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Summary It is widely though not quite universally held that there is a nomological or a constitutive link between free will and moral responsibility: at minimum that acting with free will is a necessary condition for moral responsibility (though the free act need not be a proximate cause of the behavior or state for which the agent is responsible). This link certainly explains the interest of the free will debate for many people. Some philosophers stipulate that by free will they mean the control condition on moral responsibility. Dissenters point out that it seems we may freely perform actions that have no moral significance whatsoever. They may also draw attention to aspects of human life we value independent of moral responsibility that might be underwritten by free will: self-respect, pride, love, and so forth.
Key works The assumption that free will is a necessary condition of moral responsibility is so widespread that listing key works here would produce a list that is more or less co-extensive with the key works on free will. John Martin Fischer's important workcan be read as dissenting from the near consensus view; see especially Fischer & Ravizza 1998. Whereas Fischer may be read as claiming we are morally responsible, whether or not we have free will, Waller 2011 argues that we may have free will but are not morally responsible.
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  1. Frankfurt Cases and 'Could Have Done Otherwise'.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    In his seminal essay, Harry Frankfurt argued that our exercise of free will and allocation of moral responsibility do not depend on us being able to do other than we did. Leslie Allan defends this moral maxim from Frankfurt's attack. Applying his character-based counterfactual conditional analysis of free acts to Frankfurt's counterexamples, Allan unpacks the confusions that lie at the heart of Frankfurt's argument. The author also explores how his 4C compatibilist theory measures up against Frankfurt’s conclusions.
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  2. Free Will and Compatibilism.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    The author mounts a case against the libertarian and hard determinist's thesis that free will is impossible in a deterministic world. He charges incompatibilists with misconstruing ordinary 'free will' talk by overlaying common language with their own metaphysical presuppositions. Through a review of ordinary discourse and recent developments in jurisprudence and the sciences, he draws together the four key factors required for an act to be free. He then puts his 4C theory to work in giving a credible account of (...)
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  3. Freedom in a physical world – a partial taxonomy.Jude Arnout Durieux - manuscript
    If I take a free decision, how does this express itself physically? If God acts in this world, how does he do so? The answers to those two questions may be different or the same. Here we sketch a typology of possible answers, including Transcendent Compatibility. It turns out that in an open universe, freedom is the timewise mirror image of causality.
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  4. Fairness, Sanction, and Condemnation.Pamela Hieronymi - manuscript
    I here press an often overlooked question: Why does the fairness of a sanction require an adequate opportunity to avoid it? By pressing this question, I believe I have come to better understand something that has long puzzled me, namely, what philosophers (and others) might have in mind when they talk about “true moral responsibility,” or the “condemnatory force” of moral blame, or perhaps even “basic desert.” In presenting this understanding of “condemnation” or of “basic desert,” I am presenting an (...)
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  5. A Counterexample to Huemer's ’No Matter What’ Interpretation of the Consequence Argument. Mansooreh - manuscript
    The consequence argument is a salient argument in favor of incompatibilism which is the thesis that if determinism is true, then it is not the case that we have free will. In a nutshell, the consequence argument has it that if determinism is true, then our acts are determined by the laws of nature and events of the past. But we are neither able to change the past nor the laws of nature. Therefore, we are not able to change the (...)
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  6. Humean Laws, Humean-law Compatibilism, and the Consequence Argument.Kristin M. Mickelson - manuscript
    Traditional compatibilism is the view that free will is compatible with determinism. Humean-law compatibilism (a.k.a. weak-law compatibilism), is the view that free will is compatible with determinism, where determinism is defined in terms of a broadly Humean view of the laws of nature. A growing number of philosophers hold that Humean-law compatibilists are targeted by and have special resources to resist arguments for traditional incompatibilism, including the Consequence Argument (cf. Beebee and Mele 2002, Perry 2004, Hetherington 2006, Berofsky 2012, Mele (...)
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  7. Constructive Dilemma Arguments for the Impossibility of Free Will.Kristin M. Mickelson - manuscript
    The traditional problem of free will and determinism is ostensibly about settling the relationship between free will and determinism. According to the standard narrative, this problem boils down to settling whether free will stands in a compatibility or incompatibility relation with determinism. Similarly, there is traditional debate over whether a compatibility or an incompatibility relationship holds between free will and indeterminism. Since indeterminism is simply the negation of determinism, anyone who holds that human free will is incompatible with both determinism (...)
