Monday, 29 May 2006

9:45 Welcoming Remarks

Symposium: Causation and Freedom

10:00-10:45 Stewart Goetz, “The Causal Closure Argument”

10:45-11:30 Igal Kvart, “Mental and Probabilistic Causation”

11:45-12:30 Miklavž Vospernik, “Compatibilism versus Incompatibilism: Can any Theory about Natural Laws Alone Solve the Problem?”

12:30-2:30 Lunch

Symposium: Art and Idiom, and their Relevance to the Free Will Debate

2:30-3:15 Benjamin Schnieder, “On What We Can Ensure”

3:15-4:00 Paul Russell, “Free Will, Art and Morality”

Symposium: Against Determinism and Fatalism

4:15-5:00 Boran Bercic, “Fatalism”

5:00-5:45 Mark Balaguer, “Why There Are No Good Arguments for Any Interesting Version of Determinism”

Tuesday, 30 May 2006

Symposium: Agent Causation: Pro, Pro, Pro, and Con

9:00-9:45 Meghan E. Griffith, “Freedom and Trying: Understanding Agent-Causal Exertions”

9:45-10:30 Timothy O'Connor, “Reasons Explanation and Agent Control: In Search of an Integrated Account”

10:45-11:30 Ned Markosian, “Agent Causation as the Solution to All the Compatibilist’s Problems”

11:30-12:15 Neil Levy, “Agents and Reasons”

Lunch

Symposium: Defending or Smearing PAP?

2:15-3:00 David P. Hunt, “The Significance of Morally (Ir)relevant Alternatives in Buffer Counterexamples to PAP”

3:00-3:45 Danilo Suster, “A Dilemma Defense of PAP and the Problem of Question-Begging”

Symposium: On McKenna and Pereboom

4:00-4:45 John Davenport, “The Deliberative Relevance of Refraining from Deciding: A Response to McKenna and Pereboom”

4:45-5:30 Ish Haji and Stefaan Cuypers, “Hard- and Soft-Line Responses to Pereboom’s Four-Case Manipulation Argument”

Wednesday, 31 May 2006

Symposium: Moral and Epistemic Luck

9:00-9:45 Michael Otsuka, “Moral Luck: Optional, not Brute”

9:45-10:30 Nenad Miscevic, “Armchair Luck”

Symposium: Doxastic Voluntarism

10:45-11:30 Nikolaj Nottelmann, “Is Believing at Will ‘Conceptually Impossible’?”

11:30-12:15 Matthias Steup, “Doxastic Freedom”

Thursday, 1 June 2006

Symposium: Variations on a Compatibilist Theme

9:00-9:45 Saul Smilansky, “How To Be Both a Compatibilist and a Hard Determinist”

9:45-10:30 Eugene Mills, “The Sweet Mystery Of Compatibilism”

Symposium: Against Source Incompatibilism

10:45-11:30 Joseph Keim Campbell, “Farewell to Source Incompatibilism”

11:30-12:15 Bernard Berofsky, “The Myth of Source”

Lunch

Trust and Epistemic Responsibility

2:15-3:00 Snježana Prijić-Samaržija, “Evidentialism and trust”

Symposium: Possibility, Freedom, and Responsibility

3:00-3:45 Mark A. Brown, “Freedom, Time, and Identity”

4:00-4:45 Tomis Kapitan, “Responsibility, Doxastic Options, and Compatibilist Control”

4:45-5:30 Mylan Engel Jr., “The Failure of Epistemic and Doxastic Standpoint Compatibilisms, and the Semi-Compatibilist Alternative: Moral Responsibility without Freedom”

Conference Dinner (time and location to be announced)

Friday, 2 June 2006

Symposium: Moral Responsibility and Desert

9:45-10:30 Noa Latham, “Determinism and Value”

10:45-11:30 Kenton Machina, “Moral Responsibility--What Is All the Fuss About?”

11:30-12:15 Andras Szigeti, “The Ledger View of Moral Responsibility”

Lunch

Symposium: The Phenomenology of Freedom and the Will

2:15-3:00 Matjaž Potrč, “Compatibilism and the Phenomenology of Agency”

3:00-3:45 Olga Markič, “The Feeling of Responsibility and the Illusions of Willing”

4:00-4:45 Terry Horgan, “Agentive Phenomenology and the Agent-Exclusion Problem”

4:45-5:30 Miroslava Andjelkovic, “Personal Integrity and Weakness of the Will”

Saturday, 3 June

Symposium: Contextualists Among Us: Freedom, Determinism and Context

9:00-9:45 Alastair Norcross, “Utility, Determinism, and Possibility: Context to the Rescue”

9:45-10:30 John Carroll, “Context, Conditionals, Fatalism, Time Travel and Freedom”

10:45-11:30 Mark Heller, “How to be a Contextualist about Free Will”

11:30 Closing Remarks

Abstracts

Miroslava Andjelkovic

Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade

“Personal Integrity and Weakness of the Will”

In this paper I discuss some real life situations in which it is hard (even with the help of philosophical theories) to tell whether the person involved exhibits strong or weak will. The aim of this strategy is obvious: given that there are good reasons for both views, our final decision certainly clarifies our notion of the will. The analysis of these cases shows how in different situations we stress different aspects of the will: dispositional or occurrent. These aspects are considered and in the light of this consideration personal integrity is defined.

