At Philosophy Talk John Fischer was scheduled to talk about Free Will today. I expect the radio show to be archived soon. In the meantime check out the discussion at the Philosophy Talk Blog. There John Perry presents some background for the free will debate. John Fischer introduces the idea that one might be morally responsible for something without being able to do otherwise than he does. He uses John Locke's thought experiment of the man who voluntarily remains in a room, though he couldn't leave if he wanted to because the door is locked. Might we be morally responsible without free will?
Fischer suggests

In Locke's example, the fact that the man could not have left the room plays no role in his practical reasoning or behavior. It thus seems irrelevant to his moral responsibility. I would say that the man can be held morally responsible for staying in the room, even though he could not have left the room.

He adds later

The "Locke/Frankfurt" examples have become a template for testing the relationship between moral responsibility and the sort of freedom or control that involves alternative possibilities. I agree with Locke and Frankfurt; in my view, one can choose and act freely, and thus exhibit the kind of control that grounds moral responsibility, without having freedom to choose or act otherwise. I have thus defended an "actual-sequence" approach to moral responsibility. But this is highly contentious.

Incorporating an interesting thought experiment with Martian anthropologists, Ken Taylor gets us to think about moral responsibility from a very objective point of view. To this Fischer comments:

even in our own rather paltry world, we use certain criteria to impute responsibility, moral and legal, which are similar to what you describe as certain "cognitive and volitional capacities". We do not inquire into metaphysics, when we are spanking our children (gently, of course--maybe I should have said "scolding"), or deliberating as jurors say in the Scott Peterson case (or the Michael Ross case, and so forth). But I think that as philosophers we can and should step back from these practices and try to figure out what lies behind them, as it were--what warrants or justifies the everyday invocation of facts about our psychology in ascriptions of responsibility. And, in my view, when we "step back" we are not giving up commonsense, but relying on parts of it (as in any good philosophy). My contention is that from this sort of more expansive perspective, we can see that our ordinary ascriptions of responsibility (moral and/or criminal) are bound up with free will or "control" in a certain way.

There is no further discussion of Fischer's sense of "control"--an idea I am very inerested in--, but perhaps the radio show discussion will explain in more detail.

Philosophy Talk: The Blog

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