This article contends that recent attempts to construct Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) are irrelevant to the debate over free will. The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) states that moral responsibility requires indeterminism, or multiple possible futures. Frankfurt's original case purported to demonstrate PAP false by showing an agent can be blameworthy despite not having the ability to choose otherwise; however he admits the agent can come to that choice freely or by force, and thus has alternate possibilities. Neo-FSCs attempt (...) to show that alternate possibilities are irrelevant to explaining an agent's moral responsibility, but a successful Neo-FSC would be consistent with the truth of PAP, and thus is silent on the big metaphysical issues at the center of the free will debate. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that free will requires alternative possibilities. Other philosophers deny this. There are plenty of philosophical arguments on both sides of this debate, but here I want to highlight various theological pressures that might push Christians into rejecting the principle of alternative possibilities. In this paper, I explore six cases that might push Christians in that direction: the case of divine foreknowledge, the case of prophecy, the case of the blessed in heaven, the case (...) of Christ's human freedom, the case of Mary's fiat in light of her immaculate conception, and the case of prayers for the past. As I will argue, in each of these cases, given certain other standard theological commitments, it seems that Christians are pushed to admit that the agent in question does indeed act freely but also that he or she did not possess alternative possibilities at the moment of decision. (shrink)

The free will defence attempts to show that belief in an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God may be rational, despite the existence of evil. At the heart of the free will defence is the claim that it may be impossible, even for an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God, to bring about certain goods without the accompanying inevitability, or at least overwhelming probability, of evil. The good in question is the existence of free agents, in particular, agents who (...) are sometimes free with respect to morally significant actions and who are thereby responsible, at least in part, for those actions and the personal character which is a function of and exhibited in those actions. The free will defender contends that if an agent is to be truly responsible for her actions, then she must be free to bring about both good and evil, and God cannot be blamed if such agents choose to bring about the latter rather than the former. A number of years ago, Antony Flew objected that God was not forced to choose between creating free agents who might act wrongly and not creating a world with free agents. Instead, God could have created free agents who were wholly good, i.e. who always acted rightly." Freedom and responsibility, Flew argued, are compatible with one’s actions being causally determined by God, thus it was within God’s power to create agents who were both free and responsible yet causally determined to always act rightly. In response, proponents of the free will defence criticized Flew’s conditional analysis of freedom – if S had chosen to do otherwise, she would have been able to do otherwise – maintaining instead that an agent’s freedom consists in her ability at the time in question to both perform the action and refrain from performing the action. Acting freely, on this libertarian view, is incompatible with one’s actions being determined by God, for an agent.. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt has famously criticized the principle of alternate possibilities—the principle that an agent is morally responsible for performing some action only if able to have done otherwise than to perform it—on the grounds that it is possible for an agent to be morally responsible for performing an action that is inevitable for the agent when the reasons for which the agent lacks alternate possibilities are not the reasons for which the agent has acted. I argue that an (...) incompatibilist about determinism and moral responsibility can safely ignore so-called “Frakfurt-style cases ” and continue to argue for incompatibilism on the grounds that determinism rules out the ability to do otherwise. My argument relies on a simple—indeed, simplistic—weakening of the principle of alternate possibilities that is explicitly designed to be immune to Frankfurt -style criticism. This alternative to the principle of alternate possibilities is so simplistic that it will no doubt strike many readers as philosophically fallow. I argue that it is not. I argue that the addition of one highly plausible premise allows for the modified principle to be employed in an argument for incompatibilism that begins with the observation that determinism rules out the ability to do otherwise. On the merits of this argument I conclude that deterministic moral responsibility is impossible and that Frankfurt ’s criticism of the principle of alternate possibilities—even if successful to that end—may be safely ignored. (shrink)

In Chapter VI of his powerful study God and Other Minds Dr Alvin Plantinga deploys what—following a suggestion of mine—he calls ‘The Free Will Defence’. He presents his case there as a reaction to two earlier attempts to overcome that defence. I propose to take this chapter in Plantinga as my starting point here; and, as far as can be, to ignore, though not by that token to repudiate, those by now rather ancient earlier essays.

The traditional debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists was based on the assumption that if determinism deprives us of free will and moral responsibility, it does so by making it true that we can never do other than what we actually do. All parties to the debate took for granted the truth of a claim now widely known as "the principle of alternate possibilities": someone is morally responsible only if he could have done otherwise. In a famous paper, Harry (...) Frankfurt argued that the principle of alternate possibilities is false. I argue that Frankfurt's argument rests on a modal fallacy. (shrink)

According to the highly controversial “Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” an agent is morally responsible for an action only if he could have done otherwise. In this paper, I will investigate whether Aquinas accepts this principle. I will begin by arguing that if one grants Aquinas’s theory of human action, Frankfurt-style counter-examples do not succeed. For this reason, it is necessary to investigate various texts in order to discover how Aquinas views this principle. Although he does not (...) explicitly discuss it, he does discuss an axiom that is similar to this principle in various ways. I eventually conclude that, even if Aquinas would reject a strict understanding of PAP, he would only demand a relatively common modification of it. (shrink)

Mr Ninian Smart distinguishes what he calls the Utopia Thesis from the Compatibility Thesis. The latter he formulates as the contention: ‘that causal determinism is compatible with free will.’ The former is ‘the assertion that God could have created men wholly good’. Smart clearly has his doubts about the truth of this Compatibility Thesis. But his sole aim in ‘Omnipotence, Evil and Supermen’ is to try to show ‘that the Utopia Thesis does not follow from the Compatibility Thesis, despite (...) appearances.’. (shrink)

This paper examines the position in moral philosophy that Harry Frankfurt calls the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP). The paper first describes the principle as articulated by A.J. Ayer. Subsequently, the paper examines Frankfurt’s critique and proposed revision of the principle and argues that Frankfurt’s proposal relies on an excessively simplistic account of practical reasoning, which fails to account for the possibility of moral dilemmas. In response, the paper offers a further revision of PAP, which accounts for (...) Frankfurt’s critique, moral dilemmas, and the challenge of causal determinism. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt Journal of Philosophy, 66, 829–39 famously attacked what he called the principle of alternate possibilities. PAP states that being able to do otherwise is necessary for moral responsibility. He gave counterexamples to PAP known since then as “Frankfurt cases.” This paper sidesteps the enormous literature on Frankfurt cases while preserving some of our salient pretheoretical intuitions about the relation between alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. In particular, I introduce, explain, and defend a principle that has so (...) far been overlooked, namely, “the principle of doxastic moral asymmetry” : a rational agent, S, is morally responsible for an action that S performed, E, only if, when S did E, S justifiably believed either that E was closer to S’s most praiseworthy alternate possibility than it was to S’s most blameworthy alternate possibility, or that E was closer to S’s most blameworthy alternate possibility than it was to S’s most praiseworthy alternate possibility. (shrink)

