Daniel Coren

My subject is the kind of Epistemic Conservatism (EC) that says that an agent is in some measure justified in maintaining a belief simply in virtue of the fact that the agent has that belief. Quine’s alternative to positivist foundationalism, Chisholmian particularism, Rawls’s reflective equilibrium, and Bayesianism all seem to rely on EC. I argue that, in order to evaluate EC, we must consider an agent holding a bare belief, that is, a belief stripped of all personal memory and epistemic context. Taking a stylistic cue from Peter Strawson, I argue that, though it does not seem to be self-contradictory to suppose that someone has a bare belief, and so it is not absolutely inconceivable that bare beliefs exist, it is, for us as we are, practically inconceivable that bare beliefs exist. It does not seem practically feasible, then, to evaluate EC on its own terms.

This book clarifies, defends, and explores a solution to the free-will problem. This solution's unique feature is that it does not have any alternate-sequence considerations in its analysis of free will -- no counterfactuals needed. I call this solution Agent & Reaction Control (ARC). ARC says that our ability to will and act with the freedom required for moral responsibility comes not from how we could or would have acted in non-actual scenarios, but, rather, from our willful acts themselves which produce a suitably-placed observer’s reaction. I give detailed analyses of both conditions -- the observer condition and the willful-action condition. I argue that ARC-type freedom is compatible with (the relevant sorts of) determinism and with (the relevant sorts of) indeterminism. I canvass distinctions between ARC and other theories of free will. I discuss ARC's implications for desert. Finally, I argue that ARC is enriched rather than threatened by some recent action-theoretic work in neuroscience.

We cannot create the personal history that causes us to act. Yet that self-creation is required for responsibility for action. So goes Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument, crystallizing centuries of prior thought and prompting a host of replies. All replies argue that personal history is irrelevant to responsibility or relevant in a less-demanding way than the argument requires. But in my view, personal history may be as relevant as the argument claims. The fl aw, I argue, is that it confl ates what we can do with what we do. It assumes that, if the way I am causes my act, and if I cannot create the way I am, then I lack alternate possibilities and control. My objection enriches an idea central to accounts from Susan Wolf, John Martin Fischer, Kadri Vihvelin, Dana Nelkin, Gary Watson, and others: we may be responsible for what we do even if we are not responsible for things on which our acts depend. My objection also supports features of Robert Kane, Christopher Franklin, and Laura Ekstrom’s incompatibilisms. In short, my focus is on the freedom in ‘can.’

I offer a new way of thinking about immortality: like atmospheric convection, it might be sensitive to initial conditions (the butterfly effect). Bernard Williams famously argued that eternal life would become boring or alienating. But suppose our world is a non-linear dynamical system: the laws of nature and the past determine the future but there is no lower limit on a future-altering difference in the initial state. So, eternal life might have unending possibilities for fascination while remaining stable enough to help us preserve our identity and character. This is not to say that eternity would be enjoyable. It might be awful. Nor does it entail that we should accept it. A mortal life might be better or equal. But non-linearity shows new ways to enjoy and understand eternity.

Is (secular) immortality desirable? A lively debate has formed in response. A central area of disagreement is a principle we may call too much repetition or too much novelty: either we would run out of meaningful things to do (I’m so bored!) or we would change so much that we would lose our character. Some, such as Bernard Williams and Shelly Kagan, agree that we would have one or the other. Others, such as Thomas Nagel, Lisa Bortolotti, Yujin Nagasawa, and John Martin Fischer, argue that we could escape both. I offer a non-escapist way of thinking about the issue. Suppose we concede that repetition-caused boredom is bad and inescapable. Rather than trying to escape it, what happens when we accept it? I argue that, by a genuine and growing acceptance of repetition and boredom, immortality might be not just tolerable but increasingly pleasant over time. This is not to say that we should choose to live forever. But my account makes it harder to refuse immortality.

Despite their differences, responsibility theories of all types (skeptics, forward-looking, backward-looking) concur on the following conditional: If someone deserved to suffer for an act, then they would be blameworthy for that act. Here I sketch a way of rejecting that conditional. In particular, using some of Śāntideva’s distinctions, I offer a new way of thinking about desert: Wrongdoers deserve to, and do, suffer for their wrongdoings, but they do not deserve our blame. It may be that vice is (part of) its own deserved punishment, whether or not anyone can have the free will required for blameworthiness. More generally, wrongdoers may not deserve negative responses of any kind from anyone else, yet they may still deservedly suffer in proportion to their wrongdoings.