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  8. A Talking Cure for Autonomy Traps : How to share our social world with chatbots.Regina Rini - manuscript
    Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT were trained on human conversation, but in the future they will also train us. As chatbots speak from our smartphones and customer service helplines, they will become a part of everyday life and a growing share of all the conversations we ever have. It’s hard to doubt this will have some effect on us. Here I explore a specific concern about the impact of artificial conversation on our capacity to deliberate and hold ourselves accountable (...)
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  9. Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervetion.Tamler Sommers - manuscript
  10. Maybe your virtue blanks your choice.Zhaohui Wen - manuscript
    Asymmetry Thesis proposed by Susan Wolf says, that if one agent is blameworthy, then he should have the ability to do otherwise, while if he is praiseworthy, then he is not required to have the ability to do otherwise (Wolf 1990, 79–81). In this paper, I try to advance a new proposal in defense of Asymmetry Thesis from a perspective intersecting our discussion of moral responsibility and our discussion of virtue ethics. That is, I propose to argue that a promising (...)
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  11. Why I (still) believe in free will and responsibility.David Hodgson - manuscript
    David Hodgson[1] It’s widely asserted by scientists and philosophers that our decisions and actions are wholly determined by physical processes of our brains; and many also assert that this means we cannot have free will and cannot, in any real sense, be responsible for what we do. In recent times, this has led to some questioning of the basis of criminal..
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  12. Free will, determinism, and moral responsibility: The whole thing in brief.Ted Honderich - manuscript
  13. Blackwell Companion to Free Will.Joe Campbell, Kristin Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.) - forthcoming - Blackwell.
  14. Moral Responsibility and the Strike Back Emotion: Comments on Bruce Waller’s The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility.Gregg Caruso - forthcoming - Syndicate Philosophy 1 (1).
    In The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility (2015), Bruce Waller sets out to explain why the belief in individual moral responsibility is so strong. He begins by pointing out that there is a strange disconnect between the strength of philosophical arguments in support of moral responsibility and the strength of philosophical belief in moral responsibility. While the many arguments in favor of moral responsibility are inventive, subtle, and fascinating, Waller points out that even the most ardent supporters of moral responsibility (...)
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  15. Moral Responsibility Must Look Back.Daniel Coren - forthcoming - American Philosophical Quarterly.
    I argue that to remove all backward-looking grounds and justification from the practice, as some theorists recommend, is to remove (not revise) moral responsibility. The most paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility must feature desert and retributive elements. So, moral responsibility must be (at least partially) backward-looking. When we hold people responsible, one reason we do so is that we believe that they deserve punishment or reward simply in virtue of the action for which we hold them responsible. None of this (...)
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  16. Dependence and the Freedom to Do Otherwise.Taylor Cyr - forthcoming - Faith and Philosophy.
    An increasingly popular approach to reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom is to say that, because God’s beliefs depend on what we do, we are free to do otherwise than what we actually do despite God’s infallible foreknowledge. This paper develops a new challenge for this dependence response. The challenge stems from a case of backward time travel in which an agent intuitively lacks the freedom to do otherwise because of the time-traveler’s knowledge of what the agent will do, and (...)
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  17. Election and Human Agency.Taylor Cyr & Leigh Vicens - forthcoming - In Edwin Chr van Driel (ed.), T&T Clark Handbook on Election. pp. 536-558.
    In Section 1, we begin by asking what, exactly, it might mean for God to “elect” people and how this relates to their agency and freedom. After getting clearer on what God is supposed to elect people to or for, we argue against the view that a person’s will is not involved in the process by which God elects her, which we identify in part as the person’s coming to have faith. But, in Section 2, we consider several reasons for (...)
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  18. Circumstantial and Constitutive Moral Luck in Kant's Moral Philosophy.Robert J. Hartman - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    The received view of Kant’s moral philosophy is that it precludes all moral luck. But I offer a plausible interpretation according to which Kant embraces moral luck in circumstance and constitution. I interpret the unconditioned nature of transcendental freedom as a person’s ability to do the right thing no matter how she is inclined by her circumstantial and constitutive luck. I argue that various passages about degrees of difficulty relating to circumstantial and constitutive luck provide a reason to accept a (...)