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Mark Balaguer

California State University, Los Angeles

“Why There Are No Good Arguments for Any Interesting Version of Determinism”

In this paper, I consider the empirical evidence that we currently have for various kinds of determinism that might be relevant to the thesis that human beings possess libertarian free will. I argue that at present, we do not have any good reason for believing or rejecting any of these kinds of determinism.

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Boran Bercic

Department of Philosophy

University of Rijeka, Croatia

“Fatalism”

In this article, the author critically examines the thesis of fatalism and draws a distinction between rough and sophisticated version of fatalism. Although these two versions are psychologically and rhetorically closely related, their contents are essentially different. The first one is an empirical thesis, while the second one is metaphysical. The main problem with the first one is that it is in fact false, while the main problem with the second one is that it is empty. The author also examines two famous fatalistic arguments: the idle argument or the "air raid" argument, and the "sea battle" argument. The main failures of these arguments are: unjustified inference from purely formal to substantial claims; assumption that the statements about future contingent events have their truth value now; and modal fallacy.

Key words: fatalism, fate, free will, action, the idle argument, the sea-battle argument, determinism

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Bernard Berofsky:

Columbia University

“The Myth of Source”

If determinism is a threat to freedom, that threat derives solely from its alleged eradication of power. The source incompatibilist mistakenly supposes that special views about the self are required to insure that we are the ultimate source of our decisions and actions. Source incompatibilism fails whether it takes the form of Robert Kane’s event-causal libertarianism or the various agent-causal varieties defended by Derk Pereboom, Timothy O’Connor, and Randolph Clarke. The sort of control free agents need, once power over alternatives is conceded, can be secured without metaphysical excess, whereas the sort of control allegedly provided in an indeterministic setting or by a free-floating self is bogus. If there is a free will problem, it is the one G. E. Moore addressed in 1912. He concluded that persons can act otherwise in a deterministic world. We should continue to try to figure out whether he was right or wrong.

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Mark A. Brown

Syracuse University

“Freedom, Time, and Identity”

This paper explores and compares two versions of the view that human freedom implies indeterminism. One view holds that human choice is possible in the sense that in various different possible worlds the agent makes different choices, with different consequences. This view requires that we either stipulate the identity of the agent across worlds, or have some appropriate account of trans-world identity. It also tends to view each world, taken in isolation, as essentially deterministic. A second view sees human choice as transpiring within a single possible world, with alternative outcomes occurring on diverging branches of time within that single world. This view gives a central role to a theory of branching time. On this view, each world is in its own nature indeterminist, no particular account of trans-world identity is needed, and trans-branch identity is secured by identity of origins in a very natural way. Other possible worlds then become largely irrelevant to questions about human freedom.

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Joseph Keim Campbell

Washington State University

“Farewell to Source Incompatibilism”

Incompatibilism is the view that if determinism is true, then no one is morally responsible for his actions. Two standard theories of moral responsibility are the traditional theory and the source theory. Traditional theorists endorse the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP): an agent S is morally responsible for his action a only if S can do or could have done other than a. According to the source theory, S is morally responsible for a only if S is the source of a. Thus, source incompatibilists are incompatibilists who accept the source theory.

Source theorists often reject PAP on the basis of Frankfurt-style examples. This leaves them without an argument for incompatibilism. Many opt for a version of the direct argument, which directly argues for incompatibilism with the aid of some non-responsibility transfer principle. I demonstrate that this option is not available to the source incompatibilist, for there is a tension between the following claims.

(SI-F) There are genuine Frankfurt-style examples.

(SI-D) The direct argument is sound.

More specifically, (a) Frankfurt-style examples provide the impetus for at least one group of counterexamples to non-responsibility transfer principles, and (b) non-responsibility transfer principles may be used to show that crucial agents, those purported to be responsible in Frankfurt-style examples, are not morally responsible for their actions. I extend these considerations to other arguments for incompatibilism, as well.

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John Carroll:

North Carolina State University

“Context, Conditionals, Fatalism, Time Travel and Freedom”

In this paper, building on the work of Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis, I sketch a theory describing the context-dependence of certain modal assertions, including counterfactual assertions. Then, I reveal its potential by briefly considering its application to a familiar argument for fatalism and a recent exchange about time-traveler freedom by Kadri Vihvelin and Ted Sider. My discussion provides a new take on the flaws and the seductiveness of the Fatalist Argument and the Freedom Paradox, and concludes by hinting at new way out of the Consequence Argument.

