Neil Levy

It is very widely held that Frankfurt‐style cases—in which a counterfactual intervener stands by to bring it about that an agent performs an action but never actually acts because the agent performs that action on her own—show that free will does not require alternative possibilities. This essay argues that that conclusion is unjustified, because merely counterfactual interven‐ers may make a difference to normative properties. It presents a modified version of a fake barn case to show how a counterfactual intervener can make the difference between an agent knowing a fact or merely truly believing that fact, by eliminating veretic epistemic luck. If counterfactual interveners can make this kind of difference to the epistemic status of agents, the essay argues, there is no reason why they can't make an analogous difference to agents' moral responsibility. It concludes that reflection on these cases reveals that despite the mountains of words spilled on the topic, we still don't fully understand what role access to alternative possibilities plays in whether or not agents are morally responsible for their actions.

Most of the philosophers engaged in the free will debate accept some kind of naturalism constraint. In this chapter, I distinguish three different kinds of naturalism. Strong naturalists hold that philosophical theorizing should be actually guided by current science, whereas weak naturalists avoid postulating any entities or processes that conflict with science (but may take bets on how science will evolve). Mid‐strength naturalism is agnostic about how future science will evolve, but is not actually guided by the science. I argue that though compatibilism tends to fare better on this scale when we consider its relationship to physics, consideration of neuroscience and psychology complicates the picture: major compatibilists engage in as much speculation and scientifically unmotivated postulation of entities and processes as major libertarians. I end by asking whether philosophers engaged in this debate ought to accept that the stronger a view's naturalist credentials, the better warranted it is.

Sometimes agents sincerely profess to believe a claim and yet act inconsistently with it in some contexts. In this paper, I focus on mismatch cases in the domain of religion. I distinguish between two kinds of representations: prompts and default states. Prompts are representations that must be salient to agents in order for them to play their belief-appropriate roles, whereas default states play these roles automatically. The need for access characteristic of prompts is explained by their vehicles: prompts are realized in symbolic systems or even artifacts that make them inapt for automatic regulation of inference and behavior. I argue that some mismatch cases are explained by the fact that agents often report the contents of prompts when they report their beliefs, but behavior is controlled by prompts only when they are made salient to agents. I show that a number of otherwise puzzling findings in the cognitive science of religion, concerning belief intuitiveness, are illuminated by the distinction.

Ethicists and ordinary people are typically more worried by interventions that alter agents’ mind by directly altering their brains than interventions than are focused on the environment, and thereby indirectly change minds. I argue that the causal route to changing minds is not itself important. Moreover, some of the most powerful techniques whereby behavior is altered without the consent or knowledge of agents involve environmental manipulations: manipulations of social space, for the benefit of those in the business of increasing consumption. I argue that insofar as we are fixated on internal interventions, we overlook ways in which our autonomy as agents is impaired. Once we recognize the power of environmental manipulations, however, we should come to see social space as a legitimate target for political control

ABSTRACT: In his last two books and in the essays and interviews associated with them, Foucault develops a new mode of ethical thought he describes as an aesthetics of existence. I argue that this new ethics bears a striking resemblance to the virtue ethics that has become prominent in Anglo‐American moral philosophy over the past three decades, in its classical sources, in its opposition to rule‐based systems and its positive emphasis upon what Foucault called the care for the self. I suggest that seeing Foucault and virtue ethicists as engaged in a convergent project sheds light on a number of obscurities in Foucault’s thought, and provides us with a historical narrative in which to situate his claims about the development of Western moral thought.