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  19. Levinas and the Second Personal Structure of Free Will.Kevin Houser - forthcoming - In Michael Fagenblat & Melis Erdur (eds.), Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Personal Normativity and the Moral Life. Research in Phenomenology Series.
    Many suppose some form of free will is required to make moral responsibility possible. Levinas thinks this is backwards. Freedom does not make moral responsibility possible. Moral responsibility makes freedom possible. Free will is not a condition for morality. Free will is an aspect and expression of our moral condition. Key to Levinas’s argument is his rejection of free-will-individualism: the idea that free will is a power a single being could possess. A “contradiction” extracted from standard accounts, and related troubles (...)
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  20. Reasons-Responsiveness and the Challenge of Irrelevance.Jingbo Hu - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association.
    Carolina Sartorio has criticized the reasons-responsiveness theory of freedom for being inconsistent with the actual-sequence view motivated by the Frankfurt-style cases. Specifically, reasons-responsiveness conceived as a modal property does not pertain to the actual sequence of the agent's action and thereby it is irrelevant to the agent's freedom and moral responsibility. Call this the challenge of irrelevance. In this article, I present this challenge in a new way that overcomes certain limitations of Sartorio's argument. I argue that the root of (...)
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  21. Responsibility-Foundation: Still Needed and Still Missing.Stephen Kershnar & Robert M. Kelly - forthcoming - Science, Religion and Culture.
    Responsibility is impossible because there is no responsibility-maker and there needs to be one if people are morally responsible. The two most plausible candidates, psychology and decision, fail. A person is not responsible for an unchosen psychology or a psychology that was chosen when the person is not responsible for the choice. This can be seen in intuitions about instantly-created and manipulated people. This result is further supported by the notion that, in general, the right, the good, and virtue rest (...)
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  22. Persons, Agents and Wantons.Matthew Lampert - forthcoming - Moral Philosophy and Politics.
    In this essay, I argue that any competent group agent must be a wanton. The impetus for this claim is an argument Arthur Applbaum makes in Legitimacy: The Right to Rule in a Wanton World that a formal institution (in this case, a government) can, under the right conditions, function as a free moral group agent. I begin by explaining Harry Frankfurt’s classic account of wantonism—not just for the benefit of readers who might not be familiar with the concept, but (...)
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  23. On the Top‑Down Argument for the Ability to Do Otherwise.Leonhard Menges - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-14.
    The Top-Down Argument for the ability to do otherwise aims at stablishing that humans can do otherwise in the sense that is relevant for debates about free will. It consists of two premises: first, we always need to answer the question of whether some phenomenon (such as the ability to do otherwise) exists by consulting our best scientific theories of the domain at issue. Second, our best scientific theories of human action presuppose that humans can do otherwise. This paper argues (...)
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  24. Not what I expected: Feeling of surprise differentially mediates effect of personal control on attributions of free will and responsibility.Samuel Murray & Thomas Nadelhoffer - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-25.
    Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will and responsibility. Across three studies (N = 1,516) we found that (...)
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  25. Computing and moral responsibility.Merel Noorman - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  26. Must Choices and Decisions be Uncaused by Prior Events or States of the Agent?David Palmer - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-8.
    There is an important but unorthodox view within the philosophy of action that when it comes to certain mental actions of a person—her decisions and choices—these actions cannot be caused by her beliefs and desires or by any prior event or state of her at all. The reason for this, it is said, is that there is something in the very nature of a person’s decisions and choices that entails that they cannot be caused in this way. The arguments for (...)
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  27. Recasting Responsibility: Hume and Williams.Paul Russell - forthcoming - In Marcel van Ackeren & Matthieu Queloz (eds.), Bernard Williams on Philosophy and History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Bernard Williams identifies Hume as “in some ways an archetypal reconciler” who, nevertheless, displays “a striking resistance to some of the central tenets of what [Williams calls] ‘morality’”. This assessment, it is argued, is generally correct. There are, however, some significant points of difference in their views concerning moral responsibility. This includes Williams’s view that a naturalistic project of the kind that Hume pursues is of limited value when it comes to making sense of “morality’s” illusions about responsibility and blame. (...)
