Moral Responsibility, Determinism, and the Ability to do Otherwise

In his classic paper, The Principle of Alternate Possibilities, Harry Frankfurt presented counterexamples to the principle named in his title: A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. He went on to argue that the falsity of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) implied that the debate between the compatibilists and the incompatibilists (as regards determinism and the ability to do otherwise) did not have the significance that both parties had attributed to it -- since moral responsibility could exist even if no one was able to do otherwise. I have argued that even if PAP is false, there are other principles that imply that moral responsibility entails the ability to do otherwise, and that these principles are immune to Frankfurt-style counterexamples. Frankfurt has attempted to show that my arguments for this conclusion fail. This paper is a rejoinder to that reply; I argue that he has failed to show this.     

Why Jesus?

Jesus plays potentially a uniquely important role in relation to the world's greatest needs. To respond to the global crisis, we need historical consciousness. The source of historical consciousness is the prophetic tradition. Through Jesus the prophetic tradition became widely available and important. However, this consciousness has been responsible for great evil as well as great good, often bound up with we/they thinking and the use of violence. Jesus’ teaching of love of the enemy in principle overcomes this tendency and points to way forward.     

MIRACLES AND TWO ACCOUNTS OF SCIENTIFIC LAWS

Since early modernity, it has often been assumed that miracles are incompatible with the existence of the natural laws utilized in the sciences. This paper argues that this assumption is largely an artifact of empiricist accounts of laws that should be rejected for reasons internal to philosophy of science, and that no such incompatibility arises on the most important alternative interpretations, which treat laws as expressions of forces, dispositions, or causal powers.     

Downward causation and supervenience: the non-reductionist’s extra argument for incompatibilism

Agent-causal theories of free will, which rely on a non-reductionist account of the agent, have traditionally been associated with libertarianism. However, some authors have recently argued in favor of compatibilist agent-causal accounts. In this essay, I will show that such accounts cannot avoid serious problems of implausibility or incoherence. A careful analysis of the implications of non-reductionist views of the agent (event-causal or agent-causal as they may be) reveals that such views necessarily imply either the denial of the principle of supervenience or the assumption of bottom-level indeterminism. I will contend that the former alternative comes at a high cost, while the latter is quite plausible. Therefore, providing that they accept the condition of the truth of indeterminism, non-reductionist accounts of the agent do not have to contradict our scientific worldview. Interestingly, while they should be taken seriously by anyone who is concerned with the passivity of the agent’s role under a reductionist scenario, non-reductivist accounts end up contributing an extra incompatibilist argument to the free will debate.     

Production on hold: delaying vocal production enhances the production effect in free recall

The Production Effect (PE) represents superior memory for produced (read aloud) relative to non-produced (silently read) items. Another method of improving memory is taking a test on the study material – the Testing Effect. We evaluated the combined influence of both effects on free recall memory, using delayed vocal production, in which study words were vocally produced only after their disappearance. Such procedure involves an initial instant test since participants had to vocally retrieve the words (rather than read them aloud). In five experiments, participants were presented with study words that they were instructed to learn by no-production (reading silently), immediate production (reading aloud), delayed reading aloud, or delayed vocal production (instant retrieval). The results showed superior recall for delayed production over all other conditions. We suggest that the source of this superiority is the desirable difficulty induced by the addition of the initial test (retrieval effort) to the vocal production. The novel delayed production condition forms a superior mnemonic.     

Stability of pigeon body weight under free-feeding conditions

Increases in regulatory oversight of animal research require verification of effects of standard practices. There are no formal guidelines for establishing free-feeding weights in adult pigeons. In the present study, pigeons were obtained from a commercial supplier, weighed upon arrival, and then held in quarantine for 7 days with free access to food. Subsequently, still with continuous access to food, they were weighed daily for 30 days. No significant changes in weights occurred over the 30-day period for male pigeons, indicating that seven days is sufficient for establishing a baseline body weight. A secondary finding of higher day-to-day variability in the weights of female pigeons may serve as a method of sexing pigeons.     

Semantic false memories in the form of derived relational intrusions following training

Contemporary behavior analytic research is making headway in characterizing memory phenomena that typically have been characterized by cognitive models, and the current study extends this development by producing "false memories" in the form of functional equivalence responding. A match-to-sample training procedure was administered in order to encourage participants to treat groups of unrelated English words as being interchangeable. Following training, participants were presented with a list of words from within one of the groups for a free recall test and a recognition test. Results showed that participants were more likely to falsely recall and recognize words that had been assigned to the same group as the list words during prior training, relative to words not assigned to the same group and relative to words that co-occurred with list words. These results indicate that semantic relatedness can be experimentally manipulated in order to produce specific false memories.     

A Cerebral Hyperventilation Index for Electroencephalography

This study was an attempt to determine the effect of drive on probability learning. Each of two groups of Ss was divided into high- and low-drive groups on the basis of MAS scores. Each S was given 200 trials on a probability learning task, with 70 per cent reinforcement on one side and 30 per cent reinforcement on the other. At the .05 level, there was no difference between groups in probability choices, and neither group differed from the objective probability scores. The results are discussed in terms of the number of trials involved, the introduction of emotional arousal, and Hullian theory. On the basis of a comparison with the results of previous studies, it was suggested that investigators be cautious in generalizing probability learning results from one species to another.