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72Libertarianism, Compatibilism, and LuckThe Journal of Ethics 19 (1): 1-21. 2015.The “problem of present luck” targets a standard libertarian thesis about free will. It has been argued that there is an analogous problem about luck for compatibilists. This article explores similarities and differences between the alleged problems
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277Manipulation, Moral Responsibility, and Bullet BitingThe Journal of Ethics 17 (3): 167-184. 2013.This article’s guiding question is about bullet biting: When should compatibilists about moral responsibility bite the bullet in responding to stories used in arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility? Featured stories are vignettes in which agents’ systems of values are radically reversed by means of brainwashing and the story behind the zygote argument. The malady known as “intuition deficit disorder” is also discussed.
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189Free will and luck: Reply to criticsPhilosophical Explorations 10 (2). 2007.Mele's ultimate purpose in this book is to help readers think more clearly about free will. He identifies and makes vivid the most important conceptual obstacles to justified belief in the existence of free will and meets them head on. Mele clarifies the central issues in the philosophical debate about free will and moral responsibility, criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will, and develops two overlapping conceptions of free will--one for readers who are convinced t…Read more
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51Autonomy and akrasiaPhilosophical Explorations 5 (3). 2002.Strict akratic actions, by definition, are performed freely. However, agents may seem not to be selfgoverned with respect to such actions and therefore not to perform them autonomously. If appearance matches reality here, freedom and autonomy part company in this sphere. Do they? That is this article's guiding question. To make things manageable, it is assumed that there are free actions, including strict akratic actions. Two theses are defended. First, the combination of (i) an intentional acti…Read more
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24Soft Libertarianism and Frankfurt-Style ScenariosPhilosophical Topics 24 (2): 123-141. 1996.Traditional libertarians about freedom of choice and action and about moral responsibility are hard-line incompatibilists. They claim that these freedoms (which they believe to be possessed by at least some human beings) are incompatible with determinism, and they take the same view of moral responsibility. I call them hard libertarians. A softer line is available to theorists who have libertarian sympathies. A theorist may leave it open that freedom of choice and action and moral responsibil…Read more
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99Internalist moral cognitivism and listlessnessEthics 106 (4): 727-753. 1996.This paper criticizes the conjunction of two theses: 1) cognitivism about first-person moral ought-beliefs, the thesis (roughly) that such beliefs are attitudes with truth-valued contents; 2) robust internalism about these beliefs, the thesis that, necessarily, agents' beliefs that they ought, morally, to A constitute motivation to A. It is argued that the conjunction of these two theses places our moral agency at serious risk. The argument, which centrally involves attention to clinical depress…Read more
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80Persisting intentionsNoûs 41 (4). 2007.Al is nearly finished sweeping his kitchen floor when he notices, on a counter, a corkscrew that should be put in a drawer. He intends to put the corkscrew away as soon as he is finished with the floor; but by the time he returns the broom and dustpan to the closet, he has forgotten what he intended to do. Al knows (or has a true belief) that there is something he intended to do now in the kitchen. He gazes around the room and tries to recall what it was. Within a minute or so, without seeing th…Read more
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257Effective intentions: the power of conscious willOxford University Press. 2009.Each of the following claims has been defended in the scientific literature on free will and consciousness: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100 millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all it can do is veto conscious decisions, intentions, or urges; intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. In Effective Intentions Alfred Mele shows that the evidence offered …Read more
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102Lenman on externalism and amoralism: An interplanetary explorationPhilosophia 32 (1-4): 275-283. 2005.One of us -- Alfred Mele (1996; 2003, ch. 5) -- has argued that possible instances of listlessness falsify the combination of cognitivism and various kinds of internalism about positive first-person moral ought-beliefs. If an argument recently advanced by James Lenman (1999) is successful, listlessnessis impossible and Mele's argument from listlessness therefore fails.However, we will argue that Lenman's argument is unpersuasive.
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11Self-Deception and Hypothesis TestingIn M. Marraffa, M. De Caro & F. Ferreti (eds.), Cartographies of the Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2007.The present book is a collection of essays exploring some classical dimensions of mind both from the perspective of an empirically-informed philosophy and from the point of view of a philosophically-informed psychology. In the last three decades, the level of interaction between philosophy and psychology has increased dramatically. As a contribution to this trend, this book explores some areas in which this interaction has been very productive – or, at least, highly provocative. The interaction …Read more
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79Incontinent believingPhilosophical Quarterly 36 (143): 212-222. 1986.In this paper I shall attempt to characterize a central case of incontinent believing and to explain how it is possible. Akrasiais exhibited in a variety of ways in the practical or "actional" sphere; but in the full-blown and seemingly most challenging case the akratic agent performs an intentional, free action which is contrary to a judgment of what is better or best to do that he both consciously holds at the time of action and consciously believes to be at odds with his performing the action…Read more
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66Autonomy, self-control and weakness of willIn Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, Oxford University Press. 2001.This article defends a nonstandard position on free will that is based on three topics linked to contemporary debates about free will: autonomy, self-control, and weakness of will. It argues that autonomy, and hence also free will, requires more than self-control, including ideal self-control. It considers the additional conditions required, showing how contemporary discussions of autonomy are intertwined with debates about free will. These additional conditions for genuine autonomy do not requi…Read more
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652When Are We Self-Deceived?Humana Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies (20). 2012.This article‘s point of departure is a proto-analysis that I have suggested of entering self-deception in acquiring a belief and an associated set of jointly sufficient conditions for self-deception that I have proposed. Partly with the aim of fleshing out an important member of the proposed set of conditions, I provide a sketch of my view about how selfdeception happens. I then return to the proposed set of jointly sufficient conditions and offer a pair of amendments.
