Robert Allen

The following is a now popular argument for free will skepticism: 1. If free will exists, then people must make themselves. 2. People cannot make themselves. 3. Thus, free will is impossible. It would make no sense to hold someone responsible, either for what he’s like or what he’s done, unless he has made himself. But no one could make himself. A person’s character is necessarily imposed upon him by Nature and others. To rebut, I intend to lean on common usage, according to which 2 is false: the vernacular provides a clear sense in which we DO make ourselves. It is the sense in which we speak of a cake being made from ingredients or a statue out of clay. Self-formation sufficient for a free will occurs along these lines. I shall discuss a compatibilist and a libertarian version of this project.

The following is a now popular argument for free will skepticism: 1. If free will exists, then people must make themselves. 2. People cannot make themselves. 3. Thus, free will is impossible. It would make no sense to hold someone responsible, either for what he’s like or what he’s done, unless he has made himself. But no one could make himself. A person’s character is necessarily imposed upon him by Nature and others. To rebut, I intend to lean on common usage, according to which 2 is false: the vernacular provides a clear sense in which we DO make ourselves. It is the sense in which we speak of a cake being made from ingredients or a statue out of clay. Self-formation sufficient for a free will occurs along these lines. I shall discuss a compatibilist and a libertarian version of this project.

The problem of evil is an obstacle to justified belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God . According to Saint Augustine’s free will theodicy , moral evil attends free will. Might something like AFWT also be used to account for natural evil? After all, it is possible that calamities such as famines, earthquakes, and floods are the effects of the sinful willing of certain persons, viz., ‘fallen angels.’ Working to destroy our faith, Satan and his cohorts could be responsible for the natural disasters that bring us to grief. Here, I develop this account alongside AFWT

The Principle of Robust Alternatives states that an agent is responsible for doing something only if he could have performed a ‘robust’ alternative thereto: another action having a different moral or practical value. Defenders of PRA maintain that it is not refuted by a ‘Frankfurt case’, given that its agent can be seen as having had such an alternative provided that we properly qualify that for which he is responsible. I argue here against two versions of this defense. First, I show that those who maintain that a ‘Frankfurt agent’ is responsible for voluntarily performing his action must attach moral significance to his luck. I proceed to discuss Carl Ginet's strategy of temporally qualifying ascriptions of responsibility, arguing that his counterexample to the principle that ‘If an agent is responsible for doing A @ t, then he is responsible for doing A simpliciter ’ is disanalogous to a Frankfurt case

A material object is constituted by a sum of parts all of which are essential to the sum but some of which seem inessential to the object itself. Such object/sum of parts pairs include my body/its torso and appendages and my desk/its top, drawers, and legs. In these instances, we are dealing with objects and their components. But, fundamentally, we may also speak, as Locke does, of an object and its constitutive matter—a “mass of particles”—or even of that aggregate and the sum of subatomic particles ‘making it up’. The “problem of material constitution” (henceforth, PMC) is generated by assuming inter alia that the members of any such pair are numerically identical, that is, that the constituted and the constituting are one and the same thing.

In this paper I define the role of self-esteem in promoting free agency, in order to meet some objections to the content-neutrality espoused by the reflective acceptance approach to free agency, according to which an agent has acted freely if and only if she would reflectively accept the process by which her motive was formed -- in other words, any volition the agent forms is an impetus to a free action just in case she would positively appraise its genesis. For primary self-esteem to exist it is enough to be capable of evaluating oneself, assessing, according to one's personal standards, the reasoning behind one's choices. Freedom lacks a social component; an alienated person may yet be free

Susan Wolf’s compatibilism is unique for being ‘asymmetrical.' While holding that blameworthiness entails being able to avoid acting wrongly, she maintains that our freedom consists in single-mindedly pursuing Truth and Goodness. Comparing and contrasting her position to Saint Anselm’s seminal, libertarian approach to the same subject elicits serious questions, highlighting its drawbacks. How could freedom entail the inability to do certain things? In what sense are reasons causes? What sense can be made of a double standard for assignments of responsibility? Is not self-control inconsistent with being caused to act by things independent of oneself? Does not virtue require struggling against falsehoods and evils by which one could be overcome? Wolf’s compatibilism must be rejected, I shall argue, in light of Anselm’s intuitively satisfying response to these concerns: we should prefer a philosophy that entails more of what we want from freedom without begging unanswerable questions of its own.