Stephen Morris

Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research

Science and the End of Ethics examines some of the most important positive and negative implications that science has for ethics. Addressing the negative implications first, author Stephen Morris discusses how contemporary science provides significant challenges to moral realism. One threat against moral realism comes from evolutionary theory, which suggests that our moral beliefs are unconnected to any facts that would make them true. Ironically, many of the same areas of science (e.g. evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology) that present difficulties for moral realism point to a new ethical approach that focuses on achieving some of the key practical goals shared by ethicists. Chief among these is how to increase amicable behavior among people.

Much of the recent philosophical discussion about free will has been focused on whether compatibilists can adequately defend how a determined agent could exercise the type of free will that would enable the agent to be morally responsible in what has been called the basic desert sense :5–24, 1994; Fischer in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Philos Stud, 144:45–62, 2009). While we agree with Derk Pereboom and others that the compatibilist’s burden should be properly understood as providing a compelling account of how a determined agent could be morally responsible in the basic desert sense, the exact nature of this burden has been rendered somewhat unclear by the fact that there has been no definitive account given as to what the basic desert sense of moral responsibility amounts to. In Sect. 1 we set out to clarify the compatibilist’s burden by presenting our account of basic desert moral responsibility—which we call retributivist desert moral responsibility for purposes of clarity—and explain why it is of central philosophical and practical importance to the free will debate. In Sect. 2 we employ a thought experiment to illustrate the kind of difficulty that compatibilists of any stripe are likely to encounter in attempting to explain how determined agents can exercise the kind of free will needed for retributivist desert moral responsibility.

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach.

Since philosophers generally agree that free will is understood partly by the relation it holds to moral responsibility, achieving a better understanding of free will requires that we have a clear idea of the sort of moral responsibility to which free will is thought to be connected. I argue that examining the substantive differences that exist between compatibilists and incompatibilists reveals a specific notion of moral responsibility that is best suited for philosophical debates regarding free will. Upon examination, it becomes apparent that the primary substantive disputes between compatibilists and incompatibilists—as well as between libertarians and skeptics—have to do with the issue of whether retributivist reward or punishment is ever appropriate for certain kinds of agents. Drawing from this, I suggest that participants in the free will debate adopt a particular understanding of moral responsibility that can ground the propriety of retributivist justice.

While skeptical arguments concerning free will have been a common element of philosophical discourse for thousands of years, one could make the case that such arguments have never been more numerous or forceful than at present. In response to these skeptical attacks, some philosophers and psychologists have expressed concern that the widespread acceptance of such skeptical attitudes could have devastating social consequences. In this paper, I set out to address whether such concerns are well-founded. I argue that there is reason to believe that should skeptical arguments result in the widespread dismissal of human free will, the results of such a dismissal are likely to be more positive than negative.

Moral philosophers have always encountered difficulty when trying to establish that a positive relationship holds between the demands of self-interest and the demands of morality. Francis Hutcheson coined the term “secret chain” to refer to the connection that supposedly connects individual interest with moral concerns (benevolence in particular). Despite all of the efforts, enlightened self-interest theories have found little success in achieving credibility. In my dissertation I argue that the inability of any enlightened self-interest theory to provide a convincing account of the secret chain is due to various errors in their approaches. If we are to understand the true nature of the secret chain (assuming that one exists), we must take a new approach. Part of my goal is to offer a blueprint of what such an approach might look like. In Chapter 1 I offer a critical analysis of theories that have explored the existence of the secret chain. I divide the more persuasive enlightened self-interest theories into two categories. The first category includes those theories that argue that being moral gives one the best opportunity for attaining the things that the non-moral individual desires (e.g., power, wealth, etc.). The second category includes theories that emphasize how the moral life offers benefits that are superior to and distinct from those that are accessible through the non-moral life. I argue that any enlightened self-interest theory of either of these two forms should be rejected. In Chapters 2 and 3 I consider whether a naturalistic approach might shed light on what form the secret chain takes. A working assumption in this chapter is that a prima facie case for the existence of the secret chain can be made given that evolution has selected for human beings to be altruistic. Whereas Chapter 2 focuses on the attempts that have been made to show how altruism can be selected for on the level of individual selection, Chapter 3 explores efforts that aim to demonstrate how group selection can promote the evolution of altruism. Though I believe that both of these evolutionary approaches provide valuable insights into understanding how altruism can evolve in nature, I show that each faces important difficulties that must be resolved. I begin Chapter 4 by attempting to construct a new account of how altruism might have evolved among human beings that avoids the shortcomings inherent to both traditional group selection and traditional individual selection theories. From this evolutionary model I maintain that it is possible to draw a plausible conclusion about the form that the secret chain takes among human beings. In defending my account of the secret chain, I will argue, on the one hand, that it is more plausible from a theoretical/philosophical standpoint than alternative accounts. I will draw support from evolutionary theory here. Furthermore, I believe that my position draws additional support from the fact that the picture of human motivation/behavior that underlies it reflects the psychological properties that human beings actually have. I will demonstrate this by appealing to empirical psychological studies. In Chapter 5 I lay out a blueprint of the approach that I believe could be used to successfully transform the immoral individual into a moral one. This approach is drawn from the particular conception of the secret chain that I take to be both theoretically and empirically plausible

In this paper I argue that there are strong reasons for preserving the concept of race in both medical and sociological contexts. While I argue that there are important reasons to conceive of race as picking out distinctions among populations that are both legitimate and important, the notion of race that I advocate in this paper differs in fundamental ways from traditional folk notions of race. As a result, I believe that the folk understanding of race needs either to be revised or eliminated altogether.

