L'A. cherche a expliquer pourquoi sa conception de la liberte et de la volonte libre est dist... more L'A. cherche a expliquer pourquoi sa conception de la liberte et de la volonte libre est distincte des autres conceptions traditionnelles et contemporaines, conceptions incompatibilistes et libertaristes y comprises
The landscape of free will debate was simpler in the 1960s when I first began dealing with the pr... more The landscape of free will debate was simpler in the 1960s when I first began dealing with the problem of free will. The unstated assumption was that if you had scientific leanings, you would naturally be a compatibilist about free will (believing it to be compatible with determinism). By contrast, if you defended a libertarian or incompatibilist free will, requiring indeterminism, you must inevitably reduce free will to mere chance or to the mystery of uncaused causes, immaterial minds, noumenal selves, or prime movers unmoved. The question I set for myself back then was how one might reconcile a traditional incompatibilist free will requiring indeterminism with modern science without reducing it to either chance or mystery. It has turned out that doing so required rethinking many facets of the traditional problem of free will from the ground up. I report on some results of this rethinking in this paper.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2014
Over the past five decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to w... more Over the past five decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which it requires that agents be to some degree ultimately responsible for the formation of their own wills (characters, motives and purposes). To act ‘of one's own free will’ in this sense is to act ‘from a will’ that is to some extent ‘of one's own free making’. A free will of this ultimate kind (often called ‘incompatibilist’ or ‘libertarian’) has been under attack in the modern era as obscure and unintelligible. In this paper, I discuss the arguments for such a view and compare it to other contemporary views of free will and action. I then address criticisms that such a non-determinist free will cannot be made intelligible or reconciled with modern science, does not allow sufficient agent control, reduces to mere chance or luck or randomness, leads to various regresses, or fails to account for moral responsibility, among other criticisms.
El libre albedrío y la dialéctica de la individualidad: ¿se le puede dar sentido al libre albedrí... more El libre albedrío y la dialéctica de la individualidad: ¿se le puede dar sentido al libre albedrío tradicional que requiere de la responsabilidad última?
's Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments develops an original compatibilist approach to issues ... more 's Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments develops an original compatibilist approach to issues about moral responsibility and freedom that cannot be ignored by anyone working on these topics. Wallace's theory is "Strawsonian" in the sense that it is heavily indebted to P. F. Strawson's influential work on reactive attitudes. But we would seriously underestimate the originality of Wallace's accomplishment if we said that his theory was merely an extension of Strawson's. It includes new twists that Strawson did not envisage and removes some weaknesses in Strawson's position that are clearly there. The Strawsonian approach is one of several new compatibilist approaches to responsibility and freedom that have changed the face of debates about these topics over the past four decades; and Wallace's book is the most developed and challenging Strawsonian view available. I have reservations about some of Wallace's conclusions, but I have nothing but admiration for the book. It develops an original position and is written with critical acumen and in a lucid style that could be shown to graduate students as a model of what good philosophical writing can be. I am an incompatibilist about free will and responsibility, so I will focus my remarks on Wallace's defense of compatibilism. That defense is central to the book, though focused mainly in chapter 4 to 7. (I agree with much of what he says about the reactive attitudes in chapters 1 to 3, including his critical remarks on Strawson's own view.) Wallace admits that everyday intuitions about the incompatibility of free will and determinism are powerful. Nonetheless, he thinks incompatibilist intuitions rest upon mistaken extensions of our ordinary practices of excusing and exempting persons from moral responsibility. His goal is to expose these mistakes. Compatibilists usually try to attack the incompatibilist assumption that having alternative possibilities or the power to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. But Wallace thinks this line of attack is weak (pp.115, 259). He thinks compatibilists should instead reject the claim that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities in the first place-a claim that is now often called "the principle of alternative possibilities," or PAP. This "neocompatibilist" line of attacking PAP has become increasingly popular in recent decades. But Wallace's approach to it is unique and original.1 A successful attack on PAP, he argues, will require a thorough account of ordinary practices of holding agents responsible for their actions. Wallace's account is briefly this. In some cases when we normally excuse persons from responsibility it is true that they could not have done otherwise. But even when this is the case, not being able to do otherwise is not the reason we excuse them. The reason is that in cases of legitimate excuses, the agents did not choose to do what they are being blamed for. Turning to exemptions, we exempt persons from responsibility for such conditions as childhood, insanity, addiction, behavior control, and the like. Sometimes such persons also could not have done otherwise. But again that is not the reason we exempt them. The reason is that they lack the power of "reflective self-control"-"the power to grasp and apply moral reasons and...to control or regulate [their] behavior in the light of such reasons" (p. 157). But satisfying this condition, Wallace argues, also does not require the power to do otherwise. So ordinary conditions of moral responsibility do not require alternative possibilities and hence do not require the absence of determinism. I now turn to some reservations about this line of argument, first regarding determinism and then the power to do otherwise-reservations of an admittedly unreconstructed incompatibilist. Wallace concedes that if an event (e.g., a human action) is determined, it is physically impossible that it occur given the facts and the laws of nature (pp. 201-2). But he denies that mere physical
