Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views 285Bruce Waller is a skeptic about moral responsibility but not about free will. Here
are his three books:
Waller, Bruce. 2014. The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Waller, Bruce. 2011. Against Moral Responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Waller, Bruce. 1990. Freedom without Responsibility. Philadelphia, PA: Temple Univer-
sity Press.
These two books argue for skepticism about free will from a neuroscientific and
psychological point of view:
Libet, Benjamin. 2004. Mind Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wegner, Daniel. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mele’s book defends free will against arguments from neuroscience:
Mele, Alfred. 2009. Effective Intentions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sam Harris’s Free Will is a widely read popular book that argues for a skeptical
position on free will and also discusses the neuroscientific arguments:
Harris, Sam. 2012. Free Will. New York: Free Press.
Notes
1 See also our earlier discussions about the nature and different senses of moral respons-
ibility (Section 1.3; Section 8.3).
2 Nietzsche writes in the Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche, 1889/1977):
The “inner world” is full of phantoms... the will is one of them. The will no
longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either—it merely accom-
panies events; it can also be absent. The so- called motive: another error. Merely a
surface phenomenon of consciousness—something alongside the deed that is
more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them....
What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all. (Twilight of the Idols
VI 3, as quoted by Leiter, 2007)3 The description of these studies is from Mele (2013).
4 See Section 7.4 for a full discussion of Pereboom’s manipulation argument. We offer
a compressed presentation of it here for ease of reference.
5 Section 8.2 summarizes Pereboom (2001: chapter 6) and (2014: chapter 7).
6 Sections 8.3 and 8.4 summarize Pereboom (2001: chapter 7) and (2014: chapter 8).