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...

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

I’ve argued somewhat as follows in the past: Necessarily, no one is responsible for a brute fact—an unexplained contingent fact. Necessa...

A common argument for the incompatibility of freedom and determinism goes something like this (where premises 1, 2 and 3 are implicitly assu...

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...

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

One can always take an indeterministic theory and turn it deterministic in some way or other while preserving empirical predictions. Bohmian...

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

Say that p and q are nomically equivalent provided that the laws of nature entail that p holds if and only if q does. Assume: If q ...

When I say that something is metaphysically impossible to do, I will mean: metaphysically impossible for creaturely causation. Fo...

Schellenberg has an interesting argument that evil is incompatible with the existence of God. The idea is this. God creates in o...

Everybody agrees that brainwashing can remove responsibility for the resulting actions. But how does it do that? In some cases, brainwashin...

This argument for incompatibilism is inspired by an excellent paper by Patrick Todd that I just heard. I don't know if Patrick would e...

For what it's worth, I think the upshot of my recent posts on regress arguments and free will is this: Whether compatibilism is t...

If I am responsible for an event E , then I am responsible for at least one of the causes of E . (Premise) There are no infinite ...

The following homely, unoriginal, and obvious argument seems not be a hot part of current discussions, but I've just been struck by the ...

Scripture promises that: For any temptation, the faithful Christian will receive a grace sufficient to withstand that temptation. ...

The following argument is valid: Normally, if an embodied person freely does A , then x could have done otherwise than she did. (P...

In my previous post , I discussed logical fatalism and the options available. One of these options I labeled as "compatibilism" w...