Recent Work on Agency and Responsibility

I just noticed that John Martin Fischer has a new piece in the latest volume of The Philosophical Review entitled, "The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories."  So, readers of this blog should definitely check it out.

I also thought I should take this opportunity to piece together a more thorough list of recent work on free will that has been published between 2009 and 2010.  And it dawned on me that the simplest strategy would be to simply use the Phil Papers data base.   So, below the told, you will find two extensive (but admittedly incomplete) lists of free will-related articles for 2009 and 2010.  If you notice any glaring omissions--and I am sure there are several--just post a reference in the discussion thread.  As always, happy reading!

2009

1. Randolph Clarke (2009). Dispositions, Abilities to Act, and Free Will: The New Dispositionalism. Mind 118 (470):323-351.
   

   This paper examines recent attempts to revive a classic compatibilist position on free will, according to which having an ability to perform a certain action is having a certain disposition. Since having unmanifested dispositions is compatible with determinism, having unexercised abilities to act, it is held, is likewise compatible. Here it is argued that although there is a kind of capacity to act possession of which is a matter of having a disposition, the new dispositionalism leaves unresolved the main points (...)

2. Shaun Nichols (2009). How Can Psychology Contribute to the Free Will Debate? In J. Baer, J. Kaufman & R. Baumeister (eds.), Psychology and Free Will. Oxford University Press.

   Are people free and morally responsible? Or are their actions determined, i.e. inevitable outcomes of the past conditions and the laws of nature? These seem fairly straightforward questions, but it is important to distinguish 3 different dimensions of the free will debate: a descriptive project, a substantive project, and a prescriptive project. In this chapter, I’ll consider how psychology can contribute to each project in turn. First, I should say a bit more about the projects.

3. John Martin Fischer (2009). Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will. Oxford University Press.

   Introduction: "meaning in life and death : our stories" -- John Martin Fischer and Anthony B rueckner, "Why is death bad?", Philosophical studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (September 1986) -- "Death, badness, and the impossibility of experience," Journal of ethics -- John Martin Fischer and Daniel Speak, "Death and the psychological conception of personal identity," Midwest studies in philosophy, vol. 24 -- "Earlier birth and later death : symmetry through thick and thin," Richard Feldman, Kris McDaniel, Jason R. Raibley, eds., (...)

4. Simon Shengjian Xie (2009). What is Kant: A Compatibilist or an Incompatibilist? A New Interpretation of Kant's Solution to the Free Will Problem. Kant-Studien 100 (1).

   There are generally two controversial issues over Kant's solution to the free will problem. One is over whether he is a compatibilist or an incompatibilist and the other is over whether his solution is a success. In this paper, I will argue, regarding the first controversy, that “compatibilist” and “incompatibilist” are not the right terms to describe Kant for his unique views on freedom and determinism; but that of the two, incompatibilist is the more accurate description. Regarding the second controversy, (...)

5. Chris Kaposy (2009). Will Neuroscientific Discoveries About Free Will and Selfhood Change Our Ethical Practices? Neuroethics 2 (1).

   Over the past few years, a number of authors in the new field of neuroethics have claimed that there is an ethical challenge presented by the likelihood that the findings of neuroscience will undermine many common assumptions about human agency and selfhood. These authors claim that neuroscience shows that human agents have no free will, and that our sense of being a “self” is an illusory construction of our brains. Furthermore, some commentators predict that our ethical practices of assigning moral (...)...

6. Neil Levy & Michael McKenna (2009). Recent Work on Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Philosophy Compass 4 (1):96-133.

   In this article we survey six recent developments in the philosophical literature on free will and moral responsibility: (1) Harry Frankfurt's argument that moral responsibility does not require the freedom to do otherwise; (2) the heightened focus upon the source of free actions; (3) the debate over whether moral responsibility is an essentially historical concept; (4) recent compatibilist attempts to resurrect the thesis that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise; (5) the role of the control condition in free (...)

7. Richard Holton (2009). Determinism, Self-Efficacy, and the Phenomenology of Free Will. Inquiry 52 (4):412 – 428.

   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 that one aspect of (...)

8. Thomas Nadelhoffer & Tatyana Matveeva (2009). Positive Illusions, Perceived Control and the Free Will Debate. Mind and Language 24 (5):495-522.

