Derk Pereboom

Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions provides an account of how we might effectively address wrongdoing given challenges to the legitimacy of anger and retribution that arise from ethical considerations and from concerns about free will. The issue is introduced in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 asks how we might conceive of blame without retribution, and proposes an account of blame as moral protest, whose function is to secure forward-looking goals such as the moral reform of the wrongdoer and reconciliation in relationships. Chapter 3 considers whether it's possible to justify effectively dealing those who pose dangerous threats if they do not deserve to be harmed, and contends that wrongfully posing a threat is the core condition for the legitimacy of defensive harming. Chapter 4 provides an account of how to treat criminals without a retributive justification for punishment, and argues for an account in which the right of self-defense provides justification for measures such as preventative detention. Chapter 5 considers how we might forgive if wrongdoers don't basically deserve the pain of being resented, which forgiveness would then renounce, and proposes that forgiveness be conceived instead as renunciation of the stance of moral protest. Chapter 6 considers how personal relationships might function without retributive anger having a role in responding to wrongdoing, and contends that the stance of moral protest, supplemented with non-retributive emotions, is sufficient. Chapter 7 surveys the options for theistic and atheistic attitudes regarding the fate of humanity in a deterministic universe, and defends an impartial hope for humanity.

Basic Desert, Reactive Attitudes and Free Will addresses the issue of whether we can make sense of the widespread conviction that we are morally responsible beings. It focuses on the claim that we deserve to be blamed and punished for our immoral actions, and how this claim can be justified given the philosophical and scientific reasons to believe that we lack the sort of free will required for this sort of desert. Contributions to the book distinguish between, and explore, two clusters of questions. The first asks what it is to deserve to be harmed or benefitted. What are the bases for desert – actions, good character, bad character, the omission of good character traits? The second cluster explores the disagreement between compatabilists and incompatibilists surrounding the nature of desert. Do we deserve to be harmed, benefitted, or judged, even if we lack the ability to act differently, and if we do not, what effect does this have on our everyday actions? Taken in full, this book sheds light on the notion of desert implicated in our practice of holding each other morally responsible. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Philosophical Explorations. _.

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

A traditional concern for determinists is that the epistemic conditions an agent must satisfy to deliberate about which of a number of distinct actions to perform threaten to conflict with a belief in determinism and its evident consequences. I develop an account of the sort that specifies two epistemic requirements, an epistemic openness condition and a belief in the efficacy of deliberation, whose upshot is that someone who believes in determinism and its evident consequences can deliberate without inconsistent beliefs. I argue that conditions of both types are indispensable, and that they can be formulated so as to withstand the relevant objections.

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.

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