The Experience of Free Will

In Joe Campbell, Kristin Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Free Will. Blackwell. pp. 417-433 (forthcoming)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The main question that we address in this chapter is what to say about reportedly libertarian experiences of free agency – in other words, experiences of options as being open, and up to oneself to decide among, such that, if they are accurate or veridical, then (at a minimum) indeterminism must be true. A great deal rides on this question. If normal experiences of free agency are libertarian, and if compatibilists cannot explain them away, then all of us may be under systematic illusion at almost every moment of our waking lives. That is, our experiences would be illusory if humans do not in fact satisfy libertarian conditions (e.g., if indeterminism does not occur in the right time or place during decision-making, or we lack agent-causal powers). In some sense, more rides on the question of whether we are agents of the sort that we experience ourselves as being than on the question of whether we have the type of control required for moral responsibility. At worst, we are not responsible in only one sense if we lack what libertarians say we need. Yet even then, we would not be under systematic experiential illusion during most of our waking lives, as we are if our experience is libertarian, yet false.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2024-05-22

Downloads
0

6 months
0

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Oisín Deery
York University
Eddy Nahmias
Georgia State University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references