Flickers of Freedom

Building Better Books

Manuel Vargas's Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility is now available.  Here is the abstract:

Building Better Beings presents a new theory of moral responsibility. Beginning with a discussion of ordinary convictions about responsibility and free will and their implications for a philosophical theory, Manuel Vargas argues that no theory can do justice to all the things we want from a theory of free will and moral responsibility. He goes on to show how we can nevertheless justify our responsibility practices and provide a normatively and naturalistically adequate account of responsible agency, blame, and desert.

Three ideas are central to Vargas' account: the agency cultivation model, circumstantialism about powers, and revisionism about responsibility and free will. On Vargas' account, responsibility norms and practices are justified by their effects. In particular, the agency cultivation model holds that responsibility practices help mold us into creatures that respond to moral considerations. Moreover, the abilities that matter for responsibility and free will are not metaphysically prior features of agents in isolation from social contexts. Instead, they are functions of both agents and their normatively structured contexts. This is the idea of circumstantialism about the powers required for responsibility. Third, Vargas argues that an adequate theory of responsibility will be revisionist, or at odds with important strands of ordinary convictions about free will and moral responsibility. Building Better Beings provides a compelling and state-of-the-art defense of moral responsibility in the face of growing philosophical and scientific skepticism about free will and moral responsibility.

  Congrats to Manuel!

Dennett Reviews Waller

Tom Clark has posted a book review over at Naturalism.org by Dan Dennett of Bruce Waller's latest book Against Moral Responsibility. Both the book review and the subsequent exchange between Dennett and Clark are well worth the time!

Free Books (for review)

I am an associate editor at Philosophy in Review, an open access book review journal. Many people see book reviewing as a chore but it is a valuable service to the profession. More than that, it is something worth doing in its own right. I use book reviewing as a motivation to read something I should read anyway, more carefully than I might do were I not required to write 1000-1500 words on it. Plus, free books!

The list of books available for review is here. Email me if you're interested in any of the books listed, using the link you'll find if you click on my name on the bar on the left (you must have a PhD or equivalent). Of most direct relevance to readers of Flickers, among the books currently available are the following:

David Hodgson, Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will (OUP, 2012).

Michael McKenna, Conversation and Responsibility (OUP 2012)

Jeffrey Poland and George Graham (eds) Addiction and Responsibility (MIT Press, 2011).

Tamler Sommers, Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility (Princeton UP, 2011).

Richard Swinburne (ed) Free Will and Modern Science (OUP, 2011).

Nicole A. Vincent, Ibo van de Poel and Jeroen van den Hoven, Moral Responsibility: Beyond Free Will and Determinism (Springer 2011).

 

So why wouldn't you volunteer?

Origins of the Idea of Free Will

I wanted to recommend a recent book, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, by Michael Frede. The book stems for lectures Frede gave at U. C. Berkeley about fifteen years ago. Among the themes: Aristotle didn't have a notion of the will; the first appearance of the notion of a free will is among the Stoics, and Epictetus presents one of the first detailed views; early Christian views of free will, in Origen, Plotinus, and Augustine, for example, largely follow this Stoic conception; the idea of being able to choose any one of several options plays no role in most of these early notions. I learned a great deal from the book; it addresses questions that I think many of us have about the history of an idea that intererests us.

Nahmias and King in The Philosophers' Magazine

The Philosophers Magazine has two new book reviews:  The first is a review by our own Eddy Nahmias of Sam Harris's "pithy pamphlet" Free Will.  The second is a review by Matt King of our own Tamler Sommers's Relative Justice.

Clark on Waller's Semi-Compatibilism (in Reverse)

Bruce Waller recently published an interesting new book entitled Against Moral Responsibility (MIT Press).  I am only half way through the book right now myself, but I think thus far Waller has done a nice job of motivating skepticism about desert-entailing moral responsibility.  Fortunately, Tom Clark has written up a great review over at Naturalism.org.  So, check it out here.

At Last, Part II

Another eminently reasonable popular article on free will and neuroscience: A review in the Financial Times of several new books on free will, including Tamler's terrific book. 

 

 

Conversation and Responsibility

Congratulations to Michael McKenna!  His book entitled Conversation and Responsibility (Oxford University Press) is now available for mass consumption.  Don't be the last fool who hasn't read what I can only imagine will be a book that shapes the free will debate in the years ahead.

 

OUP Description:

In this book Michael McKenna advances a new theory of moral responsibility, one that builds upon the work of P.F. Strawson. As McKenna demonstrates, moral responsibility can be explained on analogy with a conversation. The relation between a morally responsible agent and those who hold her morally responsible is similar to the relation between a speaker and her audience. A responsible agent's actions are bearers of meaning -- agent meaning -- just as a speaker's utterances are bearers of speaker meaning. Agent meaning is a function of the morally quality of the will with which the agent acts. Those who hold an agent morally responsible for what she does do so by responding to her as if in a conversation. By responding with certain morally reactive attitudes, such as resentment or indignation, they thereby communicate their regard for the meaning taken to be revealed in that agent's actions. It is then open for the agent held responsible to respond to those holding her responsible by offering an apology, a justification, an excuse, or some other response, thereby extending the evolving conversational exchange. 

The conversational theory of moral responsibility that McKenna develops here accepts two features of Strawson's theory: that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal -- so that being responsible must be understood by reference to the nature of holding responsible -- and that the moral emotions are central to holding responsible. While upholding these two aspects of Strawson's theory, McKenna's theory rejects a further Strawsonian thesis, which is that holding morally responsible is more fundamental or basic than being morally responsible. On the conversational theory, the conditions for holding responsible are dependent on the nature of the agent who is responsible. So holding responsible cannot be more basic than being responsible. Nevertheless, the nature of the agent who is morally responsible is to be understood in terms of sensitivity to those who would make moral demands of her, thereby holding her responsible. Being responsible is therefore also dependent on holding responsible. Thus, neither being nor holding morally responsible is more basic than the other. They are mutually dependent.

Fischer on Deep Control

Congrats to John Martin Fischer for the recent publication of the third in his trilogy of collections with OUP which is entitled Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value (the first two were My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility and Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will). 

Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will

While I haven't had a chance to read it yet, David Hodgson has recently published what looks to be an interesting and important book with OUP entitled Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will.  

Here is the description:

In recent years, philosophical discussions of free will have focused largely on whether or not free will is compatible with determinism. In this challenging book, David Hodgson takes a fresh approach to the question of free will, contending that close consideration of human rationality and human consciousness shows that together they give us free will, in a robust and indeterministic sense. In particular, they give us the capacity to respond appositely to feature-rich gestalts of conscious experiences, in ways that are not wholly determined by laws of nature or computational rules. The author contends that this approach is consistent with what science tells us about the world; and he considers its implications for our responsibility for our own conduct, for the role of retribution in criminal punishment, and for the place of human beings in the wider scheme of things.