The debate over whether Frankfurt-style cases are counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities has taken an interesting turn in recent years. Frankfurt originally envisaged his attack as an attempting to show that PAP is false—that the ability to do otherwise is not necessary for moral responsibility. To many this attack has failed. But Frankfurtians have not conceded defeat. Neo-Frankfurtians, as I will call them, argue that the upshot of Frankfurt-style cases is not that PAP is false, but (...) that it is explanatorily irrelevant. Derk Pereboom and David Hunt’s buffer cases are tailor made to establish this conclusion. In this paper I come to the aid of PAP, showing that buffer cases provide no reason for doubting either its truth or relevance with respect to explaining an agent’s moral responsibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that having ‘leeway’ is part and parcel of what it is to be the agential source of an action, so that embracing source incompatibilism does not, by itself, absolve the incompatibilist of the need to find Frankfurtian agents to be possessors of alternate possibilities. I offer a response to Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, based on the idea that Frankfurt's Jones exercises the two-way power of agency when he acts – (...) a power whose exercise intrinsically implies the possibility of having done otherwise. I then show how to respond to the objection that the alternative possibility noted is not sufficiently ‘robust’ to ground his moral responsibility. I also distinguish my own argument for the claim that source incompatibilism is not truly independent of leeway incompatibilism from an argument for the same conclusion which has been offered previously by Kevin Timpe, and suggest that my own version has the dialectical advantage that it does not automatically assume from the outset that sourcehood requires indeterminism, and hence is in line with the traditional idea that the alternate possibilities requirement on moral responsibility is the common property of compatibilists and incompatibilists alike. (shrink)

In a recent article, David Hunt has proposed a theological counterexample to the principle of alternative possibilities involving divine foreknowledge (G-scenario). Hunt claims that this example is immune to my criticism of regular Frankfurt-type counterexamples to that principle, as God’s foreknowing an agent’s act does not causally determine that act. Furthermore, he claims that the considerations which support the claim that the agent is morally responsible for his act in a Frankfurt-type scenario also hold in a G-scenario. (...) In reply, Icontest Hunt’s symmetry claim and also raise a worry whether, given theological fatalism, the agent’s act in a G-scenario can be deemed a free act in the libertarian sense. Finally, I offer an independent argument why in a G-scenario the agent should not regarded morally blameworthy for his act. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:183, IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES: PUBLIC OR PRIVATE? In his 'Perceptions and Persons' William Davie aims "to determine what perceptions are for Hume." He challenges what I trust that he is right in labelling "The Standard View." His statement of this view is quoted from my Hume's Philosophy of Belief:... Impressions are defined as constituting with ideas the class of 'perceptions of the mind. ' While wine must be (logically) (...) public, the impression of wine like the idea of wine must be (logically) private. Whereas the presence of wine tautologically guarantees the presence of wine, the occurrence of an impression of wine is by no means a sufficient condition of the presence of wine — because an impression of wine, but not of course real wine, may be hallucinatory. Impressions belong to the category of experiences: wine2is cellared in that of physical things. My own purpose now is to defend, against attacks recently launched not only by Davie but also by Donald Livingston, this standard view. Davie contrasts it with "my own view, which is that perceptions are the things that we know, both private and public" (p. 130). He shows no signs of recognizing either how revolutionary his present suggestion is, or how revolutionary Hume himself would have been were any such suggested interpretation correct. For this particular "Standard View" is not one first introduced by me a couple of decades ago, and later misguiding even such usually sound scholars as Terence Penelhum. Instead it seems to have been accepted by almost if not absolutely all earlier writers discussing this part of Hume's philosophy. For instance: if Davie is right, then Thomas Reid must have devoted most of his professional life to the dismembering of a straw man. "Reid," as Livingston remarked in his Introduction to Hume: A Re- 184. evaluation, "took Hume's work to be a reduction to absurdity of a philosophical hypothesis which began in modern times with Descartes.... 'The hypothesis I mean is, that nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it....'" Again: if Davie is right, then Hume is here breaking from all his immediate predecessors in a revolutionary way, and in a direction which ought to have made the revolution welcome to Reid. Yet Hume himself gives no hint of this radical new beginning. Instead he goes out of his way to note a merely verbal innovation: by his introduction of a new use for the term 'impression' the word 'idea' is restored "to its original sense, from which Mr. Locke had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions" (T2 fn.). The class of Lockean ideas, the class which Hume is thus studiously subdividing into the subclasses of Humean ideas and Humean impressions, contains, surely, nothing but what is logically private? Certainly no other interpretation of Locke's words would seem to be possible. He scarcely could have put the point more clearly or more emphatically than he does in the introductory first chapter of An Essay concerning Human Understanding. He says there that he is going to investigate "those Ideas, Notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a Man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his Mind...." Locke also apologizes for his frequent employment of "the Word Idea, " excusing it as necessary "to express whatever is meant by Phantasm, Notion, Species, or whatever it is, which the Mind can be 4 employ'd about in thinking...." Only and precisely in this understanding of the nature of ideas was it possible for Berkeley to open The Principles of Human Knowledge with a single sentence asserting everything which Reid was so correctly concerned to deny: 185, It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. In face of all this, how is it possible to maintain that, for Hume, "perceptions are the things that we know... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:183, IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES: PUBLIC OR PRIVATE? In his 'Perceptions and Persons' William Davie aims "to determine what perceptions are for Hume." He challenges what I trust that he is right in labelling "The Standard View." His statement of this view is quoted from my Hume's Philosophy of Belief:... Impressions are defined as constituting with ideas the class of 'perceptions of the mind. ' While wine must be (logically) (...) public, the impression of wine like the idea of wine must be (logically) private. Whereas the presence of wine tautologically guarantees the presence of wine, the occurrence of an impression of wine is by no means a sufficient condition of the presence of wine — because an impression of wine, but not of course real wine, may be hallucinatory. Impressions belong to the category of experiences: wine2is cellared in that of physical things. My own purpose now is to defend, against attacks recently launched not only by Davie but also by Donald Livingston, this standard view. Davie contrasts it with "my own view, which is that perceptions are the things that we know, both private and public" (p. 130). He shows no signs of recognizing either how revolutionary his present suggestion is, or how revolutionary Hume himself would have been were any such suggested interpretation correct. For this particular "Standard View" is not one first introduced by me a couple of decades ago, and later misguiding even such usually sound scholars as Terence Penelhum. Instead it seems to have been accepted by almost if not absolutely all earlier writers discussing this part of Hume's philosophy. For instance: if Davie is right, then Thomas Reid must have devoted most of his professional life to the dismembering of a straw man. "Reid," as Livingston remarked in his Introduction to Hume: A Re- 184. evaluation, "took Hume's work to be a reduction to absurdity of a philosophical hypothesis which began in modern times with Descartes.... 'The hypothesis I mean is, that nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it....'" Again: if Davie is right, then Hume is here breaking from all his immediate predecessors in a revolutionary way, and in a direction which ought to have made the revolution welcome to Reid. Yet Hume himself gives no hint of this radical new beginning. Instead he goes out of his way to note a merely verbal innovation: by his introduction of a new use for the term 'impression' the word 'idea' is restored "to its original sense, from which Mr. Locke had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions" (T2 fn.). The class of Lockean ideas, the class which Hume is thus studiously subdividing into the subclasses of Humean ideas and Humean impressions, contains, surely, nothing but what is logically private? Certainly no other interpretation of Locke's words would seem to be possible. He scarcely could have put the point more clearly or more emphatically than he does in the introductory first chapter of An Essay concerning Human Understanding. He says there that he is going to investigate "those Ideas, Notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a Man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his Mind...." Locke also apologizes for his frequent employment of "the Word Idea, " excusing it as necessary "to express whatever is meant by Phantasm, Notion, Species, or whatever it is, which the Mind can be 4 employ'd about in thinking...." Only and precisely in this understanding of the nature of ideas was it possible for Berkeley to open The Principles of Human Knowledge with a single sentence asserting everything which Reid was so correctly concerned to deny: 185, It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. In face of all this, how is it possible to maintain that, for Hume, "perceptions are the things that we know... (shrink)

