Free Will (Focus Series)

The question of what image it is appropriate to have of one's self and of other human beings is deeply connected to the issue of how free it is possible for us to be in our acts. Often our judgments concerning what attitude it is appropriate to take toward others depend upon how free we estimate their behavior to be. Did the person who just knocked me over push me of his own free will or did he accidentally slip? Resentment seems appropriate in the first case; understanding, in the second. Our judgments of the appropriateness of our attitudes toward ourselves, as well, often turn open considerations of free control. Ought we to view our failures and successes with guilt and pride? Or should we have a more detached view of ourselves, as ones so profoundly shaped by genetic and environmental factors that our behaviors are more reactions to various causal determinants than acts freely undertaken by genuine autonomous selves? Free Will is designed both to highlight central issues in recent discussions of free will and to propose a particular indeterminist account of its nature. It begins by motivating the discussion of issues in the metaphysics of freedom by considering what is at stake: why care about free will—what values would its possession secure for us? The book then critically discusses the arguments at the heart of the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists and examines a number of competing accounts of the nature of free will, leading up to the proposal of a particular libertarian theory. Thereafter the book turns to pivotal issues in free will and moral responsibility literature, including diverging views of the function of moral responsibility ascriptions and “counterfactual intervener” counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities.While the book is an ideal text for students of philosophy, it is not only philosophers to whom the topic of free will is important—because of its connections with responsibility, autonomy, and causation, the concept of freedom is of interest, as well, to legal experts, political theorists, physicians, moral psychologists, and the general public. It is certain to be useful to all such individuals and their students. Read more