Alfred Mele

This chapter performs two main tasks. First, it sets the stage for an answer to the question of how we can determine whether or not we have free will by articulating two competing proposals about what would suffice for freely making a decision to do something. Second, it identifies what we would have to learn in order to know that the conditions set out in those proposals are satisfied and what we would have to learn in order to know that these conditions are not satisfied. Both proposals appeal to consciousness, reasonableness, being well-informed, and the absence of undue pressure. They differ in that one of the proposals can be satisfied even if determinism is true, but the other one cannot.

This chapter asks how character traits influence action. He focuses on the trait of temperance, using it as a sort of case study. What is temperance? Temperance has a behavioral component: the temperate person exhibits moderation. But that is not all: the temperate person differs from the merely self-controlled person in that her desires, unlike those of the merely self-controlled, accord with her rational assessment. Yet, the desires of a voluptuary who judges immediate pleasure to be the goal of life accord with her rational assessment too. The temperate’s desires, by contrast, are moderate because they are responsive to the agent’s vision of the good life. The chapter then argues that the acquisition of temperance is a process of adopting and internalizing rules and policies regarding appetitive pleasures, for instance, “no more than one drink before driving.” The chapter’s discussion is a sort of bridge between traditional virtue ethics and situationism.

The first part of his essay introduces the luck objection to libertarian views and critically examines Kane’s response to it. Kane’s response rests, most centrally, on the claim that agents make “efforts of will” when acting freely and responsibly so that, whichever way they act, they voluntarily and rationally do something that they were trying to do. The chapter responds to Kane’s proposal by arguing that people can act freely and responsibly only if these efforts themselves are freely made. The second part of this chapter Kane’s event-causal libertarian view with his own event-causal libertarian view that does not appeal to efforts of will. The chapter then defends both views against the objection that neither view provides people with any more control over their actions than they would have if their actions were causally determined.

Audi has suggested that the difference between self‐deception and delusion with respect to a false proposition turns on whether the subject believes the false proposition: the self‐deceived do not actually believe what they avow. But the chapter holds that the self‐deceived and the deluded both believe the false proposition, and so an account of the difference between self‐deception and delusion that differs from Audi's must be offered. The chapter discusses several standard cases of self‐deception, sketching his view of self‐deception as the product of motivational or emotional biases. It then considers three psychiatric delusions found in volume IV of the American Psychiatric Association's, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and argues that they are best explained not by the kind of biasing characteristic of self‐deception, but instead by the presence of cognitive deficits.

This paper addresses a pair of issues about moral responsibility. One is whether "externalists" should claim that agents must have agential histories of a certain kind in order to be morally responsible for actions they perform or should instead, in light of certain stories about imaginary full-blown agents who have no agential history - that is, have never performed an action (because they just now came to exist) - stop short of that and contend that agents must lack an agential history of a certain kind in order to be morally responsible for something they do. (Such imaginary beings have come to be called "instant agents".) The other issue concerns the earliest actions for which ordinary human agents are morally responsible. How does an ordinary child's moral responsibility get off the ground, as it were? Connections between these two issues are explored, as is the bearing of some kinds of manipulation on moral responsibility. It is assumed that only beings who are capable of acting freely are capable of being morally responsible for actions they perform.