Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities PDF Download

Author: Michael McKenna
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351777513
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This book was published in 2003. This book explores an important issue within the free will debate: the relation between free will and moral responsibility. In his seminal article "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility", Harry Frankfurt launched a vigorous attack on the standard conception of that relation, questioning the claim that a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise. Since then, Frankfurt's thesis has been at the center of philosophical discussions on free will and moral responsibility. "Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities", edited by David Widerker and Michael McKenna, draws together the most recent work on Frankfurt's thesis by leading theorists in the area of free will and responsibility. As the majority of the essays appear here for the first time, "Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities" offers the newest developments in this important debate.

Author: David Widerker
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754656982
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This book explores an important issue within the free will debate: the relation between free will and moral responsibility. In his seminal article Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility, Harry Frankfurt launched a vigorous attack on the standard conception of that relation, questioning the claim that a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise. Since then, Frankfurt's thesis has been at the center of philosophical discussions on free will and moral responsibility.Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities, edited by David Widerker and Michael McKenna, draws together the most recent work on Frankfurt's thesis by leading theorists in the area of free will and responsibility. As the majority of the essays appear here for the first time, Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities offers the newest developments in this important debate.

Author: Kevin Timpe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441115048
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Much contemporary scholarship on free will focuses on whether it is compatible with causal determinism. According to compatibilists, it is possible for an agent to be determined in all her choices and actions and still be free. Incompatibilists, on the other hand, think that the existence of free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism. There are two dominant general conceptions of the nature of free will. According to the first of these, free will is primarily a function of being able to do otherwise than one in fact does. On this view, free will centrally depends upon alternative possibilities. The second approach focuses instead on issues of sourcehood, holding that free will is primarily a function of an agent being the source of her actions in a particular way. This book demarcates these two different conceptions free will, explores the relationship between them, and examines how they relate to the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. It ultimately argues for a version of Source Incompatibilism.

Author: John Martin Fischer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195179552
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A collection of John Martin Fischer's essays on free will and moral responsibility. Fischer's overall framework contains an argument for the contention that moral responsibility does not require free will in the sense that implies alternative possibilities and a sketch of a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility.

Author: John Martin Fischer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721569
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Explores aspects of responsibility, including moral accountability; hierarchy, rationality, and the real self; and ethical responsibility and alternative possibilities.

Author: John Martin Fischer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316583759
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive, systematic theory of moral responsibility. The authors explore the conditions under which individuals are morally responsible for actions, omissions, consequences, and emotions. The leading idea in the book is that moral responsibility is based on 'guidance control'. This control has two components: the mechanism that issues in the relevant behavior must be the agent's own mechanism, and it must be appropriately responsive to reasons. The book develops an account of both components. The authors go on to offer a sustained defense of the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism.

Author: Neil Levy
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019161906X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The concept of luck has played an important role in debates concerning free will and moral responsibility, yet participants in these debates have relied upon an intuitive notion of what luck is. Neil Levy develops an account of luck, which is then applied to the free will debate. He argues that the standard luck objection succeeds against common accounts of libertarian free will, but that it is possible to amend libertarian accounts so that they are no more vulnerable to luck than is compatibilism. But compatibilist accounts of luck are themselves vulnerable to a powerful luck objection: historical compatibilisms cannot satisfactorily explain how agents can take responsibility for their constitutive luck; non-historical compatibilisms run into insurmountable difficulties with the epistemic condition on control over action. Levy argues that because epistemic conditions on control are so demanding that they are rarely satisfied, agents are not blameworthy for performing actions that they take to be best in a given situation. It follows that if there are any actions for which agents are responsible, they are akratic actions; but even these are unacceptably subject to luck. Levy goes on to discuss recent non-historical compatibilisms, and argues that they do not offer a viable alternative to control-based compatibilisms. He suggests that luck undermines our freedom and moral responsibility no matter whether determinism is true or not.

Author: Manuel Vargas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019969754X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Manuel Vargas presents a compelling and state-of-the-art defense of moral responsibility in the face of growing philosophical and scientific skepticism about free will and accountability. He shows how we can justify our responsibility practices, and provides a normatively and naturalistically adequate account of agency, blame, and desert.

Author: David Widerker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781315248660
Category : PHILOSOPHY
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Explores the relation between free will and moral responsibility. Harry Frankfurt's thesis has been at the center of philosophical discussions on free will and moral responsibility. This book draws on the work on Frankfurt's thesis by leading theorists in the area of free will and responsibility, and offers developments in this debate.

Author: Bruce N. Waller
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028166
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In this book the author examines the stubborn philosophical belief in moral responsibility, surveying the philosophical arguments for it, but focusing on the system that supports these arguments: powerful social and psychological factors that hold the belief in moral responsibility firmly in place.--Publisher's description.