>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

Yes Virginia, there is free will.

I've been thinking lately about the following question:

    the Existence Question: does free will exist?

Of course, one's answer to the Existence Question will depend greatly on what one thinks free will is.  But there seem to be two different general strategies for trying to answer the Existence Question in the affirmative; these are what I'm calling for now the indirect and the direct approaches.

Direct approaches work as follows.  First, one specifies what free will is (e.g., free will is xyz) and then shows how that thing exists (e.g., "Hey look, there's xyz!").  This is how I think of, for example, John Fischer's view.  Free will is certain kind of control (guidance control), which we then find in actually existing people.  (I know that Fischer's semicompatibilism per se doesn't commit him to the existence of free will, just as it doesn't commit him to the truth of determinism; but it certainly seems to me that Fischer thinks there is guidance control.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Indirent approaches are different.  After specifying what free will is, they'll argue that it is necessary for some further thing, and then show that that further thing exists.  Here are two examples.  Van Inwagen argues that free will is necessary for moral responsibility, the existence of which he thinks is evident.  Second, a number of scholars argue that free will is necessary for rational deliberation, a process which (though they're not always explicit about this) they think people atleast sometimes engage in.

Any thoughts on the distinction, or the relative merits of these two approaches?

(I'm also thinking of general strategies for answering the Existence Question in the negative, which may also come in direct and indirect varieties.  But I need to think about this more before posting something even as preliminary as this.)

Meme Permutation

OK, so maybe I've been spending too much time on facebook these days and I'm infected by the plethora of top 5 memes there.  But bear with me.*

Suppose someone wanted to know the key** readings/works in the free will literature.  How would you answer?  But wait, there are three further rules:

(i) you cannot name more than 5 works,

(ii) you cannot name a work that has already been named by someone else, and

(iii) you must briefly describe your rational for your choices.

For starters, I would probably go with:

1. van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will
2. Pereboom, Living Without Free Will
3. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control
4. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About
5. Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will

This set includes what seem to me to be two of the most influential incompatibilist accounts (Kane should also be in here, but rule (i) looms large!), two of the most influential compatibilist accounts, and what I think is an indispensible collection of essays on the subject.

I'm very aware that my sample is skewed in a number of ways.  First, it is exclusively contemporary rather than historical in nature; second, it deals almost exclusively with the compatibility/incompatibility issue.  Feel free to help correct my biases in your additions.

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*If I remember, I'll later share the reason behind this post.

**I mean 'key' along the lines of 'central' or 'influential', rather than 'best'. 

Developmental Accounts

In an earlier post last week, Eddy made the following parenthetical insertion:

In a separate post I might argue that the way to get out of the silly infinite regress is to realize that moral responsibility (and desert and free will) is a graded concept and getting from none to just a little bit and then more and more doesn’t require some magical injection of agent-causal powers but the slow development of relevant psychological capacities.  The infinite regress dissolves into a Sorites paradox, and we all know that there are, in fact, heaps.

I've been waiting for him to make good on this promissory note.

For the past few years, I've been thinking that something along these lines is the right response to Strawson's Basic Argument and the like.  I know that in some of the ethics literature, folks attempt to give developmental accounts of how one can go from being a non-moral agent (such as a young child) to a moral agent (such as a normal functioning adult).  One example is Jonathon Jacob's work on habituation, and I'm sure there are other examples in other ethical traditions.  It seems to me that a response to the Basic Argument along the lines that Eddy suggests would be, in some ways, similar to these kinds of developmental accounts of moral agency in ethics or even developmental accounts in psychology.  Has anything like this been attempted in the moral responsibility/free will arenas?

Compatibilist skeptics

I should know the answer to this, but then again their are many things I should know but don't.  Are there any compatibilist skeptics?  If so, what are their reasons for thinking that we lack free will?

More on Libet by Psychologists

Here.  Would it be too much to ask at least some of these people to read Mele?

Apparantly it would.

Why reading defenses of hard determinism makes people morally worse.

"A study suggests that when people are encouraged to believe their behavior is predetermined — by genes or by environment — they may be more likely to cheat."

Details here.

Modern Day Hobartians?

I've been re-reading Hobart's classic "Free Will as Involving Determinism and Inconceivable Without It."  This got me thinking--what contemporary compatibilists think that free will is compatible with determinism, but incompatible with indeterminism?  I know that Fishcer, for example, intends his view to be neutral with respect to the truth of determinism.  This issue comes up, for example, in discussions of the Luck Objection and the Mind Argument and that many compatibilists think that indeterminism wouldn't help secure free will.  But are there recent papers explicitly defending this kind of Hobartian view where the falsity of indeterminism would, by itself, render all agents unfree?

Book on the Future

I'm at home and don't feel like going to my office, so I'm calling on the collective wisdom of the rest of you.  There is an example that gets used in the free will literature about a person who pulls a book off a shelf in a library and begins to read, only to find that the book describes everything that he does--including entering the library, pulling the book off the shelf, reading the book, etc....  For some reason, I think the guy's name in the story was Hobart.  Rather than sorting through the 193,000 hits returned by Google, could any of you point me to the (preferably original) reference for the story? 

New Teaching Philosophy Blog

Michael Cholbi has started a new blog on teaching philosophy entitled In Socrates' Wake.  Given Michael's own work, as well as his contributions to the newly greenified PEA Soup, I think that this will be a great blog once it gets going.  And perhaps Gardeners can help get it going. 

Free Will in Behavioral Science & the Law

I haven't yet had a chance to read any of the articles, but I thought I'd post the link to the latest issue of Behavioral Sciences and the Law nonetheless.  My guess is that a number of Gardeners will be interested in its contents.