In Social Life and Moral Judgment, author and philosopher Antony Flew examines the social problems induced by the mature welfare state. Welfare states make ever-increasing financial demands on their citizenry, yet the evidence clearly supports that such demands are not sustainable. In this superlative collection of thematic essays, Flew investigates and explains why this is so, and calls for a return to individual responsibility. The first essay establishes the philosophical basis for his argument. "Is Human Sociobiology Possible?" answers its (...) titular question in the negative, asserting that we are all members of a peculiar type of creature that can, and therefore must, be responsible for whatever choices between various courses of action or inaction that are open to us as individuals. In other essays, Flew shows how state welfare systems inevitably corrupt and demoralize their citizens by encouraging ever-more people to apply for welfare entitlements and reducing the incentives to avoid or escape the conditions warranting those entitlements. He investigates the origins of this new kind of welfare entitlement, and shows how very different what politicians and public sector employees produce is from what these people claim to be producing. Flew shows that the drive for "social" justice appears to require that the justly acquired income and wealth of all citizens should be progressively taxed away or supplemented by the state so that the eventual result is more, though never perfect, equality. This objective, he asserts, must be radically distinguished from old-fashioned, without prefix or suffix, justice. It was this type of justice Adam Smith referred to when he famously said that it is a virtue "of which the observance is not left to the freedom of our wills" but "which may be extorted by force." Flew question the aims of those who would discredit wealth creators and wealth-creating investment, showing that these are the same people who promote the rising "progressive" taxation needed to finance expenditure in the growing welfare state. Social Life and Moral Judgment is a timely critique, one that will be appreciated at a point in history when governments on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to describe spending on state health, social, education, and welfare services as investments, instead of mechanisms to achieve social justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:INCONSISTENCY WITHIN A RECONCILING PROJECT There is nothing I wou'd more willingly lay hold of, than an opportunity of confessing my errors; and shou'd esteem such a return to truth and reason to be more honourable than the most unerring judgment. Hume's words in the first sentence of its Appendix referred to Books I and II of A Treatise of Human Nature. I quote them here with a similarly (...) particular but less glorious reference to Chapter VIII of my Hume's Philosophy of Belief (London, and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and Philosophical Library, 19 61). The errors to be corrected are in the first instance mine. But, if I am now right, they are also and more importantly to be found in the first Inquiry itself. Hume's purpose in Section VIII is to apply to the long disputed question concerning liberty and necessity what he takes to be his discovery that Our idea... of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity observable in the operations of nature, where similar objects are constantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one from the appearance of the other. These two circumstances form the whole of that necessity, which we ascribe to matter (Selby-Bigge, EHU 81-82). In urging what is here offered as the new and only correct interpretation of what others want to distinguish as contingent necessity and contingent impossibility, Hume is in their - and my - terms saying that there is no genuine idea of, and no such thing as, contingent necessity and contingent impossibility. There are, that is to say, no true logically contingent propositions asserting certain necessities and impossibilities whether relative or absolute. There are, on the contrary, only logical necessities and logical impossibilities; and these obtain simply as relations of ideas. They do not and cannot either characterize or determine real existence and matter of fact (EHU 25-26). Now certainly, if Hume were right in maintaining either that we cannot coherently assert, or that we never have due warrant for asserting, that any causes necessitate their effects - that they make these, that is, as a matter of fact inevitable and anything else as a matter of fact impossible - then it would become a short and easy task to effect a Compatibilist resolution of the long disputed question. For, on this assumption, nothing more than profound regularities of human behaviour, and sometimes predictabilities, ever have been or ever could be revealed, whether in the everyday experience of the banausic vulgar, or whether by the elevated investigations of the physical and the human sciences. Discoveries of this sort, however, do not and cannot prejudice the familiar realities of human action; which just requires that, in some sense, agents must always be able to do otherwise than they do. This sense - a sense which allows that both the agent who acts freely and the agent who acts under compulsion act - Hume explicates as Locke had done before him in the great chapter 'Of Power' (Essay, II (xxi) 7 ff.). Action necessarily involves a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may (EHU 95). 1. Having thus in Part I drawn Compatibilist conclusions from what is in effect his rejection of all contingent necessity and contingent impossibility, Hume proceeds in Part II to apply his findings to the theological special case: to the equally long disputed question of freewill and predestination, that is, rather than of freewill and determinism. After first considering that all reward and punishment must presuppose that the persons to be so treated are the causes of whatever it is for which they are to be rewarded or punished, Hume entertains what ironically he presents as an objection to this theory, with regard to necessity and liberty... It may be said, for instance, that, if voluntary actions be subjected to the same laws of necessity with the operations of matter, there is a continued chain of necessary causes, pre-ordained and pre-determined, reaching from the original cause of all to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:177 SOCIAL JUSTICE: FROM RAWLS TO HUME It is said that "the implacable Professor," John Langshaw Austin, once set as a final examination question: "'Power polities': what other sorts of politics are there?" Had Hume been requested to discourse about social justice, he might well have responded in a parallel way: 'What non-social kinds is the insertion of that adjective intended to exclude from consideration?1 For, as Hayek has (...) urged, Hume chose an unfortunate label for the second of the two kinds of virtue distinguished at the beginning of Part II of Book III of the Treatise. Certainly "the circumstances and necessities of mankind," which give rise to the "artifice or contrivance" of what Hume calls artificial virtues, are "the circumstances and necessities" of