Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 23rd October. We are delighted to welcome Alex Kaiserman (Oxford), who will be giving a paper entitled 'Degrees of Free Will'. The abstract is below:
*Free will comes in degrees. The actions of a severe addict are less free than those of someone with a milder addiction, for example. Yet despite this, most of the philosophical work on free will has focused on the 'yes-or-no' question of what makes an action free simpliciter, neglecting almost entirely the question of what might underlie these comparative judgements. My aim in this talk is therefore to make progress towards a theory of degrees of free will. I'll start by arguing that many popular extant theories of free will can't plausibly be extended to accommodate degrees of freedom in a way that lines up with our intuitions in particular cases. Instead, I'll defend a novel approach which combines my preferred theory of degrees of causal contribution with Carolina Sartorio's causal account of reasons-sensitivity. On the resulting view, an action is free to the extent to which it was caused by reasons to act and the absence of reasons not to act. If there's time, I'll end with some more speculative thoughts about how such a view might bear on the so-called 'situationist threat' to moral responsibility, which arises from some well-known studies in social science and psychology purporting to show that our actions and decisions are influenced by irrelevant features of our environments (such as whether anyone else is in the room, whether we found a dime in a phone box earlier, and so on).* The meeting will be held at 2:30 until 4:15, in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk at the Moral Sciences Club, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday 22nd. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place at around 7pm at a location to be determined (those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details by email closer to the time). Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
