John Rawls: Free Will Skeptic?

If we define 'free will skeptic' as someone who does not think we are free in such a way that could justify moral desert then wouldn't this passage from A Theory of Justice place Rawls in the skeptic's camp?

Perhaps some will think that the person with greater natural endowments deserves those assets and the superior character that made their development possible.   Because he is more worthy in this sense, he deserves the greater advantages that he could achieve with them.  This view, however, is surely incorrect.  It seems to be one of the fixed points of our considered judgment that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one's initial starting point in society.  The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic, for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit.  The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases. 

Add to this passage that the (small) part of our character that doesn't depend on family and social circumstances ALSO depends on things (like heredity) for which we can claim no credit, and you have full blown free will skepticism.   And I think that this is implicit in the passage anyway.   

Does anyone know if Rawls has written about these ideas in the context of the free will/moral responsibility debate? 

Harry Potter on Compatibilism and Self-fulfilling Prophecies

You won’t read it in the NYT Review of Books or the Journal of Philosophy, but… Harry Potter is a compatibilist! I don’t think there are any significant spoilers in the passage I’ll quote, but if you are too worried about spoilers and haven’t read the latest Harry Potter book yet, then Do Not

Empirial evidence that Free Will Illusionism is False/Unmotivated?

Some of you may not be aware of some interesting free will and moral responsibility discussions on other blogs.  Thomas Nadelhoffer and Adam Feltz from FSU have recently done another interesting experiment, this one exploring the way in which Smilansky's Illusionism is (i) more dependent on empirical claims that other views about free will and (ii) the empirical data doesn't support Illusionism.  A fascinating post describing the experiment, as well as a good discussion of the experiment, can be found at the Experimental Philosophy blog here.

CFP: INPC

9th annual
Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference

Topic: Action, Ethics, and Responsibility

Dates: March 31-April 2, 2006
Location: Moscow, ID & Pullman, WA

The Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference is a topic-focused, interdisciplinary conference, co-sponsored by the Philosophy Departments at the University of Idaho and Washington State University.