social living; something which, he would always be the first to insist, is altogether natural to our species. So, if only he had thought to label this sort of virtues 'social' rather than 'artificial,1 he would not have had to end that Section I with an awkward final paragraph protesting that, "Tho' the rules of justice be artificial they are not arbitrary. Nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature; if by natural we understand what is common to any species, or even if we confine it to mean what is inseparable from the species." In fact, it is just worth remarking, no contemporary ever would have asked Hume for his views about social justice; or, at any rate, not in those words. For, as my friend Roland Hall tells me, the first employment known to the revisers of the Oxford English Dictionary of what has since become one of the most popular of political cant phrases dates only from 1861. It occurs in Utilitarianism, at pp. 57-58 178 in the Everyman edition. There J. S. Mill first insists: not that society should treat all equally well, period; but "that society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it." He continues: "This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost possible degree to converge." Mill himself says nothing here, or perhaps anywhere, to explain what the adjective is supposed to be doing. It seems to have been a favourite, which he was the first to preface, with equally little particular reason given, to several other nouns. So if, as seems most likely, it is intended to be no more than a superfluous synonym for 'distributive,' then it becomes important for us to notice that to Mill, as to so many of his successors, the scope of "social and distributive justice" is universal: it is what determines who is the rightful possessor of any good whatever. Thus, in contemporary courts of distributive justice, everything is up for grabs. Yet it was not ever thus, and we ought to demand reason why it should have become so. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, was, so far as we know, the first philosopher to distinguish distributive from corrective justice. He ruled that the former "is exercized in distributions of honour or wealth or of anything else which is to be divided among those who have a share in the constitution; since in these it is possible for one to have an allocation either equal or unequal to that of another" (1130B30-4). A generation dazed by the drum-beat rhetoric of equality and social justice will no doubt be 179 inclined to construe these words as making the very modern assumption that there has been an active and collective distribution of all goods, and ought now to be an active and collective redistribution. Yet such anachronistic assumptions are ruled out as Aristotle proceeds: first, to entertain the oligarchic suggestion that the relevant criterion of entitlement might be the possession of wealth; and then to conclude that this "Justice in distributing common property... when a distribution is made from the common stock... will follow the same ratio as that between the amounts which the several persons have contributed to the common stock" (1131A 25-9 and 1131B 28-33). The common... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:177 SOCIAL JUSTICE: FROM RAWLS TO HUME It is said that "the implacable Professor," John Langshaw Austin, once set as a final examination question: "'Power polities': what other sorts of politics are there?" Had Hume been requested to discourse about social justice, he might well have responded in a parallel way: 'What non-social kinds is the insertion of that adjective intended to exclude from consideration?1 For, as Hayek has (...) urged, Hume chose an unfortunate label for the second of the two kinds of virtue distinguished at the beginning of Part II of Book III of the Treatise. Certainly "the circumstances and necessities of mankind," which give rise to the "artifice or contrivance" of what Hume calls artificial virtues, are "the circumstances and necessities" of social living; something which, he would always be the first to insist, is altogether natural to our species. So, if only he had thought to label this sort of virtues 'social' rather than 'artificial,1 he would not have had to end that Section I with an awkward final paragraph protesting that, "Tho' the rules of justice be artificial they are not arbitrary. Nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature; if by natural we understand what is common to any species, or even if we confine it to mean what is inseparable from the species." In fact, it is just worth remarking, no contemporary ever would have asked Hume for his views about social justice; or, at any rate, not in those words. For, as my friend Roland Hall tells me, the first employment known to the revisers of the Oxford English Dictionary of what has since become one of the most popular of political cant phrases dates only from 1861. It occurs in Utilitarianism, at pp. 57-58 178 in the Everyman edition. There J. S. Mill first insists: not that society should treat all equally well, period; but "that society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it." He continues: "This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens, should be made in the utmost possible degree to converge." Mill himself says nothing here, or perhaps anywhere, to explain what the adjective is supposed to be doing. It seems to have been a favourite, which he was the first to preface, with equally little particular reason given, to several other nouns. So if, as seems most likely, it is intended to be no more than a superfluous synonym for 'distributive,' then it becomes important for us to notice that to Mill, as to so many of his successors, the scope of "social and distributive justice" is universal: it is what determines who is the rightful possessor of any good whatever. Thus, in contemporary courts of distributive justice, everything is up for grabs. Yet it was not ever thus, and we ought to demand reason why it should have become so. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, was, so far as we know, the first philosopher to distinguish distributive from corrective justice. He ruled that the former "is exercized in distributions of honour or wealth or of anything else which is to be divided among those who have a share in the constitution; since in these it is possible for one to have an allocation either equal or unequal to that of another" (1130B30-4). A generation dazed by the drum-beat rhetoric of equality and social justice will no doubt be 179 inclined to construe these words as making the very modern assumption that there has been an active and collective distribution of all goods, and ought now to be an active and collective redistribution. Yet such anachronistic assumptions are ruled out as Aristotle proceeds: first, to entertain the oligarchic suggestion that the relevant criterion of entitlement might be the possession of wealth; and then to conclude that this "Justice in distributing common property... when a distribution is made from the common stock... will follow the same ratio as that between the amounts which the several persons have contributed to the common stock" (1131A 25-9 and 1131B 28-33). The common... (shrink)

