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This book aims to help readers think more clearly about free will. It identifies and makes vivid the most important conceptual obstacles to the justified belief in the existence of free will, and meets them head on. It also clarifies the central concepts in the philosophical debate about free will and moral responsibility, criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will, and develops two overlapping conceptions of free will: one for readers who are convinced that free will is incompatible with determinism (incompatibilists), and another for readers who are convinced of the opposite (compatibilists). Luck poses problems for all believers in free will, and this book offers novel solutions. One chapter explains influential neuroscientific studies of free will, and debunks some extravagant interpretations of the data. Other featured topics include abilities and alternative possibilities, control and decision-making, the bearing of manipulation on free will, and the development of human infants into free agents.

Self-deception is made unnecessarily puzzling by the assumption that it is an intrapersonal analog of ordinary interpersonal deception. In paradigmatic cases, interpersonal deception is intentional and involves some time at which the deceiver disbelieves what the deceived believes. The assumption that self-deception is intentional and that the self-deceiver believes that some proposition is true while also believing that it is false produces interesting conceptual puzzles, but it also produces a fundamentally mistaken view of the dynamics of self-deception. This target article challenges the assumption and presents an alternative view of the nature and etiology of self-deception. Drawing upon empirical studies of cognitive biases, it resolves familiar “paradoxes” about the dynamics of self- deception and the condition of being self-deceived. Conceptually sufficient conditions for self-deception are offered and putative empirical demonstrations of a kind of self-deception in which a subject believes that a proposition is true while also believing that it is false are criticized. Self-deception is neither irresolvably paradoxical nor mysterious, and it is explicable without the assistance of mental exotica. The key to understanding its dynamics is a proper appreciation of our capacity for acquiring and retaining motivationally biased beliefs.

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