About this topic
Summary This category covers the main topics that have been the focus of the free will debate and over which compatibilists and determinists have argued. Topics like determinism and God's foreknowledge have been central to the debate, insofar as they raise parallel (apparent) challenges to our capacity to exercise free will. Moral responsibility is held by many to be at stake in the free will debate and it too been at the focus of attention. Fatalism, especially logical fatalism, is no longer central but there is a rich literature from earlier centuries much of which addressed issues related to those which remain central. Debate over whether free will requires alternative possibilities has always been lively: the advent of Frankfurt-style cases has given this debate new life for the past 4 decades.
Key works For a lively and penetrating selection of recent work on foreknowledge, see Fischer 1989Sobel 1998 is a central text on a range of problems to do with fatalims and determinism. Earman 1993 contains important work on determinism.Debate over alternative possibilities was revitalized by Frankfurt 1969Widerker & McKenna 2003 collects representative papers from among the very many on this increasingly complex debate.
Introductions Zagzebski 2002;Rice 2008; Earman 2004; Fischer 2002
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  1. Conceptos budistas fundamentales - En el lenguaje actual (3rd edition).Roberto Thomas Arruda - 2023 - São Paulo: Terra à Vista - edición gratuita.
    Buda no construyó una religión; Estudió filosofía y ciencias. Fue el precursor del realismo científico, el psicoanálisis, la filosofía analítica, el existencialismo, el feminismo, la epistemología, la teoría y crítica del conocimiento, la psicología social, la psicología positiva, el conservacionismo ecológico y conceptos relacionados con la materia y la energía que sólo muy recientemente la física cuántica pudo demostrar. . Conocer adecuadamente qué es el budismo es fundamental para la formación y la cultura de cualquier persona que no quiera ser (...)
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  2. Necessitation, Constraint, and Reluctant Action: Obligation in Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant.Michael Walschots & Sonja Schierbaum - forthcoming - In Courtney D. Fugate & John Hymers (eds.), Baumgarten and Kant on the Foundations of Practical Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Our aim in this paper is to present the distinct ways in which Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand the relationship between necessitation, constraint, and reluctant action in an effort to illustrate the subtle ways in which their conceptions of obligation differ from each another. Whereas Wolff conceives of natural or moral obligation as incompatible with constraint, Baumgarten holds that constraint and reluctant action are, in some instances, compatible with natural obligation. Kant departs from Baumgarten by conceiving of obligation as necessarily (...)
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  3. FISCHER, LOUIS. Men and Politics.D. S. von Mohrenschildt - 1941 - Journal of Social Philosophy and Jurisprudence 7:89.
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  4. [Erasmus' response to Luther's defence of scriptural passages opposing free will.DesideriusHG Erasmus - 2000 - In Controversies: Hyperaspistes 2. University of Toronto Press. pp. 446-566.
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  5. On some contrasts due to defects close to a free surface.C. Colliex, B. Jouffrey & D. Taupin - 1969 - Philosophical Magazine 19 (160):673-687.
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  6. Al-Òhurråiyah Al-Insåanåiyah °Inda Al-Shåi°Ah Al-Ithn'a °Ashråiyah Fåi °Aòsr Al-Ta®Såis.Munâa Aòhmad Muòhammad Abåu Zayd - 2000
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  7. Persons the Strawsonian Tradition.Seth Barber - 1995
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  8. On Frankfurt's Explanation of Respect for People.Sarah Buss & Lee Overton (eds.) - 2002 - MIT Press.
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Alternative Possibilities
  1. Libertarianism, Moral Character, and Alternative Possibilities in Thomas Reid.Juan Garcia Torres - 2018 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 35 (1):59-75.
    In the following paper, I wish to examine a problem for the theist libertarian. On the one hand, libertarians insist that freedom requires possible alternatives open to the agent. On the other hand, God’s perfectly formed moral character implies that He always does the morally best. Give His moral character, then, it appears that there are no possible alternatives open to God. We thus get a dilemma for the theist libertarian: either a) God is not libertarian free – because His (...)