The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian v... more The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian view of free will I have developed in many works over the past four decades. The issues discussed all have a bearing on the central question of how one might make sense of a traditional free will requiring indeterminism in the light of modern science. This task involves, among other things, avoiding all traditional libertarian appeals to unusual forms of agency or causation (uncaused causes, noumenal selves, non-event agent causes, etc.) that cannot be accounted for by ordinary modes of explanation familiar to the natural and human sciences. Doing this, I argue, requires piecing together a "complex tapestry" of ideas and arguments that involve rethinking many traditional assumptions about free will. The paper also argues that one cannot get to the heart of historical debates about free will without distinguishing different kinds of freedom, different senses of will, and different notions of control, among other distinctions. I especially focus here on different notions of freedom and control that are necessary to make sense of free will.
For four decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which agent... more For four decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which agents are required to be ultimately responsible for the creation or formation of their own wills (characters and purposes). The aim of this paper is to explain how a free will of this traditional kind —which I argue is incompatible with determinism— can be reconciled with modern developments in the sciences and philosophy. I address criticisms that a nondeterminist free will of this kind does not allow sufficient agent control, reduces to mere chance or randomness, fails to account of moral responsibility, and cannot be reconciled with modern science; and I relate such a free will to the nature of the self or person by developing what I call a "dialectic of selfhood."
For four decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which agent... more For four decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which agents are required to be ultimately responsible for the creation or formation of their own wills (characters and purposes).The aim of this paper is to explain how a free will of this traditional kind —which I argue is incompatible with determinism— can be reconciled with modern developments in the sciences and philosophy. I address criticisms that a nondeterminist free will of this kind does not allow sufficient agent control, reduces to mere chance or randomness, fails to account of moral responsibility, and cannot be reconciled with modern science; and I relate such a free will to the nature of the self or person by developing what I call a ‘‘dialectic of selfhood.”
Bernard Berofsky Berofsky's book Determinism (1971) had a considerable influence on me when ... more Bernard Berofsky Berofsky's book Determinism (1971) had a considerable influence on me when I first began thinking about free will. It defended a sophisticated com-patibilist position that I could neither accept nor easily dismiss (a position developed further in Freedom from Necessity ...
R. Jay Wallace's Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments develops an original compatibilist a... more R. Jay Wallace's Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments develops an original compatibilist approach to issues about moral responsibility and freedom that cannot be ignored by anyone working on these topics. Wallace's theory is "Strawsonian" in the sense that it is heavily indebted to P. F. Strawson's influential work on reactive attitudes. But we would seriously underestimate the originality of Wallace's accomplishment if we said that his theory was merely an extension of Strawson's. It includes new twists that Strawson did not envisage and removes some weaknesses in Strawson's position that are clearly there. The Strawsonian approach is one of several new compatibilist approaches to responsibility and freedom that have changed the face of debates about these topics over the past four decades; and Wallace's book is the most developed and challenging Strawsonian view available. I have reservations about some of Wallace's conclusions, but I have nothing but admiration for the book. It develops an original position and is written with critical acumen and in a lucid style that could be shown to graduate students as a model of what good philosophical writing can be. I am an incompatibilist about free will and responsibility, so I will focus my remarks on Wallace's defense of compatibilism. That defense is central to the book, though focused mainly in chapter 4 to 7. (I agree with much of what he says about the reactive attitudes in chapters 1 to 3, including his critical remarks on Strawson's own view.) Wallace admits that everyday intuitions about the incompatibility of free will and determinism are powerful. Nonetheless, he thinks incompatibilist intuitions rest upon mistaken extensions of our ordinary practices of excusing and exempting persons from moral responsibility. His goal is to expose these mistakes. Compatibilists usually try to attack the incompatibilist assumption that having alternative possibilities or the power to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. But Wallace thinks this line of attack is weak (pp. 115, 259). He thinks compatibilists should instead reject the claim that moral
The participating institutions of the American Cancer Society National Prostate Cancer Detection ... more The participating institutions of the American Cancer Society National Prostate Cancer Detection Project did 520 biopsies on 2425 men over a 3.5-year period. A total of 88 cancers were confirmed pathologically, 93% of which clinically were organ confined. In 324 men (62.3%), a recommendation for biopsy was made based solely on the results of transrectal ultrasonography (TRUS); in 69 patients (13.3%), solely on the digital rectal examination (DRE); in 116 patients (22.3%), on abnormal DRE and TRUS examinations; and in 11 patients (2.1%), in whom DRE and TRUS were normal, on elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels. The TRUS was abnormal in 80.6% of men found to have cancer, and the PSA level and DRE were abnormal for 67% and 50% of cancers, respectively. The influence of PSA level on cancer detection increased as the serum level increased above 4 ng/ ml. The positive predictive values of both the DRE and From the *M.
In a recent paper in this journal, "How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of ... more In a recent paper in this journal, "How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?" Christopher Evan Franklin critically examines my libertarian view of free will and attempts to improve upon it. He says that while Kane's influential [view] offers many important advances in the development of a defensible libertarian theory of free will and moral responsibility. .. [he made] "two crucial mistakes in formulating libertarianism"-one about the location of indeterminism, the other about its role-"both of which have helped fan the flame of the luck argument". In this paper, I respond to Franklin's criticisms, arguing that, so far from making it significantly more difficult to answer objections about luck and control, as he claims, giving indeterminism the location and role I do makes it possible to answer such objections and many other related objections to libertarian free will. A central theme of this paper will emerge in my responses: In order to make sense of freedom of will in general and to do justice to the complex historical debates about it, one must distinguish different kinds of control agents may have over events and correspondingly different kinds of freedom they may possess.
L'A. cherche a expliquer pourquoi sa conception de la liberte et de la volonte libre est dist... more L'A. cherche a expliquer pourquoi sa conception de la liberte et de la volonte libre est distincte des autres conceptions traditionnelles et contemporaines, conceptions incompatibilistes et libertaristes y comprises
The landscape of free will debate was simpler in the 1960s when I first began dealing with the pr... more The landscape of free will debate was simpler in the 1960s when I first began dealing with the problem of free will. The unstated assumption was that if you had scientific leanings, you would naturally be a compatibilist about free will (believing it to be compatible with determinism). By contrast, if you defended a libertarian or incompatibilist free will, requiring indeterminism, you must inevitably reduce free will to mere chance or to the mystery of uncaused causes, immaterial minds, noumenal selves, or prime movers unmoved. The question I set for myself back then was how one might reconcile a traditional incompatibilist free will requiring indeterminism with modern science without reducing it to either chance or mystery. It has turned out that doing so required rethinking many facets of the traditional problem of free will from the ground up. I report on some results of this rethinking in this paper.
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2014
Over the past five decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to w... more Over the past five decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which it requires that agents be to some degree ultimately responsible for the formation of their own wills (characters, motives and purposes). To act ‘of one's own free will’ in this sense is to act ‘from a will’ that is to some extent ‘of one's own free making’. A free will of this ultimate kind (often called ‘incompatibilist’ or ‘libertarian’) has been under attack in the modern era as obscure and unintelligible. In this paper, I discuss the arguments for such a view and compare it to other contemporary views of free will and action. I then address criticisms that such a non-determinist free will cannot be made intelligible or reconciled with modern science, does not allow sufficient agent control, reduces to mere chance or luck or randomness, leads to various regresses, or fails to account for moral responsibility, among other criticisms.
El libre albedrío y la dialéctica de la individualidad: ¿se le puede dar sentido al libre albedrí... more El libre albedrío y la dialéctica de la individualidad: ¿se le puede dar sentido al libre albedrío tradicional que requiere de la responsabilidad última?
's Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments develops an original compatibilist approach to issues ... more 's Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments develops an original compatibilist approach to issues about moral responsibility and freedom that cannot be ignored by anyone working on these topics. Wallace's theory is "Strawsonian" in the sense that it is heavily indebted to P. F. Strawson's influential work on reactive attitudes. But we would seriously underestimate the originality of Wallace's accomplishment if we said that his theory was merely an extension of Strawson's. It includes new twists that Strawson did not envisage and removes some weaknesses in Strawson's position that are clearly there. The Strawsonian approach is one of several new compatibilist approaches to responsibility and freedom that have changed the face of debates about these topics over the past four decades; and Wallace's book is the most developed and challenging Strawsonian view available. I have reservations about some of Wallace's conclusions, but I have nothing but admiration for the book. It develops an original position and is written with critical acumen and in a lucid style that could be shown to graduate students as a model of what good philosophical writing can be. I am an incompatibilist about free will and responsibility, so I will focus my remarks on Wallace's defense of compatibilism. That defense is central to the book, though focused mainly in chapter 4 to 7. (I agree with much of what he says about the reactive attitudes in chapters 1 to 3, including his critical remarks on Strawson's own view.) Wallace admits that everyday intuitions about the incompatibility of free will and determinism are powerful. Nonetheless, he thinks incompatibilist intuitions rest upon mistaken extensions of our ordinary practices of excusing and exempting persons from moral responsibility. His goal is to expose these mistakes. Compatibilists usually try to attack the incompatibilist assumption that having alternative possibilities or the power to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. But Wallace thinks this line of attack is weak (pp.115, 259). He thinks compatibilists should instead reject the claim that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities in the first place-a claim that is now often called "the principle of alternative possibilities," or PAP. This "neocompatibilist" line of attacking PAP has become increasingly popular in recent decades. But Wallace's approach to it is unique and original.1 A successful attack on PAP, he argues, will require a thorough account of ordinary practices of holding agents responsible for their actions. Wallace's account is briefly this. In some cases when we normally excuse persons from responsibility it is true that they could not have done otherwise. But even when this is the case, not being able to do otherwise is not the reason we excuse them. The reason is that in cases of legitimate excuses, the agents did not choose to do what they are being blamed for. Turning to exemptions, we exempt persons from responsibility for such conditions as childhood, insanity, addiction, behavior control, and the like. Sometimes such persons also could not have done otherwise. But again that is not the reason we exempt them. The reason is that they lack the power of "reflective self-control"-"the power to grasp and apply moral reasons and...to control or regulate [their] behavior in the light of such reasons" (p. 157). But satisfying this condition, Wallace argues, also does not require the power to do otherwise. So ordinary conditions of moral responsibility do not require alternative possibilities and hence do not require the absence of determinism. I now turn to some reservations about this line of argument, first regarding determinism and then the power to do otherwise-reservations of an admittedly unreconstructed incompatibilist. Wallace concedes that if an event (e.g., a human action) is determined, it is physically impossible that it occur given the facts and the laws of nature (pp. 201-2). But he denies that mere physical
The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian v... more The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian view of free will I have developed in many works over the past four decades. The issues discussed all have a bearing on the central question of how one might make sense of a traditional free will requiring indeterminism in the light of modern science. This task involves, among other things, avoiding all traditional libertarian appeals to unusual forms of agency or causation (uncaused causes, noumenal selves, non-event agent causes, etc.) that cannot be accounted for by ordinary modes of explanation familiar to the natural and human sciences. Doing this, I argue, requires piecing together a "complex tapestry" of ideas and arguments that involve rethinking many traditional assumptions about free will. The paper also argues that one cannot get to the heart of historical debates about free will without distinguishing different kinds of freedom, different senses of will, and different notions of control, among other distinctions. I especially focus here on different notions of freedom and control that are necessary to make sense of free will.
For four decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which agent... more For four decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which agents are required to be ultimately responsible for the creation or formation of their own wills (characters and purposes). The aim of this paper is to explain how a free will of this traditional kind —which I argue is incompatible with determinism— can be reconciled with modern developments in the sciences and philosophy. I address criticisms that a nondeterminist free will of this kind does not allow sufficient agent control, reduces to mere chance or randomness, fails to account of moral responsibility, and cannot be reconciled with modern science; and I relate such a free will to the nature of the self or person by developing what I call a "dialectic of selfhood."
