Neil Levy

It is by now well established that the fact that an action or aconsequence was inevitable does not excuse the agent from responsibilityfor it, so long as the counterfactual intervention which ensures thatthe act will take place is not actualized. However, in this paper I demonstrate that there is one exception to this principle: when theagent is aware of the counterfactual intervener and the role she wouldplay in some alternative scenario, she might be excused, despite the fact that in the actual scenario she acts, as we say, of her own freewill. I illustrate this contention by way of a critique of Fischer andRavizza''s well-known account of responsibility for consequences.

Doxastic responsibility matters, morally and epistemologically. Morally, because many of our intuitive ascriptions of blame seem to track back to agents’ apparent responsibility for beliefs; epistemologically because some philosophers identify epistemic justification with deontological permissibility. But there is a powerful argument which seems to show that we are rarely or never responsible for our beliefs, because we cannot control them. I examine various possible responses to this argument, which aim to show either that doxastic responsibility does not require that we control our beliefs, or that as a matter of fact we do exercise the right kind of control over our beliefs. I argue that the existing arguments are all wanting: in fact, our lack of control over our beliefs typically excuses us of responsibility for them.

Many incompatibilists, including most prominently Peter Van Inwagen, have argued that deliberation presupposes a belief in libertarian freedom. They therefore suggest that deliberating determinists must have inconsistent beliefs: the belief they profess in determinism, as well as the belief, manifested in their deliberation, that determinism is false. In response, compatibilists have advanced alternative construals of the belief in freedom presupposed by deliberation, as well as cases designed to show that determinists can deliberate without inconsistency. I argue that the compatibilist case requires a convincing demonstration not merely that belief in determinism is consistent with deliberation, but also that such a belief does not place great psychological strain on agents, and that cases so far advanced have not succeeded in showing this. I then present a case designed to show that agents can accept determinism and deliberate, without inconsistent beliefs and without psychological strain

As he recognizes, Taylor's view of practical reasoning commits him to the existence of incommensurable world-views. However, he holds that it is in principle possible to overcome these incommensurabilities. He has two major arguments for this conclusion, which I label the argument from the human condition, and the transition argument. I show that the first argument, though perhaps successful in the case Taylor takes as an example, cannot be generalized. The second argument is even less successful, since all the evidence it produces is compatible with a thoroughgoing relativism. I point out, moreover, that even if Taylor's arguments were successful, they would not demonstrate that someone who chose to continue to reject the practice that had been vindicated would be irrational to do so. I conclude that there seems no way to circumvent the relativism to which Taylor's picture of practical reasoning leads. Key Words: incommensurability • practical reason • relativism • Charles Taylor.

Recent findings in neuroscience, evolutionary biology and psychology seem to threaten the existence or the objectivity of morality. Moral theory and practice is founded, ultimately, upon moral intuition, but these empirical findings seem to show that our intuitions are responses to nonmoral features of the world, not to moral properties. They therefore might be taken to show that our moral intuitions are systematically unreliable. I examine three cognitive scientific challenges to morality, and suggest possible lines of reply to them. I divide these replies into two groups: we might confront the threat, showing that it does not have the claimed implications for morality; or we might bite the bullet, accepting that the claims have moral implications, but incorporating these claims into morality. I suggest that unless we are able to bite the bullet, when confronted by cognitive scientific challenges, there is a real possibility that morality will be threatened. This fact gives us a weighty reason to adopt a metaethics that makes it relatively easy to bite cognitive scientific bullets. Moral constructivism, in one of its many forms, makes these bullets more palatable; therefore, the cognitive scientific challenges provide us with an additional reason to adopt a constructivist metaethics.

It is, as Dana Nelkin (2004) says, a rare point of agreement among participants in the free will debate that rational deliberation presupposes a belief in freedom. Of course, the precise content of that belief – and, indeed, the nature of deliberation – is controversial, with some philosophers claiming that deliberation commits us to a belief in libertarian free will (Taylor 1966; Ginet 1966), and others claiming that, on the contrary, deliberation presupposes nothing more than an epistemic openness that is entirely compatible with determinism (Dennett 1984; Kapitan 1986). Since, however, the claim that deliberation presupposes freedom is accepted by all sides in the free will debate, it ought to be possible to frame a minimal version that is neutral between compatibilism and incompatibilism, and which therefore can be accepted by everyone. Peter van Inwagen has advanced the best-known such claim: ‘all philosophers who have thought about deliberation agree on one point: one cannot deliberate about whether to perform a certain act unless one believes it is possible for one to perform it’ (van Inwagen 1983: 154). It is the purpose of this paper to argue that van Inwagen, and the many philosophers who have followed him in this regard, is wrong.

Can our cultural membership excuse us from responsibility for certain actions? Ought the Aztec priest be held responsible for murder, for instance, or does the fact that his ritual sacrifice is mandated by his culture excuse him from blame? Our intuitions here are mixed; the more distant, historically and geographically, we are from those whose actions are in question, the more likely we are to forgive them their acts, yet it is difficult to pinpoint why this distance should excuse. Up close, historically or geographically, we tend to be less forgiving: few of us excuse the Taliban for what they did to women and homosexuals; and if there is less of an outcry concerning treatment not all that dissimilar in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, this is probably only because these actions are less well publicized.