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John Davenport

Department of Philosophy

Fordham University

“The Deliberative Relevance of Refraining from Deciding: A Response to McKenna and Pereboom”

Readers familiar with Harry Frankfurt's argument that we do not need leeway-liberty (or alternative possible actions or intentions to be morally responsible will probably also know that the most famous and popular response on behalf of leeway-libertarianism remains David Widerker's dilemma. In two essays, Widerker argued that either the agent retains some residual leeway in Frankfurt-style cases, or these cases beg the question by presupposing causal determinism. In the last few years, there have been several different attempts to defend that Frankfurt critique of PAP in response to Widerker:

(1) Eleonore Stump argument that "doing an act on one's own" can also be Frankfurt-controlled,

(2) Mele and Robb's efforts to devise simultaneous preemption cases in which the agent.

(3) David Hunt's blockage cases and divine omniscience cases.

(4) Derk Pereboom and Michael McKenna's cases in which all deliberatively relevant or "robust" alternatives are blocked, but the agent is not determined. I will focus on the last of these strategies, since I think it is the most difficult for the leeway-libertarian to defend against. In

recent publications, Pereboom and McKenna have argued that any plausible leeway-condition on responsibility must involve characterized the required alternatives as robust in certain ways, such as being voluntary performances and having a practical relevance accessible to the agent's

mind.

I agree with the requirement of robustness, and argue that we can build this notion into a complex concept of agent-possibility, or "agentive-can" (developing some of Haji's work). However, I argue that both McKenna's and Pereboom's conceptions of robustness are too demanding; they exclude alternative that are intuitively relevant. While it may be impossible to

formulate a precise set of necessary and sufficient conditions for robustness, it is possible to see that the alternative of refraining from deciding, or voluntarily failing to decide, is robust in the right sense. In agreement with a tradition running from Ockham back through Scotus to

Aquinas, I argue that this robust alternative is necessary for responsibility. If the Frankfurt-controller eliminates it, then the agent's responsibility is undermined. In particular, it Pereboom's tax evasion cases do not refute this condition on responsibility.

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Mylan Engel Jr.

Northern Illinois University

“The Failure of Epistemic and Doxastic Standpoint Compatibilisms, and the Semi-Compatibilist Alternative: Moral Responsibility without Freedom”

Frankfurt counterexamples notwithstanding, most philosophers maintain that genuinely free action requires the ability to do otherwise. Since the ability to do otherwise requires the possibility of doing otherwise, we get the following plausible constraint on free action:

Person P freely performs action A at time t only if (i) P performs A at t and (ii) it is possible for P to do something other than A at t.

Of course, if determinism is true, then all of our actions are causally necessitated by antecedent conditions coupled with the laws of nature. The challenge for the compatibilist is to identify a sense of possible alternative action that is compatible with the agent’s being causally necessitated to perform A. My paper focuses on two such compatibilist attempts. The first maintains that genuinely free action only requires the epistemic possibility of doing otherwise. According to the second, genuinely free action only requires the doxastic possibility of doing otherwise. I argue that neither epistemic nor doxastic possibility provides the kind of possibility of doing otherwise that is required to act freely. Since compatibilists haven’t been able to identify the requisite sense of alternative possibility, the prospects for defending a plausible compatibilistic account of free action do not look promising. I suspect that this is, in part, due to an incoherence in our conception of freedom. I conclude by defending an account of moral responsibility that does not require the freedom to do otherwise.

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Stewart Goetz

Ursinus College

“The Causal Closure Argument”

People ordinarily explain their choosing and/or intending to act by a reason or purpose, where this explanation is teleological in nature. The orthodox view among contemporary philosophers of action is that teleological explanation of our actions is problematic or simply wrong, unless it is a form of, or reducible to, causal explanation. One of the most important arguments these philosophers (e.g., Jaegwon Kim and Ted Honderich) give in support of their view is that the physical world is causally closed to ultimate and irreducible teleological explanations. In my paper, I plan to examine the causal closure argument. I hope to show that it does not provide us with a good reason to doubt our ordinary view that the physical world is causally open to ultimate and irreducible teleological explanations of our actions.

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Meghan E. Griffith

Davidson College

“Freedom and Trying: Understanding Agent-Causal Exertions”

In this paper, I outline an agent-causal view in which the irreducible causal relation holds between the agent and his exertions of power (this aligns with a recent interpretation of Thomas Reid’s view: Yaffe, 2004). Understanding the agent causal relation in this way may help the agent-causalist solve two major difficulties: timing and luck.