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  2. Unavoidable actions.Justin A. Capes - 2023 - Philosophical Explorations 27 (1):57-73.
    ABSTRACT It’s often assumed, especially in discussions of free will and moral responsibility, that unavoidable actions are possible. In recent years, however, several philosophers have questioned that assumption. Their views are considered here, and the possibility of unavoidable actions is defended and then applied to issues in action theory and in the literature on moral responsibility.
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  3. Doing Otherwise in a Deterministic World.Christian Loew - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    An influential version of the Consequence argument, the most famous argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism, goes as follows: For an agent to be able to do otherwise, there has to be a possible world with the same laws and the same past as her actual world in which she does otherwise. However, if the actual world is deterministic, there is no such world. Hence, no agent in a deterministic world can ever do otherwise. In this paper, (...)
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  4. Freedom, foreknowledge, and betting.Amy Seymour - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):223-236.
    Certain kinds of prediction, foreknowledge, and future‐oriented action appear to require settled future truths. But open futurists think that the future is metaphysically unsettled: if it is open whether p is true, then it cannot currently be settled that p is true. So, open futurists—and libertarians who adopt the position—face the objection that their view makes rational action and deliberation impossible. I defuse the epistemic concern: open futurism does not entail obviously counterintuitive epistemic consequences or prevent rational action.
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  5. The W-defense Defended.Justin A. Capes - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    The W-defense is among the most prominent arguments for the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP). Here I offer some considerations in support of the W-defense and respond to what I see as the most forceful objections to it to date. My response to these objections invokes the well-known flicker of freedom response to Frankfurt cases. I argue that the W-defense and the flicker response are mutually reinforcing and together yield a compelling defense of PAP.
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  6. Moral Responsibility and the Flicker of Freedom.Justin A. Capes - 2023 - Oxford University Press.
    This book addresses a longstanding controversy concerning whether Frankfurt cases—thought experiments of a sort devised by Harry Frankfurt—are counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities (roughly, the principle that a person is morally responsible for what he did only if he could have avoided doing it). Frankfurt and many others contend that they are, but here it is argued that, far from being counterexamples to the principle, Frankfurt cases actually provide further confirmation of it, a conclusion that has important implications (...)
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  7. From Báñez with Love: A Response to a Response by Taylor Patrick O’Neill.James Dominic Rooney Op - 2023 - Nova et Vetera 21 (2):675-692.
    I remain unsatisfied by a lack of philosophical clarity among Báñezian authors on the nature of freedom. In a recent paper, I therefore posed a problem for Báñezianism that resembles what is called the “grounding problem” for Molinism: where do the truths about alternative possibilities come from? And I illustrated the problem in the context of the account of grace given by one famous defender of the view, Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, whose work in turn was recently promoted by Taylor Patrick (...)
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  8. Frankfurt Cases and Alternate Deontic Categories.Samuel Kahn - 2023 - Dialogue 62 (3):539-552.
    In Harry Frankfurt’s seminal “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” he advances an argument against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities: if an agent is responsible for performing some action, then she is able to do otherwise. However, almost all of the Frankfurt cases in this literature involve impermissible actions. In this article, I argue that the failure to consider other deontic categories exposes a deep problem, one that threatens either to upend much current moral theorizing or to upend the relevance of (...)
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  9. A puzzle about the fixity of the past.Fabio Lampert - 2022 - Analysis 82 (3):426-434.
    It is a widely held principle that no one is able to do something that would require the past to have been different from how it actually is. This principle of the fixity of the past has been presented in numerous ways, playing a crucial role in arguments for logical and theological fatalism, and for the incompatibility of causal determinism and the ability to do otherwise. I will argue that, assuming bivalence, this principle is in conflict with standard views about (...)
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  10. A nonreductive physicalist libertarian free will.Dwayne Moore - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Libertarian free will is, roughly, the view that the same agential states can cause different possible actions. Nonreductive physicalism is, roughly, the view that mental states cause actions to occur, while these actions also have sufficient physical causes. Though libertarian free will and nonreductive physicalism have overlapping subject matter, and while libertarian free will is currently trending at the same time as nonreductive physicalism is a dominant metaphysical posture, there are few sustained expositions of a nonreductive physicalist model of libertarian (...)
