Maria Sekatskaya

In Free Will’s Value: Criminal Justice, Pride, and Love, John Lemos defends the importance of libertarian free will for moral responsibility, criminal justice, and meaningful relationships. Lemos argues that libertarianism is a superior theory of free will compared to compatibilism and that it offers a foundation for criminal justice that better aligns with our moral intuitions than what the free will skeptics have offered so far. I critically examine Lemos’ arguments against compatibilism, in particular his rejection of compatibilism due to its apparent inability to respond adequately to the manipulation argument, and his own version of libertarianism, the ‘indeterministic weightings’ (IW) view. In considering Lemos’ treatment of the manipulation argument, I suggest a way that a compatibilist could object to Lemos’ dismissal of both hard- and soft-line replies. In considering the IW view, I focus on Lemos’ response to the luck problem and highlight the problematic role of indeterminacy in self-forming actions, which are supposed to be the ultimate foundation of moral responsibility.

Compatibilist libertarianism proposes a new solution to the problem of an apparent incompatibility of free will and determinism. It drives a wedge between ontological levels and claims that free will is possible as a higher-level phenomenon even if the fundamental physical level is governed by determinism. After highlighting an inconsistency in the current version of compatibilist libertarianism, we discuss how one of its essential metaphysical assumptions (in particular: supervenience) can be modified in order to avoid this problem. Finally, we discuss the pros and cons of pushing the position to the limits in this way.

Rudolf Carnap was one of the earliest proponents of logical positivism/empiricism to explicitly discuss reductionism in relation to mental phenomena from a philosophy of science perspective. In order to address early criticism, Carnap’s account underwent several modifications. An important feature of the ‘mental-to-physical’ reduction endorsed by the later Carnap is that of empirical confirmability. According to this feature, a reduction can only succeed if it carries with it the possibility to confirm or undermine mental claims on the basis of physical claims. Although other modifications of Carnap’s reductionistic account have already been linked to the modern philosophy of mind debate (von Kutschera Erkenntnis 35:305–323, 1991), the role of empirical confirmability in this context remains unexplored terrain. In this paper, we tackle this question and identify relevant modifications in the philosophy of mind with respect to physicalism. We suggest that if one shifts from the metaphysical notion of supervenience to an epistemic derivative of it, one can closely relate supervenience physicalism to Carnap’s account of empirical confirmability. We will show how this both illuminates Carnap’s reductionist program from a philosophy of mind perspective and highlights how the philosophy of mind debate can benefit from Carnap’s account of reduction.

One of the central problems within the free will debate lies in the apparent incompatibility of an agent's ability to do otherwise and determinism. Recently, compatibilist libertarianism was proposed as an actualist position intended to finally reconcile both. In this article, we argue that in order to maintain consistency, this position must be understood as a variant of classical compatibilism rather than a version of libertarianism. Though this seems to be an undesired consequence for proponents of compatibilist libertarianism, we think that it is not that bad. We show that recent objections to this position can be avoided by embracing its compatibilist nature and argue that a modified version of compatibilist libertarianism might very well be as close to an actualist account of free will in a deterministic world as one can hope for.

Compatibilist libertarianism proposes a new solution to the problem of an apparent incompatibility of free will and determinism. It drives a wedge between ontological levels and claims that free will is possible as a higher-level phenomenon even if the fundamental physical level is governed by determinism. After highlighting an inconsistency in the current version of compatibilist libertarianism, we discuss how one of its essential metaphysical assumptions (in particular: supervenience) can be modified in order to avoid this problem. Finally, we discuss the pros and cons of pushing the position to the limits in this way.