Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will and Moral Responsibility

Björnsson, Gunnar; Pereboom, Derk

doi:10.1002/9781118661666.ch9

Cited by 23 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…(Feltz et al (2013) take the fact that deterministic manipulation undermines responsibility more than do non-manipulative deterministic scenarios to itself undermine EQUIVALENCE. For discussion, see Björnsson and Pereboom (2015).) 20 The current study introduced a question about deserved punishment to strengthen the connection to basic desert, but this question too is significantly open to interpretation, as subjects could be operating with consequentialist or contractualist notions of deserved punishment rather than with basic retributivist notions.…”

Section: Second Question: Does Agreement With Ouc Influence Agreement...mentioning

confidence: 97%

Outsourcing the deep self: Deep self discordance does not explain away intuitions in manipulation arguments

Björnsson

2016

Philosophical Psychology

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Manipulation arguments have figured prominently in recent debates about incompatibilism about moral responsibility, with compatibilists of various stripes seeing these arguments as particularly challenging. 1 In its basic form, a manipulation argument for incompatibilism tries to establish that there is a case of manipulation such that: UNDERMINING: It undermines the moral responsibility of the manipulated agent. EQUIVALENCE: It is not relevantly different from any other form of deterministic causal influence by factors outside an agent's control.

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Section: Second Question: Does Agreement With Ouc Influence Agreement...mentioning

confidence: 97%

Outsourcing the deep self: Deep self discordance does not explain away intuitions in manipulation arguments

Björnsson

2016

Philosophical Psychology

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“…Paolacci and Chandler 2014. 3 For some earlier overviews of the relevance of experimental philosophy to the philosophy of moral responsibility specifically, see Vargas 2006;Nelkin 2007;Sommers 2010;Björnsson and Pereboom 2016;Chan et al 2016. 2(20) Draft for Nelkin and Pereboom, Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility gbjorn@su.se support for that position.…”

Section: Experimental Philosophy and Moral Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental Philosophy and Moral Responsibility

Björnsson

2022

The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility

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Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? According to reasoning behind the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT), it might: If individual judges independently track the truth with even modest reliability, this reliability can quickly aggregate as the number of judges goes up. This chapter asks whether preconditions for such aggregation hold with respect to folk attributions of responsibility to deterministic scenarios, and whether it has consequences for philosophical method. Section 1 introduces the basic assumptions behind the CJT. Section 2 looks at the distribution of responsibility attributions in recent empirical studies. Section 3 looks at evidence concerning folk reliability, including evidence supporting two error theories for folk compatibilism—the No Matter What and Indeterminist Intrusion hypotheses—and one error theory for folk incompatiblism—the Bypassing hypotheses. It is argued that data undermines the first two error theories and suggests that only a limited class of judgments are subject to the third. Section 4 explains how conditional error theories can change the support of a position without begging the question. Section 5 asks whether the intricacies of the compatibilism question should lead us to deny that the folk are even modestly reliable in their judgments. Section 6 suggests that even if they are, their judgments will often not be independent enough to add much to the judgments of professional philosophers. Section 7 concludes.

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“…But that's significantly different from being blamed for the death of the victims. 23 Björnsson 2011;Björnsson and Persson 2012;Björnsson 2014b;Björnsson and Pereboom 2015. 24 Arpaly 2003;2006;McKenna 2012;Arpaly and Schroeder 2014.…”

Section: The Explanatory Quality Of Will Condition and Lack Of Awarenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining (Away) the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

Björnsson¹

2017

Oxford Scholarship Online

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It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent "should have known better", but it is unclear how to spell out this normative condition.This chapter combines (a) an independently motivated account of responsibility, blame, and credit as grounded in a normal explanatory relation between agential qualities and objects of responsibility with (b) the familiar Strawsonian idea that moral blame and credit depend on the agent's quality of will. The resulting explanatory quality of will condition on moral responsibility is then further motivated by being shown to account for the effects on moral blame and credit of justifications, as well as of excuses and undermined control in cases not involving ignorance.The explanatory quality of will condition is finally applied to cases involving various degrees of lack of awareness. Though this condition itself involves no awareness requirement, it is shown how it accounts for the degrees to which lack of awareness can excuse. It is also explained how lack of awareness fails as an excuse exactly when the agent should have known better and can be blamed for not doing so.

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Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will and Moral Responsibility

Cited by 23 publications

References 51 publications

Outsourcing the deep self: Deep self discordance does not explain away intuitions in manipulation arguments

Outsourcing the deep self: Deep self discordance does not explain away intuitions in manipulation arguments

Experimental Philosophy and Moral Responsibility

Explaining (Away) the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

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