Evolutionary theorists have encountered difficulty in explaining how altruistic behavior can evolve. I argue that these theorists have made this task more difficult than it needs to be by focusing their efforts on explaining how nature could select for a strong type of altruism that has powerful selection forces working against it. I argue that switching the focus to a weaker type of altruism renders the project of explaining how altruism can evolve significantly less difficult. I offer a model of weak altruism that can avoid many of the difficulties that evolutionary accounts of altruism have traditionally faced.

While many philosophers agree that evolutionary theory has important implications for the study of ethics, there has been no consensus on what these implications are. I argue that we can better understand these implications by examining two related yet distinct issues in evolutionary theory: the evolution of our moral beliefs and the evolution of cooperative behavior. While the prevailing evolutionary account of morality poses a threat to moral realism, a plausible model of how altruism evolved in human beings provides the grounding for a research program that focuses on achieving some of the more practical goals shared by ethicists. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy, College of Staten Island/City University of New York, 2800 Victory Blvd., Staten Island, NY 10314; e‐mail: [email protected].

Although the concept of HAPPINESS plays a central role in ethics, contemporary philosophers have generally given little attention to providing a robust account of what this concept entails. In a recent paper, Dan Haybron sets out to accomplish two main tasks: the first is to underscore the importance of conducting philosophical inquiry into the concept of HAPPINESS; the second is to defend a particular account of happiness—which he calls the ‘emotional state conception of happiness’—while pointing out weaknesses in the primary competing accounts of happiness, including the hedonistic account. I argue against his claim that the emotional state conception of happiness is superior to the hedonistic conception of happiness. In the course of defending the hedonistic account of happiness against Haybron's attacks, I provide my own explanation for why the study of happiness is important to ethics.

In this paper I consider two kinds of approaches that philosophers have used to defend free will against psychologist Daniel Wegner’s claim that neuroscience research indicates that consciousness does not have any causal power over our actions. On the one hand, Eddy Nahmias relies heavily on empirical arguments to challenge Wegner’s conclusions. In contrast, Daniel Dennett employs a conceptual argument based on the idea that Wegner is operating under a mistaken notion of self. After ultimately rejecting the defenses of free will given by both Nahmias and Dennett, I conclude by assessing whether either of the types of approaches taken by these philosophers might eventually yield a viable defense of free will in light of the challenges posed by contemporary neuroscience

Manuel Vargas advocates a revised understanding of the terms “free will” and “moral responsibility” that eliminates the problematic libertarian commitments inherent to the commonsense understanding of these terms. I argue that in order to make a plausible case for why philosophers ought to adopt his recommendations, Vargas must explain why we ought to retain the retributivist elements that figure prominently in both commonsense views about morality and philosophical discussions concerning free will and moral responsibility. Furthermore, I argue that his revisionist account lacks the resources necessary to accommodate retributivist attitudes and practices

The importance of the notion of common knowledge in sustaining cooperative outcomes in strategic situations is well appreciated. However, the systematic analysis of the extent to which small departures from common knowledge affect equilibrium in games has only recently been attempted.We review the main themes in this literature, in particular, the notion of common p-belief. We outline both the analytical issues raised, and the potential applicability of such ideas to game theory, computer science and the philosophy of language.

People are less willing to accept bets about an event when they do not know the true probability of that event. Such uncertainty aversion has been used to explain certain economic phenomena. This paper considers how far standard private information explanations (with strategic decisions to accept bets) can go in explaining phenomena attributed to uncertainty aversion. This paper shows that if two individuals have different prior beliefs about some event, and two sided private information, then each individual’s willingness to bet will exhibit a bid ask spread property. Each individual is prepared to bet for the event, at sufficiently favorable odds, and against, at sufficiently favorable odds, but there is an intermediate range of odds where each individual is not prepared to bet either way. This is only true if signals are distributed continuously and sufficiently smoothly. It is not true, for example, in a finite signal model

Why is common priors are implicit or explicit in the vast majority of the differential information literature in economics and game theory? Why has the economic community been unwilling, in practice, to accept and actually use the idea of truly personal probabilities in much the same way that it did accept the idea of personal utility functions? After all, in, both the utilities and probabilities are derived separately for each decision maker. Why were the utilities accepted as personal, and the probabilities not?

In “The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the Question of Natural Compatibilism,” Deery, Davis, and Carey recommend that experimental philosophers employ a new methodology for determining the extent to which the folk are natural compatibilists about free will and moral responsibility. While I agree that the general methodology that the authors developed holds great promise for improving our understanding of folk attitudes about free will and moral responsibility, I am much less enthusiastic about some of the conclusions that they reached on the basis of the particular studies they ran. Key among these are that the folk harbor some compatibilist intuitions and that the findings of both Nichols and Knobe , on the one hand, and Nahmias and Murray , on the other, are undermined by their reliance upon a particular formulation of determinism in the cases they presented to their subjects