   It is a common assumption among both philosophers and psychologists that having accurate beliefs about ourselves and the world around us is always the epistemic gold standard. However, there is gathering data from social psychology that suggest that illusions are quite prevalent in our everyday thinking and that some of these illusions may even be conducive to our overall well being. In this paper, we explore the relevance of these so-called 'positive illusions' to the free will debate. More specifically, we (...)

9. Manuel Vargas (2009). Revisionism About Free Will: A Statement & Defense. Philosophical Studies 144 (1).

   This article summarizes and extends the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to libertarianism based on the moral costs of its current epistemic status, (3) an objection to the distinctiveness (...)

10. Alfred R. Mele (2009). Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will. Oxford University Press.

    Each of the following claims has been defended in the scientific literature on free will and consciousness: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100 millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all it can do is veto conscious decisions, intentions, or urges; intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. In Effective Intentions Alfred Mele shows that the evidence offered (...)

11. Kenneth Einar Himma (2009). The Free-Will Defence: Evil and the Moral Value of Free Will. Religious Studies 45 (4):395-415.
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13. Benjamin Vilhauer (2009). Free Will Skepticism and Personhood as a Desert Base. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (3):pp. 489-511.

14. Roberto Loss (2009). Free Will and the Necessity of the Present. Analysis 69 (1).

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16. Michael McKenna (2009). Compatibilism & Desert: Critical Comments on Four Views on Free Will. Philosophical Studies 144 (1).

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    Richard Holton (2009). Willing, Wanting, Waiting. Oxford University Press.

    Richard Holton provides a unified account of intention, choice, weakness of will, strength of will, temptation, addiction, and freedom of the will.

18. Edward J. Romar (2009). Noble Markets: The Noble/Slave Ethic in Hayek's Free Market Capitalism. Journal of Business Ethics 85 (1).

    Friedrich A. von Hayek influenced many areas of inquiry including economics, psychology and political theory. This article will offer one possible interpretation of the ethical foundation of Hayek’s political and social contributions to libertarianism and free market capitalism by analyzing several of his important non-economic publications, primarily The Road to Serfdom, The Fatal Conceit, The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty. While Hayek did not offer a particular ethical foundation for free market capitalism, he argued consistently that free (...)

19. Adam Feltz, Edward T. Cokely & Thomas Nadelhoffer (2009). Natural Compatibilism Versus Natural Incompatibilism: Back to the Drawing Board. Mind and Language 24 (1):1-23.

    In the free will literature, some compatibilists and some incompatibilists claim that their views best capture ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. One goal of researchers working in the field of experimental philosophy has been to probe ordinary intuitions in a controlled and systematic way to help resolve these kinds of intuitional stalemates. We contribute to this debate by presenting new data about folk intuitions concerning freedom and responsibility that correct for some of the shortcomings of previous studies. (...)

20. Derk Pereboom (2009). Hard Incompatibilism and its Rivals. Philosophical Studies 144 (1).

    In this article I develop several responses to my co-authors of Four Views on Free Will. In reply to Manuel Vargas, I suggest a way to clarify his claim that our concepts of free will and moral responsibility should be revised, and I question whether he really proposes to revise the notion of basic desert at stake in the debate. In response to Robert Kane, I examine the role the rejection of Frankfurt-style arguments has in his position, and whether his (...)

21. Paul Sheldon Davies (2009). Subjects of the World: Darwin's Rhetoric and the Study of Agency in Nature. The University of Chicago Press.

    Part one: A progressive orientation: naturalism as exploration -- The vividness of truth: Darwin's romantic rhetoric and the evolutionary framework -- Our most vexing problem: conceptual conservatism and conceptual imperialism -- Naturalism as exploration: the elements of reform -- Part two: The allure of agency: "purpose" in biology -- The real heart of Darwinian evolutionary biology -- A formative power of a self-propagating kind: natural purposes and the concept location project -- A persistent mode of understanding: the psychological power of(...)

22. Mark Balaguer (2009). Why There Are No Good Arguments for Any Interesting Version of Determinism. Synthese 168 (1).

    This paper considers the empirical evidence that we currently have for various kinds of determinism that might be relevant to the thesis that human beings possess libertarian free will. Libertarianism requires a very strong version of indeterminism, so it can be refuted not just by universal determinism, but by some much weaker theses as well. However, it is argued that at present, we have no good reason to believe even these weak deterministic views and, hence, no good reason—at least from (...)

23. Gunnar Björnsson & Karl Persson (2009). Judgments of Moral Responsibility – a Unified Account. In [2009] Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 35th Annual Meeting (Bloomington, IN; June 12-14).

24. Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in deterministic scenarios depends on whether the deterministic laws are couched in neurological or psychological terms (Nahmias et. al. 2007), on whether actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression they seem to represent (Nichols & Knobe 2007). Finally, people are more inclined to hold an agent (...)

25. E. J. Coffman (2009). Does Luck Exclude Control? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3):499-504.

    Many philosophers hold that luck excludes control-more precisely, that an event is lucky for you only if that event lies beyond your control. Call this the Lack of Control Requirement (LCR) on luck. Jennifer Lackey [2008] has recently argued that there is no such requirement on luck. Should such an argument succeed, it would (among other things) disable a main objection to the "libertarian" position in the free will debate. After clarifying the LCR, I defend it against both Lackey's argument (...)

26. Kent C. Berridge (2009). Wanting and Liking: Observations From the Neuroscience and Psychology Laboratory. Inquiry 52 (4):378 – 398.

    Different brain mechanisms seem to mediate wanting and liking for the same reward. This may have implications for the modular nature of mental processes, and for understanding addictions, compulsions, free will and other aspects of desire. A few wanting and liking phenomena are presented here, together with discussion of some of these implications.

27. Matthew C. Braddock (2009). Evolutionary Psychology's Moral Implications. Biology and Philosophy 24 (4):531-540.
    

28. In this paper, I critically summarize John Cartwrtight’s Evolution and Human Behavior and evaluate what he says about certain moral implications of Darwinian views of human behavior. He takes a Darwinism-doesn’t-rock-the-boat approach and argues that Darwinism, even if it is allied with evolutionary psychology, does not give us reason to be worried about the alterability of our behavior, nor does it give us reason to think that we may have to change our ordinary practices and views concerning free-will and moral (...)

29. Daniel Silvermintz (2009). Philosophy in Fragments: Cultivating Philosophic Thinking with the Presocratics. Metaphilosophy 40 (5):689-701.

    Abstract: This article presents a strategy for introducing Presocratic thought to students in a manner that is both engaging and relevant. The first section addresses students' reactions to the claim that the Presocratics were the first philosophers. The second section considers how the fragmentary state of Presocratic thought does not hinder its comprehension. The third section proposes a classroom exercise for testing the scientific merits of each of the Presocratic theories. The final section proposes the use of a mock trial (...)

30. Bennett W. Helm (2009). The Import of Human Action. In Jesus Aguilar & Andrei Buckareff (eds.), Philosophy of Action. Automatic Press/Vip.

    My central philosophical concern for many years has been with what it is to be a person. Of course, we persons are agents, indeed agents of a special sort, so understanding personhood has of course led me to think about that special sort of agency. Yet my background in the philosophy of mind leads me to think that any account of this special sort of agency must appeal to psychological capacities that are themselves grounded in an account of the relation (...)

31. Maartje Schermer (2009). The Mind and the Machine. On the Conceptual and Moral Implications of Brain-Machine Interaction. Nanoethics 3 (3).

    Brain-machine interfaces are a growing field of research and application. The increasing possibilities to connect the human brain to electronic devices and computer software can be put to use in medicine, the military, and entertainment. Concrete technologies include cochlear implants, Deep Brain Stimulation, neurofeedback and neuroprosthesis. The expectations for the near and further future are high, though it is difficult to separate hope from hype. The focus in this paper is on the effects that these new technologies may have on (...)

32. Neil Levy (2009). Neuroethics: Ethics and the Sciences of the Mind. Philosophy Compass 4 (1):69-81.

    Neuroethics is a rapidly growing subfield, straddling applied ethics, moral psychology and philosophy of mind. It has clear affinities to bioethics, inasmuch as both are responses to new developments in science and technology, but its scope is far broader and more ambitious because neuroethics is as much concerned with how the sciences of the mind illuminate traditional philosophical questions as it is with questions concerning the permissibility of using technologies stemming from these sciences. In this article, I sketch the two (...)

33. Ronnie Hermens, Quantum Mechanics: From Realism to Intuitionism.

    The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been a problem since its founding days. A large contribution to the discussion of possible interpretations of quantum mechanics is given by the so-called impossibility proofs for hidden variable models; models that allow a realist interpretation. In this thesis some of these proofs are discussed, like von Neumann’s Theorem, the Kochen-Specker Theorem and the Bell-inequalities. Some more recent developments are also investigated, like Meyer’s nullification of the Kochen-Specker Theorem, the MKC-models and Conway and Kochen’s (...)

