Abstract

I believe that libertarian writers on freedom of the will are driven to their position, despite its implausibility, because they think it the only way to show that we are morally responsible for our conduct. My dissertation is an attempt to provide a compatibilist account of freedom of the will and moral responsibility which addresses libertarians' concerns explicitly, and shows them to be unfounded. ;My account of freedom of the will and moral responsibility is based on the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning. I argue that our reasons for ascribing freedom of the will and moral responsibility to persons are based on the requirements of practical reasoning. When we adopt the standpoint of practical reasoning, we find that we have every reason to hold ourselves responsible for what we do. When we adopt the theoretical point of view, however, we seem to have no reason to apply concepts like freedom and responsibility at all, since we have left the standpoint from whose requirements our reasons for holding ourselves responsible are derived. Libertarians' arguments against the possibility of providing a compatibilist justification of moral responsibility seem as convincing as they do because they accurately describe human actions as seen from the standpoint of theoretical reasoning. Their mistake, I argue, is to look to the theoretical point of view for a justification of our ascriptions of freedom and responsibility; and to conclude from the fact that that point of view affords no such justification that our ascriptions of responsibility cannot be justified at all. ;To establish this claim, I try to determine which conceptions of freedom of the will and moral responsibility are relevant to practical reasoning, and to show that these conceptions are not vulnerable to many of the objections which libertarians have directed against compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will. I argue that whether or not we are free or responsible in these senses is independent of the truth or falsity of mechanism, determinism, or any similar account of the causes of human actions