Is moral responsibility compatible with determinism? Peter Strawson’s first answer is: I do not know what the thesis of determinism is. His second answer seems to be: Yes, it is, and we can see this by looking to relevant pockets of our ordinary practices and attitudes, especially our responses (resentment, anger, love, forgiveness) to quality of will. His second answer has shaped subsequent discussions of moral responsibility. But what exactly is Strawson’s compatibilism? And is it a plausible view? By attending to Strawson’s account of parenting and the development of moral agents from children to adults, I’ll clarify and defend the following account: For Strawson, the appropriateness conditions for holding responsible change by degrees, over time, based on an agent’s susceptibility to empathy and quality of will, and this shows us that determinism is irrelevant to responsibility.

Self-control requires intentionally resisting what we most want to do. Yet we do what we most want to do, if we do anything intentionally at that time (The Law of Desire). Therefore, self-control is impossible. So runs a well-studied puzzle. The three standard accounts assume that if a desire is our strongest desire, then it is stronger than all others. But that assumption is false. For we may have desires of equal strength. I describe cases which feature tied desires, self-control, and doing what we most want to do. Following insights from computer science (Buridan’s Principle), equal-strength desires are possible any time we try to decide. My proposal may also be used to bolster all three standard analyses.

Despite their differences, responsibility theories of all types (skeptics, forward-looking, backward-looking) concur on the following conditional: If someone deserved to suffer for an act, then they would be blameworthy for that act. Here I sketch a way of rejecting that conditional. In particular, using some of Śāntideva’s distinctions, I offer a new way of thinking about desert: Wrongdoers deserve to, and do, suffer for their wrongdoings, but they do not deserve our blame. It may be that vice is (part of) its own deserved punishment, whether or not anyone can have the free will required for blameworthiness. More generally, wrongdoers may not deserve negative responses of any kind from anyone else, yet they may still deservedly suffer in proportion to their wrongdoings.

I argue that to remove all backward-looking grounds and justification from the practice, as some theorists recommend, is to remove (not revise) moral responsibility. The most paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility must feature desert and retributive elements. So, moral responsibility must be (at least partially) backward-looking. When we hold people responsible, one reason we do so is that we believe that they deserve punishment or reward simply in virtue of the action for which we hold them responsible. None of this rebuts responsibility skepticism. For instance, forward-looking theories might adopt Myisha Cherry's proposal: anger as love without blameworthiness.

Resentment is a negative reaction to expressions of bad will. Gratitude is a positive reaction to expressions of good will. To give up resentment, when someone has wronged you, is to forgive them. We might expect an analog for giving up gratitude. The practice features in some ordinary and extraordinary moments in our lives. But it is unnamed and unstudied. I clarify what giving up gratitude is. I identify three types of ordinary and important cases. I then attend to implications; in particular, my account sheds light on restorations of gratitude analogous to un‐forgiving. Restoring gratitude may help to repair relationships, and restoring your once‐lost gratitude may be morally required in some contexts. More generally, by taking account of gratitude as a dynamic attitude that may be given up and restored as fits the situation and one's judgment, we may better understand the power and flexibility of gratitude's everyday function.

How is willpower possible? Which desires are relevant to well-being? Despite a surge of interest in both questions, recent philosophical discussions have not connected them. I connect them here. In particular, the puzzle of synchronic self-control says that synchronic self-control requires a contradiction, namely, wanting not to do what we most want to do. Three responses have been developed: Sripada’s divided mind view, Mele’s motivational shift thesis, and Kennett and Smith’s non-actional approach. These responses do not incorporate distinctions from desire-satisfaction theories of well-being. I argue that distinguishing between behavioural desires and genuine-attraction desires disarms one objection to synchronic self-control. Conversely, disarming that objection salvages an axiologically crucial claim in recent versions of desire-satisfaction theory.

Unlike Yiddish (_fargin_) and Sanskrit (_muditā_), English has no single word to describe the practice of sharing someone else’s joy at their success. Sympathetic joy has also escaped attention in philosophy. We are familiar with schadenfreude, begrudging, envy, jealousy, and other terms describing either (a) pleasure at someone else’s misfortune or (b) displeasure at someone else’s good fortune. But what, exactly, is sympathetic joy? I argue that it is a short-term or long-term feeling of great delight at another’s good fortune, requiring no more than minimal understanding of the relevant person and event. It is intensified relative to understanding, sharing, and positive disposal. It is importantly different from empathetic emotions and also from vicarious pride. It may be group-directed. Empirical research suggests it occurs fairly often, activates the brain in the same way as does sympathetic sadness, and may increase our well-being. It is primarily not a reactive attitude (an emotional reaction to good or bad will), but, rather, a sign of good will toward another.

