity as an agent. An action for which the agent is responsible in (...) this sense expresses what the agent is ready to stand up for, to defend, to affirm, to answer for. (1996: 233-4) . The second face of responsibility has perhaps had a more explicit role in debates about free will — it concerns control and accountability. Watson argues that when one is skeptical about the second "accountability" face, one need not also be skeptical about responsibility as self-disclosure. I agree, and in my view, this helps us see why maintaining that determinism precludes accountability need not also commit one to the view that determinism precludes responsibility in a way that threatens meaning in life. Part of the reason for this is that when responsibility as accountability is undermined, less of what we deem valuable needs to be relinquished than often believed. But in addition, it turns out that the kind of accountability precluded by determinism is not nearly as important to what is most significant in human life as is responsibility as self-disclosure. Indeed, it may be that an unfortunate fusing of these two notions underlies the concern that if determinism imperils accountability, it also threatens what most fundamentally makes our lives meaningful. (shrink)

Among Immanuel Kant's most influential contributionsto philosophy is his development of the transcendental argument. InKant's conception, an argument of this kind begins with a compellingpremise about our thought, experience, or knowledge, and then reasonsto a conclusion that is a substantive and unobvious presupposition andnecessary condition of this premise. The crucial steps in thisreasoning are claims to the effect that a subconclusion or conclusionis a presupposition and necessary condition of a premise. Such anecessary condition might be a logically necessary condition, butoften (...) in Kant's transcendental arguments the condition is necessary inthe sense that it is the only possible explanation for the premise,whereupon the necessity might be weaker than logical. Typically, thisreasoning is intended to be a priori in some sense, eitherstrict or more relaxed. The conclusion of the argument is often directed againstskepticism of some sort. For example, Kant's Transcendental Deductiontargets Humean skepticism about the applicability of a priorimetaphysical concepts, and his Refutation of Idealism takes aim atskepticism about external objects. These two transcendental argumentsare found in the Critique of Pure Reason, butsuch arguments are found throughout Kant's works, for example inthe Critique of Practical Reason, in the Critiqueof the Power of Judgment, and in the OpusPosthumum. This article focuses on theTranscendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and more recenttranscendental arguments such as P. F. Strawson's that areinspired by these two examples. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Works cited.

The aim of this article is to set out a theory for treatment of criminals that rejects retributive justification for punishment; does not fall afoul of a plausible prohibition on using people merely as means; and actually works in the real world. The theory can be motivated by free will skepticism. But it can also be supported without reference to the free will issue, since retributivism faces ethical challenges in its own right. In past versions of the account I’ve emphasized (...) the quarantine analogy for incapacitation together with the value of rehabilitation and reintegration. Here I pay special attention to the permissibility and the limits of general deterrence. (shrink)

The psychotherapeutic theories of Descartes and Spinoza are heavily influenced by Stoicism. Stoic psychotherapy has two central features. First, we have a remarkable degree of voluntary control over our passions, and we can and should exercise this control to keep ourselves from having any irrational passions at all. Second, the universe is determined by the providential divine will, and in any situation we can and should align ourselves with this divine will in order to achieve equanimity. Whereas Descartes largely endorses (...) the Stoic picture, Spinoza develops a distinctive, intellectualized version of this view. (shrink)

This article explores Immanuel Kant’s transcendental argument in philosophy. According to Kant, a transcendental argument begins with a compelling first premise about our thought, experience, knowledge, or practice, and then reasons to a conclusion that is a substantive and unobvious presupposition and necessary condition of the truth of this premise, or as he sometimes puts it, of the possibility of this premise’s being true. Transcendental arguments are typically directed against skepticism of some kind. For example, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction targets Humean (...) skepticism about the applicability of a priori metaphysical concepts, and his Refutation of Idealism takes aim at skepticism about an external world. The article first considers the nature of transcendental arguments before analysing a number of specific transcendental arguments, including Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and Refutation of Idealism. It also discusses contemporary arguments, such as those forwarded by P. F. Strawson and and Christine Korsgaard, together with their problems and prospects. (shrink)

