• Introduction
    In Taylor W. Cyr, Andrew Law & Neal A. Tognazzini (eds.), Freedom, Responsibility, and Value: Essays in Honor of John Martin Fischer, Routledge. 2023.
  •  337
    Is moral responsibility essentially historical, or does an agent's moral responsibility for an action depend only on their psychological structure at that time? In previous work, I have argued that the two main (non‐skeptical) views on moral responsibility and agents’ histories—historicism and standard structuralism—are vulnerable to objections that are avoided by a third option, namely history‐sensitive structuralism. In this paper, I develop this view in greater detail and evaluate the view by…Read more
  •  250
    Election and Human Agency
    In Edwin Chr van Driel (ed.), T&T Clark Handbook on Election, . pp. 536-558. forthcoming.
    In Section 1, we begin by asking what, exactly, it might mean for God to “elect” people and how this relates to their agency and freedom. After getting clearer on what God is supposed to elect people to or for, we argue against the view that a person’s will is not involved in the process by which God elects her, which we identify in part as the person’s coming to have faith. But, in Section 2, we consider several reasons for thinking that a person’s free will is not involved in her coming to hav…Read more
  •  276
    Natural Compatibilists Should Be Theological Compatibilists
    In Peter Furlong & Leigh Vicens (eds.), Theological Determinism: New Perspectives, Cambridge University Press. pp. 119-132. forthcoming.
    Natural compatibilists say that moral responsibility is compatible with natural (or causal) determinism, where natural events and laws of nature determine everything that happens. Theological compatibilists say that moral responsibility is compatible with theological determinism, where God (rather than natural events/laws) determines everything that happens. Some philosophers accept natural compatibilism but reject theological compatibilism, and, in this chapter, I argue that this combination of…Read more
  •  346
    The Robustness Requirement on Alternative Possibilities
    The Journal of Ethics 26 (3): 481-499. 2022.
    In a series of recent papers, Justin Capes and Philip Swenson and Michael Robinson have proposed new versions of the flickers of freedom reply to Frankfurt-style cases. Both proposals claim, first, that what agents in FSCs are morally responsible for is performing a certain action on their own, and, second, that agents in FSCs retain robust alternative possibilities—alternatives in which the agent freely omits to perform the pertinent action on their own. In this paper, I argue that, by attendin…Read more
  •  28
    Freedom, Responsibility, and Value: Essays in Honor of John Martin Fischer (edited book)
    with Andrew Law and Neal A. Tognazzini
    Routledge. 2023.
    This volume celebrates the career of John Martin Fischer, whose work on a wide range of topics over the past forty years has been transformative and inspirational. Fischer's semicompatibilist view of free will and moral responsibility is perhaps the most widely discussed view of its kind, and his emphasis on the significance of reasons-responsiveness as the capacity that underlies moral accountability has been widely influential. Aside from free will and moral responsibility, Fischer is also wel…Read more
  •  259
    Free Will and (In)determinism in Hang the DJ
    In Amber Bowen & John Anthony Dunne (eds.), Theology and Black Mirror, Fortress Academic. pp. 55-65. 2022.
    Like most episodes of Black Mirror, “Hang the DJ” raises a host of philosophical questions. While there is much from this episode to explore, this chapter will explore something that has not yet been addressed in other work, namely the connection between “Hang the DJ” and questions about free will and determinism (or indeterminism, as the case may be). This chapter will proceed as follows: first, I will sketch some reasons for thinking that, if determinism is true, then no one has or exercises f…Read more
  •  560
    Prenatal and Posthumous Nonexistence: Lucretius on the Harmlessness of Death
    In Erin Dolgoy, Kimberly Hurd Hale & Bruce Peabody (eds.), Political Theory on Death and Dying, Routledge. 2021.
    One of the most fascinating and continually debated arguments in the philosophical literature on the badness of death comes from the work of Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, circa 99-55 BCE). This chapter will focus on Lucretius’s famous Symmetry Argument. I will begin by saying more about what exactly Epicureanism teaches about death — and why Epicureans thought it could not be bad. After that, I will provide the passage from Lucretius’s epic poem that includes his reasons for thinking that de…Read more
  •  294
    Dependence and the Freedom to Do Otherwise
    Faith and Philosophy. forthcoming.
    An increasingly popular approach to reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom is to say that, because God’s beliefs depend on what we do, we are free to do otherwise than what we actually do despite God’s infallible foreknowledge. This paper develops a new challenge for this dependence response. The challenge stems from a case of backward time travel in which an agent intuitively lacks the freedom to do otherwise because of the time-traveler’s knowledge of what the agent will do, and t…Read more
  •  816
    What Time Travel Teaches Us about Moral Responsibility
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (3). 2024.
