Situationism and Moral Responsibility: Free Will in Fragments
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Many prominent accounts of free will and moral responsibility treat as central the ability of agents to respond to reasons. Call such theories Reasons accounts. In what follows, I consider the tenability of Reasons accounts in light of situationist social psychology and, to a lesser extent, the automaticity literature. In the first half of this chapter, I argue that Reasons accounts are genuinely threatened by contemporary psychology. In the second half of the paper I consider whether such threats can be met, and at what cost. Ultimately, I argue that Reasons accounts can abandon some familiar assumptions, and that doing so permits us to build a more empirically plausible picture of our agency. 1. Preliminaries: free will and moral responsibility ‘Free will ’ is a term of both ordinary and technical discourse. We might say that Ava chose to major in mathematics “of her own free will ” or that Ruth lacks free will because of, say, brainwashing or mental illness. What is less clear is whether ordinary sorts of usages of free will reflect a unified or single concept of free will. Perhaps ordinary usage picks out distinct features of the
Author: Manuel Vargas
Institution: University of California San Diego
Language: English
Topic: Free Will and Agency
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W299423618