It is often claimed that Russellian monism carries a commitment to a structuralist conception of physics, on which physics describes the world only in terms of its spatiotemporal structure and dynamics. We argue that this claim is mistaken. On Russellian monism, there is more to consciousness, and to the rest of concrete reality, than spatiotemporal structure and dynamics. But the latter claim supports only a conditional claim about physics: _if_ structuralism about physics is true, then there is more to consciousness (...) and to the rest of concrete reality than physics describes. Given the fundamental nature of their position, Russellian monists can, we argue, deny the antecedent without inconsistency. We also draw out two significant consequences of that result. One is that it provides a response to some recent objections to Russellian monism, by Alyssa Ney and Eric Hiddleston. The other consequence concerns a line of reasoning known as _the structure and dynamics argument_—reasoning that is thought to motivate Russellian monism. In David J. Chalmers’s version, which is regarded as canonical, structuralism about physics is implied by a premise. If our main thesis is true, then that version is problematic, at least from the perspective of Russellian monists who take the argument to motivate their theory. However, we argue, the argument can be reformulated without relying on structuralism about physics. (shrink)

Critical notice of Derk Pereboom's "Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism". Discusses Pereboom's idea that conscious states might be misrepresented in introspection, and his idea that instantiations of mental properties are composed of instantiations of physical properties.

If my ability to react freely is constrained by forces beyond my control, am I still morally responsible for the things I do? The question of whether, how and to what extent we are responsible for our own actions has always been central to debates in philosophy and theology, and has been the subject of much recent research in cognitive science. And for good reason- the views we take on free will affect the choices we make as individuals, the moral (...) judgments we make of others, and they will inform public policy. Michael McKenna's text introduces this important subject with remarkable clarity, offering the first comprehensive overview of both incompatibilist and compatibilist stances. He begins by motivating both viewpoints, then provides classical accounts of each before giving students an in-depth examination of current scholarship in the free will debate. Topics covered include: the nature of free will the nature of determinism the nature of moral responsibility arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism arguments of the compatibility of free will and determinism libertarian theories of free will and moral responsibility compatibilist theories of free will and moral responsibility hard determinist and hard incompatibilist theories. (shrink)

The chapter begins by introducing the problem of free will and moral responsibility and the standard terminology used to frame it in the philosophical context. It turns to the contributions of experimental philosophy and the prospects for the use of this methodology in the area. People believe that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates. The chapter discusses an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy nahmias and colleagues, and the role that empirical studies might have in the (...) assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism. It also presents the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. A number of philosophers argue that the results of surveys provide confirming evidence for a meta‐view about moral theories, variantism. (shrink)

Current attempts to understand psychological content divide into two families of views. According to externalist accounts such as those advanced by Tyler Burge and Ruth Millikan, psychological content does not supervene on the physical features of the individual subject, but is fixed partially by the nature of the world external to her.¹ In the rival functional role theories developed by Ned Block and Brian Loar, content does supervene on the physical features of the individual, and is, in addition, determined solely (...) by the role it plays in the causal network of an individual's sensations, behavior, and mental states.² Over the past fifteen years, criticism of these two types of views has often focussed on their capacity to individuate content in an acceptable way, and both seem to be deficient in this respect. (shrink)

© 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyThis is a very good, very helpful book. In describing two possible outgrowths of contemporary physicalism, Pereboom performs a feat of time‐travel: he takes us forward to see the fruits ultimately to be produced by current seeds of thought. One of these branches—based on the ‘qualitative inaccuracy’ thesis—almost represents a parody of prevailing physicalist epistemic treatments of consciousness, to the extent that I can't shake the feeling that the book's first half may (...) be written with tongue in cheek. The second—to my mind far more sensible—view bears close relation to a Russellian neutral monism. Thus the time‐travel goes back as well as forward. The ‘qualitative inaccuracy’ view, too, has foreshadows in some early suggested treatments of the grain problem. The book's third strand... (shrink)

In his mature period Kant maintained that human beings have never devised a theory that shows how the existence of God is compatible with the evil that actually exists. But he also held that an argument could be developed that we human beings might well not have the cognitive capacity to understand the relation between God and the world, and that therefore the existence of God might nevertheless be compatible with the evil that exists. At the core of Kant’s position (...) lies the claim that God’s relation to the world might well not be purposive in the way we humans can genuinely understand such a relation. His strategy involves demonstrating that the teleological argument is unsound - for this argument would establish that the relation between God and the world is purposive in a way we can grasp - and showing that by way of a Spinozan conception we can catch an intellectual glimpse of an alternative picture of the relation between God and the world. (shrink)

1. Consider first Baker’s definition of constitution. In her view, constitution is a relation between concrete individuals. Each concrete individual is fundamentally a member of exactly one primary kind. By definition, any concrete individual has its primary kind membership essentially, so that a concrete individual x’s ceasing to be a member of this kind entails that x ceases to exist. For example, David’s primary kind is statue, Piece’s primary kind is piece of marble. Suppose that x and y are concrete (...) individuals; F* designates the property of having F as one’s primary-kind; F and G are not the same kind; individual x has F* and individual y has G*; and D designates G- favorable circumstances—“the milieu required for something to be a G”. Then. (shrink)

Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism has three parts. The first (Chapters 1–4) develops a response to the knowledge and conceivability arguments against physicalism, one that features the open possibility that introspective representations represent mental properties as having features they actually lack. The second part (Chapters 5 and 6) proposes a physicalist version of a Russellian Monist answer to these arguments, the core of which is that currently unknown intrinsic physical properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and also (...) yield an account of consciousness. The third part (Chapters 7 and 8) defends a nonreductive account of physicalism about the mental, according to which the relation between the mental and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not explicated by the notion of identity. (shrink)

Examines the relevance of empirical studies of responsibility judgments for traditional philosophical concerns about free will and moral responsibility. We argue that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates, but that setting up experiments and interpreting data in just the right way is no less difficult than negotiating traditional philosophical arguments. Both routes are valuable, but so far neither promises a way to secure significant agreement among the competing parties. To illustrate, we focus on three sorts of issues. For (...) illustration, we discuss an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy Nahmias and colleagues, the role that empirical studies might have in the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, and the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. (shrink)

In Wrongs and Crimes, Victor Tadros argues that wrongdoers acquire special duties to those they’ve wronged, and from there he generates wrongdoers’ duties to contribute to general deterrence by being punished. In support, he contends that my manipulation argument against compatibilism fails to show that causal determination is incompatible with the proposed duties wrongdoers owe to those they’ve wronged. I respond that I did not intend my manipulation argument to rule out a sense of moral responsibility that features such duties, (...) and that I don’t believe it does. In fact, I’m willing to accept a restricted version of Tadros’s proposal, and I explain how this addition modifies the self-defense-based position on deterrence that I’ve defended in the past. (shrink)

This chapter explores the prospects that skeptics about free will have for addressing the problem of evil. I argue that skeptics have available many of the resources employed by antiskeptics about free will, and that the responses that involve an essential appeal to free will are not especially powerful. As a result, the theist who is a free will skeptic is not at a significant disadvantage in coping with the problem of evil.

'Free will skepticism' refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings lack the control in action - i.e. the free will - required for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. Critics fear that adopting this view would have harmful consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and laws. Optimistic free will skeptics, on the other hand, respond by arguing that life without free will and so-called (...) basic desert moral responsibility would not be harmful in these ways, and might even be beneficial. This collection addresses the practical implications of free will skepticism for law and society. It contains eleven original essays that provide alternatives to retributive punishment, explore what changes are needed for the criminal justice system, and ask whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the real-world implications of free will skepticism. (shrink)

I first want to thank John Fischer for his generous appraisal of the book, and for his astute and challenging comments on my treatment of the manipulation argument in Chapter 4. Fischer’s core strategy for resisting this argument is a soft-line reply. Soft-liners claim that in some manipulation cases the agent is not morally responsible, and in others he is. A corollary of the soft-line reply is that there is a plausible compatibilist condition on moral responsibility that has not been (...) met in some of the cases. One prominent response of this sort is that a key condition on basic desert moral responsibility is the absence of intentional manipulation or causal determination . This is not the line Fischer takes. In the response he proposes, intentional causal determination is compatible with moral responsibility in Case 2, that is, in what he calls an initial design case, in which the intentional causation, as in Leibniz’s theological determinism, is confined to the beginning of the agent’s life. But in Case 1, where the intentional manipulation is direct and immediate, the agent is not morally responsible. Fischer’s thought is that Plum’s non-responsibility in Case 1 can be accounted for by the conditions on mechanism-ownership, a feature of the compatibilist account of moral responsibility he and Ravizza developed, which, he correctly points out, I neglect in favor of the reasons-responsiveness component. (shrink)

