I sketch a more-or-less compatibilist solution to the free will/determinism problem, defining free will as that which an agent must exhibit in order to be legitimately held accountable for his/her actions. Based on this definition it would seem that, judging by fairly widespread social conventions, free will consists in a series of capacities, such as the ability to respond rationally to information. I argue that these capacities are not undermined by the potential truth of universal determinism, but I would like. not to settle for a compatibilism that stops at the recognition of that fact. After all, why should we feel obliged to reconcile our free will with metaphysical determinism? I argue that the deterministic character of the universe is not so much a discovery that has been made by scientists as it is a methodological presupposition that is mandatory for doing science in the first place. With that in mind, determinism is, at its core, an epistemic notion and not an ontological one. My guiding idea is that free will exists insofar as it is a category mistake to conceive of the futures of intentional systems (like human beings) as facts of nature. I take "nature" to be that which is the subject of scientific research and therefore necessarily objective, where a fact's being objective consists in it being the way it is regardless of what anyone thinks about it. The future of any individual does not meet these criteria (that is, it is not a fact of nature) because one's future (unlike, say, the chemical composition of water) is not something that is the way it is regardless of what one thinks about it. We form different attitudes toward different futures and these attitudes contribute to our behavior. Since "deterministic" is a property predicated of events in nature, it is a category mistake to apply the term outside of that domain.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Denna uppsats är huvudsakligen en diskussion av Augustinus försök att förena tesen att människan har en fri vilja med sin predestinationslära. Enligt de definitioner av ”determinism” och ”fri vilja” som föreslås i uppsatsen, utesluter predestinationens förhandenvarande möjligheten för människan att ha en fri vilja. Augustinus utgångspunkt i tron och hans antaganden om Guds och människans egenskaper, gör det omöjligt för honom att acceptera en sådan slutsats. Det samtidiga föreliggandet av predestinationen och den fria viljan utgör en betydelsefull komponent i hans syn på människans relation till Gud. Uppsatsen undersöker hur Augustinus resonemang i De Libero Arbitrio (Om den Fria Viljan) står sig mot en nutida kritik, för att i förlängningen söka påvisa varför hans antagande att människan har fri vilja inte är förenligt med hans samtidiga antagande att Gud har predestinerat alla händelser i världen. / This paper is mainly a discussion of Augustine’s combination of the idea that human beings have a free will with his doctrine of predestination. According to the definitions of “determinism” and “free will” suggested in this paper, the actuality of predestination excludes the possibility of human free will. Since Augustine takes starting-point in his belief in God and his assumptions about the attributes of God and human beings, such a conclusion is impossible for him. The actuality of both predestination and human free will is an important feature of his view of the relationship between human beings and God. This paper investigates how Augustine’s line of argument in De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Choice of the Will) manages to hold against a modern criticism. The primary aim is to show why Augustine’s assumption that human beings have free will is inconsistent with his assumption that God has predestined all events of the world.

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Retributive attitudes are deeply held and widespread in the general population and most legal systems incorporate retributive elements. It is probably also the dominant theory of punishment among contemporary philosophers of criminal justice. However, retributivism relies on conceptions of free will and responsibility that have, for millennia, fundamentally divided those who have thought seriously about the subject. Our legal system upholds the principle that the responsibility of the offender has to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, before the accused can be punished. In view of the intractable doubts surrounding the soundness of retributivism’s very conception of responsibility, my thesis argues that it is ethically dubious to punish individuals for solely retributive reasons. Instead, my thesis proposes that a person should only be punished if the main theories of punishment agree that punishing that person is appropriate – I call this ‘the convergence requirement’. This approach, I argue, is in accordance with the considerations underlying the beyond reasonable doubt standard. In addition to considering the question of ‘whom to punish’ my thesis considers what methods of responding to criminal behaviour are acceptable. In particular, it attempts to explain, without appealing to the contested notions of free will or retributive desert, what is problematic about ‘manipulative’ methods of dealing with criminal offenders (focussing in particular on the possibility of modifying their behaviour through neurological interventions). The final part of this thesis also gives an overview of some of the practical implications for Scots criminal law of taking doubts about free will and retributivism seriously. Given the severe treatment that offenders undergo within the Scottish penal system (e.g. deprivation of liberty, stigma) and the high rate of recidivism, it is important to consider whether our current penal practices are justified, what alternatives are available and what goals and values should guide attempts at reforming the system.

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One major approach to weight stigma reduction consists of decreasing beliefs about the personal controllability of—and responsibility for—obesity by educating about its biogenetic causes. Evidence on the efficacy of this approach is mixed, and it remains unclear whether this would create a deterministic view, potentially leading to detrimental side-effects. Two independent studies from Germany using randomized designs with delayed-intervention control groups served to (1) develop and pilot a brief, interactive stigma reduction intervention to educate N = 128 university students on gene × environment interactions in the etiology of obesity; and to (2) evaluate this intervention in the general population (N = 128) and determine mechanisms of change. The results showed (1) decreased weight stigma and controllability beliefs two weeks post-intervention in a student sample; and (2) decreased internal attributions and increased genetic attributions, knowledge, and deterministic beliefs four weeks post-intervention in a population sample. Lower weight stigma was longitudinally predicted by a decrease in controllability beliefs and an increase in the belief in genetic determinism, especially in women. The results underline the usefulness of a brief, interactive intervention promoting an interactionist view of obesity to reduce weight stigma, at least in the short term, lending support to the mechanisms of change derived from attribution theory. The increase in genetic determinism that occurred despite the intervention’s gene × environment focus had no detrimental side-effect on weight stigma, but instead contributed to its reduction. Further research is warranted on the effects of how biogenetic causal information influences weight management behavior of individuals with obesity.

We report a new chameleon-like Anolis species from Hispaniola that is ecomorphologically similar to congeners found only on Cuba. Lizards from both clades possess short limbs and a short tail and utilize relatively narrow perches, leading us to recognize a novel example of ecomorphological matching among islands in the well-known Greater Antillean anole radiation. This discovery supports the hypothesis that the assembly of island faunas can be substantially deterministic and highlights the continued potential for basic discovery to reveal new insights in well-studied groups. Restricted to a threatened band of midelevation transitional forest near the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, this new species appears to be highly endangered.

This thesis seeks an answer to a question of whether social normative systems, particularly law and morality, are consistent with the most recent scientific and philosophical findings. Those in fact often conclude that the human will is not free and that the human decision- making is only a physiological process governed by the laws of physics. Such findings thus, at a first glance, collide mainly with the concept of responsibility, through which law and morality are implemented. Therefore, the paper begins with a brief introduction of the current state of knowledge concerning free will and presents mainly determinism and indeterminism. The conclusion of the first part called Free Will and Determinism introduces a view of the world, which best suits the current state of knowledge and is further referred to as Physicalism. The second part called Law, Morality, Physicalism, briefly presents law and morality as regulators of human behavior, for which the concept of free will is fundamental. The focus of the thesis then shifts towards the institutions of criminal and civil law, that seem to be threatened by Physicalism the most. However, general consistency of Physicalism and the examined normative concepts is concluded, while it is argued that within the physicalistic view of the world, law and morality...