Derk Pereboom

This chapter argues that Kant’s commitment to conceiving space as exhibiting a kind of priority monistic or “part-on-whole” ontological dependence stems from his more fundamental conception of the structure of intuitive representation. The chapter explicates this structure and make three claims: First, that there is no obviously cogent inference from Kant’s claims regarding the structure of space to adopting transcendental idealism as a means of blocking determinism and securing rational belief in human freedom. Second, it points out that Kant’s aim of securing the legitimacy of belief in freedom by way of transcendental idealism is in apparent tension with his conception of divine intellectual intuition, since God’s intuition of the noumenal realm exhibits the very same sort of freedom-threatening monism that our anthropocentric intuitions of space and time do. Third, the chapter argues that this threat may in fact be avoided even if priority monism about the noumenal holds.

In this chapter, Derk Pereboom defends the claim that forgiveness is essentially the renunciation of a stance of moral protest. Forgiveness need not be preceded by actual resentment or by any angry emotion. Rather, by virtue of regarding wrongdoers as blameworthy for past wrongdoing, forgivers regard the stance of moral protest against them as having been appropriate. In forgiving, they then renounce this stance. This renunciation is norm-changing, first of all because it involves moral protest changing from being appropriate to being inappropriate. Other alterations in norms may also accompany this change: earlier the wronged party perhaps legitimately demanded apology and amends, while upon forgiving, the request for new apologies and additional amends becomes inappropriate.

Is morality viable without the notions of desert, moral demand, and moral obligation, notions threatened by possible limitations in human abilities? This essay contends that it may well be. Instead of invoking desert, blame can be largely forward-looking, recast as appropriate moral protest, and aiming at protection, moral formation, and reconciliation. Moral demands in relationships can be re-envisioned as commitments deriving from care, and failure to act in accord with one’s commitments can be conceived as wrong in the sense that they are appropriately protested. Moral obligations can be reconfigured as axiological recommendations. Revision of morality poses risks, but it is argued that the changes envisioned are practically viable.

Many of John Calvin’s followers took him to be advocating a supralapsarian view of salvation history according to which God has decided, from all eternity, what will happen, who will be elected, and who will be damned. This raises obvious questions about divine goodness—or, put another way, this brand of Calvinism raises questions about the extent to which there is a streak of the diabolical even in the heart of the divine. Such a view of the divine tends to provoke a strong reaction, which we see in Horace Mann’s turn to a view of the divine that foregrounds kindness and ethical integrity.

This chapter focuses on the significance of free will. It evaluates Kane’s claim that we tend to think a libertarian free will is valuable because we desire to be independent selves and we desire that our achievements have objective worth. It suggests that a compatibilist free will might be able to satisfy both of these desires at least to some degree. Even if determinism were true, we might still possess a sort of freedom that would allow us to distinguish ourselves as being different from others and from the world itself, and our achievements might still have some degree of objective worth. The chapter then turns to examine whether love and personal relationships are undermined in the absence of a libertarian free will but contends that these two things can still be had by us in a significant way even if we were to lack libertarian free will.

This chapter sets out a notion of moral responsibility that incorporates the central features of the answerability conception advocated by T. M. Scanlon, Hilary Bok, and Angela Smith, and of Michael McKenna’s more specific conversational account, but which excludes any notion of desert, whether basic or non-basic. The point of blaming and praising on this notion is largely forward-looking: its main objectives are protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. Agents are blameworthy and praiseworthy by virtue of being appropriate recipients of blame and praise given these aims. Blaming on this conception can involve causing harm, but the justifiability of such harming does not reintroduce the legitimacy of desert. The resulting notion of moral responsibility is immune to any threat from the causal determination of action.

This chapter examines the fact that one cannot rationally accept both theological determinism and the libertarian conception of free will, and asks which of the two is preferable. The main reason to opt for theological determinism is that it provides an uncontroversial route to a strong notion of divine providence. The only proposal for securing such a conception of providence absent theological determinism is Molinism, and its status is uncertain. Libertarianism would provide us with basic desert moral responsibility, and also a promising response to the problem of evil. But theistic religion can do without basic desert moral responsibility, and responses to the problem of evil that essentially involve free will on the libertarian conception turn out to be ineffective when it comes to horrendous evils. Accordingly, this chapter contends that theological determinism is preferable, and regards the libertarian conception of free will as dispensable.

The book argues we are not free in the sense required for moral responsibility that involves basic desert, but that a conception of life without this type of free will would not be devastating to morality or to our sense of meaning in life, and in certain respects it may even be beneficial. This chapter sets out a notion of blame and its place in the moral life consistent with a denial of the sort of free will required for moral responsibility in the basic desert sense, and the chapter specifies the respect in which this sort of blame requires that its target have an ability to do otherwise.

Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso’s chapter on _hard-incompatibilist existentialism_ explores the practical and existential implications of free will skepticism, focusing on punishment, morality, and meaning in life. They consider two different routes to free will skepticism: the route that denies the causal efficacy of the types of willing required for free will, which receives impetus from pioneering work in neuroscience, and the route that does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that, whether deterministic or indeterministic, it does not achieve the level of control to count as free will. They argue that while there are compelling objections to the first route, the second remains intact and that free will skepticism allows for adequate ways of responding to criminal behavior—in particular, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alternation of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justified and sufficient for good social policy.

Increasingly, theists have come to see their relationship with God as anological to an exemplary human relationship. Seeing it this way would be difficult, supposing a traditional theological determinist view of providence in which God elects some to salvation in heaven and others to eternal damnation. But, as Derk Pereboom explains in this esssay, if one accepts universal salvation and denies divine retribution, both libertarianism and theological determinism accommodate a good relationship with God. Each of these positions can secure trust in God by a developmental account for why God permits evil, and by a sufficiently strong notion of divine providence can be used to respond to the problem of evil. The challenge that valuable love for God is ruled out by theological determinism can be answered by reflecting on what sorts of loving responses we ordinarily cherish.

This chapter explores the viability of theological determinism as a route to securing a strong doctrine of divine providence. A perennial concern for theological determinism is that it would have God be the author of sin. But on a hard determinist option, God would be the cause of wrongdoing, but not of actions for which we deserve blame, since deserved blame is ruled out by determinism. The extent to which the hard determinist perspective can retain a theistic ethic of guilt, forgiveness, gratitude, and love is then addressed. The article closes with a skeptical theist response to the problem of evil that appeals only to goods that do not involve free will.

This chapter contends that a Kantian perspective on the nature of introspective representation inspires a defense of a physicalist understanding of phenomenal states in the face of the most prominent arguments against it. Immanuel Kant claims that introspective representations (those of _inner sense_) are entities caused by the states they represent and are distinct from them, and that they mediate the representational relationship between the subject and the introspected psychological states. As a result, the subject may not represent these states as they are in themselves. It is argued that Kant's position yields a significant challenge to Frank Jackson's knowledge argument, and that it provides a response to those — like Joseph Levine and Robert Adams — who maintain that there is an explanatory gap between the physical and the phenomenal that the physicalist will have difficulty closing.

John Lemos sets out an event-causal libertarian view that is like Robert Kane’s except that it crucially substitutes indeterministic weightings for Kane’s efforts of will. I contend, using the disappearing agent argument, that neither Kane’s nor Lemos’s accounts secure an agent’s settling which action to perform in an indeterministic setting. An agent settles which option for action occurs just in case she determines, not necessarily causally, which action occurs, and she makes the difference as to which action occurs. I then propose that Lemos’s indeterministic-weightings event-causal libertarianism is viable without such settling, and that the advantages he aims to secure through libertarianism generally are largely recouped by the resulting position. Specifically, the desert in holding morally responsible to which Lemos is committed can be framed as nonbasic desert, and the advantages Lemos cites for indeterministic libertarianism that require neither settling nor desert, such as the advantage for the value of love, can be retained.

The question I raise is whether Mark Balaguer’s event-causal libertarianism can withstand the disappearing agent objection. The concern is that with the causal role of the events antecedent to a decision already given, nothing settles whether the decision occurs, and so the agent does not settle whether the decision occurs. Thus it would seem that in this view the agent will not have the control in making decisions required for moral responsibility. I examine whether Balaguer’s position has the resources to answer this objection.

Ted Honderich has made a very significant contribution to the debate about free will and determinism, in particular in his important book, A Theory of Determinism (Honderich, A Theory of Determinism, Oxford University Press, 1988). I share his general perspective on this issue, which, like mine, is in the Spinozist camp (Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Princeton University Press, 1677/1985), and I also agree with many of its specific features. His account of the aspects of our practice of holding moral responsibility that would have to be given up and which can be retained is nuanced and powerful. This is the part of the project that I have addressed in past works (Pereboom, Living without Free Will, Cambridge University Press, 2001; Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, Oxford University Press, 2014). Here, I will recount and expand on what I said there.

“Doğal din” terimi, bazen doğanın kendisinin ilahi olduğu bir panteistik doktrine atıfta bulunur. “Doğal teoloji” terimi ise aksine, başlangıçta gözlemlenen doğal gerçekler temelinde (ve bazen) Tanrı’nın varlığını savunmaya yönelik projeye atıfta bulunur. Bununla birlikte çağdaş felsefede, hem “doğal din” hem de “doğal teoloji” genel olarak, dinî veya teolojik konuları araştırmak için insana, “doğal” olan bilişsel yetilerini – akıl, algı, içgözlem- kullanma projesini ifade eder. Doğal din veya teoloji, mevcut anlayış üzerine, doğayla ilgili ampirik araştırmalarla sınırlı olmamakla birlikte ayrıca panteistik bir sonuçla da bağlantılı değildir. Bununla birlikte o, özel doğal olmayan yetilere (ESP, telepati, mistik deneyim) veya doğaüstü bilgi kaynaklarına (kutsal metinler, vahiy teolojisi, inanç otoriteleri, doğrudan doğaüstü iletişim) hitap etmekten kaçınır. Genel olarak, doğal din veya teoloji (bundan böyle “doğal teoloji” olarak anılacaktır), diğer felsefi ve bilimsel girişimlerle aynı rasyonel inceleme standartlarına uymayı amaçlamaktadır ve aynı değerlendirme ve eleştiri yöntemlerine tabidir.