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  28. The Reason View and "the Morality System".Paul Russell - forthcoming - In Michael Frauchiger & Markus Stepanians (eds.), Themes from Wolf. Berlin:
    This paper examines Susan Wolf's accout of "the Reason View" of moral responsibility as articulated and defended in 'Freedom Within Reason' (OUP 1990). The discussion turns on two questions about the Reason View: -/- (1) Does the Reason View aim to satisfy what Bernard Williams describes as “morality” and its (“peculiar”) conception of responsibility and blame? -/- (2) If it does, how successful is the Reason View judged in these terms? -/- It is argued that if the Reason View aims (...)
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  29. A Kantian Quality of Will Account of Excuses.Matthé Scholten - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-27.
    It is a common picture that Kant is committed to an uncompromising account of moral responsibility that leaves no room for excuses. I argue that this picture is mistaken. More specifically, I reconstruct a Kantian quality of will account of excuses according to which an agent is excused for performing a morally wrong (or omitting a morally obligatory) action if and only if the action (or omission) does not manifest a lack of good will on the part of the agent. (...)
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  30. Are the Folk Historicists about Moral Responsibility?Matthew Taylor & Heather Maranges - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology:1-22.
    Manipulation cases have figured prominently in philosophical debates about whether moral responsibility is in some sense deeply historical. Meanwhile, some philosophers have thought that folk thinking about manipulated agents may shed some light on the various argumentative burdens facing participants in that debate. This paper argues that folk thinking is, to some extent, deeply historical. Across three experiments, it is shown that a substantial number of participants did not attribute moral responsibility to agents with manipulation in their histories. The results (...)
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  31. Truth and Moral Responsibility.P. Roger Turner - forthcoming - In Fabio Bacchini Massimo Dell'Utri & Stefano Caputo (eds.), New Advances in Causation, Agency, and Moral Responsibility. Cambridge Scholars Press.
    Most philosophers who study moral responsibility have done so in isolation of the concept of truth. Here, I show that thinking about the nature of truth has profound consequences for discussions of moral responsibility. In particular, by focusing on the very trivial nature of truth—that truth depends on the world and not the other way around—we can see that widely accepted counterexamples to one of the most influential incompatibilist arguments can be shown not only to be false, but also impossible.
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  32. What Time Travel Teaches Us about Moral Responsibility.Taylor Cyr & Neal Tognazzini - 2024 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (3).
    This paper explores what the metaphysics of time travel might teach us about moral responsibility. We take our cue from a recent paper by Yishai Cohen, who argues that if time travel is metaphysically possible, then one of the most influential theories of moral responsibility (i.e., Fischer and Ravizza’s) is false. We argue that Cohen’s argument is unsound but that Cohen’s argument can serve as a lens to bring reasons-responsive theories of moral responsibility into sharper focus, helping us to better (...)
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  33. Genius Malignus oder Verantwortung: Descartes und die Konspirologie.Albert Dikovich - 2024 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 78 (1):130-156.
    This paper aims at developing an understanding of conspirational thinking as a means for dealing with epistemic and practical insecurity. This strategy of coping with insecurity results in the construction of a metaphysical system, which is centered around the idea of a nearly omnipotent conspirator. The paper argues that there is a relatedness between the Cartesian cogito and conspirational thinking. The latter can be conceived of as an aberration from the philosophical search for a fundamentum inconcussum. After the relevance of (...)
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  34. The Self, Emptiness, and Awareness.Claus Janew - 2024 - In Truthfulness. The Consciousness that Creates Reality. KDP.
    In this exploration of self-identity, I argue that the self is not a standalone entity but an integral part of a broader consciousness. Deep meditation reveals the self as a construct beyond egoistic confines, interlinked with the external world and others' experiences. Decisions arise from an awareness that transcends individual ego, suggesting that our sense of self is an inexhaustible center of dynamic consciousness rather than an ultimate emptiness.
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  35. Indirect compatibilism.Andrew J. Latham - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):141-162.
