“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

Hard-Incompatibilist Existentialism: Neuroscience, Punishment, and Meaning in Life

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

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

Antioxidant activity of pineal methoxyindoles on hepatocyte plasmatic membrane

Antioxidant effect of several pineal derived molecules has been well documented. Here, the protective effects of 5-methoxytryptophol (5-MTOH) and 5-methoxyindol-3-acetic acid (5-MIAA) on hepatic cell membrane lipid peroxidation and cell membrane rigidity induced by FeCl3 plus ascorbic acid have been systemically investigated. The membrane fluidity was evaluated by fluorescence spectroscopy, malondialdehyde (MDA) and 4-hydroxyalkenals (4-HDA) concentrations and carbonyl groups of protein were measured as the parameters of lipid and protein damage, respectively. Results showed that oxidative stress increased membrane rigidity, MDA and 4-HDA concentra-tions as well as carbonyl content in a concentration-dependent manner. 5-MTOH, but not 5-MIAA, significantly attenuated these oxidative indecies. In absence of oxidative stress, none of these methoxyindoleamines modified the content of MDA, 4-HDA or carbonyl-ation. However 5-MIAA at its highest concentration slightly modified membrane fluidity. The results suggest that structural modification of C3 in the methoxyindoleamine, that is, the carboxyl group replaced by hydroxyl group in this site could improve the ability of 5-methoxyindoleamine derivatives to preserve membrane fluidity of cells which are under oxidative stress

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