Free will is a problem of modality, hampered by a commitment to modal dualism: the view that there is only necessity and pure contingency. If we have necessity, then things couldn't have been otherwise, against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (AP). If there is complete contingency, then the agent seems to have no control over her actions, against the principle of Ultimate Authorship (UA). There is a third modality in natural causal processes, however. AP and UA can (...) be reconciled if we allow both causation and agency to involve the dispositional modality. (shrink)

In his paper, "Free Choice, Incommensurable Goods and the Self-Refutation of Determinism,"' Joseph Boyle seeks to show how the argument for the self-refutation of determinism - first articulated over twenty-five years ago - is an argument whose force depends on (first) a proper understanding of just what free choice is, and (secondly) a proper understanding of how free choice is a principle of moral responsibility. According to Boyle, a person can make a genuinely free choice (...) only if he is presented with alternative options that are incommensurable in their goodness or desirability. If the goodness or desirability of alternative options could be commensurated, or compared in accordance with some common standard, then it would be possible in principle for a person to determine which of the two options offered more, and which offered less, of the same sort of good represented by the two options. But if this sort of commensuration or comparison were possible, according to Boyle, then there would really be no need to choose. Rather, the only task that would have to be performed in order to determine the person's selection among alternative options would be the task clarifying or calculating which of the alternative options offered most fully what it is that makes both options desirable in the first place. Once the clarification or calculation is done, there would be no need-and in fact, no possibility--of really choosing: the calculation alone would settle which option is the best option, and thus which option is to be selected. Now if genuinely free choice requires that the choosing person be presented with options that are incommensurable in goodness or desirability, then it also seems to be the case that genuine choice-and the moral responsibility that goes along with it-requires that the person be presented with alternative possibilities from which to choose. And yet some compatibilist thinkers have held that moral responsibility does not really require the presence of alternative possibilities. In particular, Harry G. Frankfurt has sought to show (by means of counter-example) that a person can be a moral agent and morally responsible, even if the person did not, in fact, have any alternative possibilities available to him (that is, even if the person could not have done otherwise). Frankfurt's counter-example offers a direct challenge to the sort of incompatibilism that Boyle seeks to defend; and so Boyle is quite right to address Frankfurt head-on. For if Frankfurt is right, then it is erroneous to hold "the principle of alternative possibilities" (the principle that a person can be morally responsible for what he has done, only if he had alternative possibilities, or only if he could have done otherwise). But if it is erroneous to hold the principle of alternative possibilities, then it also seems erroneous to hold the more robust position that Boyle wishes to defend: namely, the position that moral responsibility requires not only alternative possibilities, but also alternative possibilities representing options that are incommensurable in their goodness. (shrink)

Many philosophers and non-philosophers who reflect on the causal antecedents of human action get the impression that no agent can have morally relevant freedom. Call this the ‘non-existence impression.’ The paper aims to understand the (often implicit) reasoning underlying this impression. On the most popular reconstructions, the reasoning relies on the assumption that either an action is the outcome of a chance process, or it is determined by factors that are beyond the agent’s control or which she did not bring (...) about. I argue that arguments based on this premise fail to apply to some possible agents for whom the non-existence impression arises. On the alternative reconstruction I offer, the impression rests on the assumption that free will requires being involved in the ultimate explanation of one’s actions in a novel sense in which nothing can be involved in the ultimate explanation of anything. (shrink)

© Mind Association 2017In Causation and Free Will Carolina Sartorio offers an intricate argument for the claim ‘that actual sequences are sufficient grounds for freedom: they ground freedom, and nothing is required to ground it other than themselves, or their own grounds’. On this view, free will with respect to a choice or action is not explained in terms of the agent’s having alternative possibilities. Like Harry Frankfurt, Sartorio rejects the Principle of Alternate Possibilities : (...) class='Hi'>Principle of Alternate Possibilities : a person does something freely only if he could have done otherwise. As is well known, Frankfurt opposes PAP on the grounds that it is vulnerable to counter-examples. One of Sartorio’s variants of these examples is as follows: Frankfurt’s case: Frank has reasons to harm Furt and makes the choice on... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Frankfurt cases are often presented as counterexamples to the principle that one is morally responsible for one’s action only if one could have acted otherwise. But ‘could have acted otherwise’ is context-sensitive; it’s therefore open to a proponent of this principle to reply that although there is a salient sense in which agents in Frankfurt-style cases couldn’t have acted otherwise, there’s another, different sense in which they could have, and it is this latter sense which is relevant (...) to what we are morally responsible for doing. In this paper, I will evaluate the prospects of this contextualist response. I will argue that despite some initial signs of promise, the response fails, for reasons that were clearly anticipated in Frankfurt’s original paper. (shrink)

In this introductory study I discuss the notion of alternative possibilities and its relation to contemporary debates on free will and moral responsibility. I focus on two issues: whether Frankfurt-style cases refute the principle of alternative possibilities, and whether alternative possibilities are relevant to grounding free will and moral responsibility. With respect to the first issue, I consider three objections to Frankfurt-syle cases: the flicker strategy, the dilemma defense, and the objection from new dispositionalism. (...) With respect to the second issue, I consider the debate between Alternative Possibilities views and Actual Sequence views, as framed by Carolina Sartorio in her Causation and Free Will. I then explain how these two issues are relevant to the papers included in this volume. (shrink)

Greg Janzen has recently criticised my defence of Frankfurt’s counterexample to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by arguing that Jones avoids killing Smith in the counterfactual scenario. Janzen’s argument consists in introducing a new thought-experiment which is supposed to be analogous to Frankfurt’s and where the agent is supposed to avoid A-ing. Here I argue that Janzen’s argument fails on two counts, because his new scenario is not analogous to Frankfurt’s and because the agent in his new scenario does (...) not avoid A-ing. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump has argued that a proponent of libertarian freedom must maintain that an agent is sometimes morally responsible for his mental action and that such moral responsibility is incompatible with that mental action’s being causally determined. Nevertheless, she maintains that this moral responsibility does not require that the agent be free to perform another mental action (act otherwise). In this paper, I argue that Stump fails to make a good case against the view that moral responsibility requires the (...) freedom to act otherwise. (shrink)

