Have PhD, will travel

This autobiography contains some of the clinical and research highlights of my career in the context of my personal odyssey and my appreciation of science as a potential check on political and economic forces in psychology. Typically, my research arose from clinical problems encountered at work and from my disinclination to rely on methods that lacked prior demonstrated validity for the type of problem and client in question. Otherwise, I feared my recommendations were no better than those based on common prejudices and biases, which I encountered throughout my work life as a dark-skinned, outspoken, non-Christian from the Bronx.     

Free will,grace, and anti-Pelagianism

Critics of synergism often complain that the view entails Pelagianism (or at least semi-Pelagianism), and so, critics think, monergism looks like the only live (orthodox) option. Critics of monergism often claim that the view entails that the blame for human sin ultimately traces to God. Recently, several philosophers (including Richard Cross, Eleonore Stump, and Kevin Timpe) have attempted to chart a middle path by offering soteriological accounts which are monergistic (and thus avoid Pelagianism) but maintain the resistibility of God’s grace (with the aim of blocking the tracing of sin to God). In this paper, we present a challenge to such accounts of the resistibility of grace, namely that they imply that human beings are praiseworthy for omitting to resist God’s grace. Even if such views escape Pelagianism as it is typically defined, they fail to avoid the worry at the heart of prominent criticisms of Pelagianism concerning the praise for a human being’s salvation. At the end of the paper, we suggest three possible solutions to this problem.     

Autonomy,decisions, and free will

Can humans make decisions? Can machines? What ethical questions arise from using robotics in the education of children? Or in elderly care? These were some of the topics of the interdisciplinary college (IK), which took place from the 25th of March to the 1st of April in Günne, next to Lake Möhne. During this one-week spring school, more than 40 well-known lecturers from around the globe gave 170 participants an insight into a cornucopia of topics surrounding “autonomy, decisions, and free will”.     

Intending,believing, and supposing at will

In this paper I consider an argument for the possibility of intending at will, and its relationship to an argument about the possibility of believing at will. I argue that although we have good reason to think we sometimes intend at will, we lack good reason to think this in the case of believing. Instead of believing at will, agents like us often suppose at will.     

Persons, punishment, and free will skepticism

The purpose of this paper is to provide a justification of punishment which can be endorsed by free will skeptics, and which can also be defended against the “using persons as mere means” objection. Free will skeptics must reject retributivism, that is, the view that punishment is just because criminals deserve to suffer based on their actions. Retributivists often claim that theirs is the only justification on which punishment is constrained by desert, and suppose that non-retributive justifications must therefore endorse treating the people punished as mere means to social ends. Retributivists typically presuppose a monolithic conception of desert: they assume that action-based desert is the only kind of desert. But there are also personhood-based desert claims, that is, desert claims which depend not on facts about our actions, but instead on the more abstract fact that we are persons. Since personhood-based desert claims do not depend on facts about our actions, they do not depend on moral responsibility, so free will skeptics can appeal to them just as well as retributivists. What people deserve based on the mere fact of their personhood is to be treated as they would rationally consent to be treated if all they had in view was the mere fact of their personhood. We can work out the implications of this view for punishment by developing a “hypothetical consent” justification in which we select principles of punishment in the Rawlsian original position, so long as we are careful not to smuggle in the retributivist assumption that it is under our control whether we end up as criminals or as law-abiding citizens once we raise the veil of ignorance.     

Weakness of will, reasonability, and compulsion

Experimental philosophers have recently begun to investigate the folk conception of weakness of will (e.g., Mele in Philos Stud 150:391–404, 2010; May and Holton in Philos Stud 157:341–360, 2012; Beebe forthcoming; Sousa and Mauro forthcoming). Their work has focused primarily on the ways in which akrasia (i.e., acting contrary to one’s better judgment), unreasonable violations of resolutions, and variations in the moral valence of actions modulate folk attributions of weakness of will. A key finding that has emerged from this research is that—contrary to the predominant view in the history of philosophy—ordinary participants do not think of weakness of will solely in terms of akrasia but see resolution violations and moral evaluations as playing equally important roles. The present article extends this line of research by reporting the results of four experiments that investigate (i) the interplay between hastily revising one’s resolutions and the degree of reasonableness of the actions one had resolved to undertake, (ii) whether ordinary participants are willing to ascribe weakness of will to agents whose actions stem from compulsion or addiction, and (iii) the respects in which akratic action, resolution violations, and the seriousness of an addiction impact attributions of weakness of will to agents acting in accord with their addictions.     

