-
222The 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
-
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
-
166Real Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, and MetametaphilosophyCR 7 (3): 51-78. 2007.This is an essay on philosophical methodology, the disciplinary prejudices of the Anglophone philosophical world, and how these things interact with some aspects of the content and form of Latin American philosophy to preclude the latter's integration with mainstream Anglophone philosophical work. Among the topics discussed of interest to analytic philosophers: metaphilosophy, the status hierarchy of philosophical subfields, experimental philosophy, and patterns of openness and exclusion in phil…Read more
-
144Reasons and Real SelvesIdeas Y Valores 58 (141): 67-84. 2009.connection to the action, or alternately, the idea that an agent must be in some sense responsive to reasons.1 Indeed, we might even understand much of the past couple of decades of philosophical work on moral responsibility as concerned with investigating which of these two approaches offers the most viable account of moral responsibility. Here, I wish to revisit an idea basic to all of this work. That is, I consider whether there is even a fundamental distinction between these approaches. I wi…Read more
-
2527Four Views on Free WillWiley-Blackwell. 2007.Focusing on the concepts and interactions of free will, moral responsibility, and determinism, this text represents the most up-to-date account of the four major positions in the free will debate. Four serious and well-known philosophers explore the opposing viewpoints of libertarianism, compatibilism, hard incompatibilism, and revisionism The first half of the book contains each philosopher’s explanation of his particular view; the second half allows them to directly respond to each other’s arg…Read more
-
170On the Value of Philosophy: The Latin American CaseComparative Philosophy 1 (1): 33-52. 2010.There is very little study of Latin American Philosophy in the English-speaking philosophical world. This can sometimes lead to the impression that there is nothing of philosophical worth in Latin American philosophy or its history. The present article offers some reasons for thinking that this impression is mistaken, and indeed, that we ought to have more study of Latin American philosophy than currently exists in the English-speaking philosophical world. In particular, the article argues for t…Read more
-
348Situationism and Moral Responsibility: Free Will in FragmentsIn Tillman Vierkant, Julian Kiverstein & Andy Clark (eds.), Decomposing the Will, Oxford Up. 2013.Many prominent accounts of free will and moral responsibility make use of the idea that agents can be responsive to reasons. Call such theories Reasons accounts. In what follows, I consider the tenability of Reasons accounts in light of situationist social psychology and, to a lesser extent, the automaticity literature. In the first half of this chapter, I argue that Reasons accounts are genuinely threatened by contemporary psychology. In the second half of the paper I consider whether such threa…Read more
-
83Dead Serious: Evil and the Ontology of the UndeadIn Richard Greene & K. Silem Mohammed (eds.), The Undead and Philosophy, Open Court. 2006.I don’t know whether undead beings exist. I also think it is an open question whether anyone is evil in, say, the way bad guys are depicted in supernatural horror films and serial killer movies. I do think it’s nevertheless puzzling that the undead are frequently portrayed as evil in that way. I’m inclined to think that if we were to stumble across any undead they would be less likely to be evil than any random live person we stumble across. Consider this a call for some undead understanding. I …Read more
-
89Responsibility in a World of CausesPhilosophic Exchange 40 (1): 56-78. 2010.There is a familiar chain of reasoning that goes something like this: if everything is caused, no one is free, and thus, no one can be morally responsible. Reasoning like this has made scientific explanations of human behavior (e.g., biology, psychology, and neuroscience) threatening to familiar ideas of responsibility, blameworthiness, and merit. Rather than directly attacking the chain of reasoning that gives rise to these worries, I explore an alternative approach, one that begins by consider…Read more
-
163Building better beings: a theory of moral responsibilityOxford University Press. 2013.Part I: Building blocks. 1. Folk convictions -- 2. Doubts about libertarianism -- 3. Nihilism and revisionism -- 4. Building a better theory -- Part II. A theory of moral responsibility. 5. The primacy of reasons -- 6. Justifying the practice -- 7. Responsible agency -- 8. Blame and desert -- 9. History and manipulation --10. Some conclusions.
-
134Revisionism about Free Will: A Statement and DefensePhilosophical Studies 144 (1): 45-62. 2009.This article summarizes and extends the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to libertarianism based on the moral costs of its current epistemic status, (3) an objection to the distin…Read more
-
185Taking the Highway on Skepticism, Luck, and the Value of ResponsibilityJournal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2): 249-265. 2009.I consider some themes and issues arising in recent work on moral responsibility, focusing on three recent books —Carlos Moya's Moral Responsibility, Al Mele's Free Will and Luck, and John Martin Fischer's My Way. I argue that these texts collectively suggest some difficulties with the way in which many issues are currently framed in the free will debates, including disputes about what constitutes compatibilism and incompatibilism and the relevance of intuitions and ordinary language for descri…Read more
-
19Guttorm Fløistad (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey - Vol. 8: Philosophy of Latin America (review)Philosophy in Review 24 (4): 259-261. 2004.
