Princeton University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1995
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  •  248
    The act of choice
    Philosophers' Imprint 6 1-15. 2006.
    Choice is one of the central elements in the experience of free will, but it has not received a good account from either compatibilists or libertarians. This paper develops an account of choice based around three features: (i) choice is an action; (ii) choice is not determined by one's prior beliefs and desires; (iii) once the question of what to do has arisen, choice is typically both necessary and sufficient for moving to action. These features might appear to support a libertarian account, bu…Read more
  •  202
    I am delighted to be able to comment on this piece by Baumeister, Crescioni and Alquist (henceforth BCA). Baumeister’s earlier work has had a huge influence on my own, and I find myself in very substantial agreement with what BCA have to say here. In particular, I agree that if the philosophical debate on free will is to move forward we need to pay close attention to what it is that agents are thinking when they talk of free will, to the experiences that give rise to their conviction that they h…Read more
  •  197
    Willing, Wanting, Waiting
    Oxford University Press UK. 2009.
    Richard Holton provides a unified account of intention, choice, weakness of will, strength of will, temptation, addiction, and freedom of the will. Drawing on recent psychological research, he argues that, rather than being the pinnacle of rationality, the central components of the will are there to compensate for our inability to make or maintain sound judgments. Choice is understood as the capacity to form intentions even in the absence of judgments of what action is best. Weakness of will is …Read more
  •  89
    Reason, value and the muggletonians
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (3). 1996.
    Michael Smith has argued that to value an action is to believe that if one were fully rational one would desire that one perform it. I offer the Muggletonians as a counter-example. The Muggletonians, a 17th century English sect, believed that reason was the path of the Devil. They believed that their fully rational selves - rational in just Smith's sense - would have blasphemed against God; and that their rational selves would have wanted their actual selves to do likewise. But blaspheming again…Read more
  •  1760
    What in the World is Weakness of Will?
    with Joshua May
    Philosophical Studies 157 (3). 2012.
    At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one‘s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will. Richard Holton (1999, 2009) claims that it doesn’t, while Alfred Mele (2010) argues that, to a certain extent, it does. As Mele recognizes, the question about an…Read more
  •  217
    Rational resolve
    Philosophical Review 113 (4): 507-535. 2004.
    Empirical findings suggest that temptation causes agents not only to change their desires, but also to revise their beliefs, in ways that are not necessarily irrational. But if this is so, how can it be rational to maintain a resolution to resist? For in maintaining a resolution it appears that one will be acting against what one now believes to be best. This paper proposes a two-tier account according to which it can be rational neither to reconsider the question of what one is going to do nor …Read more
  •  394
    Partial belief, partial intention
    Mind 117 (465): 27-58. 2008.
    Is a belief that one will succeed necessary for an intention? It is argued that the question has traditionally been badly posed, framed as it is in terms of all-out belief. We need instead to ask about the relation between intention and partial belief. An account of partial belief that is more psychologically realistic than the standard credence account is developed. A notion of partial intention is then developed, standing to all-out intention much as partial belief stands to all-out belief. Va…Read more
  •  272
    Determinism, Self-Efficacy, and the Phenomenology of Free Will
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 52 (4): 412-428. 2009.
    Some recent studies have suggested that belief in determinism tends to undermine moral motivation: subjects who are given determinist texts to read become more likely to cheat or engage in vindictive behaviour. One possible explanation is that people are natural incompatibilists, so that convincing them of determinism undermines their belief that they are morally responsible. I suggest a different explanation, and in doing so try to shed some light on the phenomenology of free will. I contend th…Read more
  •  100
    Intention detecting
    Philosophical Quarterly 44 (172): 298-318. 1994.
    Crispin Wright has argued that our concept of intention is extension-determining, and that this explains why we are so good at knowing our intentions: it does so by subverting the idea that we detect them. This paper has two aims. The first is to make sense of Wright's claim that intention is extension-determining; this is achieved by comparing his position to that of analytic functionalism. The second is to show that it doesn't follow from this that we do not detect our intentions. Wright has c…Read more
  •  119
    Freedom, coercion and discursive control
    In Geoffrey Brennan, Robert Goodin, Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), Common Minds: Themes From the Philosophy of Philip Pettit, Oxford University Press. pp. 104-119. 2007.