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Ish Haji [University of Calgary] and Stefaan Cuypers [Katholieke Universiteit Leuven]

“Hard- and Soft-Line Responses to Pereboom’s Four-Case Manipulation Argument”

Derk Pereboom has advanced a four-case manipulation argument that, he claims, undermines both libertarian accounts not committed to agent-causation and compatibilist accounts of free action. The first two cases are meant to be ones in which the key agent is not responsible for his actions owing to his being manipulated. We first consider a “hard-line” response to this argument that denies that the agent is not morally responsible in these cases. We argue that this response presupposes a dialectically uncharitable reading of the argument. We then propose an alternative interpretation; it affirms that, at least prima facie, the manipulated agent in the first two cases is not responsible. Finally, we question Pereboom’s rationale for why the manipulation in these cases subverts responsibility.

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Mark Heller

Syracuse University

“How to be a Contextualist about Free Will”

Contextualism about free will holds that there are many properties that are candidates for being the referent of the term “free will” and that which candidate is the referent for a given utterance of that term depends on the context of utterance. I will attempt to (A) identify some of the contextually relevant components of free will (e.g., ability and normalcy), (B) identify some of the elements of context that are relevant to selecting among the candidate properties (no, it’s not just salience), (C) answer some criticisms raised against earlier versions of contextualism about free will, and (D) use contextualism to shed some light on the traditional free will debate. I will close by considering the relationship between contextualist free will and moral responsibility – the relevant question becomes “which of the candidate properties provide a sufficient ground for which moral properties?”

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Terry Horgan

University of Arizona

“Agentive Phenomenology and the Agent-Exclusion Problem”

Agentive experience represents one’s own behavior not as caused by internal states of oneself, but rather as self-generated. The agent-exclusion problem, as I call it, is the threat that the satisfaction conditions of agentive experience are rarely or never met, and hence that agentive experience is systematically nonveridical. I will defend a broadly compatibilist position concerning the problem. I will argue that agentive experience is compatible with (i) state-causal determinism, (ii) the hypothesis of the state-causal completeness of physics, and (iii) the hypothesis that all human behaviors are state-caused by mental states of the behaving subject. Central to the argument will be the distinction between (a) one’s experience not representing one’s behavior as state-caused, and (b) one’s experience representing one’s behavior as not state-caused. Although feature (a) is a genuine aspect of agentive experience, to think that that agentive experience exhibits feature (b) is to be guilty of introspective confabulation.

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David P. Hunt

Whittier College

“The Significance of Morally (Ir)relevant Alternatives in Buffer Counterexamples to PAP”

The current debate over Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) appears to have shifted somewhat in focus, toward the implications of rejecting PAP on Frankfurt-type grounds (Is “source incompatibilism” the way to go? What’s the best response to David Widerker’s “W-defense”?), and away from the viability of the counterexamples themselves. This is, by and large, a healthy development: it’s important to get as clear an understanding as possible of what a post-PAP landscape would look like, and it would be foolish to postpone this exploration until the unlikely day when there is philosophical consensus that PAP is false. Nevertheless, the question whether there are in fact viable counterexamples to PAP continues to attract considerable attention and even generate fresh insights—e.g., regarding the difference between morally relevant and morally irrelevant alternatives (and whether the difference even matters).

In an essay in the most recent Midwest Studies in Philosophy, I put forward a “buffer strategy” against PAP (Derk Pereboom’s “Tax Evasion,” for example, is also a buffer case), defending it against six objections: three objections to the effect that buffered agents (supposing they do lack relevant alternatives) are not morally responsible for their actions, and three objections to the effect that buffered agents (supposing they really are morally responsible for their actions) retain relevant alternatives. The second set of objections seems to me to be the strongest, and while I stand by the responses I made in the paper, the issues raised are well worth exploring at greater length. Is it really possible to set up a buffering counterexample in such a way that a morally responsible agent has no morally relevant alternatives? I think that it is, and I will try to defend this answer. But even those unpersuaded by my defense of buffer counterexamples to PAP might still find some of what I have to say along the way about the nature and role of morally relevant alternatives to be of independent interest.

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Tomis Kapitan

Northern Illinois University

“Responsibility, Doxastic Options, and Compatibilist Control”

No one is responsible for an action, an omission, or a situation unless there were options, and options require an ability to have done otherwise. But an ability to have done otherwise implies the possibility of having done otherwise. Compatibilists who accept these ideas must articulate a notion of possibility that is different from a possibility relativized to the entire past. I attempt to do this by delineating a type of doxastic possibility that is indexed to the agent’s envisioned past, and with it, set forth notions of doxastic options and free choice that satisfies the practical freedom requirement associated with moral virtue or vice exhibited in an intentional effort (internal responsibility). Adding the familiar compatibilist conditionals asserting the efficacy of choice concerning a situation, yields a notion of control that is claimed to be necessary for an agent’s accountability for his or her deeds (external responsibility). Cases where an agent X fails to be accountable to Y for P despite X’s control over P are explained in terms of X’s lack of control over some other situation Q which is known by Y (i) to obtain, and (ii) to render pointless acts of blaming or praising S for P.