-
33Razian Responsibility (review)Jurisprudence 5 (1): 161-172. 2014.This essay considers two aspects of Joseph Raz's recent work: (1) his theory of responsibility, arising out his reflections on something he calls "our Being in the World," and (2) the methodological presumptions that guide his account. On the matter of responsibility, his notion of "domains of secure competence" is suggestive but unclear. Natural regimentations of the idea suggest a host of problems in the specification of competence, and whether the notion is to be understood subjectively or th…Read more
-
62Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2014.Michael Bratman's work has been unusually influential, with significance in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, computer science, law, and primatology.The essays in this volume engage with ideas and themes prominent in Bratman's work. The volume also includes a lengthy reply by Bratman that breaks new ground and deepens our understanding of the nature of action
-
293Psychopaths and moral knowledgePhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 14 (2): 157-162. 2007.Neil Levy (2007) argues that empirical data shows that psychopaths lack the moral knowledge required for moral responsibility. His account is intriguing, and it offers a promising way to think about the significance of psychopaths for work on moral responsibility. In what follows we focus on three lines of concern connected to Levy's account: his interpretation of the data, the scope of exculpation, and the significance of biological explanations for anti-social behavior.
-
219Philosophy and the Folk: On Some Implications of Experimental Work For Philosophical Debates on Free WillJournal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2): 239-254. 2006.I discuss experimental work by Nichols, and Nichols and Knobe, with respect to the philosophical problems of free will and moral responsibility. I mention some methodological concerns about the work, but focus principally on the philosophical implications of the work. The experimental results seem to show that in particular, concrete cases we are more willing to attribute responsibility than in cases described abstractly or in general terms. I argue that their results suggest a deep problem for …Read more
-
33Lessons from the Philosophy of Race in MexicoPhilosophy Today, SPEP Supplement 2000 26 (Supplement): 18-29. 2000.
-
134Social Explanations and the Free Will ProblemIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 4: Free Will and Moral Responsibility, . pp. 403-411. 2014.There is strikingly little agreement across academic fields about the existence of free will, what experimental results show, and even what the term ‘free will’ means. In Lee and Harris’ “A Social Perspective on Debates About Free Will” the authors argue that group identities and their attendant social rewards are part of the problem. As they portray it, “different philosophical stances create social groups and inherent conflict, hindering interdisciplinary intellectual exploration on the questi…Read more
-
134Eurocentrism and the Philosophy of LiberationAPA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues 4 (2): 8-17. 2005.Proponents of the philosophy of liberation generally counsel that various forms of liberation in at least the Americas requires that we should fight Eurocentrism and resist the ontology and conceptual framework of Europe. However, most of the work done in this tradition relies heavily on the terminology and theoretical apparatus of various strands of European philosophy. The apparent disconnect between the aims and methods (or if you like, the theory and practice) has given rise to a criticism I…Read more
-
52Review of Mele, Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (9). 2009.
-
17Culture and the Value of Philosophy: The Latin American CaseComparative Philosophy 1 (1): 33-52. 2010.
-
278Revisionism about free will: a statement & defensePhilosophical Studies 144 (1): 45-62. 2009.This article summarizes the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to the distinctiveness of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism, and (3) whether moderate revi…Read more
-
43On Maurice Mandelbaum’s “Determinism and Moral Responsibility”Ethics 125 (3). 2015.It is sometimes instructive to reflect on a problem as it appeared before our current philosophical presumptions became ingrained. In this context, Maurice Mandelbaum’s “Determinism and Moral Responsibility” is of particular interest. Published in 1960, it appeared only a few years before the wave of work that gave us much of our contemporary understanding of moral responsibility, free will, and determinism. Mandelbaum’s account repays reconsideration. Mandelbaum argues that (1) there is an unde…Read more
-
137Why the luck problem isn'tPhilosophical Issues 22 (1): 419-436. 2012.The Luck Problem has existed in one form or another since David Hume, at least. It is perhaps as old as Stoic objections to the Epicurean swerve. Although the general issue admits of different formulations with subtly different emphases, the characterization of it that will serve as my target focuses on “cross-worlds” luck, a kind of luck that arises when the decision-making of agents is indeterministic
APA Western Division
La Jolla, San Diego, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Free Will and Responsibility |
Philosophy of Action |
Moral Psychology |
Latin American Philosophy |
Philosophy of the Americas |
Metaphilosophy |