Free will is widely thought to require (i) the possibility of acting otherwise and (ii) the intentional endorsement of one’s actions (“indeterministic picking is not enough”). According to (i), a necessary condition for free will is agential-level indeterminism: at some points in time, an agent’s prior history admits more than one possible continuation. According to (ii), however, a free action must be intentionally endorsed, and indeterminism may threaten freedom: if several alternative actions could each have been (...) actualized, then none of them is necessitated by the agent’s prior history, and the actual action seems nothing more than the result of indeterministic picking. We argue that this tension is only apparent. We distinguish between actions an agent can possibly do and actions he or she can do with endorsement. One can consistently say that someone who makes a choice has several alternative possibilities, and yet that, far from merely indeterministically picking an action, the agent chooses one he or she endorses. An implication is that although free will can consistently require (i) and (ii), it cannot generally require the possibility of acting otherwise with endorsement. (shrink)

Our concept of choice is integral to the way we understand others and ourselves, especially when considering ourselves as free and responsible agents. Despite the importance of this concept, there has been little empirical work on it. In this paper we report four experiments that provide evidence for two concepts of choice—namely, a concept of choice that is operative in the phrase having a choice and another that is operative in the phrase making a choice. The experiments indicate that (...) the two concepts of choice can be differentiated from each other on the basis of the kind of alternatives to which each is sensitive. The results indicate that the folk concept of choice is more nuanced than has been assumed. This new, empirically informed understanding of the folk concept of choice has important implications for debates concerning free will, responsibility, and other debates spanning psychology and philosophy. -/- Specifically, 'having a choice' appears to require genuinely open alternatives, or alternative possibilities that are actually realizable, while 'making a choice' appears to only require psychological open alternatives, or the ability to consider alternatives independent of whether these alternatives are actually realizable. We argue that these findings are relevant to the free will debate because choice is central to the folk concept of free will and many philosophical analysis of free will. The kinds of alternatives required for having a choice appear to be incompatibilist in nature, while the kinds of alternatives required for making a choice appear to be compatibilist in nature. If free will requires having choices, then this is perhaps evidence against compatibilism. If free will requires making choices, then this is perhaps evidence in favor of--or at least consistent with--compatibilism. (shrink)

Two intuitions lie at the heart of our conception of free will. One intuition locates free will in our ability to deliberate effectively and control our actions accordingly: the ‘Deliberation and Control’ (DC) condition. The other intuition is that free will requires the existence of alternative possibilities for choice: the AP condition. These intuitions seem to conflict when, for instance, we deliberate well to decide what to do, and we do not want it to be possible (...) to act in some other way. I suggest that intuitions about the AP condition arise when we face ‘close calls,’ situations in which, after deliberating, we still do not know what we really want to do. Indeed, several incompatibilists suggest such close calls are necessary for free will. I challenge this suggestion by describing a ‘confident agent’ who, after deliberating, always feels confident about what to do (and can then control her actions accordingly). Because she maximally satisfies the DC condition, she does not face close calls, and the intuition that the AP condition is essential for free will does not seem to apply to her. I conclude that intuitions about the importance of the AP condition rest on our experiences of close calls and arise precisely to the extent that our deliberations fail to arrive at a clear decision. I then raise and respond to several objections to this thought experiment and its relevance to the free will debate. (shrink)

This essay challenges the widely accepted principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. The author considers situations in which there are sufficient conditions for a certain choice or action to be performed by someone, So that it is impossible for the person to choose or to do otherwise, But in which these conditions do not in any way bring it about that the person chooses or acts as (...) he does. In such situations the person may well be morally responsible for what he chooses or does despite his inability to choose or to do otherwise. Finally the author considers certain suggestions for revising the principle he rejects or for replacing it with a principle of an altogether different kind. (shrink)

Arguments pertaining to the mind-brain connection and to the physical effectiveness of our conscious choices have been presented in two recent books, one by John Searle, the other by Jaegwon Kim. These arguments are examined, and it is explained how the encountered difficulties arise from a defective understanding and application of a pertinent part of contemporary science, namely quantum mechanics. The principled quantum uncertainties entering at the microscopic levels of brain processing cannot be confined to the micro level, but percolate (...) up to the macroscopic regime. To cope with the conflict between the resulting macroscopic indefiniteness and the definiteness of our conscious experiences, orthodox quantum mechanics introduces the idea of agent-generated probing actions, each of which specifies a definite set of alternative possible empirically/experientially distinguishable outcomes. Quantum theory then introduces the mathematical concept of randomness to describe the probabilities of the various alternative possible outcomes of the chosen probing action. But the agent-generated choice of which probing action to perform is not governed by any known law or rule, statistical or otherwise. This causal gap provides a logical opening, and indeed a logical need, for the entry into the dynamical structure of nature of a process that goes beyond the currently understood quantum mechanical statistical generalization of the deterministic laws of classical physics. The well-known quantum Zeno effect can then be exploited to provide a natural process that establishes a causal psychophysical link within the complex structure consisting of a stream of conscious experiences and certain macroscopic classical features of a quantum mechanically described brain. This naturally created causal link effectively allows consciously felt intentions to affect brain activity in a way that tends to produce the intended feedback. This quantum mechanism provides an eminently satisfactory alternative to the classical physics conclusion that the physical present is 1 completely determined by the physical past, and hence provides a physicsbased way out of the dilemma that Searle and Kim tried to resolve by philosophical analysis.. (shrink)