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Igal Kvart

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“Mental and Probabilistic Causation”

An argument in favor of mental causation will be presented based on probabilistic causation. Mental events turn out to be causally efficacious simpliciter, although not so as aspectual modifiers of their subvenient realizer.

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Noa Latham

University of Calgary

“Determinism and Value”

In this talk I examine the question what values, if any, are undermined by determinism. I offer two reasons for preferring this question as a way of investigating the relevance of determinism. Then I propose an answer_that the evaluative claims undermined are all those that entail that the intrinsic goodness of a person_s receiving pleasure or pain depends on the virtue or vice of the person. I call these desert principles and give some elucidation and examples of them. Then I offer a thought experiment that might give some compatibilists pause in thinking that determinism cannot undermine any values. With the traditional impasse between compatibilists and incompatibilists slightly recast, I suggest that the impasse should not be assimilated to a

difference in fundamental evaluative beliefs but should be construed as a factual difference in which one side is making a mistake. I look at various sources of such a mistake and suggest that there is greater scope for compatibilist error.

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Neil Levy

University of Melbourne

“Agents and Reasons”

Accounts of agent causation suffers from two under explored and interrelated problems. They must explain how agent causation contributes to the agent's active control over her actions, and they must explain in what manner the special kind of causation they highlight amounts to causation, precisely, by the agent. I shall argue that agent causation cannot solve the control problem, because control requires causation for reasons, and the power of reasons is exhausted on the event-causal route to action. In addition, I shall claim that agent causation cannot explain

how agent causation is causation by the agent for precisely the same reason: because the agent - at least in the characterization sense of identity, relevant to moral responsibility - must be identified with mental states, dispositions and other entities best explicated in event-causal terms - and not with an undifferentiated and mysterious substance.

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Kenton Machina

Illinois State University

“Moral Responsibility--What Is All the Fuss About?”

When we debate the conditions that persons must meet in order to be morally responsible agents, it is easy to assume that we are all talking about the same thing, namely, moral responsibility. This paper raises doubts about that assumption, primarily by exploring life without moral responsibility. By asking what kinds of evaluations might still be possible without invoking moral responsibility, we are forced to think about what we think moral responsibility is, since we cannot try to answer this question without assuming at least something about moral responsibility. For example, since moral responsibility attaches to agents rather than actions, it might seem that life without moral responsibility could include moral evaluation of actions, without moral evaluation of agents. But upon examination, that option turns out to not to be implementable without implying a weak type of moral responsibility. Trying various answers to the question of what evaluations are possible without moral responsibility not only highlights potential significant ambiguity and theory-ladenness in the concept of moral responsibility, but also sheds light on what forms of human life are at stake in the debates over moral responsibility.

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Olga Markič

University of Ljubljana,

“The Feeling of Responsibility and the Illusions of Willing”

In this talk I will examine recent psychological research which suggests that free will is an illusion. In his book The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002) and in some other papers, Daniel Wegner argues that the actual causal paths are not present in the person's consciousness and suggests the thesis that our conscious will is an illusion that plays no role in causing our actions. Wegner supports his thesis with many experiments and examples in which conscious experiences of our actions do not correspond with those actions. Sometimes people have the conscious feeling of not owning an action and not being responsible for it, but they in fact are, and vice versa. I will argue that these examples show that the action and the feeling responsible for it are separate and suggest how to understand "the illusion of conscious will".

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Ned Markosian

Western Washington University

“Agent Causation as the Solution to All the Compatibilist’s Problems”

Abstract: In a recent paper I argued that agent causation theorists should be compatibilists. In this paper, I argue that compatibilists should be agent causation theorists. I consider three of the main problems facing compatibilism: (i) the powerful intuition that one can’t be responsible for actions that were somehow determined before one was born, (ii) Peter van Inwagen’s modal argument (the one involving the inference rule ()), and (iii) the objection to compatibilism that is based on claiming that the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition for freedom. And in the case of each of these problems, I argue that the compatibilist has a much more plausible response to that problem if she endorses the theory of agent causation than she does otherwise.

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Eugene Mills

Virginia Commonwealth University

“The Sweet Mystery Of Compatibilism”

Where freedom is concerned, a little mystery is a good thing. Any satisfactory account of freedom must capture, or at least permit, a role for rational agency; but fitting rational agency into the natural world is a matter of some mystery.

