•  387
    On Libertarianism as an Explanatory Hypothesis
    Southwest Philosophy Review 35 (2): 91-110. 2019.
    Recently, several libertarian philosophers have argued that we appear free on the basis of widespread experience, and that this appearance justifies believing that we enjoy libertarian free will (e.g. Pink 2004 and Swinburne 2013). Such arguments have a long history in philosophy but have been easily dismissed on one of two grounds: either the appearance of freedom does not exist, or else it is an illusion. In this paper, I argue that although presentations of the argument have been historical…Read more
  •  366
    Indeterministic intuitions and the Spinozan strategy
    Mind and Language 33 (3): 280-298. 2018.
    This article focuses on philosophical views that attempt to explain widespread belief in indeterministic choice by following a strategy that harkens back at least to Spinoza. According to this Spinozan strategy, people draw an inference from the absence of experiences of determined choice to the belief in indeterministic choice. Accounts of this kind are historically liable to overgeneralization. The pair of accounts defended in Shaun Nichols’ recent book, Bound: Essays on Free Will and Responsi…Read more
  •  61
    Free will, the self, and video game actions
    Ethics and Information Technology 23 (3): 177-183. 2020.
    In this paper, I raise several concerns for what I call the willing endorsement view of moral responsibility in videogames. Briefly, the willing endorsement view holds that players are appropriate targets of moral judgments when their actions reflect their true, real-world selves. In the first section of the paper, I argue that core features of the willing endorsement view are widely implicitly accepted among philosophers engaging in discussions of morality in games. I then focus on a particular…Read more
  •  28
    The Cartesian Doxastic Argument For Free Will
    Journal of Philosophical Research 45 217-229. 2020.
    This paper raises objections to what I call the Cartesian Doxastic Argument for free will: the argument that it is probably true that we are free on the grounds that there is already widespread intuitive belief in that claim. Richard Swinburne provides the best extant defense of the argument, using his principle of credulity, which holds that beliefs are probably true merely on the believer’s evidence that they believe it. I argue that the PoC is either too liberal, justifying intuitively unjust…Read more
  •  13
    Thinking Reasonably about Indeterministic Choice Beliefs
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (8): 588-601. 2021.
    Recent research suggests that, regardless of the truth of libertarianism about free will, there appears to be a widespread belief among nonphilosopher laypersons that the choices of free agents are not causally necessitated by prior states of affairs. In this paper, I propose a new class of debunking explanation for this belief which I call ‘reasons-based accounts’. I start the paper by briefly recounting the failures of extant approaches to debunking explanations, and then use this as a jumping…Read more
  •  12
    This volume highlights interdisciplinary research on the ethical, metaphysical, and experimental dimensions of extended reality technologies, including virtual and augmented realities. It explores themes connected to the nature of virtual objects, the value of virtual experiences and relationships, experimental ethics, moral psychology in the metaverse, and game/simulation design. Extended reality (XR) refers to a family of technologies aiming to augment (AR) or virtually replace (VR) human expe…Read more