    This paper explores what the metaphysics of time travel might teach us about moral responsibility. We take our cue from a recent paper by Yishai Cohen, who argues that if time travel is metaphysically possible, then one of the most influential theories of moral responsibility (i.e., Fischer and Ravizza’s) is false. We argue that Cohen’s argument is unsound but that Cohen’s argument can serve as a lens to bring reasons-responsive theories of moral responsibility into sharper focus, helping us to …Read more
  •  463
    The inescapability of moral luck
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (4): 302-310. 2021.
    I argue that any account attempting to do away with resultant or circumstantial moral luck is inconsistent with a natural response to the problem of constitutive moral luck. It is plausible to think that we sometimes contribute to the formation of our characters in such a way as to mitigate our constitutive moral luck at later times. But, as I argue here, whether or not we succeed in bringing about changes to our characters is itself a matter of resultant and circumstantial moral luck. I conclud…Read more
  •  398
    Taking Hobart Seriously
    Philosophia 49 (4): 1407-1426. 2020.
    Hobart’s classic 1934 paper “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It” has been widely cited as an example of an argument for the view that free will requires the truth of determinism. In this paper, I argue that this reading of Hobart’s paper is mistaken and that we should instead read Hobart as arguing that an agent exercises their free will only if the proximate causes of the agent’s action deterministically cause their action. After arguing that Hobart’s view, rightl…Read more
  •  18
    Timelessness and freedom
    Synthese 197 (10): 4439-4453. 2020.
    One way that philosophers have attempted to defend free will against the threat of fatalism and against the threat from divine beliefs has been to endorse timelessness views (about propositions and God’s beliefs, respectively). In this paper, I argue that, in order to respond to general worries about fatalism and divine beliefs, timelessness views must appeal to the notion of dependence. Once they do this, however, their distinctive position as timelessness views becomes otiose, for the appeal t…Read more
  •  438
    Many find it intuitive that having been manipulated undermines a person's free will. Some have objected to accounts of free will like Harry Frankfurt's (according to which free will depends only on an agent's psychological structure at the time of action) by arguing that it is possible for manipulated agents, who are intuitively unfree, to satisfy Frankfurt's allegedly sufficient conditions for freedom. Drawing resources from Greg Egan's "Reasons to Be Cheerful" as well as from stories of psycho…Read more
  •  546
    Although convinced by Frankfurt-style cases that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise, semicompatibilists have not wanted to accept a parallel claim about moral responsibility for omissions, and so they have accepted asymmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and omissions. In previous work, I have presented a challenge to various attempts at defending this asymmetry. My view is that semicompatibilists should give up these defenses and instead adop…Read more
  •  475
    Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Dependence: A Dialectical Intervention
    with Andrew Law
    American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2): 145-154. 2020.
    Recently, several authors have utilized the notion of dependence to respond to the traditional argument for the incompatibility of freedom and divine foreknowledge. However, proponents of this response have not always been so clear in specifying where the incompatibility argument goes wrong, which has led to some unfounded objections to the response. We remedy this dialectical confusion by clarifying both the dependence response itself and its interaction with the standard incompatibility argume…Read more
  •  1010
    Manipulation Arguments and Libertarian Accounts of Free Will
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (1): 57-73. 2020.
    In response to the increasingly popular manipulation argument against compatibilism, some have argued that libertarian accounts of free will are vulnerable to parallel manipulation arguments, and thus manipulation is not uniquely problematic for compatibilists. The main aim of this article is to give this point a more detailed development than it has previously received. Prior attempts to make this point have targeted particular libertarian accounts but cannot be generalized. By contrast, I prov…Read more
  •  635
    Atemporalism and dependence
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 87 (2): 149-164. 2020.
    It is widely thought that Atemporalism—the view that, because God is “outside” of time, he does not foreknow anything —constitutes a unique solution to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge. However, as I argue here, in order for Atemporalism to escape certain worries, the view must appeal to the dependence of God’s timeless knowledge on our actions. I then argue that, because it must appeal to such dependence, Atemporalism is crucially similar to the recent sempiternalist accounts proposed b…Read more
  •  334
    Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 70 (278): 207-209. 2020.
    Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility. By Mele Alfred R..)
  •  383
    Why Compatibilists Must Be Internalists
    The Journal of Ethics 23 (4): 473-484. 2019.