Philosophers have described the human perspective on climate change as a perfect moral storm. I take a new angle on that storm: I argue that our relevant desires feature a particularly problematic case of seemingly consistent but genuinely inconsistent desires. We have, first, non‐indexical desires such as a desire to (make the sacrifices necessary to) stop polluting our environment at some point. We have, second, indexical desires such as a desire not to (make the sacrifices necessary to) stop polluting our environment this year. Our indexical and non‐indexical desires are inconsistent. Such inconsistency is obvious in most short‐term, individual cases such as when we need to make a dentist appointment. But when it comes to climate change, that inconsistency is masked by factors such as longevity and bitter divisions. This is, unfortunately, why humanity may continue putting off the collective action required to address climate change.

The problem known as Buridan’s Ass says that a hungry donkey equipoised between two identical bales of hay will starve to death. Indecision kills the ass. Some philosophers worry about human analogs. Computer scientists since the 1960s have known about the computer versions of such cases. From what Leslie Lamport calls ‘Buridan’s Principle’—a discrete decision based on a continuous range of input-values cannot be made in a bounded time—it follows that the possibilities for human analogs of Buridan’s Ass are far more wide-ranging and securely provable than has been acknowledged in philosophy. We are never necessarily decisive. This is mathematically provable. I explore four consequences: first, increased interest of the literature’s solutions to Buridan’s Ass; second, a new asymmetry between responsibility for omissions and responsibility for actions; third, clarification of the standard account of akrasia; and, fourth, clarification of the role of credences in normative decision-theory.

Using research in social psychology, philosophers such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris argue that human beings do not have – and cannot acquire – character traits such as virtues. Along with defenders of virtue ethics such as Julia Annas and Rachana Kamtekar, they assume that this constitutes a dangerous attack on virtue ethics. I argue that even if virtues and vices did not exist and everyone accepted that truth, (1) we would continue to make attributions of character traits in our ordinary practices and institutions and (2) it would still be useful to strategically harness – rather than suppress or ignore – our virtue (and vice) attributions.

I show that some famous arguments against moral responsibility — most notably, Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument and Susan Wolf’s Troubling Train of Thought — reason in an unnatural way: if a clearly has some property that results in our saying that a is F, and if b less clearly has that property, then it is the case that b is F. I argue that this problem is not present in reasons-responsiveness theories of responsibility. I do so by applying Boolos’s elegant technique of generating spanning conditionals from universal instantiations of mathematical induction premises.

In this paper, we motivate, propose and defend the following two conditions as individually sufficient and disjunctively necessary for moral responsibility: PODMA —originally proposed by Coren, Acta Analytica, 33, 145–159,, now cast as sufficient rather than necessary—and the TWC*, which amends versions presented by Young, 961–969, 2016; Philosophia, 45, 1365–1380, 2017). We explain why there is a need for new necessary and sufficient conditions, how these build on and improve existing ideas, particularly in relation to Frankfurt-style counterexamples and the continuing discussion on their effectiveness, and why PODMA and the TWC* are good candidates. Finally, we defend the proposal against anticipated objections in order to clarify why we think these individually sufficient and disjunctively necessary conditions are plausible and able to inform the ongoing debate on the role of alternate possibilities in the ascription of moral responsibility.

Is moral responsibility compatible with determinism? Peter Strawson’s first answer is: I do not know what the thesis of determinism is. His second answer seems to be: Yes, it is, and we can see this by looking to relevant pockets of our ordinary practices and attitudes, especially our responses (resentment, anger, love, forgiveness) to quality of will. His second answer has shaped subsequent discussions of moral responsibility. But what exactly is Strawson’s compatibilism? And is it a plausible view? By attending to Strawson’s account of parenting and the development of moral agents from children to adults, I’ll clarify and defend the following account: For Strawson, the appropriateness conditions for holding responsible change by degrees, over time, based on an agent’s susceptibility to empathy and quality of will, and this shows us that determinism is irrelevant to responsibility.

In a brief and deeply interesting 2017 Acta Analytica paper, Peter Baumann argues that there are cases of necessarily incompatible but mutually consistent desires, that this is a common problem, and that there is no solution in sight. I’ll argue that Baumann fails to note certain non-trivial assumptions that must be made for the possibility of consistent incompatible desires; if consistent incompatible desires do exist then they’re sometimes beneficial; and if they are sometimes involved with problematic outcomes then the mere presence of incompatibility and consistency does not cause the subject to frustrate the (more) beneficial desire. In short, if there is a problem of consistent incompatible desires then it is not the problem that Baumann identifies.