The complex tapestry of free will: striving will,indeterminism and volitional streams

The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian view of free will I have developed in many works over the past four decades. The issues discussed all have a bearing on the central question of how one might make sense of a traditional free will requiring indeterminism in the light of modern science. This task involves, among other things, avoiding all traditional libertarian appeals to unusual forms of agency or causation (uncaused causes, noumenal selves, non-event agent causes, etc.) that cannot be accounted for by ordinary modes of explanation familiar to the natural and human sciences. Doing this, I argue, requires piecing together a “complex tapestry” of ideas and arguments that involve rethinking many traditional assumptions about free will. The paper also argues that one cannot get to the heart of historical debates about free will without distinguishing different kinds of freedom, different senses of will, and different notions of control, among other distinctions. I especially focus here on different notions of freedom and control that are necessary to make sense of free will.

     

Randomness, game theory and free will

Libertarians claim that human behaviour is undetermined and cannot be predicted from knowledge of past history even in principle since it is based on the random movements of quantum mechanics. Determinists on the other hand deny thatmacroscopic phenomena can be activated bysub-microscopic events, and assert that if human action is unpredictable in the way claimed by libertarians, it must be aimless and irrational. This is not true of some types of random behaviour described in this paper. Random behaviour may make one unpredictable to opponents and may therefore be rational. Similarly, playing a game with a mixed strategy may have an unpredictable outcome in every single play, but the strategy is rational, in that it is meant to maximize the expected value of an objective, be it private or social. As to whether the outcome of such behaviour is genuinely unpredictable as in quantum mechanics, or predictable by a hypothetical outside observer knowing all natural laws, it is argued that it makes no difference in practice, as long as it is not humanly predictable. Thus we have a new version of libertarianism which is compatible with determinism.     

Libet-style experiments,neuroscience, and libertarian free will

People have disagreed on the significance of Libet-style experiments for discussions about free will. In what specifically concerns free will in a libertarian sense, some argue that Libet-style experiments pose a threat to its existence by providing support to the claim that decisions are determined by unconscious brain events. Others disagree by claiming that determinism, in a sense that conflicts with libertarian free will, cannot be established by sciences other than fundamental physics. This paper rejects both positions. First, it is argued that neuroscience and psychology could in principle provide support for milder deterministic claims that would also conflict with libertarian free will. Second, it is argued that Libet-style experiments—due to some of their peculiar features, ones that need not be shared by neuroscience as a whole—currently do not (but possibly could) support such less demanding deterministic claims. The general result is that neuroscience and psychology could in principle undermine libertarian free will, but that Libet-style experiments have not done that so far.     

Soritic thinking, vagueness, and weakness of will

Soritic thinking based on reasoning that is involved in the sorites paradox plays a crucial role in some forms of weakness of will. Such soritic reasoning leads to failures of behavior, but cannot be shown to be irrational by standard means. Thus weakness of will appears to be rational, whereas strength of will is irrational when viewed soritically. The puzzle is how to undermine weakness of will and expose it as irrational. Even though such weakness of will is not moral, moral-type reasoning involving the principle of equality can be brought to bear. Weakness of will can also be seen to be analogous to free-rider problems and the prisoner's dilemma.     

Kane,Luck, and the significance of free will

Abstract

This paper raises a pair of objections to the novel libertarian position advanced in Robert Kane's recent book, The Significance of Free Will.The first objection's target is a central element in Kane's intriguing response to what he calls the “Intelligibility” and “Existence” questions about free will. It is argued that this response is undermined by considerations of luck.The second objection is directed at a portion of Kane's answer to what he calls “The Significance Question” about free will: “Why do we, or should we, want to possess a free will that is incompatible with determinism? Is it a kind of freedom ‘worth wanting’... and, if so, why?” A desire for “objective worth” has a featured role in his answer. However, a compatibilist can have that desire.