1. Eric Funkhouser (2009). Frankfurt Cases and Overdetermination. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (3):pp. 341-369.

   In traditional Frankfurt cases some conditions that make an outcome unavoidable fail to bring about that outcome. These are cases of causal preemption. I defend this interpretation of traditional Frankfurt cases, and its application to free will, against a dilemma raised by various libertarians. But I go on to argue that Frankfurt cases involving gen- uine (symmetric) causal overdetermination are even more effective at achieving the compatibilist’s purposes. Such cases avoid the “flicker of freedom” debate and better display the central (...)

2. Tamler Sommers (2009). A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain. McSweeney's Press.

   A collection of long, detailed interviews with philosophers and scientists who work on issues in ethics and moral psychology. The researchers interviewed include Galen Strawson, Philiip Zimbardo, Stephen Stich, Jonathan Haidt, Frans De Waal, Michael Ruse, Joshua Greene, Liane Young, Joe Henrich, and William Ian Miller.

3. Jeanne L. Schroeder & David Gray Carlson (2009). Psychoanalysis as the Jurisprudence of Freedom. In Francis J. Mootz & William S. Boyd (eds.), On Philosophy in American Law. Cambridge University Press.

   What is the future of legal philosophy? No doubt it has many. But we are betting that jurisprudence will gravitate towards freedom. Freedom, the attribute of the human subject, has largely been absent from legal philosophy. This is a lack that psychoanalytic jurisprudence aims to correct. In this essay, drafted as chapter in "On Philosophy in American Law" (Francis Jay Mootz III, ed.) to be published by the Cambridge University Press, we set forth what we think are the primary differences (...)

4. Trenton Merricks (2009). Truth and Freedom. Philosophical Review 118 (1).

   is just a few moments from now. And suppose that the proposition that Jones sits at t was true a thousand years ago. Does the thousand-years-ago truth of that proposition imply that Jones's upcoming sitting at t will not be free? This article argues that it does not. It also argues that Jones even now has a choice about the thousand-years-ago truth of that Jones sits at t . Those arguments do not require the complex machinery of Ockhamism, with its (...)

   2010:

   1. Mark Balaguer (2010). Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem. Mit Press.  In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, Mark Balaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open ...

      
      

      Roy F. Baumeister, Alfred R. Mele & Kathleen D. Vohs (2010). Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? University Press.

      This volume is aimed at readers who wish to move beyond debates about the existence of free will and the efficacy of consciousness and closer to appreciating ...

      
      

      Justin A. Capes (2010). Can 'Downward Causation' Save Free Will? Philosophia 38 (1).

      Recently, Trenton Merricks has defended a libertarian view of human freedom. He claims that human persons have downward causal control of their constituent parts, and that downward causal control of this sort is sufficient for free will. In this paper I examine Merricks’s defense of free will, and argue that it is unsuccessful. I show that having downward causal control is not sufficient for for free will. In an Appendix I also argue that Merricks’s defense of free will, together with (...

      Tamler Sommers (2010). Experimental Philosophy and Free Will. Philosophy Compass 5 (2):199-212.

      This paper develops a sympathetic critique of recent experimental work on free will and moral responsibility. Section 1 offers a brief defense of the relevance of experimental philosophy to the free will debate. Section 2 reviews a series of articles in the experimental literature that probe intuitions about the "compatibility question"—whether we can be free and morally responsible if determinism is true. Section 3 argues that these studies have produced valuable insights on the factors that influence our judgments on the (...)

5. Alfred R. Mele (2010). Testing Free Will. Neuroethics 3 (2).
6. This article describes three experiments that would advance our understanding of the import of data already generated by scientific work on free will and related issues. All three can be conducted with existing technology. The first concerns how reliable a predictor of behavior a certain segment of type I and type II RPs is. The second focuses on the timing of conscious experiences in Libet-style studies. The third concerns the effectiveness of conscious implementation intentions. The discussion of first two experiments (...)
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8. Maureen Sie & Arno Wouters (2010). The Bcn Challenge to Compatibilist Free Will and Personal Responsibility. Neuroethics 3 (2).
9. Many philosophers ignore developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences that purport to challenge our ideas of free will and responsibility. The reason for this is that the challenge is often framed as a denial of the idea that we are able to act differently than we do. However, most philosophers think that the ability to do otherwise is irrelevant to responsibility and free will. Rather it is our ability to act for reasons that is crucial. We argue that the (...)

