- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Homeric Ethics
- Plato's Ethics
- Aristotle's Ethics
- Epicurus: Freedom, Death, and Hedonism
- Cynicism and Stoicism
- Ancient Scepticism
- Platonic Ethics in Later Antiquity
- Thomism
- The Franciscans
- Later Christian Ethics
- Nature, Law, and Natural Law
- Seventeenth-Century Moral Philosophy: Self-Help, Self-Knowledge, and the Devil's Mountain
- Rousseau and Ethics
- Utilitarianism: Bentham and Rashdall
- Rationalism
- Rational Intuitionism
- Moral Sense and Sentimentalism
- Butler's Ethics
- Hume's Place in the History of Ethics
- Adam Smith
- Kant's Moral Philosophy
- Kantian Ethics
- Post-Kantianism
- Hegel and Marx
- J. S. Mill
- Sidgwick
- British Idealist Ethics
- Ethics in the Analytic Tradition
- Free Will
- Emotion and the Emotions
- Happiness, Suffering, and Death
- Autonomy
- Egoism, Partiality, and Impartiality
- Conscience, Guilt, and Shame
- Moral Psychology and Virtue
- Justice, Equality, and Rights
- Styles of Moral Relativism: a Critical Family Tree
- Moral Metaphysics
- Constructing Practical Ethics
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter analyses the problem of free will and moral responsibility, to which the history of philosophy records three standard reactions. Compatibilists maintain that it is possible for us to have the free will required for moral responsibility if determinism is true. Others contend that determinism is not compossible with our having the free will required for moral responsibility – they are incompatibilists – but they resist the reasons for determinism and claim that we do possess free will of this kind. They advocate the libertarian position. Hard determinists are also incompatibilists, but they accept that determinism is true and that we lack the sort of free will required for moral responsibility. Source and leeway theories, and the notions of incompatibilism and libertarianism, are discussed.
Keywords: moral responsibility, determinism, incompatibilism, libertarianism
Derk Pereboom is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He is the author of Living without Free Will (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Oxford University Press, 2011); co-author (together with Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, and Manuel Vargas) of Four Views on Free Will (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); and he has published articles in free will, philosophy of mind, history of modern philosophy, and philosophy of religion.
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- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Homeric Ethics
- Plato's Ethics
- Aristotle's Ethics
- Epicurus: Freedom, Death, and Hedonism
- Cynicism and Stoicism
- Ancient Scepticism
- Platonic Ethics in Later Antiquity
- Thomism
- The Franciscans
- Later Christian Ethics
- Nature, Law, and Natural Law
- Seventeenth-Century Moral Philosophy: Self-Help, Self-Knowledge, and the Devil's Mountain
- Rousseau and Ethics
- Utilitarianism: Bentham and Rashdall
- Rationalism
- Rational Intuitionism
- Moral Sense and Sentimentalism
- Butler's Ethics
- Hume's Place in the History of Ethics
- Adam Smith
- Kant's Moral Philosophy
- Kantian Ethics
- Post-Kantianism
- Hegel and Marx
- J. S. Mill
- Sidgwick
- British Idealist Ethics
- Ethics in the Analytic Tradition
- Free Will
- Emotion and the Emotions
- Happiness, Suffering, and Death
- Autonomy
- Egoism, Partiality, and Impartiality
- Conscience, Guilt, and Shame
- Moral Psychology and Virtue
- Justice, Equality, and Rights
- Styles of Moral Relativism: a Critical Family Tree
- Moral Metaphysics
- Constructing Practical Ethics
- Index