Christopher Taggart

Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen predict that neuroscience’s growing predictive power will motivate anti-retributivist penal reform by amplifying our conviction that we lack free will. According to one agent-causal libertarian position, ACT libertarianism, we often exercise free will by satisfying the conditions that ACT, an agent-causal account of free will, posits for its exercise. This paper argues that, even if compatibilism is false, ACT’s account of free will implies that, for us, neuroscience’s growing predictive power is epistemically irrelevant to whether we have free will in the sense that it can provide us only unquantifiable epistemic risk regarding whether we have it. Since retributivism’s definitive tenet is that satisfying a criminal wrongdoer’s negative desert justifies legal punishment independently of any good consequences that might result, neuroscience’s growing predictive power cannot provide us any reason to implement anti-retributivist penal reform.

One of the great challenges for a materialistic metaphysical picture of the world is the challenge of finding a place within it for the mind. I argue that materialism is doomed to failure in that there could be neither a reduction nor an elimination of certain phenomenal features of mental states within any physical theory. ;I begin to paint a property dualistic picture of the mind in Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapter 1, I discuss the nature of perception and belief, and in Chapter 2, I discuss introspection and the subjectivity of the mental. All four of these preliminary topics play important roles in my final argument. ;In Chapter 3, I discuss three criticisms of Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument$\sp1$ in order to defend my take on these preliminaries and my interpretation of what Jackson has shown. ;In Chapter 4, I discuss mental representation. I argue that there are "mentalese predicates" in the brain whose semantic features are analogous to natural language predicates, and I distinguish the property picked out by a predicate from the concept expressed by it. ;In Chapter 5, I adopt and defend the position, suggested by Richard Warner,$\sp2$ that one is conditionally introspectively incorrigible when it comes to forming judgments about the phenomenal natures of one's perceptions. ;Finally, in Chapter 6, I pull all these topics together in my argument for the irreducibility and ineliminability of the troublesome qualitative properties of the mental, which I, following convention, call qualia. ftn$\sp1$See Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Philosophical Quarterly, 32, 1982, pp.127-36. $\sp2$See Richard Warner, "Incorrigibility." In H. Robinson, , Objections to Physicalism . Oxford University Press, 1993

Because an agent’s constitutive luck may seem to preclude free will, it may seem to preclude moral responsibility. An agent is basically morally responsible for performing actionAat timetonly if there is another possible world with the same past up totand the same laws of nature in which the agent does not performAatt. A compatibilist can solve the constitutive luck problem for moral responsibility without worrying about basic moral responsibility. According to compatibilism, if determinism is true, then agents can be morally responsible for performing actions without being basically morally responsible for performing them. But a libertarian who thinks agents can be basically morally responsible for what they do must explain how basic moral responsibility is possible. ACT-endorsing libertarianism can both solve the constitutive luck problem for moral responsibility and explain how agents can be basically morally responsible for what they do.

Derk Pereboom has posed an empirical objection to agent-causal libertarianism: The best empirically confirmed scientific theories feature physical laws predicting no long-run deviations from fixed conditional frequencies that govern events. If agent-causal libertarianism were true, however, then it would be virtually certain, absent ‘wild coincidences’, that such long-run deviations would occur. So, current empirical evidence makes agent-causal libertarianism unlikely. This paper formulates Pereboom’s ‘Problem of Wild Coincidences’ as a five-step argument and considers two recent responses. Then, it offers a different response: The Problem of Wild Coincidences does not show that current empirical evidence makes agent-causal libertarianism unlikely, even if all events are governed by physical laws featuring fixed long-run conditional frequencies and even if agents can ‘overrule’ normal physical laws.

One aspiration of an analytic jurisprudential theory is to provide an account of how legal obligations arise, including the legal obligation of judges to apply only legally valid norms when adjudicating cases. Also, any fully adequate theory should enable a solution to a ‘chicken-egg’ puzzle regarding legal authority: legal authority can exist only in virtue of rules that authorize it, but such rules require a legal authority as their source. Which came first? This article argues that it is difficult to see how a particular type of positivist theory (featuring a fundamental norm that plays certain roles) can solve the puzzle and also account for the aforementioned adjudicative duty. The challenge can be framed in terms of the need to be able to derive a legal ‘ought’ (applying to courts) from only ‘is’-statements expressing social facts, where the requisite derivation cannot rely on what John Searle has called ‘institutional facts’

Retributivism’s definitive tenet is that satisfying a criminal wrongdoer’s negative desert morally justifies legal punishment independently of any good consequences that might result. The Epistemic Argument against traditional harsh retributivism imposes on such retributivists the burden of establishing beyond reasonable doubt that sometimes we are morally responsible for performing actions in the sense that we deserve to be praised or punished for doing them if we possess cognitive sensitivity to their moral status when we perform them. The Epistemic Argument may have force against traditional harsh retributivism, whose penal objective is inconsistent with respecting a substantial limit on the severity of harm and suffering that can be imposed on deserving offenders. But it is significantly less forceful if extended against any form of retributivism whose penal objectives respect such a limit.

Christopher Franklin summarizes the standard argument for an agent-causal libertarian account of free will and formulates an alternative, which he calls the ‘It Ain’t Me’ argument. The latter relies on agent-causal libertarianism’s causal non-reductivism. Franklin suggests that agent-causal libertarians should support their position by defending a nonreductive agent-causal account of reasons-responsive agency instead of employing the standard argument. This paper summarizes a proposed agent-causal account of free will; argues for a nonreductive agent-causal account of reasons-responsive agency in doing so; and supports the proposed account with a variant of Franklin’s ‘It Ain’t Me’ argument.

Derk Pereboom has posed an empirical objection to agent-causal libertarianism: The best empirically confirmed scientific theories feature physical laws predicting no long-run deviations from fixed conditional frequencies that govern events. If agent-causal libertarianism were true, however, then it would be virtually certain, absent ‘wild coincidences’, that such long-run deviations would occur. So, current empirical evidence makes agent-causal libertarianism unlikely. This paper formulates Pereboom’s ‘Problem of Wild Coincidences’ as a five-step argument and considers two recent responses. Then, it offers a different response: The Problem of Wild Coincidences does not show that current empirical evidence makes agent-causal libertarianism unlikely, even if all events are governed by physical laws featuring fixed long-run conditional frequencies and even if agents can ‘overrule’ normal physical laws.

Because an agent’s constitutive luck may seem to preclude free will, it may seem to preclude moral responsibility. An agent is basically morally responsible for performing action A at time t only if there is another possible world with the same past up to t and the same laws of nature in which the agent does not perform A at t. A compatibilist can solve the constitutive luck problem for moral responsibility without worrying about basic moral responsibility. According to compatibilism, if determinism is true, then agents can be morally responsible for performing actions without being basically morally responsible for performing them. But a libertarian who thinks agents can be basically morally responsible for what they do must explain how basic moral responsibility is possible. ACT-endorsing libertarianism can both solve the constitutive luck problem for moral responsibility and explain how agents can be basically morally responsible for what they do.