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14Michael A. Simon: "Understanding Human Action" (review)The Thomist 48 (1): 121. 1984.A book review of Michael A. Simon's Understanding Human Action: Social Explanation of the Vision of Social Science.
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43Motivational TiesJournal of Philosophical Research 16 431-442. 1991.Must a rational ass equidistant from two equally attractive bales of hay starve for lack of a reason to prefer one bale to the other? Must a human being faced with a comparable, explicitly motivational, tie fail to pursue either option? Surely, one suspects, some practical resolution is possible. Surely, ties of either sort need not result in death or paralysis. But why? Donald Davidson has suggested that, in the human case, resolution depends upon the tie’s being broken---upon the agent’s comin…Read more
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122Deciding to actPhilosophical Studies 100 (1). 2000.As this passage from a recent book on the psychology of decision-making indicates, deciding seems to be part of our daily lives. But what is it to decide to do something? It may be true, as some philosophers have claimed, that to decide to A is to perform a mental action of a certain kind – specifically, an action of forming an intention to A. (Henceforth, the verb ‘form’ in this context is to be understood as an action verb.) Even if this is so, we are faced with pressing questions. Do we form …Read more
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177Goal-Directed Action: Teleological Explanations, Causal Theories, and DevianceNoûs 34 (s14). 2000.Teleological explanations of human actions are explanations in terms of aims, goals, or purposes of human agents. According to a familiar causal approach to analyzing and explaining human action, our actions are, essentially, events (and sometimes states, perhaps) that are suitably caused by appropriate mental items, or neural realizations of those items. Causalists traditionally appeal, in part, to such goal-representing states as desires and intentions (or their neural realizers) in their expl…Read more
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38Self-deception and akratic belief: A rejoinderPhilosophical Psychology 1 (2): 201-206. 1988.Self-deception is standardly viewed as a motivated phenomenon in both the philosophical and the psychological literature. In Irrationality, I maintain that it is at least characteristically motivated. Knight's provocative thesis, that there is an important unmotivated species of self-deception, is consistent with this. Still, if she is right, I overlooked a kind of self-deception that merits close attention.
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86Is akratic action unfree?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (4): 673-679. 1986.That incontinent action is possible, I have argued elsewhere. The purpose of the present paper is to ascertain whether such action can ever be free.
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24Aristotle on the Proximate Efficient Cause of ActionCanadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Vol. X (n/a): 133-155. 1984.In this paper I shall attempt to locate and articulate Aristotle's answer to a foundational question in the theory of action - viz., 'what is the proximate (efficient) cause of action?' This task is certainly of historical importance, since one cannot hope to understand Aristotle's interesting and influential theory of action without understanding his views on the proximate efficient cause of action. But the present project is not, I should think, of historical interest alone; for it has recentl…Read more
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7The Structure of Emotions (review)Philosophical Books 29 (4): 224-225. 1988.A book review of Robert M. Gordon's The Structure of Emotions.
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72Crimes of Negligence: Attempting and Succeeding (review)Criminal Law and Philosophy 6 (3): 387-398. 2012.In chapter 6 of Attempts , Gideon Yaffe defends the thesis that it is “possible to attempt crimes of negligence” ( 2010 , p. 173). I am persuaded that he is right about this, provided that “attempt crimes of negligence” is read as (potentially misleading) shorthand for “attempt to bring it about that we commit crimes of negligence.” But I find certain parts of his defense unpersuasive. My discussion of those parts of his argument motivates the following thesis: Not only can one attempt to bring …Read more
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43Self-Deception and Akrasia: A Review of David Pears's Motivated Irrationality (review)Behaviorism 14 (2): 183-191. 1986.
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67Akratic feelingsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (2): 277-288. 1989.Elsewhere, I have argued for the possibility of strict or full-blown akratic action - roughly, free (or uncompelled), intentional action against the agent's better judgment.' My aim in the present paper is to defend and account for the possibility of an analogous variety of akratic feeling.
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300The philosophy of action (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1997.The latest offering in the highly successful Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, The Philosophy of Action features contributions from twelve leading figures in the field, including: Robert Audi, Michael Bratman, Donald Davidson, Wayne Davis, Harry Frankfurt, Carl Ginet, Gilbert Harman, Jennifer Hornsby, Jaegwon Kim, Hugh McCann, Paul Moser, and Brian O'Shaughnessy. Alfred Mele provides an introductory essay on the topics chosen and the questions they deal with. Topics addressed include intenti…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |