PHGA 7457 Free Will
Professor John Davenport
Spring 2008
Friday, 2:00–4:00 PM

Précis of the Seminar: Analyzing different conceptions of free will and arguments concerning the requirements for moral responsibility has become a major area of focus in contemporary analytic philosophy, in which ideas from metaphysics and ethics are interwoven. This course will introduce students to the new landscape of positions that has emerged from an explosion of work in this area, surveying the most important positions and arguments for them. They are all proposals concerning what we may call "moral freedom," i.e. the agent-control conditions of moral responsibility, as opposed to its epistemic conditions (though these are sometimes linked). The major positions try to answer two questions:

1. Exactly what kind of freedom or control over our decisions, actions, intentions, omissions, and their consequences is needed for us to be morally responsible for them?
2. Is this kind of freedom (moral freedom) compatible with physical determinism? (A related but arguably distinct question concerns its compatibility with forms of psychological determinism).

The traditional libertarian view is that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities or ‘leeway,’ that this kind of liberty to do or choose otherwise is not compatible with deterministic natural laws, and that we have moral freedom. During the classical modern period, empiracists such as Hobbes and Hume argued that ‘can do otherwise’ should be interpreted as conditional upon prior motives and reasons: the agent could have done otherwise if he had chosen otherwise, and could have chosen otherwise if he had different desires and thoughts, etc. This traditional compatibilist view denies that responsibility requires leeway-liberty and maintains that moral freedom can exist in a deterministic world.

Both these traditional positions have been dramatically challenged in the last 35 years. In two papers published in 1969 and 1971, Harry Frankfurt critiqued the view that responsibility requires leeway-liberty, i.e. the power, starting from a given set of motives, beliefs, and attitudes, to bring about any one out of a significant range of possible decisions or intentions. On the other side, we have Peter van Inwagen's famous "Consequence Argument" (and its newer variants) for the conclusion that libertarian freedom is incompatible with natural determinism. But the Consequence Argument leaves open the question of whether moral responsibility requires freedom in this leeway-sense. "Semi-compatibilists" such as John Fischer have combined the two positions, holding that leeway-liberty is incompatible with determinism, but also that moral freedom only requires kinds of control that are compatible with determinism – in particular, dispositions to be receptive and responsive to various kinds of practical reason. Another camp, the "source-incompatiblists" hold that the Consequence Argument or similar reasons show that moral freedom is incompatible with determinism even if (or though) it does not require leeway. Some defenders of this view argue, for example, that moral freedom involves "agent-causation," which cannot be determined by events governed by causal laws.

Main Themes in Readings: We will examine some of the most important representatives of these different views as they have developed in the last 35 years, in a natural order that helps reveal how positions developed in response to earlier proposals. In particular, we will focus in particular on three issues:

1. Are Frankfurt-style counterexamples to leeway-libertarian requirements compelling, or are there adequate libertarian defenses of leeway-requirements?
2. Does the concept of agent-causation make sense (in particular, how does one act for reasons in these models?), and if so, does it necessarily involve leeway?
3. Do leeway-libertarians have any satisfaction answer to the famous difficulty (often called the "luck" problem or "arbitrariness" objection) that they cannot explain why an agent choose one accessible option over another?

Links to Related Topics: The free will literature is closely linked with (i) work on action theory and accounts of intentionality, (ii) work on personal autonomy or development of one's own practical identity; (iii) issues in metaethics such as moral luck and the internalism/externalism debate regarding moral motivation; (iv) positions on the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and moral freedom; (v) developments in virtue epistemolgy. Students who are interested in these links, or in historical sources of the contemporary positions (e.g. comparisons of medieval and contemporary positions), will be welcome to develop such connections in final papers. Our supplementary readings will include some articles in these connected areas. However, our primary readings will stay focused on the main lines of development in the contemporary free will literature itself.

Likely Readings:
Books

1. Free Will, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2002), edited Gary Watson. Must be 2nd ed!
2. John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control (Cambridge 1998). New pb. ed.
3. Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room (Bradford 1984)
4. Timothy O'Connor, Persons and Causes (Oxford, 2002); New paperback edition.
5. Laura Ekstrom, Free Will (HarperCollins, 1999); paperback edition.
6. Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1998)

Articles and book chapters

1. John Davenport, “The Deliberative Relevance of Refraining from Deciding: A Response to McKenna and Pereboom,” Acta Analytica 21 no.4 (Fall 2006): 62–88.
2. Keith Wyma, “Moral Responsibility and Leeway for Action,” APQ 34 (January 1997).
3. Ishtiyaque Haji, Deontic Morality and Control (Cambridge, 2002), chs. 1-3.
4. David Copp, “Defending the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: Blameworthiness and Moral Responsibility,” Noûs 31 (1997).
5. Michael McKenna, “Robustness, Control, and the Demand for Morally Significant Counterexamples,” from McKenna and Widerker, eds. Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities (Ashgate, 2004).
6. Michael Della Rocca, “Frankfurt, Fischer, and Flickers,” Noûs 32 (March 1998).
7. John Fischer, “Recent Work on Moral Responsibility,” Ethics 110, No. 1 (Oct., 1999), pp. 93–139.
8. Eleonore Stump, “Alternative Possibilities and Responsibility: The Flicker of Freedom,” Journal of Ethics (1999).
9. Linda Zagzebski, “Does Libertarian Freedom Require Alternate Possibilities?” Philosophical Perspectives 14: Action and Freedom (2000).
10. 10. Gary Watson, “Free Action and Free Will,” reprinted in Watson, Agency and Answerability (Oxford University Press, 2004).
11. John Davenport, “Liberty of the Higher-Order Will,” Faith and Philosophy 19.4 (October 2002).
12. Derk Pereboom, Living Without Free Will (Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch.1.
13. Randolph Clarke, selection from Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (Oxford, 2003).