Defending hard incompatibilism

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 29, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 228-247

  Pereboom, Derk ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 53149088284     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4975.2005.00114.x     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Derk Pereboom, Living without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
2. I discuss the issues in this section in "Alternative Possibilities and Causal Histories," Philosophical Perspectives 14 (2000), 119-37;
3. Living without Free Will, chapter 1;
4. and "Source Incompatibilism and Alternative Possibilities," in Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, ed Michael McKenna and David Widerker (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Press 2003), 185-99)
5. Peter van Inwagen, An Essay On Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 166-80.
6. John Martin Fischer provides a lucid discussion and criticism of this strategy in The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 134-47.
7. John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will, 131-59;
8. "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility," Ethics 110 (1999), 93-139.
9. See also Alfred Mele's characterization of robustness, which I endorse, in "Soft Libertarianism and Frankfurt-Style Scenarios," Philosophical Topics 24 (1996), 123-41, at 126-27.
10. Robert Kane, Free Will and Values (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), 51 n. 25,
11. and The Significance of Free Will, 142-44, 191-2;
12. David Widerker, "Libertarianism and Frankfurt's Attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," The Philosophical Review 104 (1995), 247-61;
13. cf. Ishtayaque Haji, Moral Appraisability (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 34-35.
14. Carl Ginet develops a related objection in his "In Defense of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: Why I Don't Find Frankfurt's Arguments Convincing," Philosophical Perspectives 10 (1996), 403-17.
15. Fischer provides a clear and helpful account of these views in "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility," 111-2.
16. David Hunt, in "Moral Responsibility and Unavoidable Action," Philosophical Studies 97 (2000), 195-227, considers making the prior sign a necessary condition of the alternative decision, but there he expresses skepticism about this approach (pp. 214-16).
17. More recently, in "Moral Responsibility and Buffered Alternatives," delivered at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meetings, 2000, Hunt endorses this sort of strategy, and he develops a case similar to mine. Michael McKenna devises a related but yet significantly different example in "Robustness, Control, and the Demand for Morally Significant Alternatives," in Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, ed. Michael McKenna and David Widerker, 201-17.
18. Tax Evasion (2) differs from the version presented in "Alternative Possibilities and Causal Histories" (128) and in Living without Free Will (18-9) mainly in its necessary condition for the availability of a robust alternative possibility. The change is designed to enhance the example's psychological realism.
19. Michael Otsuka, "Incompatibilism and the Avoidability of Blame," Ethics 108 (1998), 685-701;
20. Keith D. Wyma, "Moral Responsibility and Leeway for Action," American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997), 57-70;
21. Michael McKenna, "Alternative Possibilities and the Failure of the Counterexample Strategy," Journal of Social Philosophy 28 (1997), 71-85;
22. cf. John Martin Fischer, "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility," 117-119.
23. Stewart Goetz, "Alternative Frankfurt-Style Counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2002), 131-47, at 146, note 36.
24. Carl Ginet, "Review of Living without Free Will" Journal of Ethics 6 (2002), 305-9.
25. Derk Pereboom, Living without Free Will, 28-33.
26. Michael Delia Rocca, "Frankfurt, Fischer, and Flickers," Noûs 32 (1998), 99-105, at 102-3.
27. Derk Pereboom, "Determinism Al Dente" Noûs 29 (1995), 21-45, at 22-6;
28. Alfred Mele, "A Critique of Pereboom's 'Four-Case' Argument for Incompatibilism," Analysis 65 (2005), 75-80, at 75-6, 80.
29. Alfred Mele, "A Critique of Pereboom's 'Four-Case' Argument for Incompatibilism," 78.
30. John Martin Fischer, "Responsibility and Manipulation," The Journal of Ethics 8, 145-77, at 158.
31. Hilary Bok, Freedom and Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 152.
32. Someone's taking responsibility for these springs of action has three ingredients: (a) The individual must see himself as an agent; he must see that his choices and actions are efficacious in the world. This condition includes the claim that the individual sees that if he were to choose and act differently, different upshots would occur in the world. (b) The individual must accept that he is a fair target of the reactive attitudes as a result of how he exercises this agency in certain contexts. (c) The individual's view of himself specified in the first two conditions must be based, in an appropriate way, on the evidence. Fischer and Ravizza argue that by proceeding through these steps it is the mechanisms that produce action, in particular, for which the agent takes responsibility; John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, 210-4.
33. Michael McKenna, "The Relationship between Autonomous and Morally Responsible Agency," forthcoming, in J. S. Taylor, ed., Personal Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
34. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Appendix to Part I, II 78;
35. The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and tr. Edwin Curley, Volume 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 440.
36. Robert Kane defends an event-causal libertarian account in The Significance of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
37. This sort of argument has its origins in David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 399-412, esp. 411-2.
38. For a development of this sort of argument, see Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will, 126-50.
39. Theories of agent causation have recently been advanced by Timothy O'Connor, Persons and Causes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000);
40. Randolph Clarke, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 133-217.
41. Alfred Mele, "Libertarianism, Luck, and Control," forthcoming, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.
42. Carl Ginet advances a similar argument in "Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency," Journal of Ethics 1 (1997), 85-98, at 91.
43. Ishtiyaque Haji, "Active Control, Agent Causation, and Free Action," forthcoming Philosophical Explorations.
44. Randolph Clarke, "Toward a Credible Agent-Causal Account of Free Will," Noûs 27 (1993), 191-203, at 193.
45. Randolph Clarke, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will, 181.
46. Timothy O'Connor, "Review of Living without Free Will" Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003), 308-10, at 309.
47. Randolph Clarke, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will, 181, n. 31.