This Element examines the concept of moral responsibility as it is used in contemporary philosophical debates and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with it, including moral praise/blame, retributive punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. After identifying and discussing several different varieties of responsibility-including causal responsibility, take-charge responsibility, role responsibility, liability responsibility, and the kinds of responsibility associated with attributability, answerability, and accountability-it distinguishes between basic and non-basic desert conceptions of moral responsibility and considers a (...) number of skeptical arguments against each. It then outlines an alternative forward-looking account of moral responsibility grounded in non-desert-invoking desiderata such as protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. It concludes by addressing concerns about the practical implications of skepticism about desert-based moral responsibility and explains how optimistic skeptics can preserve most of what we care about when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, morality, and meaning in life. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility is a collection of 33 articles by leading international scholars on the topic of moral responsibility and its main forms, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. The articles in the volume provide a comprehensive survey on scholarship on this topic since 1960, with a focus on the past three decades. Articles address the nature of moral responsibility - whether it is fundamentally a matter of deserved blame and praise, or whether it is grounded anticipated good consequences, such (...) as moral education and formation, or whether there are different kinds of moral responsibility. They examine responsibility for both actions and omissions, whether responsibility comes in degrees, and whether groups such as corporations can be responsible. The traditional debates about moral responsibility focus on the threats posed from causal determinism, and from the absence of the ability to do otherwise that may result. The articles in this volume build on these arguments and appraise the most recent developments in these debates. Philosophical reflection on the personal relationships and moral responsibility has been especially intense over the past two decades, and several articles reflect this development. Other chapters take up the link between blameworthiness and attitudes such as moral resentment and indignation, while others explore the role that forgiveness and reconciliation play in personal relationships and responsibility. The range of articles in this volume look at moral responsibility from a range of perspectives and disciplines, explaining how physics, neuroscience, and psychological research on topics such as addiction and implicit bias illuminate the ways and degrees to which we might be responsible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Free Will’s Value: Criminal Justice, Pride, and Love by John LemosJohn DavenportLEMOS, John. Free Will’s Value: Criminal Justice, Pride, and Love. New York: Routledge, 2023. 284 pp. Cloth, $160.00It is a pleasure to read John Lemos’s latest work on moral free will, understood as the control needed for us to be morally responsible in “the just deserts sense.” Lemos is a clear writer who carefully lays out (...) the positions that he reviews and critiques. This book would be wonderful as a main text in a graduate seminar: The first six chapters critically address most of the main theories and moves in this wide field during the last twenty to twenty-five years, providing a very helpful overview while setting up Lemos’s own position. He advances an “indeterministic weightings” version of leeway-libertarianism about moral freedom that builds on both Robert Kane’s event-causal account and Robert Nozick’s older account of fixing the weight of practical considerations in the moment of choice. Lemos’s new account significantly refines the position that he defended against hard incompatiblism in his 2018 book. [End Page 721]Free Will’s Value also discusses responsibility in applied contexts, such as criminal justice and loving relationships. There are two chapters arguing that hard incompatibilists cannot save the “just deserts” aspect of criminal punishment or explain all the wrongness of taking the liberty of innocent persons mistakenly convicted. Their “public health quarantine” account of criminal justice will be utilitarian, and thus have a hard time justifying the beyond-reasonable-doubt standard for conviction. And, building on the critiques of compatibilism that he develops partly from Derk Pereboom and Bruce Waller, Lemos includes three chapters arguing that “axiological/pragmatist reasons” provide more evidence for libertarian free will than psychological evidence alone can.The final chapter in particular offers a novel argument that valuable sorts of interhuman loves need to involve self- or character-forming initiatives that are not primarily determined by factors beyond our control. The intrinsic value of some types of love, such as deep friendships—including romantic friendships—involve their being autonomous (my term), which in turn requires a kind of leeway-control. This involves arguing that “our will, effort, or a decision to love” is important to values achieved in sustaining loving relationships.Lemos’s own theory contends that Kane’s account of “self-forming actions” (SFAs) and “willings” (SFWs) in terms of dual “tryings” (or decisions) to do A or B in a fraught situation suffers from the “phenomenological problem” stated by Laura Ekstrom and Marc Balaguer, namely, that we do not normally experience fraught choices as involving such opposed tryings. This is even more evident, I believe, if we consider choices involving three or more salient options. Lemos is not convinced by Kane’s reply that the dual or multiple simultaneous efforts are usually unconscious, because he thinks responsibility for unconscious mental processes will (normally) trace to patterns of conscious choices made earlier in life. In fact, unconscious efforts, Lemos says, cannot meet even “plausible minimal compatibilist standards of responsibility” for elements of agency.I’m not convinced by this last claim, because it seems that an unconscious choice, C, could be responsive to (or counterfactually guided by) reasons relevant to C that the agent has considered in the past. Perhaps the problem is that “trying” is normally associated with attempting to act on an intention, but Kane uses it to describe the more elusive processes of agency involved in forming an intention via decision in the face of competing relevant options, which thereby incorporates motives into the intention. This sheds light on the further problem that it appears irrational to try to do multiple incompatible things at once. Pace Lemos, I think that Kane is right that “will-settling” is a special context in which it is not irrational for a single person’s agency to be engaged along dual pathways. Even if we do not call this “trying,” the agent’s interactions with the salient options are not like those of a detached spectator; they are volitional as well as evaluative. [End Page 722]Lemos’s account recognizes three loci... (shrink)