Mysteries, however, may be sweet or sour. When critics of the doctrine of agent-causation complain that it’s mysterious, for example, they don’t mean this as praise. They mean that insofar as they find it intelligible, it’s an incoherent view of the etiology of action, and insofar as it’s coherent, they find it unintelligible. While the chief dialectical task for advocates of agent-causation is to dispel the sour mystery attaching to it, the analogous task for compatibilists is to inject sweet mystery into the compatibilist notion of freedom. What’s needed is an account of freedom that makes it both intelligible and mysterious, that does justice to the idea that we ourselves may be the authors of our actions even while those actions follow causal laws over which, it seems, we have no say.

I argue here that compatibilism can capture the sweet mystery of freedom. More prosaically, I argue as follows. First, I sketch a certain constraint of rationality (“the rationality constraint”) on free action and argue that it does justice to the idea that a free action must be authored by the agent. Second, I argue that it’s plausible that the rationality constraint is at least sometimes satisfied. While satisfaction of this constraint is consistent with causal determinism, determinism doesn’t entail its satisfaction; and if determinism is true and the rationality constraint satisfied, there’s a sense in which our actions are overdetermined. The overdetermination, moreover, is not merely causal; it’s also an overdetermination that invokes explanatorily sufficient normative and non-normative conditions. Here’s the mystery: while it seems plausible (given that our actions are causally determined) that our actions are overdetermined in the way I’ll describe, it seems utterly inexplicable why they should be so overdetermined. The mystery is not a sour mystery of unintelligibility, but a sweet mystery of epistemic wonderment. Compatibilism’s capacity to accommodate this mystery is a mark in its favor.

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Nenad Miscevic

“Armchair Luck”

Is there such a thing as luck in acquisition of a priori beliefs, and if yes what does it consist in, and does it preclude knowledge? It is argued that there is, and that the possibility of luck in a priori domain shows that definitions of believing by luck that p offered in literature are inadequate, since they mostly rely on the possibility of it being the case that not-p. When p is necessary, such a definition should be supplemented by one pointing to variation in belief, not in the fact believed.

The paper develops a taxonomy of views, from pessimistic ones, claiming that luck is needed but impermissible (skepticism about a priori), to optimistic ones claiming either that luck is generally welcome and innocuous (pro-luck optimism), or impermissible but also not needed (anti-luck optimism). It defends a moderate stance on luck, inspired by Descartes, but more naturalistic. Some luck is unavoidable, but it is not fatal to knowledge. The stance is contrasted to firm anti-luck views, in particularly the optimistic anti-luck one claiming that luck is neither possible nor needed, since in the case of typical a priori propositions mere understanding already guarantees the correctness of believing them. Finally, the paper defends the affirmative answer to the vexing question whether causal explanation of thinkers having of a priori intuitions and of their reliability is compatible with their responsible holding of them.

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Alastair Norcross

Rice University

“Utility, Determinism, and Possibility: Context to the Rescue”

Determinism is thought to pose a problem for moral responsibility to the extent that we agree with the principle that someone is only to be held morally responsible for an action if s/he could have done otherwise. The worry, of course, is that if determinism is true, nobody could ever have done otherwise. Utilitarians might seem to be in a better position than other, less enlightened, theorists in this regard. Holding someone responsible, they point out, and related notions such as praise, blame, punishment and reward, are all actions that themselves can be assessed in terms of their consequences. So, the question of whether to hold someone responsible for an action is to be settled by reference to the consequences of the act of holding someone responsible. Whether someone could have done otherwise is, at best, indirectly related to the question of whether and how to hold them responsible. Similarly, the question of whether an act is right or wrong is simply a matter of whether the act was optimal, and has nothing to do with whether the agent could have done otherwise. The problem with this response, of course, is that, if determinism is true, every action is both optimal and pessimal. Every action is both the best and the worst of all the acts that are possible for the agent, because every action is the only action that is possible for the agent. This also applies to the actions of holding responsible, praising, blaming, etc. The solution is to appeal to the conversational context of praising, blaming, judging right and wrong, holding responsible, and the like. Even if, strictly speaking, an agent couldn’t have done otherwise, conversational context may select certain counterpossible alternatives as the relevant ones with which to compare the action. We may, therefore, be able to make sense of a negative (or positive) judgment of an action based on a comparison of the action with an alternative that was not, strictly speaking, available to the agent.

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Nikolaj Nottelmann

University of Copenhagen

“Is Believing at Will ‘Conceptually Impossible’?”

Abstract: In this paper I discuss the claim that believing at will is ‘conceptually impossible’ or, to use a formulation encountered in the debate, “that nothing could be a belief and be willed directly”. I argue that such a claim is only plausible if directed against the claim that believing itself is an action-type. However, in the debate the claim has been univocally directed against the position that forming a belief is an action-type. I argue that the many arguments offered in favor of the ‘conceptual impossibility’ of performing such actions fail without exception. If we are to argue against doxastic voluntarism we are so far better off by resorting to more modest means.