This paper argues that Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) do not compromise the agent’s ability to decide otherwise. In his attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, Frankfurt relied on what Austin called the ‘all-in’ sense of ‘can’, and misconstrued the agent’s inability to do otherwise as an all-in can’t. Like the new dispositionalists, I maintain that the agent’s relevant abilities are ‘masked’ rather than lost in Frankfurt cases. The argument from masked abilities, however, is not confined to a compatibilist (...) construal of the relevant abilities. On a libertarian construal, Black deprives Jones of the opportunity to use his two-way power of choice to a different outcome than he actually uses it. I argue that being deprived of this opportunity is immaterial to what free will requires. In the second half of the paper, I relate my approach to the ‘flicker of freedom’ strategy. On closer look, we do find a residual ability that Jones not only possesses but also exercises in cases where Black intervenes. I argue that Jones tries to decide otherwise in these cases, that Black only thwarts the success of Jones’s attempt, and that being snatched from the wheel at the very last moment does not compromise Jones’s free will. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response 2: “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”Antonis BalasopoulosLet me begin with a few words on my title, which was chosen as reflecting the nature of the orientation of my work in the field of utopian studies and therefore also of my orientation toward the theme of this roundtable. As Francesca Antonini puts it in a recent essay, the phrase, which became associated with the work of (...) Antonio Gramsci though it originates in Romain Rolland, describes “the (seemingly contradictory) coexistence of a realistic description of the status quo, on the one hand, and a genuine commitment to the possibility of transforming reality, on the other.”1Anyone who has read Thomas More’s Utopia knows that Rolland’s and Gramsci’s formula very much describes that book’s bifurcation between a voice of relentless critique of what exists in Europe—and particularly in England—in More’s time (in Book 1) and a voice preoccupied with the description of an alternative, and arguably better, world (in Book 2). This bifurcation, it is equally well known, is part of the genetic material More’s book bequeathed to its successors, so that one calls a “utopia” a (mostly, though not always) literary text, where the “realistic description of the status quo” coexists with a vision arising out of a “commitment to the possibility of transforming reality”—admittedly in different admixtures and proportions of [End Page 544] the critical or negative and the anticipatory, projective or prefigurative elements. Though Ernst Bloch’s distinction between “cold” and warm” streams within Marxism is not identical to this first binary, it is certainly related to it, so that the “cold” stream is one that privileges the rational and analytical element (usually, I would propose, in relation to the part of the Marxist tradition we know as “critique of political economy”), while the “warm stream” is one that rather foregrounds that which relates to affect, to desire, hope, or fidelity to the transformative project (these are frequently correlated to those elements of Marxism that correspond to its also being a political and philosophically imbued creed).2 What follows here, then, explores the implications of the dialectical interplay between these two sets of oppositions—and hopefully justifies such insistence on dialectic itself.3To the extent that I can see, the basic themes and areas of concentration in my colleagues’ essays involve decolonizing utopian studies as a project; addressing, in that connection, the heterogeneity of utopianisms that emerge out of a number of marginalized subjectivities; the provenance of the questions of ecology, sustainability, animal life for the present and future of utopian studies (and to some degree, for utopianism’s past); and finally, the question of utopian forms of social activism and therefore also the search for spaces beyond the walls of academic insularity. These are important and largely interconnected questions, but I am afraid I will only have the space to touch on them briefly and sketchily here.In her cogent and multifaceted intervention, Caroline Edwards begins her reflections on the task of decolonizing utopian studies by noting the high investment of fin-de-siècle utopian fiction in notions of industrial progress, noting that such notions have involved “lasting damage” for “Black writers, artists, and thinkers.” Within this framework, she evokes Joseph R. Winters’s argument that “modern notions of progress and freedom are inherently flawed,” since they are founded on the oppressive traditions of capitalism and colonialism. In turn, this leads to an argument against the teleological futurism of most nineteenth-century utopias and in support of the deconstruction of “the idea of historical progress unfolding in Hegelian dialectical stages.” What is to replace this is a hauntological (after Derrida) conception of the relation between the present and the past, for which “the present is always a site of potential breaks and ruptures that can signify both dislocation and pain as well as novelty and possibility.” In a similar vein, Heather Alberro questions the teleological futurism of an earlier tradition of utopia, evoking Laurence Davis’s observation on the importance of [End Page 545] “neglected or suppressed possibilities for qualitatively better forms of life” within the “Now.” The desideratum is, again... (shrink)

In her recent book Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio develops a distinctive version of an actual-sequence account of free will, according to which, when agents choose and act freely, their freedom is exclusively grounded in, and supervenes on, the actual causal history of such choices or actions. Against this proposal, I argue for an alternative- possibilities account, according to which agents’ freedom is partly grounded in their ability to choose or act otherwise. Actual-sequence accounts of freedom (...) are motivated by a reflection on so-called Frankfurt cases. Instead, other cases, such as two pairs of examples originally designed by van Inwagen, threaten actual-sequence accounts, including Sartorio’s. On the basis of her view of causation, Sartorio contends, however, that the two members of each pair have different causal histories, so that her view is not undermined by those cases after all. I discuss these test cases further and defend my alternative-possibilities account of freedom. (shrink)

Michael Pauen defends the compatibility of freedom and determinism by way of strengthening the principle of authorship and interpreting the principle of alternative possibilities in terms of determinism. Authorship is said to be incompatible with indeterminism because the latter is unable to grasp the connection between the mental content of an agent and her action in a non-fortuitous way. Apart from authorship, there is a second minimal criterion which, according to our common sense view of freedom, must (...) be met, namely autonomy. Authorship requires absence of pure chance,autonomy requires absence of compulsion. In course of specifying his idea of self-determination, the author examines current arguments against compatibilism. The paper sets in with a terse introduction which nicely formulates the issue and, among other things, rightly stresses that every theory of self-determination depends on some idea of the self which has to be made explicit. (shrink)

