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Even Better Than the Real Thing: Revisionism and ResponsibilityDissertation, Stanford University. 2001.This is a dissertation about moral responsibility, whether we have it in the sense we ordinarily suppose, and what alternatives are available to us given that we lack it. ;The dissertation comes in two main parts. The first part defends a particular kind of error theory about the folk concept of moral responsibility. That is, given a roughly scientific picture of the world, it is likely that our commonsense beliefs about responsible agency are systematically mistaken. The second part of the diss…Read more
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78Review of James Stacey Taylor (ed.), Personal Autonomy: New Essays on Personal Autonomy and its Role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (8). 2006.I once heard a colleague opine that we would be better off if there were a 50-year moratorium on philosophers using the word 'autonomy'. He went on to argue that we could get along just fine without the word, and that a good number of confusions would be dispelled along the way. This collection of new papers goes a long way toward responding to this challenge in ways that both undercut and vindicate aspects of this complaint.
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169Compatibilism evolves?: On some varieties of Dennett worth wantingMetaphilosophy 36 (4): 460-475. 2005.I examine the extent to which Dennett’s account in Freedom Evolves might be construed as revisionist about free will or should instead be understood as a more traditional kind of compatibilism. I also consider Dennett’s views about philosophical work on free agency and its relationship to scientific inquiry, and I argue that extant philosophical work is more relevant to scientific inquiry than Dennett’s remarks may suggest
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197Revisionist Accounts of Free Will: Origins, Varieties, and ChallengesIn Robert Kane (ed.), Oxford Handbook on Free Will, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press. 2011.The present chapter is concerned with revisionism about free will. It begins by offering a new characterization of revisionist accounts and the way such accounts fit (or do not) in the familiar framework of compatibilism and incompatibilism. It then traces some of the recent history of the development of revisionist accounts, and concludes by remarking on some challenges for them.
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155On the importance of history for responsible agencyPhilosophical Studies 127 (3): 351-382. 2006.In this article I propose a resolution to the history issue for responsible agency, given a moderate revisionist approach to responsibility. Roughly, moderate revisionism is the view that a plausible and normatively adequate theory of responsibility will require principled departures from commonsense thinking. The history issue is whether morally responsible agency – that is, whether an agent is an apt target of our responsibility-characteristic practices and attitudes – is an essentially histor…Read more
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275Libertarianism and skepticism about free will: Some arguments against bothPhilosophical Topics 32 (1&2): 403-26. 2004.In this paper I criticize libertarianism and skepticism about free will. The criticism of libertarianism takes some steps towards filling in an argument that is often mentioned but seldom developed in any detail, the argument that libertarianism is a scientifically implausible view. I say "take some steps" because I think the considerations I muster (at most) favor a less ambitious relative of that argument. The less ambitious claim I hope to motivate is that there is little reason to believe th…Read more
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2Response to Kane, Fischer, and PereboomIn John Martin Fischer (ed.), Four Views on Free Will, Blackwell. 2007.
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116Desert, responsibility, and justification: a reply to Doris, McGeer, and RobinsonPhilosophical Studies 172 (10): 2659-2678. 2015.Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility argues that the normative basis of moral responsibility is anchored in the effects of responsibility practices. Further, the capacities required for moral responsibility are socially scaffolded. This article considers criticisms of this account that have been recently raised by John Doris, Victoria McGeer, and Michael Robinson. Robinson argues against Building Better Beings’s rejection of libertarianism about free will, and the account of …Read more
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505Are Psychopathic Serial Killers Evil? Are they Blameworthy for What They Do?In Sarah Waller (ed.), Serial Killers and Philosophy, Blackwell. 2010.At least some serial killers are psychopathic serial killers. Psychopathic serial killers raise interesting questions about the nature of evil and moral responsibility. On the one hand, serial killers seem to be obviously evil, if anything is. On the other hand, psychopathy is a diagnosable disorder that, among other things, involves a diminished ability to understand and use basic moral distinctions. This feature of psychopathy suggests that psychopathic serial killers have at least diminished …Read more
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120Responsibility and the Limits of ConversationCriminal Law and Philosophy 10 (2): 221-240. 2016.Both legal and moral theorists have offered broadly “communicative” theories of criminal and moral responsibility. According to such accounts, we can understand the nature of responsibility by appealing to the idea that responsibility practices are in some fundamental sense expressive, discursive, or communicative. In this essay, I consider a variety of issues in connections with this family of views, including its relationship to free will, the theory of exemptions, and potential alternatives t…Read more
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87Practical Reason, Instrumental Irrationality, and TimePhilosophical Studies 126 (2): 241-252. 2005.Standard models of practical rationality face a puzzle that has gone unnoticed: given a modest assumption about the nature of deliberation, we are apparently frequently briefly irrational. In what follows, I explain the problem, consider what is wrong with several possible solutions, and propose an account that does not generate the objectionable result.
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224The Revisionist Turn: A Brief History of Recent Work on Free WillIn Jesús H. Aguilar, Andrei A. Buckareff & Keith Frankish (eds.), New waves in philosophy of action, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.I’ve been told that in the good old days of the 1970s, when Quine’s desert landscapes were regarded as ideal real estate and David Lewis and John Rawls had not yet left a legion of influential students rewriting the terrain of metaphysics and ethics respectively, compatibilism was still compatibilism about free will. And, of course, incompatibilism was still incompatibilism about free will. That is, compatibilism was the view that free will was compatible with determinism. Incompatibilism was the…Read more
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127Five Questions on Philosophy of ActionIn Jesus Aguilar & Andre Buckareff (eds.), Philosophy of Action: 5 Questions, Automatic/vip Press. 2009.In terms of my own first-personal narrative, the most obvious proximal cause of my theorizing about agency was a graduate seminar on free will taught by Peter van Inwagen. It was my first semester of graduate school, and van Inwagen’s forceful presentation of incompatibilism made a big impression on me. I left that course thinking incompatibilism was both obvious and irrefutable. The only problem was that I didn’t stay at Notre Dame. I transferred to Stanford in the following year, where I disco…Read more
APA Western Division
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Free Will and Responsibility |
Philosophy of Action |
Moral Psychology |
Latin American Philosophy |
Philosophy of the Americas |
Metaphilosophy |