11. Andrew E. Monroe & Bertram F. Malle (2010). From Uncaused Will to Conscious Choice: The Need to Study, Not Speculate About People’s Folk Concept of Free Will. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):211-224.

    People’s concept of free will is often assumed to be incompatible with the deterministic, scientific model of the universe. Indeed, many scholars treat the folk concept of free will as assuming a special form of nondeterministic causation, possibly the notion of uncaused causes. However, little work to date has directly probed individuals’ beliefs about what it means to have free will. The present studies sought to reconstruct this folk concept of free will by asking people to define the concept (Study (...)

12. Richard Holton (2010). Disentangling the Will. In Al Mele, Kathleen Vohs & Roy Baumeister (eds.), Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? (New York: OUP, 2010). OUP.

    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.

    
    

    Hagop Sarkissian, Amita Chatterjee, Joshua Knobe, Felipe De Brigard & Shaun Nichols (2010). Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal? Mind and Language 25 (3):346-358.

    Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of (...)

13. Bernard Berofsky (2010). Free Will and the Mind–Body Problem. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (1):1 – 19.
14. Compatibilists regard subsumption under certain sorts of deterministic psychological laws as sufficient for free will. As bona fide laws, their existence poses problems for the thesis of the unalterability of laws, a cornerstone of the Consequence Argument against compatibilism. The thesis is challenged, although a final judgment must wait upon resolution of controversies about the nature of laws. Another premise of the Consequence Argument affirms the supervenience of mental states on physical states, a doctrine whose truth would not undermine the (...)
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16. Kenneth Einar Himma (2010). Plantinga's Version of the Free-Will Argument: The Good and Evil That Free Beings Do. Religious Studies 46 (1):21-39.
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18. Asaf Federman (2010). What Kind of Free Will Did the Buddha Teach? Philosophy East and West 60 (1):pp. 1-19.
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20. Colin Klein (2010). Philosophical Issues in Neuroimaging. Philosophy Compass 5 (2):186-198.
21. Functional neuroimaging (NI) technologies like Positron Emission Tomography and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) have revolutionized neuroscience, and provide crucial tools to link cognitive psychology and traditional neuroscientific models. A growing discipline of 'neurophilosophy' brings fMRI evidence to bear on traditional philosophical issues such as weakness of will, moral psychology, rational choice, social interaction, free will, and consciousness. NI has also attracted critical attention from psychologists and from philosophers of science. I review debates over the evidential status of fMRI, including (...)

23. Jeremy Byrd (2010). The Necessity of Tomorrow's Sea Battle. Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (2):160-176.

    In chapter 9 of De Interpretatione , Aristotle offers a defense of free will against the threat of fatalism. According to the traditional interpretation, Aristotle concedes the validity of the fatalist's arguments and then proceeds to reject the Principle of Bivalence in order to avoid the fatalist's conclusion. Assuming that the traditional interpretation is right on this point, it remains to be seen why Aristotle felt compelled to reject such an intuitive semantic principle rather than challenge the fatalist's inference from (...)

    Mary I. Bockover (2010). Confucianism and Ethics in the Western Philosophical Tradition II: A Comparative Analysis of Personhood. Philosophy Compass 5 (4):317-325.

24. This Philosophy Compass article continues the comparison between Confucian and mainstream Western views of personhood and their connection with ethics begun in Confucianism and Ethics in the Western Philosophical Tradition I: Fundamental Concepts , by focusing on the Western self conceived as an independent agent with moral and political rights. More specifically, the present article briefly accounts for how the more strictly and explicitly individualistic notion of self dominating Western philosophy has developed, leading up to a recent debate in modern (...)

Comments

[R. Clarke]

There's a symposium on John Fischer's MY WAY, with comments from Gideon Yaffe, Calvin Normore, and myself, in PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH 80 (2010), 229-78.

[Andrei A. Buckareff]

I'm just curious, but since you have placed the Free Will Bibliography at Phil Papers under the web pages links, why not a link to Philosophy of Action Bibliography of which the Free Will Bibliography is a proper part?

[Andrei A. Buckareff]

Lest I seem like the curmudgeonly critic whose posts display a dismissive attitude towards anything but action theory, I do want to laud Thomas's efforts. It is nice to have a digest of what's new in the journals on free will. Thanks for doing this, Thomas.

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

Andrei,

No, I merely mistook you from a curmudgeonly action theory loving commentator not a critic! That being said, I took your advice concerning the Phil. Action link. To be honest, I have no idea why I didn't include it in the first place. So, thanks for the suggestion.