The premodern history of the European university can be divided into two triads of three centuries: the medieval university and the ‘medieval’ university of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During these last three centuries Europe’s Christian university was a ‘confessional’ university: the catholic, Lutheran, reformed and Anglican university and the dissenter university of New England. The reformed university of these centuries offered a distinctive way of systematic thought. A specific doctrine of God was connected with a distinct ontology and (...) this combination constituted the theoretical framework of its philosophy and theology. What are the main distinctive features of this scholastic way of thought and can a specific traditionhistorical background be identified ? I– The key concept of this systematic way of thought is God’s free knowledge . This free knowledgeis here understood to be God’s knowledge of future states of affairs – see section 7 for the main lines of Turrettini’s doctrine of God. This free knowledge of future states of affairs is also called definite , because future states of affairs are definite on the basis of God’s certain will. Thus God’s free knowledge is partly based on divine will, but the other pillar of God’s free knowledge is that divine knowledge which is structurally prior to an act of divine will: God’s ‘natural’ knowledge . This natural or necessary knowledge of God encompasses all possible states of affairs. This structure turning around the notion of scientia libera is vital for understanding Western thought, because Aristotelianism and latin Averroism, Thomism and nominalism do not dispose of this notion of scientia libera. Such a free knowledge doctrine of God is married to a specific type of ontology, namely a contingency ontology– see section 8. This type of ontology centres on the notion of fundamental possibility. All possible states of affairs enjoy the status of possibility . This status of possibility is constituted by logical possibility. Turrettini joins Duns Scotus in defining the logicum possibile: If a state of affairs is possible, then it is not inconsistent that it obtains. Therefore, the twin concept of fundamental possibility is logical IMpossibility: What is logically impossible, is inconsistent and self-contradictory, because it includes contradictory predicates. This approach leads to the central ontological notion of synchronic contingency. Turrettini’s key term is even almost the same as this modern invention to name this crucial device: simultas potentiae. When is an event contingent in this sense? An event e is synchronically contingent at time t, if e is the case at time t – therefore eis possible – while it is possible too that e is not the case at the same time t. Because of the simultaneity of the possibility of the opposite, reality is not necessary. It is open. Thus, the tool of implicative necessity is essential to Turrettini’s methodology. It does not only govern his doctrine of God, but also his theory of true freedom of the human will. II – In contrast to traditional descriptions of reformed scholasticism, Turrettini’s theology is a theology of will and radical contingency in general and a theology of freedom and grace in particular. I have already indicated that Turrettini followed Scotism in vital respects and Duns Scotus stood on the shoulders of Henry of Ghent and of Bonaventure . The ontological infrastructure was delivered by Duns Scotus’ way of thinking structured by synchronic contingency, but the basics of this type of doctrine of God’s knowledge are already conspicuous in the so-called Summa fratris Aleandri . Thomas Aquinas substantially borrowing from Aristotle consciously deviates from this tradition built on the legacy of Augustine and Anselm, the Victorines and Alexander of Hales by ignoring the new theory of divine knowledge put forward by John of La Rochelle. This new approach develops a new relationship between God’s notitia simplex and notitia visionis on the one hand and his potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata on the other hand. (shrink)

: The principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) says that doing something freely implies being able to do otherwise. I show that Descartes consistently believed not only in PAP, but also in clear and distinct determinism (CDD), which claims that we sometimes cannot but judge true what we clearly perceive. Because Descartes thinks judgment is always a free act, PAP and CDD seem contradictory, but Descartes consistently resolved this apparent contradiction by distinguishing between two senses of 'could have (...) done otherwise.' In one sense alternative possibilities are necessary for freedom and in another they are not. I discuss three possible interpretations of the two senses. (shrink)

: Accidents will survive the outbreak of driverless cars, but their moral implications will suffer substantial changes. The decision made today by a human in a fraction of a second will eventually be replaced by an algorithm subject to moral scrutiny. This not only raises the question of how the algorithm should work, or whether alternatives solutions are indeed comparable, but also changes the essence of the problem: from ascertaining liability to defining desired outcomes. In this paper, I first contest (...) two possible approaches to resolving the driverless car dilemma – which I call statistical and nominal – to conclude that neither is morally sound. I then propose an alternative solution based on “time-relative equality”, or always sparing younger people. This follows from seeking an egalitarian solution, that is the least intrusive – a position I defend from a possible ageist critique. Keywords: Driverless Cars; Accident; Algorithm; Age-relative Equality Condotti verso un incidente morale Riassunto: Vi saranno incidenti anche dopo la diffusione delle auto a guida autonoma, ma le loro implicazioni morali subiranno mutamenti sostanziali. Le decisioni prese oggi in una frazione di secondo dagli esseri umani saranno alla fine sostituite da un algoritmo soggetto a controllo morale. Sorge non solo il problema di come dovrebbe funzionare questo algoritmo – o se vi siano soluzioni alternative comparabili –, ma cambia anche la sostanza del problema: dall’accertamento dell’imputabilità alla definizione dell’esito auspicato. In questo lavoro discuterò due possibili approcci per risolvere il dilemma – che chiamerò “statistico” e “nominale” –, per concluderne che non sono moralmente corretti. Proporrò quindi una soluzione alternativa, basata sulla “eguaglianza tempo-relativa”, il principio per cui bisogna sempre salvare il più giovane. Questo segue dal cercare una soluzione egalitarista, che sia la meno intrusiva – una posizione che difenderò da una possibile critica che la vede come discriminatoria verso gli anziani. Parole chiave: Automobili a guida automatica; Incidenti; Algoritmo; Eguaglianza relativa all’età. (shrink)

The principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) says that doing something freely implies being able to do otherwise. I show that Descartes consistently believed not only in PAP, but also in clear and distinct determinism (CDD), which claims that we sometimes cannot but judge true what we clearly perceive. Because Descartes thinks judgment is always a free act, PAP and CDD seem contradictory, but Descartes consistently resolved this apparent contradiction by distinguishing between two senses of 'could have done (...) otherwise.' In one sense alternative possibilities are necessary for freedom and in another they are not. I discuss three possible interpretations of the two senses. (shrink)

In his recent book The Natural Selection of Autonomy, Bruce Waller defends a view that he calls “natural autonomy.” This view holds that human beings possess a kind of autonomy that we share with nonhuman animals, a capacity to explore alternative courses of action, but an autonomy that cannot support moral responsibility. He also argues that this natural autonomy can provide support for the ethical principle of noninterference. I argue that to support the ethical principle of noninterference (...) Waller needs either a libertarian or a compatibilist theory of autonomy. I then go on to argue that, contra Waller, the libertarian view is both compatible with Darwinism and able to make sense of how autonomous acts belong to the agents who perform them. Thus, I conclude that the libertarian position is a live option for Darwinians. If however, naturalism is taken to include a deterministic view of the universe (at least at the nonquantum level), as is often the case, then my article takes some strides in defending “Darwinian non–naturalism.”. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to develop a paradigm in problem solving where the notion of virtuality plays a central role. Following a brief discussion on virtual simulation, the paper attempts to identify a notion of virtuality based on the identification of the self (man or computer) with the problem solver. It is shown that such an identification/distinction possibly violates some general principle of the problem environment.To deal with this violation, a new problem is generated and a new virtualization (...) act is required, in order to attain a correspondence between virtuality and reality. A better understanding of this approach requires a combination of analog and digital reasoning: the analog being related to the environment in which the problem solving is required, and the digital to the problem solver's “mental” activities.We will briefly analyze the recursive approach to problem solving and suggest a possible problem solving methodology based on virtuality. The paper concludes with comments on the relation between etnology and virtual reality. (shrink)