I explain what Aristotle means when, after puzzling about the matter of motion in incomplete animals (those without sight, smell, hearing), he suggests in De Anima III 11.433b31–434a5 that just as incomplete animals are moved indeterminately, desire and phantasia are present in those animals, but present indeterminately. I argue that self-motion and its directing faculties in incomplete animals differ in degree but not in kind from those of complete animals. I examine how an object of desire differs for an incomplete animal. Using a comparison with Aristotle’s account of recollection, especially in unfavorable circumstances, I describe indeterminate self-motion. Finally, I discuss implications for our understanding of Aristotle’s accounts of the faculties of the soul and incomplete animals.

Why does someone, S, deserve blame or reproach for an action or event? One part of a standard answer since Aristotle: the event was caused, at least in part, by S’s bad will. But recently there’s been some insightful discussion of cases where the event’s causes do not include any bad will from S and yet it seems that S is not off the hook for the event. Cheshire Calhoun, Miranda Fricker, Elinor Mason, David Enoch, Randolph Clarke, and others include in this category some cases of glitches, forgetfulness, inattentiveness, the actions of one’s children or one’s country, and certain instances of explicit bias and implicit bias. Enoch and Mason argue that in these cases S should extend the realm of S’s responsibility. Drawing on Aristotle’s emphases on retrospective attitudes and the non-voluntary, this paper attempts to clarify the relation between quality of will and blameworthiness. I analyze cases where (1) S is clearly not morally responsible for an action or event, E, yet (2) S deserves reproach for E unless S has the appropriate retrospective attitudes (such as regret) or the absence of inappropriate attitudes toward E.

The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don’t matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars cannot think, human beings can. Through an exploration of some features of awe and its positive effects on us, I offer a novel way of answering the second question: even if we don’t matter, we, unlike the stars, naturally benefit from observing our own smallness. I explore implications for accounts of the absurdity of human life. Life might be absurd. But I give reasons to think that life isn’t absurd in the ways some such as Nagel and Camus suggest. Finally, I connect non-symmetric awe with Buddhist insights to strengthen a recent and more positive account of how to find meaning in life.

The universe is enormous, perhaps unimaginably so. In comparison, we are very small. Does this suggest that humanity has little if any cosmic significance? And if we don’t matter, should that matter to us? Blaise Pascal, Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Stephen Hawking, and others have offered insightful answers to those questions. For example, Pascal and Ramsey emphasize that whereas the stars (in all their enormity) cannot think, human beings can. Through an exploration of some features of awe and its positive effects on us, I offer a novel way of answering the second question: even if we don’t matter, we, unlike the stars, naturally benefit from observing our own smallness. I explore implications for accounts of the absurdity of human life. Life might be absurd. But I give reasons to think that life isn’t absurd in the ways some such as Nagel and Camus suggest. Finally, I connect non-symmetric awe with Buddhist insights to strengthen a recent and more positive account of how to find meaning in life.

I explain what Aristotle means when, after puzzling about the matter of motion in incomplete animals (those without sight, smell, hearing), he suggests in De Anima III 11.433b31-434a5 that just as incomplete animals are moved indeterminately, desire and phantasia are present in those animals, but present indeterminately. I argue that self-motion and its directing faculties in incomplete animals differ in degree but not in kind from those of complete animals. I examine how an object of desire differs for an incomplete animal. Using a comparison with Aristotle’s account of recollection, especially in unfavorable circumstances, I describe indeterminate self-motion. Finally, I discuss implications for our understanding of Aristotle’s accounts of the faculties of the soul and incomplete animals.

Every thing that moves is caused to move by something else. Yet there are things that move themselves. How does Aristotle square those two commitments? This paper helps to answer that question. One argument in Physics VII 1 seems to pose a problem for the bare possibility of self-motion; in it he seems to argue that everything that moves must be moved by something else. The text in which this argument appears is itself vexed on a number of fronts, because it is not clear how Physics VII fits with the rest of the Physics, and also because there are two distinct manuscript traditions for Physics VII. I argue for a new and charitable reading of Aristotle’s Physics VII 1 α241b35-242a49 / β241b25-242a15. I show that the argument is compatible with Aristotle’s endorsements of self-motion; I defend the argument’s most controversial premise; and I argue that my reading has some useful implications for understanding Aristotelian self-motion. Unqualified self-motion (where just the whole of A moves the whole of A) is impossible, for Aristotle.