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  11. “Epistemic Frankfurt Cases” Against the Backdrop of the Original Frankfurt Case.Isabelle Keßels - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (3):233-245.
    This paper critically examines so-called “epistemic Frankfurt cases” (see e.g., Kelp 2016; Zagzebski 2001) against the backdrop of the original Frankfurt case. A distinction is drawn between two ways of deserving “epistemic credit,” which are subsequently compared to the concept of moral responsibility that is in play within the original Frankfurt case. Based on this analysis, Zagzebski's claim that agents in “epistemic Frankfurt cases” can be considered epistemically credible for the same reason as the agent in the original version is (...)
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  12. A Companion to Free Will.Joseph Keim Campbell, Kristin M. Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.) - 2022 - Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley-Blackwell.
    The concept of free will is fraught with controversy, as readers of this volume likely know. Philosophers disagree about what free will is, whether we have it, what mitigates or destroys it, and what it's good for. Indeed, philosophers even disagree about how to fix the referent of the term 'free will' for purposes of describing and exploring these disagreements. What one person considers a reasonably neutral working definition of 'free will' is often considered question-begging or otherwise misguided by another. (...)
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  13. Against the inside out argument.Amy Seymour - 2022 - Analytic Philosophy (00):1-16.
    Bailey (2021) offers a clever argument for the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility based on the nature of intrinsic intentions. The argument is mistaken on two counts. First, it is invalid. Second, even setting that first point aside, the argument proves too much: we would be blameworthy in paradigm cases of non-blameworthiness. I conclude that we cannot reason from intentions to responsibility solely from the “inside out”—our possessing a blameworthy intention cannot tell us whether this intention is also blameworthy (...)
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  14. Reasons-Responsiveness and the Challenge of Irrelevance.Jingbo Hu - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association.
    Carolina Sartorio has criticized the reasons-responsiveness theory of freedom for being inconsistent with the actual-sequence view motivated by the Frankfurt-style cases. Specifically, reasons-responsiveness conceived as a modal property does not pertain to the actual sequence of the agent's action and thereby it is irrelevant to the agent's freedom and moral responsibility. Call this the challenge of irrelevance. In this article, I present this challenge in a new way that overcomes certain limitations of Sartorio's argument. I argue that the root of (...)
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  15. The Robustness Requirement on Alternative Possibilities.Taylor W. Cyr - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics 26 (3):481-499.
    In a series of recent papers, Justin Capes and Philip Swenson and Michael Robinson have proposed new versions of the flickers of freedom reply to Frankfurt-style cases. Both proposals claim, first, that what agents in FSCs are morally responsible for is performing a certain action on their own, and, second, that agents in FSCs retain robust alternative possibilities—alternatives in which the agent freely omits to perform the pertinent action on their own. In this paper, I argue that, by attending to (...)
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  16. Moral Obligation, Luck, and Alternative Possibilities.Tess Laurenne Murphy - unknown
    The way in which luck impacts moral obligation has not been given sufficient philosophical attention. It is the subject of this thesis. I argue that just as there is a control condition that must be met in order for one to be morally responsible, so too there is a control condition that must be met in order for one to perform a morally obligatory action. The requisite control is captured by the principle that “ought” implies “can”. Exercising such control requires (...)
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  17. John Martin Fischer on the Puzzle of Theological Fatalism.David P. Hunt - 2017 - Science, Religion and Culture 4 (2):15-26.
    This is a contribution to an Author Meets Critics special issue on John Martin Fischer's _Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will_.
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  18. Alternative possibilities in context.Alex Kaiserman - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (10):1308-1324.
    ABSTRACT Frankfurt cases are often presented as counterexamples to the principle that one is morally responsible for one’s action only if one could have acted otherwise. But ‘could have acted otherwise’ is context-sensitive; it’s therefore open to a proponent of this principle to reply that although there is a salient sense in which agents in Frankfurt-style cases couldn’t have acted otherwise, there’s another, different sense in which they could have, and it is this latter sense which is relevant to what (...)