For four decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which agent... more For four decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which agents are required to be ultimately responsible for the creation or formation of their own wills (characters and purposes).The aim of this paper is to explain how a free will of this traditional kind —which I argue is incompatible with determinism— can be reconciled with modern developments in the sciences and philosophy. I address criticisms that a nondeterminist free will of this kind does not allow sufficient agent control, reduces to mere chance or randomness, fails to account of moral responsibility, and cannot be reconciled with modern science; and I relate such a free will to the nature of the self or person by developing what I call a ‘‘dialectic of selfhood.”
Bernard Berofsky Berofsky's book Determinism (1971) had a considerable influence on me when ... more Bernard Berofsky Berofsky's book Determinism (1971) had a considerable influence on me when I first began thinking about free will. It defended a sophisticated com-patibilist position that I could neither accept nor easily dismiss (a position developed further in Freedom from Necessity ...
R. Jay Wallace's Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments develops an original compatibilist a... more R. Jay Wallace's Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments develops an original compatibilist approach to issues about moral responsibility and freedom that cannot be ignored by anyone working on these topics. Wallace's theory is "Strawsonian" in the sense that it is heavily indebted to P. F. Strawson's influential work on reactive attitudes. But we would seriously underestimate the originality of Wallace's accomplishment if we said that his theory was merely an extension of Strawson's. It includes new twists that Strawson did not envisage and removes some weaknesses in Strawson's position that are clearly there. The Strawsonian approach is one of several new compatibilist approaches to responsibility and freedom that have changed the face of debates about these topics over the past four decades; and Wallace's book is the most developed and challenging Strawsonian view available. I have reservations about some of Wallace's conclusions, but I have nothing but admiration for the book. It develops an original position and is written with critical acumen and in a lucid style that could be shown to graduate students as a model of what good philosophical writing can be. I am an incompatibilist about free will and responsibility, so I will focus my remarks on Wallace's defense of compatibilism. That defense is central to the book, though focused mainly in chapter 4 to 7. (I agree with much of what he says about the reactive attitudes in chapters 1 to 3, including his critical remarks on Strawson's own view.) Wallace admits that everyday intuitions about the incompatibility of free will and determinism are powerful. Nonetheless, he thinks incompatibilist intuitions rest upon mistaken extensions of our ordinary practices of excusing and exempting persons from moral responsibility. His goal is to expose these mistakes. Compatibilists usually try to attack the incompatibilist assumption that having alternative possibilities or the power to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism. But Wallace thinks this line of attack is weak (pp. 115, 259). He thinks compatibilists should instead reject the claim that moral
The participating institutions of the American Cancer Society National Prostate Cancer Detection ... more The participating institutions of the American Cancer Society National Prostate Cancer Detection Project did 520 biopsies on 2425 men over a 3.5-year period. A total of 88 cancers were confirmed pathologically, 93% of which clinically were organ confined. In 324 men (62.3%), a recommendation for biopsy was made based solely on the results of transrectal ultrasonography (TRUS); in 69 patients (13.3%), solely on the digital rectal examination (DRE); in 116 patients (22.3%), on abnormal DRE and TRUS examinations; and in 11 patients (2.1%), in whom DRE and TRUS were normal, on elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels. The TRUS was abnormal in 80.6% of men found to have cancer, and the PSA level and DRE were abnormal for 67% and 50% of cancers, respectively. The influence of PSA level on cancer detection increased as the serum level increased above 4 ng/ ml. The positive predictive values of both the DRE and From the *M.
In a recent paper in this journal, "How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of ... more In a recent paper in this journal, "How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?" Christopher Evan Franklin critically examines my libertarian view of free will and attempts to improve upon it. He says that while Kane's influential [view] offers many important advances in the development of a defensible libertarian theory of free will and moral responsibility. .. [he made] "two crucial mistakes in formulating libertarianism"-one about the location of indeterminism, the other about its role-"both of which have helped fan the flame of the luck argument". In this paper, I respond to Franklin's criticisms, arguing that, so far from making it significantly more difficult to answer objections about luck and control, as he claims, giving indeterminism the location and role I do makes it possible to answer such objections and many other related objections to libertarian free will. A central theme of this paper will emerge in my responses: In order to make sense of freedom of will in general and to do justice to the complex historical debates about it, one must distinguish different kinds of control agents may have over events and correspondingly different kinds of freedom they may possess.
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Papers by Robert Kane