    In this paper I will introduce a new compatibilist account of free action: indirect conscious control compatibilism, or just indirect compatibilism for short. On this account, actions are free either when they are caused by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes, or else by sub‐personal level processes influenced in particular ways by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes. This view is motivated by a problem faced by a certain family of compatibilist views, which I call conscious control views. These views hold that we act (...)
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  36. The significance of skepticism.Taylor Madigan - 2024 - Ratio (1):26-37.
    There is a recurrent sort of skeptical character in philosophical debates who believes that some social practice must be abolished because it involves a false presupposition about how things ‘really’ are. I examine this style of skeptical argument, using the moral responsibility skeptic as my main illustration. I excavate two unstated and un-argued for premises that it requires (which I call Undistorted Truth and Privileged Conception). This exposes the full extent of the argumentative burdens that such a skeptic must discharge. (...)
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  37. “Free will” is vague.Santiago Amaya - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):7-21.
    This paper argues that “free will” is vague. The argument has two steps. First, I argue that free will is a matter of degrees and, second, that there are no sharp boundaries separating free decisions and actions and non‐free ones. After presenting the argument, I focus on one significant consequence of the thesis, although others are mentioned along the way. In short, considerations of vagueness help understand the logic behind so‐called manipulation arguments, but also show why these arguments are ultimately (...)
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  38. The Active Powers of the Human Mind.Ruth Boeker - 2023 - In Aaron Garrett & James A. Harris (eds.), Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, Volume II: Method, Metaphysics, Mind, Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 255–292.
    This essay traces the development of the philosophical debates concerning active powers and human agency in eighteenth-century Scotland. I examine how and why Scottish philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull, David Hume, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, depart from John Locke’s and other traditional conceptions of the will and how Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart reinstate Locke’s distinction between volition and desire. Moreover, I examine what role desires, passions, and motives play in the writings of these and other Scottish (...)
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  39. Moral Responsibility and the Flicker of Freedom.Justin A. Capes - 2023 - Oxford University Press.
    This book addresses a longstanding controversy concerning whether Frankfurt cases—thought experiments of a sort devised by Harry Frankfurt—are counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities (roughly, the principle that a person is morally responsible for what he did only if he could have avoided doing it). Frankfurt and many others contend that they are, but here it is argued that, far from being counterexamples to the principle, Frankfurt cases actually provide further confirmation of it, a conclusion that has important implications (...)
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  40. Deliberation and the Possibility of Skepticism.Simon-Pierre Chevarie-Cossette - 2023 - In Maximilian Kiener (ed.), The Routledge handbook of philosophy of responsibility. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. pp. 239-249.
    No one is responsible for their conduct because free will is an illusion, say some skeptics. Even when it seems that we have several options, we only have one. Hence, says the free will skeptic, we should reform our practices which involve responsibility attributions, such as punishment and blame. How seriously should we take this doctrine? Is it one that we could live by? One thorn in the side of the skeptic concerns deliberation. When we deliberate about what to do—what (...)
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  41. Why history matters for moral responsibility: Evaluating history‐sensitive structuralism.Taylor W. Cyr - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):58-69.
    Is moral responsibility essentially historical, or does an agent's moral responsibility for an action depend only on their psychological structure at that time? In previous work, I have argued that the two main (non‐skeptical) views on moral responsibility and agents’ histories—historicism and standard structuralism—are vulnerable to objections that are avoided by a third option, namely history‐sensitive structuralism. In this paper, I develop this view in greater detail and evaluate the view by comparing it with its three dialectical rivals: skepticism about (...)
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  42. Freedom, Responsibility, and Value: Essays in Honor of John Martin Fischer.Taylor W. Cyr, Andrew Law & Neal A. Tognazzini (eds.) - 2023 - New York: Routledge.
    This volume celebrates the career of John Martin Fischer, whose work on a wide range of topics over the past forty years has been transformative and inspirational. Fischer's semicompatibilist view of free will and moral responsibility is perhaps the most widely discussed view of its kind, and his emphasis on the significance of reasons-responsiveness as the capacity that underlies moral accountability has been widely influential. Aside from free will and moral responsibility, Fischer is also well-known for his work on freedom (...)