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  19. Frankfurt cases, alternative possibilities and agency as a two-way power.Helen Steward - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (9):1167-1184.
    ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that having ‘leeway’ is part and parcel of what it is to be the agential source of an action, so that embracing source incompatibilism does not, by itself, absolve the incompatibilist of the need to find Frankfurtian agents to be possessors of alternate possibilities. I offer a response to Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, based on the idea that Frankfurt's Jones exercises the two-way power of agency when he acts – a (...)
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  20. Free Will and Human Agency: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments.Garrett Pendergraft - 2022 - Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments in Philosophy.
    In this new kind of entrée to discussions of free will and human agency, Pendergraft illuminates 50 puzzles, paradoxes, and thought experiments. Assuming no familiarity with the topic, each chapter describes a case, explains the questions that it raises, summarizes some of the key responses, and provides suggested readings.
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  21. Free Will, Control, and the Possibility to do Otherwise from a Causal Modeler’s Perspective.Gerhard Schurz, Maria Sekatskaya & Alexander Gebharter - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (4):1889-1906.
    Strong notions of free will are closely connected to the possibility to do otherwise as well as to an agent’s ability to causally influence her environment via her decisions controlling her actions. In this paper we employ techniques from the causal modeling literature to investigate whether a notion of free will subscribing to one or both of these requirements is compatible with naturalistic views of the world such as non-reductive physicalism to the background of determinism and indeterminism. We argue that (...)
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  22. Compatibilist Libertarianism: Why It Talks Past the Traditional Free Will Problem and Determinism Is Still a Worry.John Daniel Wright - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (4):604-622.
    Compatibilist libertarianism claims that alternate possibilities for action at the agential level are consistent with determinism at the physical level. Unlike traditional compatibilism about alternate possibilities, involving conditional or dispositional accounts of the ability to act, compatibilist libertarianism offers us unqualified modalities at the agential level, consistent with physical determinism, a potentially big advance. However, I argue that the account runs up against two problems. Firstly, the way in which the agential modalities are generated talks past the worries of the (...)
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  23. Molinism: Explaining our Freedom Away.Nevin Climenhaga & Daniel Rubio - 2022 - Mind 131 (522):459-485.
    Molinists hold that there are contingently true counterfactuals about what agents would do if put in specific circumstances, that God knows these prior to creation, and that God uses this knowledge in choosing how to create. In this essay we critique Molinism, arguing that if these theses were true, agents would not be free. Consider Eve’s sinning upon being tempted by a serpent. We argue that if Molinism is true, then there is some set of facts that fully explains both (...)
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  24. Dependence and the Freedom to Do Otherwise.Taylor Cyr - forthcoming - Faith and Philosophy.
    An increasingly popular approach to reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom is to say that, because God’s beliefs depend on what we do, we are free to do otherwise than what we actually do despite God’s infallible foreknowledge. This paper develops a new challenge for this dependence response. The challenge stems from a case of backward time travel in which an agent intuitively lacks the freedom to do otherwise because of the time-traveler’s knowledge of what the agent will do, and (...)
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  25. Against (modified) buffer cases.Justin A. Capes - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):711-723.
    I defend the principle of alternative possibilities against what are sometimes known as buffer cases, which are supposed by some to be counterexamples to the principle. I develop an existing problem with the claim that standard buffer cases are counterexamples to PAP, before responding to a recent attempt by Michael McKenna to modify the cases in a way that circumvents this problem. While McKenna’s strategy does avoid the problem, I argue that it faces a different difficulty. I conclude that buffer (...)
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  26. Freedom to do Otherwise and the Contingency of the Laws of Nature.Jeff Mitchell - manuscript
    This article argues that the freedom of voluntary action can be grounded in the contingency of the laws of nature. That is, the possibility of doing otherwise is equivalent to the possibility of the laws being otherwise. This equivalence can be understood in terms of an agent drawing a boundary between self and not-self in the domains of both matter and laws, defining the extent of the body and of voluntary behaviour. In particular, the article proposes that we can think (...)
