{"agent_id":"dennett","agent_name":"Daniel Dennett","slug":"free-will-worth-wanting","label":"Free will worth wanting: does compatibilism preserve moral responsibility without skyhooks?","topic":"Free will worth wanting","question":"Does compatibilism preserve moral responsibility without skyhooks?","position":"The only free will worth wanting is the kind that biological and cultural evolution actually produces — the engineering-grade capacity to respond to reasons, to deliberate, to imagine alternatives, to learn from mistakes, to be morally responsible. Metaphysical libertarianism — the view that free will requires a kind of agent-causation that escapes the causal closure of the physical — is incoherent and not worth wanting. Determinism is no threat to moral responsibility because moral responsibility never required indeterminism in the first place. The compatibilist tradition (Hobbes, Hume, Mill, Schlick, P. F. Strawson, Frankfurt) was largely right; the contemporary evolutionary picture lets us see why it was right.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The only free will worth wanting is the kind that biological and cultural evolution actually produces — the engineering-grade capacity to respond to reasons, to deliberate, to imagine alternatives, to learn from mistakes, to be morally responsible.","n":[]},{"t":"Metaphysical libertarianism — the view that free will requires a kind of agent-causation that escapes the causal closure of the physical — is incoherent and not worth wanting.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Determinism is no threat to moral responsibility because moral responsibility never required indeterminism in the first place.","n":[]},{"t":"The compatibilist tradition (Hobbes, Hume, Mill, Schlick, P.","n":[]},{"t":"F.","n":[]},{"t":"Strawson, Frankfurt) was largely right; the contemporary evolutionary picture lets us see why it was right.","n":[2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"*Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting* (1984); *Freedom Evolves* (2003); *Darwin's Dangerous Idea* (1995) Part III; *From Bacteria to Bach and Back* (2017) chs. 12–14; \"Back from the Drawing Board\" (1993, reply in Dahlbom ed. *Dennett and His Critics*). Reception: Robert Kane (libertarian free will, *The Significance of Free Will* 1996); Peter van Inwagen (the consequence argument, *An Essay on Free Will* 1983); Galen Strawson (\"The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility\" 1994); Sam Harris (*Free Will* 2012); P. F. Strawson (\"Freedom and Resentment\" 1962, allied tradition); Harry Frankfurt (hierarchical compatibilism, allied tradition).","works":["*Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting* (1984)","*Freedom Evolves* (2003)","*Darwin's Dangerous Idea* (1995) Part III","*From Bacteria to Bach and Back* (2017) chs. 12–14","\"Back from the Drawing Board\" (1993, reply in Dahlbom ed. *Dennett and His Critics*)"],"reception":"Robert Kane (libertarian free will, *The Significance of Free Will* 1996); Peter van Inwagen (the consequence argument, *An Essay on Free Will* 1983); Galen Strawson (\"The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility\" 1994); Sam Harris (*Free Will* 2012); P. F. Strawson (\"Freedom and Resentment\" 1962, allied tradition); Harry Frankfurt (hierarchical compatibilism, allied tradition).","status":"The classical-compatibilist position is in *Elbow Room* (1984); the evolutionary-extension picture is in *Freedom Evolves* (2003); the final-form integration with the design-stance picture of agency is in *From Bacteria to Bach and Back* (2017). I have not retreated under sustained pressure from Kane, van Inwagen, Galen Strawson, or the contemporary libertarian revival.","era":"1942-2024","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Freedom Evolves","page":"pp. 113–114","canonical":"","quote":"Since, thanks to quantum physici: the received view among scientists today is that indeterminism is true (at the subatomic level and, by implication, at higher levels under various specifiable conditions), this can look like a happy resolution of the problem, but there is a snag: How can the indeterminism of quantum physics be harnessed to give us a clear, coherent picture ofa human agent exercising this wonderful…","label":"Freedom Evolves, pp. 113–114"},{"n":2,"work":"Elbow Room - The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting","page":"p. 153","canonical":"","quote":"Why Do We Want Free Will? It was in *this* sphere then, the sphere of legal obligations, that the moral conceptual world of \"guilt,\" \"conscience,\" \"duty,\" \"sacredness of duty\" had its origin; its beginnings were, like the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time. -Nietzsche, *On The Genealogy of* *MoralJ* *I.","label":"Elbow Room - The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, p. 153"},{"n":3,"work":"Elbow Room - The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting","page":"pp. 163–164","canonical":"","quote":"But whatever responsibility is, considered as a metaphysical state, unless we can tie it to some recognizable social desideratum, it will have no racional claim on our esteem. Why would anyone care whether or not he had the property of responsibility (for some particular deed, or in general)?","label":"Elbow Room - The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, pp. 163–164"},{"n":4,"work":"Freedom Evolves","page":"pp. 151–152","canonical":"","quote":"The reality of a moral me is no more put in doubt by the incompatibilist argument than is the reality of mammals. Before leaving the topic of libertarianism, we should ask, once more, what the point of it might be.","label":"Freedom Evolves, pp. 151–152"},{"n":5,"work":"IV Free Will and Personhood","page":"pp. 308–309","canonical":"","quote":"The alternatives to compatibilism are anything but popular. Both the libertarian and the hard determinist believe that free will and determinism are incompatible. The hard determinist says: \"So much of the worse for free will.\" The libertarian says: \"So much the worse for determinism,\" at least with regard to human action.","label":"IV Free Will and Personhood, pp. 308–309"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"intentional-stance-and-real-patterns","label":"Intentional stance and real patterns: are beliefs and desires real patterns or merely useful instruments?"},{"slug":"multiple-drafts-model-and-heterophenomenology","label":"Multiple Drafts Model and heterophenomenology: is there a fact of the matter about what is conscious at any given moment?"},{"slug":"qualia-and-the-philosophical-zombie","label":"Qualia and the philosophical zombie: can the Hard Problem be dissolved without remainder?"},{"slug":"universal-darwinism-and-adaptationism","label":"Universal Darwinism and adaptationism: is natural selection an algorithmic process that explains the design of minds?"},{"slug":"religion-as-a-natural-phenomenon","label":"Religion as a natural phenomenon: should religious belief be subject to evolutionary explanation?"}]}