Alexander Pruss's Blog

The problem of heavenly freedom is the apparent tension between these two claims: The blessed in heaven are free The blessed in heaven ca...

Suppose human beings are deterministic systems. Then quite likely there are many cases where the complex play of associations combined with...

Here would be a really bad kind of moral dilemma: It is certain that unless you murder one innocent person now, you will freely become a m...

Here are three plausible theses: You’re only culpable for a morally wrong choice determined by a relevantly abnormal mental state if you a...

Suppose determinism and compatibilism are true. Imagine that a clever alien crafted a human embryo and the conditions on earth so as to prod...

If at most one action is possible for one, that action is not supererogatory. If determinism is true, then there is never more than one ac...

Molinists have the ability to give a distinctive pre-established harmony account of how the exceptionless truth of deterministic laws of nat...

It is not possible for a creature to exercise complete control over another person’s (non-derivatively) free action. If Molinism is true, ...

Internalism about non-derivative responsibility holds that whether one is non-derivatively responsible for a decision depends only on facts ...

Suppose soft determinism is true: the world is deterministic and yet we are responsible for our actions. Now imagine a device that can be a...

Plausibly, there is some function from the strengths of my motivations (reasons, desires, etc.) to my chances of decision, so that I am more...

In this post I want to argue for this: If a computer can non-accidentally have free will, compatibilism is true. Compatibilism here is t...

Consider this naive argument: If the desire-belief theory of motivation is true, whenever I act, I do what I want. Sometimes in acting I ...

Let’s idealize the decision process into two stages: Intellectual: Figure out the degrees to which various options promote things that one...

All analogue devices jitter on a small time-scale. The jitter is for all practical purposes random, even if the system is deterministic. Su...

If determinism is true, then I always do the best I can do. If I always do the best I can do, I lack moral imperfection. So if determinism i...

I've just been struck by the obviousness of this principle: It would be unjust for you to be punished for something that someone else ma...

The randomness objection to libertarian free will holds that undetermined choices will be random and hence unfree. Some randomness-based obj...

Invoking free will has always been a major part of theodicy. If God has good reason to give us the possibility to act badly, that ...

The standard consequence argument for incompatibilism makes use of the operator N p which abbreviates " p and no one has or has e...