In his “Frankfurt-style cases user manual”, Florian Cova (2013) distinguishes two kinds of Frankfurt-style arguments against the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), and argues that my attack on the soundness of Frankfurt-style cases succeeds, at most, only against one kind. Since either kind of argument can be used to undermine PAP, Cova suggests, the fact that my attack fails against at least one means that it does not succeed in rescuing PAP from the clutches of Frankfurt enthusiasts. In this brief response I will argue that my attack undermines both kinds of Frankfurt-style arguments. It shows that we are not entitled to rely on the intuitions that these arguments provoke, whether they are produced by the direct version of the Frankfurt-style argument or the indirect.In a typical Frankfurt-style case (FSC), an agent performs a bad action for which, intuitively, they seem to be morally responsible, despite the fact that they lack alternative possibilities (see Frankfurt 196

To the extent that indeterminacy intervenes between our reasons for action and our decisions, intentions and actions, our freedom seems to be reduced, not enhanced. Free will becomes nothing more than the power to choose irrationally. In recognition of this problem, some recent libertarians have suggested that free will is paradigmatically manifested only in actions for which we have reasons for both or all the alternatives. In these circumstances, however we choose, we choose rationally. Against this kind of account, most fully developed by Robert Kane, critics have pressed the demand for contrastive explanations. Kane has responded by arguing that the demand does not need to be met: responsibility for an action does not require that there be a contrastive explanation of that action. However, this response proves too much: it implies that agents are responsible not only for the actions they choose, but also for the counterfactual actions which were equally available to them

In a recent paper, Ishtiyaque Haji and Michael McKenna argue that my attack on Frankfurt-style cases fails. I had argued that we cannot be confident that agents in these cases retain their responsibility-underwriting capacities, because what capacities an agent has can depend on features of the world external to her, including merely counterfactual interveners. Haji and McKenna argue that only when an intervention is actual does the agent gain or lose a capacity. Here I demonstrate that this claim is false: capacities are dispositions that can be constituted by features of the environment that are currently inactive. I also reply to two other objections: that my argument begs the question against historical accounts of moral responsibility and that it leaves the very locus of free action, our mental acts, untouched

In a recent article in this journal, Storrs McCall and E.J. Lowe sketch an account of indeterminist free will designed to avoid the luck objection that has been wielded to such effect against event‐causal libertarianism. They argue that if decision‐making is an indeterministic process and not an event or series of events, the luck objection will fail. I argue that they are wrong: the luck objection is equally successful against their account as against existing event‐causal libertarianisms. Like the event‐causal libertarianism their account is meant to supplant, the process view cannot offer a reasons explanation of the agent’s choice itself; that choice is explained by nothing except chance. The agent therefore fails to exercise freedom‐level control over it.

In a recent paper in this journal, Matt King and Peter Carruthers argue that the common assumption that agents are only (or especially) morally responsible for actions caused by attitudes of which they are conscious needs to be rethought. They claim that there is persuasive evidence that we are never conscious of our propositional attitudes; we ought therefore to design our theories of moral responsibility to accommodate this fact. In this reply, I argue that the evidence they adduce need not worry philosophers. There is an ongoing debate over the role that consciousness of our attitudes plays in morally responsible behaviour, but the evidence they produce does not favour either side. Even if we are not conscious of our propositional attitudes as such - even if we lack introspective access to their content - we nevertheless reliably come to know their content. There are systematic differences between those attitudes of whose content we come to be aware and those we do not, and these differences are directly relevant to our moral responsibility. Moreover, coming to be aware of the content of our attitudes has effects on our behaviour, and these effects are directly relevant to our moral responsibility. The causal route whereby we come to be conscious of the content of our attitudes is irrelevant to whether they play the right kinds of roles to distinguish between actions for which we are responsible and actions for which we ought to be excused

Several ethicists have argued that research trials and treatment programs that involve the provision of drugs to addicts are prima facie unethical, because addicts can’t refuse the offer of drugs and therefore can’t give informed consent to participation. In response, several people have pointed out that addiction does not cause a compulsion to use drugs. However, since we know that addiction impairs autonomy, this response is inadequate. In this paper, I advance a stronger defense of the capacity of addicts to participate in the programs envisaged. I argue that it is only in certain circumstances that addicts find themselves choosing in ways that conflict with their genuine preferences. Research and treatment programs have none of the features that characterize choices in these autonomy-undermining circumstances, and there is therefore no reason to think that addicts lack the capacity to give informed consent to these programs

Addiction is almost universally held to be characterized by a loss of control over drug-seeking and consuming behavior. But the actions of addicts, even of those who seem to want to abstain from drugs, seem to be guided by reasons. In this paper, I argue that we can explain this fact, consistent with continuing to maintain that addiction involves a loss of control, by understanding addiction as involving an oscillation between conflicting judgments. I argue that the dysfunction of the mesolimbic dopamine system that typifies addictions causes the generation of a mismatch between the top-down model of the world that reflects the judgment that the addict ought to refrain from drugs, and bottom-up input caused by cues predictive of drug availability. This constitutes a powerful pressure toward revising the judgment and thereby attenuating the prediction error. But the new model is not stable, and shifts under the pressure of bottom-up inputs in different contexts; hence the oscillation of all-things-considered judgment. Evidence from social psychology is adduced, to suggest that a similar process may be involved in ordinary cases of weakness of will