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Living Without Free Will
Argues that morality, meaning and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible for our actions.
Free Will
A unique anthology featuring contributions to the dispute over free will from Aristotle to the twenty-first century, Derk Pereboom's volume presents the most thoughtful positions taken in this crucial debate and discusses their consequences for free will's traditional corollary, moral responsibility. The Second Edition retains the organizational structure that made its predecessor the leading anthology of its kind, while adding major new selections by such philosophers as Spinoza, Reid, John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Galen Strawson, and Timothy O'Connor. Hackett Readings in Philosophy is a versatile series of compact anthologies, each devoted to a topic of traditional interest. Selections include classical, modern, and contemporary writings chosen for their elegance of exposition and success at stimulating thought and discussion.
Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life
Derk Pereboom articulates and defends an original conception of moral responsibility. He argues that if determinism were true we would not be morally responsible in the key basic-desert sense at issue in the free will debate, but that we would also lack this kind of moral responsibility if indeterminism were true and the causes of our actions were exclusively states or events. It is possible that if we were undetermined agent causes--if we as substances had the power to cause decisions without being causally determined to cause them--we would have this kind of free will. But although our being undetermined agent causes has not been ruled out as a coherent possibility, it's not credible given...
Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism
In this book, Derk Pereboom explores how physicalism might best be formulated and defended against the best anti-physicalist arguments. Two responses to the knowledge and conceivability arguments are set out and developed. The first exploits the open possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental properties as they are in themselves; specifically, that introspection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, which these properties might actually lack. The second response draws on the proposal that currently unknown fundamental intrinsic properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and would also yield an account of consciousness. While there are non-physicalist versions of this position, some are amenable to physicalism. The book's third theme is a defense of a nonreductive account of physicalism. The type of nonreductivism endorsed departs from others in that it rejects all token identity claims for psychological and microphysical entities. The deepest relation between the mental and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity.
Free Will
As an advanced introduction to the challenging topic of free will, this book is designed for upper-level undergraduates interested in a comprehensive first-stop into the field’s issues and debates. It is written by two of the leading participants in those debates—a compatibilist on the issue of free will and determinism (Michael McKenna) and an incompatibilist (Derk Pereboom). These two authors achieve an admirable objectivity and clarity while still illuminating the field’s complexity and key advances. Each chapter is structured to work as one week’s primary reading in a course on free will, while more advanced courses can dip into the annotated further readings, suggested at the end of each chapter. A comprehensive bibliography as well as detailed subject and author indexes are included at the back of the book.
Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society
'Free will skepticism' refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings lack the control in action - i.e. the free will - required for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. Critics fear that adopting this view would have harmful consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and laws. Optimistic free will skeptics, on the other hand, respond by arguing that life without free will and so-called basic desert moral responsibility would not be harmful in these ways, and might even be beneficial. This collection addresses the practical implications of free will skepticism for law and society. It contains eleven original essays that provide alternatives to retributive punishment, explore what (if any) changes are needed for the criminal justice system, and ask whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the real-world implications of free will skepticism.
Four Views on Free Will
Focusing on the concepts and interactions of free will, moralresponsibility, and determinism, this text represents the mostup-to-date account of the four major positions in the free willdebate. Four serious and well-known philosophers explore the opposingviewpoints of libertarianism, compatibilism, hard incompatibilism,and revisionism The first half of the book contains each philosopher’sexplanation of his particular view; the second half allows them todirectly respond to each other’s arguments, in a lively andengaging conversation Offers the reader a one of a kind, interactive discussion Forms part of the acclaimed Great Debates in Philosophyseries
Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions
Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions provides an account of how we might effectively address wrongdoing given challenges to the legitimacy of anger and retribution that arise from ethical considerations and from concerns about free will. The issue is introduced in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 asks how we might conceive of blame without retribution, and proposes an account of blame as moral protest, whose function is to secure forward-looking goals such as the moral reform of the wrongdoer and reconciliation in relationships. Chapter 3 considers whether it's possible to justify effectively dealing those who pose dangerous threats if they do not deserve to be harmed, and contends that wrongfully posing a...
Moral Responsibility Reconsidered
This Element examines the concept of moral responsibility as it is used in contemporary philosophical debates and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with it, including moral praise/blame, retributive punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. After identifying and discussing several different varieties of responsibility-including causal responsibility, take-charge responsibility, role responsibility, liability responsibility, and the kinds of responsibility associated with attributability, answerability, and accountability-it distinguishes between basic and non-basic desert conceptions of moral responsibility and considers a number of skeptical arguments against each. It then outlines an alternative forward-looking account of moral responsibility grounded in non-desert-invoking desiderata such as protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. It concludes by addressing concerns about the practical implications of skepticism about desert-based moral responsibility and explains how optimistic skeptics can preserve most of what we care about when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, morality, and meaning in life.
Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility
Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility investigates the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications. Skepticism about free will and moral responsibility has been on the rise in recent years. In fact, a significant number of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists now either doubt or outright deny the existence of free will and/or moral responsibility—and the list of prominent skeptics appears to grow by the day. Given the profound importance that the concepts of free will and moral responsibility hold in our lives—in understanding ourselves, society, and the law—it is important that we explore what is behind this new wave of skepticism. It is also important that we explore the potential consequences of skepticism for ourselves and society. Edited by Gregg D. Caruso, this collection of new essays brings together an internationally recognized line-up of contributors, most of whom hold skeptical positions of some sort, to display and explore the leading arguments for free will skepticism and to debate their implications.