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Timothy O'Connor

Indiana University

“Reasons Explanation and Agent Control: In Search of an Integrated Account”

Perhaps the central challenge for indeterministic (“libertarian”) accounts of human freedom is one of integration: squaring one’s understanding of an agent’s control over his own free action with a plausible account of how such actions are properly explained by the reasons the agent had for so acting. Two types of account predominate. One is centered on the notion of agent causation. The other holds that a free action is the (event) causal, but nondeterministic outcome of antecedent factors including the states of the agent’s having reasons for so acting. Many philosophers judge that typical agent causal accounts of freedom improperly sacrifice the possibility of rational explanation of the action for the sake of securing control, while others judge that the reverse shortcoming plagues typical event causal accounts. (And many philosophers make both these judgments.) After briefly rehearsing the reasons for these verdicts on the two traditional strategies, I examine Randolph Clarke’s recent attempt to meet the challenge by proposing an original, “integrated agent-causal” account of human free action. I argue that Clarke’s account fails. I then sketch a more promising route to integration.

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Michael Otsuka

University College London

“Moral Luck: Optional, not Brute”

In this paper, I defend a form of moral luck with respect to how blameworthy one is for what one has done that is analogous to Ronald Dworkin's option luck in the domain of distributive justice. I also reject a form of moral luck that is analogous to Dworkin's brute luck, where option luck is roughly luck to which one has exposed oneself as the result of one's voluntary choices and brute luck is luck that is unchosen and unavoidable.

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Matjaž Potrč

University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

“Compatibilism and the Phenomenology of Agency”

In the discussion of intentionality, phenomenology tended not to be taken into account. Once we do recognize its role, it turns out that phenomenology is an essential part of intentionality. Similarly, as we recognize the phenomenology of agency, we realize that it obtains an important role in the free will discussion. In this case, compatibilism may show itself as an option that is more plausible than incompatibilism. Moral responsibility is the area where phenomenology enters into discussion of compatibilism. If intuitions linked to moral responsibility ascriptions are the key issue for understanding of free actions, then it seems rather unlikely that these intuitions would not be partially shaped by the phenomenology of moral action.

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Snježana Prijić-Samaržija

University of Rijeka, Phil. Department

“Evidentialism and trust”

The unique nature of testimony as a social source of knowledge imposes the question of the acceptance of other people’s words as crucial. The main purpose of this paper is to consider what makes our acceptance of other people testimonies epistemically responsible or, more precisely, whether evidence makes our trust of other people epistemically responsible. Trust is here understood as an epistemic act or epistemic decision to treat another person as a source of knowledge or to accept her testimony as true in a risky situation in which a hearer could be deceived.

In the first part of paper, we will give a brief account of evidentialist position concerning trust as a stance that affirms that the strength of a doxastic attitude ought to be proportional to the strength of evidence. In the second part, we will consider purism and anti-reductivism that points out several inconsistencies with evidentialism. In the third part, we will focus on the anti-reductivist’s critique that evidential support for testimony is principally deficient. We offer three interpretations of the epistemic right to trust without evidence, defended by anti-reductivism: (i) global anti-evidentialism; (ii) local anti-evidentialism; and (iii) minimal local anti-evidentialism. We would like to show that each of these three interpretations fails to offer an acceptable denial of evidentialism concerning trust and that the implied gap between epistemically responsible trusting of someone and having evidence should be rejected.

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Paul Russell

University of British Columbia

“Free Will, Art and Morality”

In this paper I examine the way in which the free will issue relates to the issue of artistic achievement, merit and creativity. I consider, in particular, whether these notions presuppose some form of libertarian ultimate control or if compatibilist accounts of freedom can serve as a proper ground for our intuitions about such (artistic) matters. I then turn to the relevance of these observations for free will as it concerns morality or questions of moral responsibility. One distinction that is especially important for any analogy that we may draw between art and morality, as it concerns agency, is that between general capacity, on one side, and achievement or performance, on the other. I conclude with a discussion of particular worries about equality and fairness as it relates to our evaluations and assessments of agents and their achievements or performances.

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Benjamin Schnieder

University of Hamburg

“On What We Can Ensure”

A family of idioms that can be used to describe the powers of agents played a prominent role in debates about compatibilism; relevant members of that family are for instance 'NN can render it false that p', 'NN can ensure the falsity of p', or 'NN has a choice about whether p'. A proper understanding of these locutions will be important to an evaluation of several much-debated claims.

