“Free Will and Affirmation: Assessing Honderich’s Third Way”

In the third and final part of his A Theory of Determinism (TD) Ted Honderich addresses the fundamental question concerning “the consequences of determinism.” The critical question he aims to answer is what follows if determinism is true? This question is, of course, intimately bound up with the problem of free will and, in particular, with the question of whether or not the truth of determinism is compatible or incompatible with the sort of freedom required for moral responsibility. It is Honderich’s aim to provide a solution to “the problem of the consequences of determinism” and a key element of this is his articulation and defence of an alternative response to the implications of determinism that collapses the familiar Compatibilist/Incompatibilist dichotomy. Honderich offers us a third way – the response of “Affirmation” (HFY 125-6). Although his account of Affirmation has application and relevance to issues and features beyond freedom and responsibility, my primary concern in this essay will be to examine Honderich’s theory of “Affirmation” as it concerns the free will problem

Moral Responsibility Reconsidered

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

The Replication Argument for Incompatibilism

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 incompatibilist argument than those we have considered previously

Alternatives and responsibility: an asymmetrical approach

En este trabajo defiendo una visión asimétrica sobre la relación entre las posibilidades alternativas y la responsabilidad moral, según la cual se requiere tener posibilidades alternativas para ser culpable por lo que uno decide o hace, pero no para ser laudable por ello. Defiendo la no necesidad de alternativas para ser laudable a través de un examen de lo que yo llamo “ejemplos Lutero”. Mi defensa de la necesidad de alternativas para ser culpable procede en cambio mediante un análisis de los llamados “casos Frankfurt”. En ambos casos, mis argumentos se basan en la afirmación según la cual, en las adscripciones de responsabilidad moral, la cuestión principal no es si el agente podría haber hecho algo distinto, sino si debería haber hecho lo que hizo, de modo que la primera pregunta solo se vuelve apremiante cuando la respuesta a la segunda es negativa. Así, pues, en lo que se refiere a la responsabilidad moral, el concepto de obligación o deber moral es previo al de posibilidades alternativas.In this paper, I defend an asymmetrical view concerning the relationship between alternative possibilities and moral responsibility, according to which alternative possibilities are required for being blameworthy, but not praiseworthy, for what one decides or does. I defend the non-necessity of alternatives for praiseworthiness through an examination of what I call ‘Luther’ examples. My defence of the necessity of alternatives for blameworthiness proceeds instead through an analysis of so-called ‘Frankfurt’ examples. In both cases, my arguments rest on the contention that, in ascriptions of moral responsibility, the primary question is not whether the agent could have done otherwise, but whether she should have done what she did, so that the former question only becomes pressing when the answer to the latter is negative. Concerning moral responsibility, then, the concept of moral obligation or duty is prior to that of alternative possibilities

Free Will & Empirical Arguments for Epiphenomenalism

While philosophers have worried about mental causation for centuries, worries about the causal relevance of conscious phenomena are also increasingly featuring in neuroscientific literature. Neuroscientists have regarded the threat of epiphenomenalism as interesting primarily because they have supposed that it entails free will scepticism. However, the steps that get us from a premise about the causal irrelevance of conscious phenomena to a conclusion about free will are not entirely clear. In fact, if we examine popular philosophical accounts of free will, we find, for the most part, nothing to suggest that free will is inconsistent with the presence of unconscious neural precursors to choices. It is only if we adopt highly non-naturalistic assumptions about the mind (e.g. if we embrace Cartesian dualism and locate free choice in the non-physical realm) that it seems plausible to suppose that the neuroscientific data generates a threat to free will

Aristotle on Deliberation and Contingency

The author discusses Aristotle’s notion of deliberation and shows that it differs considerably from the model of deliberation as is common in contemporary discussions of free will and moral responsibility. As opposed to the contemporary model, Aristotle’s account does not require that the deliberator has any belief (or lack thereof) concerning the availability of possible courses of action. However, the action chosen by deliberation, before it is performed, is still contingent––i.e. such that it can both be and not be done––and up to us. Moreover, the action’s being up to us can be seen as grounded in our having rational capacities that are necessarily two-sided. This might suggest that the agent can do otherwise than she has decided by deliberation. The author argues that this is not the case: after deliberation, or after forming the relevant desire, the agent can actualize only one arm of her two-sided capacity, and hence, she cannot act differently than as decided by deliberation. If it makes sense to say that she can act differently, it is only because there may occur, in the interval between deliberation and action, some other desire which takes over a role of the decisive factor