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  27. Moral Responsibility, Alternative Possibilities, and Acting on One’s Own.Bradford Stockdale - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics 26 (1):27-40.
    Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) have famously served as counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). The fine-grained version of the flicker defense has become one of the most popular responses to FSCs. Proponents of this defense argue that there is an alternative available to all agents in FSCs such that the cases do not show that PAP is false. Specifically, the agents could have done otherwise than decide on their own, and this available alternative is robust enough to ground moral (...)
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  28. Libertarian Free Will and the Physical Indeterminism Luck Objection.Dwayne Moore - 2021 - Philosophia 50 (1):159-182.
    Libertarian free will is, roughly, the view that agents cause actions to occur or not occur: Maddy’s decision to get a beer causes her to get up off her comfortable couch to get a beer, though she almost chose not to get up. Libertarian free will notoriously faces the luck objection, according to which agential states do not determine whether an action occurs or not, so it is beyond the control of the agent, hence lucky, whether an action occurs or (...)
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  29. 50 Years of responsibility without alternative possibilities: guest editors’ introduction.Jaster Romy & Keil Geert - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (9):1143-1148.
    2019 marked the 50th anniversary of Harry Frankfurt’s seminal paper ‘Moral responsibility without alternate possibilities’. The paper set an avalanche of research on the role of alternative possibilities for freedom and responsibility in motion which has not abated to this day. A good 50 years later, the debate over Frankfurt’s central argument and its implications is still very much alive. [...].
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  30. Christ and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities.Randall Kenneth Johnson - 2021 - Journal of Analytic Theology 9:314-321.
    Classical Christology provides reason to reject the principle of alternative possibilities [PAP]. The Gethsemane prayer highlights an instance in which Jesus Christ performs a voluntary and morally significant action which he could not have done otherwise, namely, Christ’s submission to God’s will. Two classical Christological doctrines undermine PAP: impeccability, and volitional non-contrariety. Classical Christology teaches that Christ could not sin, and that Christ’s human will could not be contrary to his divine will. Yet, classical Christology also teaches that Christ’s death (...)
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  31. God’s Impossible Options.Kenneth L. Pearce - 2021 - Faith and Philosophy 38 (2):185-204.
    According to Michael Almeida, reflections on free will and possibility can be used to show that the existence of an Anselmian God is compatible with the existence of evil. These arguments depend on the assumption that an agent can be free with respect to an action only if it is possible that that agent performs that action. Although this principle enjoys some intuitive support, I argue that Anselmianism undermines these intuitions by introducing impossible options. If Anselmianism is true, I argue, (...)
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  32. Moral Responsibility for Actions and Omissions: The Asymmetry Thesis Rejected.David Palmer & Yuanyuan Liu - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (5):1225-1237.
    There is an important contemporary debate in moral responsibility about whether the following asymmetry thesis is true: moral responsibility for actions does not require alternative possibilities but moral responsibility for omissions does. In this paper, we do two things. First, we consider and reject a recent argument against the asymmetry thesis, contending that the argument fails because it rests on a false view about the metaphysics of omissions. Second, we develop and defend a new argument against the asymmetry thesis, one (...)
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  33. What Freedom in a Deterministic World Must Be.Brian Looper - 2021 - Mind 130 (519):863-885.
    Contrary to Lewis and Vihvelin, I argue that free will in a deterministic world is an ability to break a law of nature or to change the remote past. Even if it were true, as Lewis and Vihvelin think, that an agent who is predetermined to perform a particular act might not break a law or change the remote past by doing otherwise, it would nevertheless be true that he is able to do otherwise only if he is able to (...)
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  34. Quantum propensities in the brain cortex and free will.Danko D. Georgiev - 2021 - Biosystems 208:104474.
    Capacity of conscious agents to perform genuine choices among future alternatives is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. Determinism that pervades classical physics, however, forbids free will, undermines the foundations of ethics, and precludes meaningful quantification of personal biases. To resolve that impasse, we utilize the characteristic indeterminism of quantum physics and derive a quantitative measure for the amount of free will manifested by the brain cortical network. The interaction between the central nervous system and the surrounding environment is shown to (...)
