Works in Progress

Minds Matter
The immodest ambition of this book is to unwind the traditional problem of free will and moral responsibility. I think the problem can be unwound, because I believe it is a philosophical one—that is to say, I believe the problem is created by certain philosophical pictures to which we are naturally (or culturally) prone. We model our experiences in certain ways, and we end up in paradox and difficulty. One such picture is what I will call the ordinary notion of control, another is what I will call the merited-consequences conception of responsibility. Both are natural, and fine for certain purposes, but together they lead to the traditional problem of free will and moral responsibility. The solution, I believe, is to do some remodeling: to revisit these models, understand what has gone wrong, and replace them with something better. This is what I attempt. The replacements I advocate are, I believe, still natural models of our experience. I believe the replacements are better models than those that lead us into difficulty—and not just because they avoid the difficulty. I believe they have a greater claim to being correct.

I presented this material as Gifford Lectures in Glasgow in November of 2024.  I am now converting them into a book, as outlined below.

Introduction
Part One: Freedom
Chapter 1: Problems in Life and a Problem in Theory
Chapter 2: The Underlying Problem
Chapter 3: Mind Control
Part Two: Moral Responsibility
Chapter 4: The Ethical Challenge
Chapter 5: Fairness, Sanction, and Condemnation
Chapter 6: The Force of Fact
Chapter 7: Beyond Belief
Chapter 8: Matter that Matters
Conclusion
Postscript One: The Victim-Criminal
Postscript Two: Artificial Intelligence

“Not Like Changing a Spark Plug: The Immediacy of Mental Agency”
Prepared for a conference in honor of my teacher Richard Moran, this paper highlights the ways in which his apparently simple insight, that changing your mind is not like changing a bad spark plug, can unfold into significant philosophical progress.

“Harry and the Wolf: Real Selves and the Reason View, Reprised”
Prepared for a conference in honor of Susan Wolf, this paper revisits Wolf’s Freedom within Reason, paying particular attention to her way of  understanding the problem of free will and moral responsibility:  The problem is to explain “how persons can coherently be understood to have a special status in virtue of which” they are open to that “distinctive and more serious” kind of criticism and blame to which, it seems, only morally responsible adults are open.  While accepting Wolf’s account of the problem, I express some dissatisfaction her solution.  I consider, instead, a “divide-and-conquer” strategy: Our distinctive and serious responses to moral failing come in different forms, with correspondingly different conditions for their aptness or fairness. The divide-and-conquer strategy, while a response to Wolf’s way of understanding the problem, can be pursued by a conventional compatibilist—perhaps most effectively by a view that I believe Wolf would classify as a “real self” view.

“Extrinsic Reasons, Alienation, and Moral Philosophy”
In the last few decades virtue ethics has become a staple in introductory ethics courses, taking its place alongside consequentialism and deontology. These three comprise the default syllabus. Recent interest in virtue ethics is due, in no small part, to a spate of criticisms directed against the perceived alternatives, utilitarianism and Kantianism. In this paper I hope, not to revisit these familiar debates, but rather to point out a familiar but overlooked fact about action, a fact with implications that can be understood to unify and underwrite many of the criticisms against modern moral philosophy. The overlooked fact, once appreciated, does indeed tell against a particular approach to moral philosophy.

“Attempting Virtue”
This long-neglected paper displays the role of each form of control in our attempts at moral self-improvement. It examines the way in which trying to believe can be self-defeating, and shows that the attempt to perform a virtuous action or adopt a virtuous attitude will be self-defeating in just the same sense.