Four Views on Free Will

JOHN MARTIN FISCHER is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. In 2017 he was named a University Professor in the University of California. He has held a UC Presidential Chair and is a Past President of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division. Fischer has published widely on the topics of this debate, including two monographs, The Metaphysics of Free Will and (with Mark Ravizza) Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Four collections of his essays have been published by Oxford University Press: My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility, Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will, Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value, and Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will. ROBERT KANE is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Law at The University of Texas at Austin, where he was named an inaugural member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 1995. He is editor of two editions of Oxford Handbook of Free Will, and the author of nine books and eighty articles on mind, action, value, ethics, and free will, including Free Will and Values, Through the Moral Maze, The Significance of Free Will, Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom, and A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will. In 2017, Kane received the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who. DERK PEREBOOM is Susan Linn Sage Professor in the Philosophy Department at Cornell University. His areas of research include free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, and early modern philosophy, especially Kant. He is the author of Living without Free Will, Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions, Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism, and Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. He has published articles on free will and moral responsibility, consciousness and physicalism, nonreductive materialism, and on Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology. MANUEL VARGAS is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California San Diego. He writes about the overlap of moral and psychological issues concerning human agency and freedom, the history of philosophy in Latin America, and philosophical problems concerning social identities. He is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, which was awarded the APA Book Prize in 2015. He is the author of the forthcoming Mexican Philosophy and the co-editor of Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology and Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman.

Notes on Authors vi

Preface to the Second Edition viii

Acknowledgments ix

Some Terms and Concepts x

1 Libertarianism 1
Robert Kane

2 Compatibilism 51
John Martin Fischer

3 Hard Incompatibilism 92
Derk Pereboom

4 Revisionism 132
Manuel Vargas

5 Response to Fischer, Pereboom, and Vargas 173
Robert Kane

6 Response to Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas 189
John Martin Fischer

7 Response to Kane, Fischer, and Vargas 201
Derk Pereboom

8 Response to Kane, Fischer, and Pereboom 212
Manuel Vargas

Appendix: Some Free Will Debates 232

Bibliography 235

Index 253