    Some compatibilists are internalists. On their view, whether an agent is morally responsible for an action depends only on her psychological structure at that time. Other compatibilists are externalists. On their view, an agent’s history can make a difference as to whether or not she is morally responsible. In response to worries about manipulation, some internalists have claimed that compatibilism requires internalism. Recently, Alfred Mele has argued that this internalist response is untenable…Read more
  •  429
    Manipulation and constitutive luck
    Philosophical Studies 177 (8): 2381-2394. 2020.
    I argue that considerations pertaining to constitutive luck undermine historicism—the view that an agent’s history can determine whether or not she is morally responsible. The main way that historicists have motivated their view is by appealing to certain cases of manipulation. I argue, however, that since agents can be morally responsible for performing some actions from characters with respect to which they are entirely constitutively lucky, and since there is no relevant difference between th…Read more
  •  345
    Timelessness and freedom
    Synthese 1-15. 2018.
    One way that philosophers have attempted to defend free will against the threat of fatalism and against the threat from divine beliefs has been to endorse timelessness views. In this paper, I argue that, in order to respond to general worries about fatalism and divine beliefs, timelessness views must appeal to the notion of dependence. Once they do this, however, their distinctive position as timelessness views becomes otiose, for the appeal to dependence, if it helps at all, would itself be suf…Read more
  •  638
    Moral Responsibility Without General Ability
    Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274): 22-40. 2019.
    It is widely thought that, to be morally responsible for some action or omission, an agent must have had, at the very least, the general ability to do otherwise. As we argue, however, there are counterexamples to the claim that moral responsibility requires the general ability to do otherwise. We present several cases in which agents lack the general ability to do otherwise and yet are intuitively morally responsible for what they do, and we argue that such cases raise problems for various kinds…Read more
  •  247
    Is Semicompatibilism Unstable?
    Disputatio 9 (45): 245-264. 2017.
    Recently, John Maier has developed a unified account of various agentive modalities. According to him, however, adopting the account provides an alternative framework for thinking about free will and moral responsibility, one that reveals an unacceptable instability in semicompatibilism. In this paper, I argue that Maier is mistaken about the implications of his account and sketch a semicompatibilist proposal that can, without countenancing any instability, accept Maier’s unified account of the …Read more
  •  471
    Moral Responsibility, Luck, and Compatibilism
    Erkenntnis 84 (1): 193-214. 2019.
    In this paper, I defend a version of compatibilism against luck-related objections. After introducing the types of luck that some take to be problematic for moral responsibility, I consider and respond to two recent attempts to show that compatibilism faces the same problem of luck that libertarianism faces—present luck. I then consider a different type of luck—constitutive luck—and provide a new solution to this problem. One upshot of the present discussion is a reason to prefer a history-sensi…Read more
  •  446
    Semicompatibilism: no ability to do otherwise required
    Philosophical Explorations 20 (3): 308-321. 2017.
    In this paper, I argue that it is open to semicompatibilists to maintain that no ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility. This is significant for two reasons. First, it undermines Christopher Evan Franklin’s recent claim that everyone thinks that an ability to do otherwise is necessary for free will and moral responsibility. Second, it reveals an important difference between John Martin Fischer’s semicompatibilism and Kadri Vihvelin’s version of classical compatibilism, whic…Read more
  •  576
    Free will, grace, and anti-Pelagianism
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 83 (2): 183-199. 2018.
    Critics of synergism often complain that the view entails Pelagianism, and so, critics think, monergism looks like the only live option. Critics of monergism often claim that the view entails that the blame for human sin ultimately traces to God. Recently, several philosophers have attempted to chart a middle path by offering soteriological accounts which are monergistic but maintain the resistibility of God’s grace. In this paper, we present a challenge to such accounts of the resistibility of …Read more
  •  425
    The Parallel Manipulation Argument
    Ethics 126 (4): 1075-1089. 2016.
    Matt King has recently argued that the manipulation argument against compatibilism does not succeed by employing a dilemma: either the argument infelicitously relies on incompatibilist sourcehood conditions, or the proponent of the argument leaves a premise of the argument undefended. This article develops a reply to King’s dilemma by showing that incompatibilists can accept its second horn. Key to King’s argument for the second horn’s being problematic is “the parallel manipulation argument.” I…Read more
  •  2355
    How Does Death Harm the Deceased?
    In John K. Davis (ed.), Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments, Routledge. pp. 29-46. 2016.
    The most popular philosophical account of how death can harm (or be bad for) the deceased is the deprivation account, according to which death is bad insofar as it deprives the deceased of goods that would have been enjoyed by that person had the person not died. In this paper, the author surveys four main challenges to the deprivation account: the No-Harm-Done Argument, the No-Subject Argument, the Timing Argument, and the Symmetry Argument. These challenges are often raised by Epicureans, who …Read more