    If moral and political philosophy is to be of any use, it had better be concerned with real people. The focus need not be exclusively on people as they are; but it should surely not extend beyond how they would be under laws as they might be. It is one of the strengths of Philip Pettit’s work that it is concerned with real people and the ways that they think: with the commonplace mind. In this paper I examine Pettit’s recent work on free will.2 Much of my concern will be to see how his contentio…Read more
  •  258
    How is strength of will possible?
    In Sarah Stroud & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Weakness of will and practical irrationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 39-67. 2003.
    Most recent accounts of will-power have tried to explain it as reducible to the operation of beliefs and desires. In opposition to such accounts, this paper argues for a distinct faculty of will-power. Considerations from philosophy and from social psychology are used in support.
  •  108
    From Determinism to Resignation, and How to Stop It
    In Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein & Tillman Vierkant (eds.), Decomposing the Will, Oxford University Press. 2013.
    A few philosophers have held that determinism should lead to an attitude of resignation: since what will be will be, there is no point trying to influence the future. That argument has rightly been seen as mistaken. But a plausible parallel argument leads from the thesis of predictability---the thesis that it can be known what will happen---to an attitude of resignation. So if predictability is true, our normal practical attitudes may well be deeply mistaken. Fortunately, whilst determinism is a…Read more
  •  876
    Intention and Weakness of Will
    Journal of Philosophy 96 (5): 241. 1999.
    Philosophical orthodoxy identifies weakness of will with akrasia: the weak willed person is someone who intentionally acts against their better judgement. It is argued that this is a mistake. Weakness of will consists in a quite different failing, namely an over-ready revision of one's intentions. Building on the work of Bratman, an account of such over-ready revision is given. A number of examples are then adduced showing how weakness of will, so understood, differs from akrasia.
  •  520
    The standard account of weakness of will identifies it with akrasia, that is, with action against one's best judgment. Elsewhere I have argued that weakness of will is better understood as over-readily giving up on one's resolutions. Many cases of weak willed action will not be akratic: in over-readily abandoning a resolution an agent may well do something that they judge at the time to be best. Indeed, in so far as temptation typically gives rise to judgment shift -- to a tendency to change one…Read more
  •  1404
    Intention as a Model for Belief
    In Manuel Vargas & Gideon Yaffe (eds.), Rational and Social Agency: Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Bratman, Oxford University Press. 2014.
    This paper argues that a popular account of intentions can be extended to beliefs. Beliefs are stable all-out states that allow for planning and coordination in a way that is tractable for cognitively limited creatures like human beings. Scepticism is expressed that there is really anything like credences as standardly understood.
  •  121
    Disentangling the Will
    In Al Mele, Kathleen Vohs & Roy Baumeister (eds.), Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work?, Oxford University Press. pp. 82. 2010.
    It is argued that there are at least three things bundled up in the idea of free will: the capacity manifested by agents whenever they act freely; the property possessed by those actions for which an agent in morally responsible; and the ability to do otherwise. This paper attempts some disentangling.
  •  57
    Addiction, Self‐Signalling and the Deep Self
    Mind and Language 31 (3): 300-313. 2016.
    Addicts may simply deny that they are addicted; or they may use self-signalling to try to provide evidence that giving up is not worthwhile. I provide an account that shows how easy it is to provide apparent evidence either that the addiction is so bad that it cannot be escaped; or that there is no real addiction, and hence nothing to escape. I suggest that the most effective way of avoiding this is to avoid self-signalling altogether.
  •  574
    The Addict in Us All
    Frontiers in Psychiatry 5 (139): 01-20. 2014.
    In this paper, we contend that the psychology of addiction is similar to the psychology of ordinary, non-addictive temptation in important respects, and explore the ways in which these parallels can illuminate both addiction and ordinary action. The incentive salience account of addiction proposed by Robinson and Berridge (1993; 2001; 2008) entails that addictive desires are not in their nature different from many of the desires had by non-addicts; what is different is rather the way that addict…Read more
  •  281
    Addiction Between Compulsion and Choice
    with Kent Berridge
    In Neil Levy (ed.), Addiction and Self-Control, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    We aim to find a middle path between disease models of addiction, and those that treat addictive choices as choices like any other. We develop an account of the disease element by focussing on the idea that dopamine works primarily to lay down dispositional intrinsic desires. Addictive substances artifically boost the dopamine signal, and thereby lay down intrinsic desires for the substances that persist through withdrawal, and in the face of beliefs that they are worthless. The result is cravin…Read more