Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Determinism 25van Inwagen, Peter. 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Vihvelin, Kadri. 2013. Causes, Laws, & Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter.
New York: Oxford University Press.
As for the topic of moral responsibility, there are very few discussions in work
on free will that take any time at the outset to define and explain what moral
responsibility is in any detail. For a couple that do, see:
Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. 1998. Responsibility and Control: An Essay on
Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pereboom, Derk. 2014. Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
For an extended discussion of moral responsibility, and especially the account-
ability sense that we contend is at the heart of the free will debate, see:
McKenna, Michael. 2012. Conversation and Responsibility. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Nelkin, Dana. 2011. Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Shoemaker, David. 2015. Responsibility from the Margins. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
And, as well, see several essays in this recent collection:
Clarke, Randolph, Michael McKenna, and Angela M. Smith, eds., 2015. The Nature of
Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press.
Notes
1 See Mele (1995: 3) for a similar point. Mele uses an example from Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics (X.7) of amoral beings who are nevertheless self- governed (free)
beings.
2 A warning to the introductory student: Some newcomers to this philosophical topic
find it nearly irresistible to take the meaning of the term free will to be or to include as
one of its ingredients “the opposite of determinism.” This thought should be strongly
resisted. What “free will” means, on our formulation, has to do with a particular kind
of ability to control one’s actions; there is no mention of determinism at all in our def-
inition. Notice that the other competitor views we considered were also formulated in
ways that made no mention of determinism. Perhaps after careful reflection, one
should conclude for substantive reasons that free will rules out determinism. But this
should not be settled just by appeal to the meaning of the term.
3 One might ask why decisions have this focus in the free will debate. As an aide in
thinking about these issues further, we offer the following consideration:
First, there is a familiar way of using the notion of decision that suggests that at the
root of every intentional action is a decision. How so? For each intentional act a
person performs, it can seem natural to ask the person, “Why did you decide to do
that?” or “Why did you choose to do that?”