Specter of Reason

I still haven't had a chance to look at Bruce Waller's book, Against Moral Responsibility   (2011) , but I've been reading about it and related topics in my spare time a bit over the past several days.  One reader, David Duffy, was kind enough to bring one of Waller's papers to my attention.  It's called "Empirical Free Will and the Ethics of Moral Responsibility"(2003).  In it, Waller claims that moral responsibility and free will are either conceptually wedded by definition (in which case, he says, we only get confusion) or there is some synthetic (empirical) connection between them.  He then argues that there is no such empirical connection. I question the claim that there is any confusion resulting from regarding a logical (analytic) entailment between moral responsibility and free will.  Unfortunately, Waller does not support his assertion here, though perhaps he addresses the issue in his more recent book.  I think the only conceptual confusion...

As I mentioned in a recent post , I'm not aware of any satisfactory arguments against Kant's demonstration that the freedom of the will can neither be proved nor disproved by pure reason.  Kant puts forward that argument in his Critique of Pure Reason .  Yet, in his Critique of Practical Reason , he makes a pragmatic argument for belief in free will: We need to believe in free will because it is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Kant's arguments are not just about free will.  They're also about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.  Yet, these days, the latter two are not seen as practically required for morality.  We can have moral responsibility without eternal souls or Divine judgment.  But can we have it without free will? Kant was a deontologist--he believed that morality requires duty and dignity, and not just behavior calculated to maximize some quantity of happiness, pleasure or goodness.  Yet, even those pursu...

I caught Skyfall last weekend and posted this mini-review on my Facebook wall: In some ways, it's excellent. Javier Bardem is unsurprisingly phenomenal. The music is very good, sometimes excellent. In other ways, it's predictably silly (the dialogue and action sequences are often well-crafted, but sometimes ridiculous). The plot is very sophisticated and convincing, and it works as an exploration of Bond himself, even though there are some pretty big holes. Nothing devastating, though. What bothers me, surprisingly, is Bond's relationship with women. Bond has always been promiscuous, but in this one he seems capable of very sincere and passionate intimacy, but without any emotional attachment at all. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I was seriously offended by the way the film depicted his relationship with women. Again, I know he's always slept around, but was it always this bad? (Maybe you need to see the film to answer that question.) Anyway, that point aside, ...

A little while ago William Egginton published a piece about neuroscience and abortion at The Stone .  He criticizes the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Act" (PUCA), which attempts to limit women's freedom to abort by appeal to the fetus' capacity to feel pain.  Egginton's argument is that the Act is philosophically and scientifically fraudulent.  He says that it relies on the false assumption that the mere capacity to perceive pain entails the sort of self-awareness we associate with personhood.  The PUCA argument is that fetuses can respond to pain, and therefore deserve to be regarded as persons under the law.  Egginton cogently argues that pain perception is not enough, scientifically speaking, to indicate the higher levels of consciousness we normally require for personhood. Egginton also makes the much broader claim that neuroscience (or any other science) is not capable of defining the limits of personhood, period.  This a controversial topic, and I woul...