So, I will discuss how such locutions are to be understood. I will furthermore discuss a concrete principle that involves one of these idioms and show how the proposed analysis of these idioms bears upon its evaluation. The principle says, roughly, that whenever the truth of some conjunction can be brought about by some agents, then the truth of its conjuncts can be brought about too. I will show that this principle can be questioned on the basis of the proposed analysis of the involved idiom ("bring about the truth of a proposition").

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Matthias Steup

St. Cloud State University

“Doxastic Freedom”

I argue that, if compatibilism is true, then our doxastic attitudes are mostly free. Defending this claim is relatively easy when we consider contemporary versions of compatibilism which focus on reason-responsiveness. The basic idea of compatibilism thus construed is that an action/doxastic attitude is free iff it results from a reason-responsive process. Since our doxastic attitudes typically do result from reason-responsive processes, we get the outcome that they are mostly free. The issue becomes more complicated when we consider classical compatibilism, according to which an action is free iff it’s an action the agent wants to perform. Applying this conception of freedom to doxastic attitudes, we are confronted with the notion of wanting to have attitude A toward p. Some authors have argued that this notion is to be understood in terms of intentionality: to adopt an attitude freely is to adopt it as a result of intending to adopt it. I argue that there are decisive counterexamples to such a requirement. However, if we construe compatibilism employing a weaker sense of intentionality, it turns out that our doxastic attitudes qualify as intentional and therefore free.

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Andras Szigeti

Department of Philosophy

Central European University

Budapest, Hungary

“The Ledger View of Moral Responsibility”

There is a view of moral responsibility, sometimes referred to as the Ledger View, that underlies many a discussion of the concepts of responsibility and punishment but the implications of which are seldom spelled out in detail. On this account an ascription of moral responsibility is like an entry in the agent’s ideal record, a positive or negative mark in his/her record. Advocates of the Ledger View maintain that entries in this record are absolute in the sense that they are perfectly precise matters of fact, leave no room for discretion and are immune to all extraneous considerations of policy and strategy. It is held that insofar ascriptions of moral responsibility differ crucially from judgements of legal responsibility which are not subect to such absolutistic constraints. The paper sums up and critiques the main tenets of the Ledger View. It is argued that ultimately the Ledger View entails all-out skepticism concerning moral responsibility. However, that only shows the untenability of the Ledger View and not that the concept of moral responsibility is vacuous or has no application. If that conclusion is correct, we may be permitted to draw closer parallels between ascriptions of responsibility in legal and moral contexts than previously thought.


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Danilo Šuster

University of Maribor

“A Dilemma Defense of PAP and the Problem of Question-Begging”

Frankfurt presented counterexamples (FSC) to the principle (PAP): “An agent is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise.” FSC are based on (IRR) - There may be circumstances in which a person performs some action which, although they make it impossible for him to avoid performing that action, they in no way bring it about that he performs it. In (IRR) circumstances the agent is morally blameworthy for what he did, even though she could not have done otherwise. Hence, PAP is false. The dilemma defense of PAP (Kane, Ginet Widerker) states that FSC fail to establish IRR and that, therefore, Frankfurt’s argument against PAP does not succeed. Widerker argues that the situation described by Frankfurt is not an IRR-situation, since the factor that makes it impossible for an agent to avoid a certain mental action does bring about that action. I argue that FSC are cases of causal overdetermination and if the objection succeeds than (if determinism is true) there are no cases of causal overdetermination. This result is implausible, so there must be something wrong with this strategy of defending PAP.

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Miklavž Vospernik

University of Maribor

“Compatibilism versus Incompatibilism: Can any Theory about Natural Laws Alone Solve the Problem?”

As far as 1985, Norman Swartz argued in his book “The Concept of Physical Law” that to adopt the regularity theory of laws of nature (as opposed to adopting the necessitarian view) is a good way to deal with mutual compatibility of free will and determinism. A banalized version of his argument would go as follows: provided we sacrifice nomic necessity in the sense that it boils down to what happens anyway, and thus take laws to be mere observed regularities, there is nothing to constrain us. Hence, real freedom is possible. If we do one thing, then it is a part of the course of nature. But, if we do the opposite one, it is a part of the course of nature, as well. More recently, arguments for Humean compatibilism have been considered by authors like Helen Bebee and Alfred Mele (2002). In general they argue that in a sense the natural laws are “up to us” and that this is why the leading argument for incompatibilism – the consequence-style argument – has a false premiss.

In my paper, I shall be attacking the thesis that regularity theory of natural laws alone could provide a viable, let alone a straight-forward resolution of the problem of compatibility of determinism and free will. I shall show that at least in principle, it cannot do this any better than the necessity theory. My argument shall be based on the thesis that the problem of free will is relatively independent of any theory of natural laws we might embrace. I shall argue for this thesis falling back on van Inwagen’s original argument for incompatibility (1974). I shall try to reinterpret its fourth premiss in such a way that will render the question about compatibility neutral to any theory of natural laws.