Four Views on Free Will is a robust and careful debate about free will, how it interacts with determinism and indeterminism, and whether we have it or not. Providing the most up-to-date account of four major positions in the free will debate, the second edition of this classic text presents the opposing perspectives of renowned philosophers John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas. Substantially revised throughout, this new volume contains eight in-depth chapters, almost entirely rewritten for the new edition, in which the authors state their different positions on the debate, offer insights into how their views have evolved over the past fifteen years, respond to recent critical literature in the field, and interact and engage with each other in dialogue. In the first four chapters the authors defend their distinctive views about free will: libertarianism, compatibilism, hard incompatibilism, and revisionism. The subsequent four chapters consist of direct replies by each of the authors to the other three.

The term “natural religion” is sometimes taken to refer to a pantheistic doctrine according to which nature itself is divine. “Natural theology”, by contrast, originally referred to (and still sometimes refers to)[1] the project of arguing for the existence of God on the basis of observed natural facts. In contemporary philosophy, however, both “natural religion” and “natural theology” typically refer to the project of using all of the cognitive faculties that are “natural” to human beings—reason, sense-perception, introspection—to investigate religious or theological matters. Natural religion or theology, on the present understanding, is not limited to empirical inquiry into nature, and it is not wedded to a pantheistic result. It does, however, avoid appeals to special non-natural faculties (ESP, telepathy, mystical experience) or supernatural sources of information (sacred texts, revealed theology, creedal authorities, direct supernatural communication). In general, natural religion or theology (hereafter “natural theology”) aims to adhere to the same standards of rational investigation as other philosophical and scientific enterprises, and is subject to the same methods of evaluation and critique. Natural theology is typically contrasted with “revealed theology”, where the latter explicitly appeals to special revelations such as miracles, scriptures, and divinely-superintended commentaries and creedal formulations. (See DeCruz and DeSmedt 2015) Philosophers and religious thinkers across almost every epoch and tradition (Near Eastern, African, Asian, and European) have engaged the project of natural theology, either as proponents or critics. The question of whether natural theology is a viable project is at the root of some of the deepest religious divisions: Shi’ite thinkers are optimistic about reason’s ability to prove various theological and ethical truths, for instance, while Sunnis are not; Roman Catholic theologians typically think that reason provides demonstrations of the existence of God, while many Protestant theologians do not. Unlike most of the topics discussed in an encyclopedia of philosophy, this is one over which wars have been fought and throats have been cut. The most active discussions of natural theology in the West occurred during the high medieval period (roughly 1100–1400 C.E.) and the early modern period (1600–1800 C.E.). The past few decades have witnessed a revival of natural theological debate in the public sphere: there are now institutes promoting “Intelligent Design Theory”, popular apologetics courses, campus debates between believers and agnostics, a “New Atheist” movement, Youtube debates between apologists and atheists regarding new books in natural theology (such as the one between Nathan Lewis and Bernie Dehler on the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology),[2] and TED talks by famous atheists on how to resist natural religion (such as the one by Richard Dawkins in February 2002).[3] Among professional philosophers (who aren’t typically part of these more popular debates), arguments over our ability to justify positive or negative answers to religious questions have become fairly technical, often employing sophisticated logical techniques in an effort to advance the discussion instead of retreading the same old ground. The prestigious Gifford Lectures series hosted by a consortium of Scottish universities, however, has tried to feature new but still accessible work in natural theology for over 100 years (it too has a Youtube channel!)[4] In this article, we aim to avoid most the more recent complexities but also explain their origins by focusing on some central developments in the early modern period that helped to frame contemporary natural theological debates. We are focused here only on theoretical arguments (both a priori and a posteriori or empirical ones). It is controversial whether moral arguments are also part of natural theology, but we set them aside here (see also the entry on God, arguments for the existence of: moral arguments).

The chapter begins by introducing the problem of free will and moral responsibility and the standard terminology used to frame it in the philosophical context. It turns to the contributions of experimental philosophy and the prospects for the use of this methodology in the area. People believe that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates. The chapter discusses an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy nahmias and colleagues, and the role that empirical studies might have in the assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism. It also presents the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. A number of philosophers argue that the results of surveys provide confirming evidence for a meta‐view about moral theories, variantism.