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  43. Responsibility Internalism and Responsibility for AI.Huzeyfe Demirtas - 2023 - Dissertation, Syracuse University
    I argue for responsibility internalism. That is, moral responsibility (i.e., accountability, or being apt for praise or blame) depends only on factors internal to agents. Employing this view, I also argue that no one is responsible for what AI does but this isn’t morally problematic in a way that counts against developing or using AI. Responsibility is grounded in three potential conditions: the control (or freedom) condition, the epistemic (or awareness) condition, and the causal responsibility condition (or consequences). I argue (...)
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  44. Hume on Free Will.Lorenzo Greco - 2023 - Argumenta:1-14.
    In this essay, I discuss David Hume’s reasoning on free will as he presents it in A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. I proceed by showing how Hume’s compatibilist solution acquires meaning in the light of his sentimentally based science of human nature, which conceives human beings as reasonable, social, and active creatures. Within Hume’s empiricist, naturalistic, and sceptical approach, we deal only with perceptions and never with things themselves, and human experience is structured in (...)
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  45. A Christian Ethics of Blame: Or, God says, "Vengeance is Mine".Robert J. Hartman - 2023 - Religious Studies:1-16.
    There is an ethics of blaming the person who deserves blame. The Christian scriptures imply the following no-vengeance condition: a person should not vengefully overtly blame a wrongdoer even if she gives the wrongdoer the exact negative treatment that he deserves. I explicate and defend this novel condition and argue that it demands a revolution in our blaming practices. First, I explain the no-vengeance condition. Second, I argue that the no-vengeance condition is often violated. The most common species of blame (...)
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  46. Responsibility collapses: why moral responsibility is impossible.Stephen Kershnar - 2023 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Our worldview assumes that people are morally responsible. Consider our emotions regarding other people or ourselves. We often feel anger, gratitude, pride, and shame toward them or ourselves. Consider religious beliefs. Jews and Christians believe that God cares whether a person does right by others and freely loves him. Consider moral values. We value dignity, freedom, and rights. The above emotions, beliefs, and values assume that people are responsible. In particular, they assume that a person is responsible for what she (...)
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  47. Kant on Freedom and Rational Agency.Markus Kohl - 2023 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    In "Kant on Freedom and Rational Agency", I aim to give a comprehensive interpretation and a qualified defense of Kant’s doctrine of freedom as a systematic conception of rational agency. -/- Although my book follows Kant in focusing on the idea of free will as a condition of moral agency, it denies that moral freedom of will is the only relevant (transcendental) type of freedom. Human beings also exercise absolute freedom of thought (intellectual autonomy) in their theoretical cognition. Moreover, our (...)
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  48. A puzzle about moral responsibility.Fabio Lampert & John William Waldrop - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (8):2291-2307.
    We present a new puzzle about logical truth, necessity, and moral responsibility. We defend one solution to the puzzle. A corollary of our preferred solution is that prominent arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility are invalid.
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  49. Let's Not Do Responsibility Skepticism.Ken M. Levy - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (3):458-73.
    I argue for three conclusions. First, responsibility skeptics are committed to the position that the criminal justice system should adopt a universal nonresponsibility excuse. Second, a universal nonresponsibility excuse would diminish some of our most deeply held values, further dehumanize criminals, exacerbate mass incarceration, and cause an even greater number of innocent people (nonwrongdoers) to be punished. Third, while Saul Smilansky's ‘illusionist’ response to responsibility skeptics – that even if responsibility skepticism is correct, society should maintain a responsibility‐realist/retributivist criminal justice (...)
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  50. On Three Arguments Against Metaphysical Libertarianism.Ken M. Levy - 2023 - Review of Metaphysics 76 (4):725-748.
    I argue that the three strongest arguments against metaphysical libertarianism—the randomness objection, the constitutive luck objection, and the physicalist objection—are actually unsuccessful and therefore that metaphysical libertarianism is more plausible than the common philosophical wisdom allows. My more positive thesis, what I will refer to as “Agent Exceptionalism,” is that, when making decisions and performing actions, human beings can indeed satisfy the four conditions of metaphysical libertarianism: the control condition, the rationality condition, the ultimacy condition, and the physicalism condition.
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