On the Benefits of Believing in One's Own Free Will

My antipodean friend and colleague Allan McCay sent me the link to this article, which describes a study on the ethical benefits of believing in free will. Gardeners may be interested to take a look.

Vargas Wins NEH Fellowship

Our very own Revisionist, Manuel Vargas, has been awarded a fellowship from the NEH for his project entitled, "Beyond Atomism and Monism:  A Revisionist View of Moral Responsibility". (See Leiter's announcement here.) Congratulations, Manuel -- you make us proud!

Conference at UCR

On February 22 and 23, UCR will be hosting a conference called "Self, Agency, and Self-Awareness". You can see a PDF flier for the conference by clicking here. (Note, in particular, the information at the bottom of the flier about the format of the conference and the contact information for reservations.) It looks like it will be very interesting.

Best papers 2007

As many of you will know by now, the Philosopher's Annual has apparently been revived. Brian Leiter and Keith DeRose have both opened threads  calling for suggestions on the best papers of 2007. Now it's your turn: what were the best papers in free will/moral responsibility/agency in 2007?

Call for Papers: Experimental Philosophy

The newly-created European Review of Philosophy and Psychology is calling for papers for a special issue on experimental philosophy.  The editors welcome papers that report new experimental results, papers that engage in philosophical or theoretical reflection on existing results, or papers that address metaphilosophical questions about the very idea of experimental philosophy. 

Papers can either support or oppose the project of using experimental data to address philosophical issues.  Both highly empirical and highly philosophical work are very welcome. 

The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2008.

Taking Responsibility for Luck

The Garden has been mighty quiet lately. Of course, winters aren't really the best time of year for gardens in general, so perhaps it's not too surprising. Still, I'd like to see us get back into some philosophy, so here's some food for thought.

Luck poses at least the following two problems for libertarianism: (1) It hurts, and (2) It doesn't help. That is, according to some objections, the indeterminism required for libertarianism actually diminishes control, whereas according to other objections, the indeterminism might not hurt, but it at least doesn't give agents any more control than they could have had without it. Ignore the second worry for now and focus instead on the first.

Consider a libertarian who accepts most of the details of Fischer and Ravizza's theory of moral responsibility, except that this theorist thinks that moral responsibility requires an ownership condition that requires the falsity of determinism. In particular, this theorist agrees with F&R that an agent need not know the details about the operation of her mechanisms in order to take responsibility for them. Now, if libertarianism is true, then some of our mechanisms operate indeterministically. But it doesn't seem like this fact would preclude an agent from taking responsibility for the mechanism. So why should we think that indeterminism would diminish control, then?

Maybe I'm missing some good reason to think that indeterminism diminishes control, but it seems to me that as long as you have taken responsibility for your indeterministic mechanism, you're good to go (at least with respect to the first threat posed by indeterminism).

SPP Workshop on Experimental Philosophy

The deadline for submissions to the next meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) is February 1. It’s always a great conference.  It is in Philadelphia (U Penn) June 26-29. And there is a bonus this year, a pre-conference workshop on experimental philosophy that has an impressive line-up of presenters from various disciplines (see below). The workshop starts in the afternoon of June 25 and continues the morning of June 26. Everyone is invited to the workshop for one or both days (there will probably be a $10 registration fee set up at the SPP website).

In the workshop we will present and discuss a variety of methodologies and approaches to doing experimental philosophy, as well as some new results, and debate the goals and methods of this emerging field. It should be informative and fun!

Pre-SPP Workshop on Experimental Philosophy (tentative schedule)

Wed., June 25, 1:30-6:30pm

Chair: Thomas Nadelhoffer
1:30-2:00  Shaun Nichols, Title TBA
2:00-2:30  Bertram Malle, Title TBA
2:30-3:00  John Mikhail, Intuitions of Negligence
3:00-3:30  Jonathan Baron, Moral Intuitions vs. Law and Economics
3:30-4:00  Liane Young, The Guilty Mind: A cognitive neuroscience approach to theory of mind and moral judgment
4:00-4:30  Catch up and Coffee
4:30-5:00  Eric Schwitzgebel, Introspection and Experiment
5:00-5:30  Brian Scholl, Two Kinds of Experimental Philosophy, and their Methodological Dangers
5:30-6:00  Ron Mallon, Title TBA
6:00-6:30  Tania Lombrozo, Title TBA

Thursday, June 26, 9:00-12:00am

Chair: Eddy Nahmias
9:00-9:15  Eddy Nahmias, A Brief Introduction to Experimental Philosophy
9:15-9:55  Joshua Knobe and Edouard Machery, Experimental Philosophy of Consciousness
9:55-10:40  Ernest Sosa, Some critiques of experimental philosophy
10:40-11:10  Jonathan Weinberg, Defending experimental philosophy
11:10-12:00 Panel Discussion Q&A with Sosa, Weinberg, Knobe, Machery, Nichols, and Nadelhoffer