Papers on Agency and Related Issues

Adina Roskies

Roskies, A. (2006). "Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Moral Responsibility," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10: 419-423.

Stolorow on the Compatibility of Moral Outrage and Clinical Empathy

Robert Stolorow, "Are Moral Outrage and Clinical Empathy Mutually Exclusive?", International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 1 (3) 2006

John Doris and Joshua Knobe

John Doris and Joshua Knobe, "Strawsonian Variations: Folk Morality and the Search for a Unified Theory", draft, comments welcome.

Much of the agenda for contemporary philosophical work on moral responsibility was set by Strawson’s (1962) essay ‘Freedom and Resentment.’ In that essay, Strawson suggests that we focus not so much on metaphysical speculation as on understanding the actual practice of moral responsibility judgment. The hope is that we will be able to resolve the apparent paradoxes surrounding moral responsibility if we can just get a better sense of how this practice works and what role it serves in people’s lives.

Many of the philosophers working on moral responsibility today would disagree with some of the substantive conclusions Strawson reached in that early essay, but almost all have been influenced to some degree by his methodological proposals. Thus, almost all participants in the contemporary debate about moral responsibility make some appeal to the ordinary practice of moral responsibility judgment. Each side tries to devise cases in which the other side’s theory yields a conclusion that diverges from people’s ordinary judgments, and to the extent that a given theory actually is shown to conflict with ordinary judgments, it is widely supposed that we have strong reason to reject the theory itself.

It seems to us that this philosophical effort to understand the ordinary practice of moral responsibility judgment has in some ways been a great success and in other ways a dismal failure. We have been extremely impressed with the ingenuity philosophers have shown in constructing counterexamples to each other’s theories, and we think that a number of participants in the debate have been successful in coming up with cases in which their opponents’ theories yield conclusions that conflict with ordinary judgments. But we have been less impressed with attempts to actually develop theories that accord with ordinary judgments. It seems that each side has managed to show that the other falls prey to counterexamples. The result is a kind of mutual annihilation or, as Fischer (1994: 83-5) calls it, a ‘dialectical stalemate.’

We want to offer a diagnosis for this persistent difficulty. We suggest that the problem can be traced back to a basic assumption that has guided almost all philosophical discussions of moral responsibility. The assumption is that people should apply the same criteria in all of their moral responsibility judgments. In other words, it is supposed to be possible to come up with a single basic set of criteria that can account for all moral responsibility judgments in all cases ─ judgments about both abstract questions and concrete questions, about morally good behaviors and morally bad behaviors, about the behaviors of one’s close friends and the behaviors of complete strangers. It is supposed to be completely obvious, and hence in need of no justification or argument, that we ought to apply the same criteria in all cases rather than applying different criteria in different cases. This assumption is so basic that it has never even been given a name. We will refer to it as the assumption of invariance.

John Doris, Joshua Knobe, and Robert L. Woolfolk

John Doris, Joshua Knobe, and Robert L. Woolfolk, "Variantism about Responsibility", draft, comments welcome.

The method of philosophy is, to a considerable extent, the method of cases, and nowhere is this more evident than in the literature on moral responsibility. The progress of philosophy is, as numerous observers have noted, afflicted with uncertainty, and this too is abundantly evident in the responsibility literature. One leading contributor – himself an ingenious practitioner of cases – warns of “dialectical stalemate” (Fischer 1994: 83-5; cf. Vargas 2004: 218); the major theoretical competitors, various versions of compatiblism and incompatiblism, are firmly entrenched, but hotly disputed. We contend that the methodological and substantive conditions of the responsibility literature are related. The method of cases is unlikely to provide unequivocal support for any of the orthodox philosophical contenders, because people’s responses across a diversity of cases will frequently manifest variation precluding a theoretically uniform result. However, a closer look at the method and its yield suggests the possibility of an illuminating departure from orthodoxy. In what follows, we present this departure for preliminary inspection, as we begin to articulate a view we call variantism about responsibility.

Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder

Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder, "The Concept of Valuing: Experimental Studies", forthcoming at the Online Philosophy Conference.

Kip Werking

Kip Werking, "You are the Cards that are Dealt You", draft.

V. Alan White

V. Alan White, "Dumbo's Feather: Why We Need Free Will", draft.

Manuel Vargas

Manuel Vargas, "Building a Better Beast"

Abstract: In this paper I propose an account of responsible agency that emphasizes context-dependent sensitivity to moral considerations, where this is (1) revisionist, (2) semi-structuralist, and (3) embedded in an account of the justification of responsibility practices tied to influencing us to be better sensitive to moral considerations. I contrast the account to various other accounts in the literature. I also discuss how the account is equipped to handle issues raised by (a) recent empirical work about responsibility attribution, (b) troubles with reliance on "tracing," and (c) the alleged importance of indeterministic efforts of will.

Paul Russell

Paul Russell, "Practical Reason and Motivational Scepticism", in Dieter Schoenecker, ed., Moralische Motivation: Kants Ethik in der Diskussion (forthcoming).

You can also find more of Paul's papers here.

Robert Kane

Robert Kane, remarks on The Psychology of Free Will given at the 31st Annual Meeting of THE SOCIETY OF PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, June 9-12, 2005.

These are remarks Robert Kane gave at a symposium in response to the following three papers:

Jonathan Schooler, Kathleen Vohs and Azim Shariff (Psychology, University of British Columbia) “The ‘Easy’ and ‘Hard’ Problems of Free Will”

Jordan Peterson (Psychology, University of Toronto) and Azim Shariff (British Columbia) “Free Will is for the Future, not the Past or Present”

Shaun Nichols (Philosophy, University of Utah) and Joshua Knobe (Philosophy, Princeton) “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions.”