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  35. Free will, determinism, and the right levels of description.Leonhard Menges - 2021 - Philosophical Explorations 25 (1):1-18.
    ABSTRACT Recently, many authors have argued that claims about determinism and free will are situated on different levels of description and that determinism on one level does not rule out free will on another. This paper focuses on Christian List’s version of this basic idea. It will be argued for the negative thesis that List’s account does not rule out the most plausible version of incompatibilism about free will and determinism and, more constructively, that a level-based approach to free will (...)
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  36. Actual Sequences, Frankfurt-Cases, and Non-accidentality.Heering David - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (10):1269-1288.
    ABSTRACT There are two tenets about free agency that have proven difficult to combine: free agency is grounded in an agent’s possession or exercise of their reasons-responsiveness, only actual sequence features can ground free agency. This paper argues that and can only be reconciled if we recognise that their clash is just the particular manifestation of a wider conflict between two approaches to the notion of non-accidentality. According to modalism, p is non-accidentally connected to q iff p modally tracks q. (...)
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  37. A Problem for Frankfurt Examples.Samuel J. M. Kahn - 2021 - Southwest Philosophy Review 37 (1):159-167.
    In this paper I intend to raise a problem for so-called Frankfurt examples. I begin by describing the examples and what they are used for. Then I describe the problem.
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  38. Kant’s Reply to the Consequence Argument.Matthé Scholten - 2021 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (2):135-158.
    In this paper, I show that Kant’s solution to the third antinomy is a reply sui generis to the consequence argument. If sound, the consequence argument yields that we are not morally responsible for our actions because our actions are not up to us. After expounding the modal version of the consequence argument advanced by Peter van Inwagen, I show that Kant accepts a key inference rule of the argument as well as a requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. (...)
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  39. Why Frankfurtian all-in can’ts are irrelevant to free will.Geert Keil - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65.
    This paper argues that Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) do not compromise the agent’s ability to decide otherwise. In his attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, Frankfurt relied on what Austin called the ‘all-in’ sense of ‘can’, and misconstrued the agent’s inability to do otherwise as an all-in can’t. Like the new dispositionalists, I maintain that the agent’s relevant abilities are ‘masked’ rather than lost in Frankfurt cases. The argument from masked abilities, however, is not confined to a compatibilist construal of (...)
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  40. Agentive und andere Fähigkeiten: Bemerkungen zu Agents' Abilities von Romy Jaster.David Löwenstein - 2020 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 74 (3):448-453.
    Agents' Abilities ist ein Geschenk von einem Buch, das man nicht genug loben kann. Und deswegen versuche ich es erst gar nicht. Stattdessen beschränke ich mich auf einige konstruktiv-kritische Bemerkungen, die in zwei miteinander verbundenen Bereichen Perspektiven der Weiterentwicklung und Verfeinerung aufzeigen sollen.
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  41. A Fundamental Failure of Frankfurt’s Agentic Counterfactual Intervention: No Agency.Joseph de la Torre Dwyer - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (2):633-642.
    Frankfurt’s “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” made an important intervention into the literature on moral responsibility via a classical Frankfurt-type example, arguing that “the principle of alternate possibilities” is false. This paper argues that classical Frankfurt-type examples fail due to the use of agentic counterfactual interventions who lack agency. Using finite state machines to illustrate, I show the models that classical Frankfurt-type examples must use and why they are incongruent with leeway incompatibilist beliefs—the motivating interlocutor for classical Frankfurt-type examples. I (...)
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  42. How (not) to think about the sense of ‘able’ relevant to free will.Simon Kittle - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (10):1289-1307.
    This essay is an investigation into the sense of ‘able’ relevant to free will, where free will is understood as requiring the ability to do otherwise. I argue that van Inwagen's recent functional specification of the relevant sense of ‘able’ is flawed, and that explicating the powers involved in free will shall likely require paying detailed attention to the semantics and pragmatics of ‘can’ and ‘able’. Further, I argue that van Inwagen's promise-level ability requirement on free will is too strong. (...)
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