I defend a hard-line reply to Derk Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. Pereboom accuses compatibilists who take a hard-line reply to his manipulation argument of adopting inappropriate initial attitudes towards the cases central to his argument. If Pereboom is correct he has shown that a hard-line response is inadequate. Fortunately for the compatibilist, Pereboom’s list of appropriate initial attitudes is incomplete and at least one of the initial attitudes he leaves out provides room for a revised hard-line reply to be successfully (...) mounted against the multiple-case argument. (shrink)

Basic desert is central to the dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists over the four-case manipulation argument. I argue that there are two distinct ways of understanding the desert salient to moral responsibility; moral desert can be understood as a claim about fitting responses to an agent or as a claim about the merit of the agent. Failing to recognize this distinction has contributed to a stalemate between both sides. I suggest that recognizing these distinct approaches to moral desert will help (...) clarify a central source of disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists and assist both sides in resolving the current stalemate. (shrink)

Casey, in Supernatural, alludes to one of the oldest and most resilient arguments against the existence of God, the problem of evil. This problem arises from an apparent conflict between the existence of evil and the attributes that Western theists attribute to God. Casey's challenge to the existence of God is called the logical problem of evil by philosophers. Casey's problem of evil focused on an apparent logical inconsistency between believing in a God that is all‐powerful, all‐knowing, and all‐good, while (...) at the same time believing that evil exists. The soul‐making defense doesn't appear to be enough to solve the problem for Dean. While it seems true that an all‐powerful, all‐good, all‐knowing God would have the power to create a universe with soul‐growth, containing significantly less evil and suffering than the universe of Supernatural, that's just not Dean's world. (shrink)

Joshua May responds to skepticism about moral knowledge via appeal to empirical work on moral foundations. I demonstrate that the moral foundations literature is not able to do the work May needs. It demonstrates shared moral cognition, not shared moral judgment, and therefore, May's attempt to defeat general skepticism fails.