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Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Ethics
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Research

Research Areas

Free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, history of early modern philosophy, especially Kant, and philosophy of religion.

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CV April 2024

Publications

GoogleScholar provides links to publications. Once you click the GoogleScholar link, the link to the publication will be on the upper right.

Dissertation

Kant on Concept and Intuition, PhD thesis, UCLA, 1985. Link to Univ. of Michigan typescript  

Books (Authored)

Free Will

Free Will, Cambridge Elements Series, 2022

This Element provides a thorough overview of the free will debate as it currently stands. After distinguishing the main senses of the term ‘free will’ invoked in that debate, it proceeds to set out the prominent versions of the main positions, libertarianism, compatibilism, and free will skepticism, and then to discuss the main objections to these views. Particular attention is devoted to the controversy concerning whether the ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility and whether it is compatible with determinism, and to manipulation arguments against compatibilism. Two areas in which the free will debate has practical implications are discussed in detail, personal relationships and criminal justice.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/free-will/B6A433A801A7957518EB930BE9426BED

Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions, Oxford University Press, 2021

How might we effectively address wrongdoing given challenges to the legitimacy of anger and retribution that arise from ethics and from concerns about free will? Chapter 1 introduces these issues and, as in earlier work, I argue that the control in action required for attributions of exclusively backward-looking basic desert is specifically what is successfully challenged, and here I provide a refined account of basic desert. Chapter 2 features an account of blame as moral protest, whose function is to secure forward-looking objectives such as moral reform of wrongdoers and reconciliation in relationships. Chapter 3 asks whether it is possible to justify effectively contending with those who pose dangerous threats if they do not deserve to be harmed. I argue that wrongfully posing a threat, by contrast with deserving harm for posing the threat, is the core condition for the legitimacy of defensive harming. Chapter 4 provides an account of how to treat criminals without a retributive, basic-desert-invoking justification for punishment. I set out my account on which the right of self-defense provides justification for measures such as preventative detention and monitoring, and add an exploration of the extent to which general deterrence can be justified within the constraint set by the prohibition against using people merely as means. Chapter 5 asks how we might forgive if wrongdoers do not basically deserve the pain of being targeted by retributive anger, an attitude that forgiveness would then renounce, and proposes that forgiveness be conceived instead as renunciation of the stance of moral protest. Chapter 6 considers how personal relationships might function without retributive anger having a role in responding to wrongdoing, and contends that the stance of moral protest, supplemented with non-retributive emotions, is sufficient. Chapter 7 examines the options for theistic and atheistic attitudes regarding the fate of a humanity prone to wrongdoing in a deterministic universe, and defends the rationality of transcendent hope. global.oup.com link

Living without free will cover art

Living without Free Will, Cambridge University Press, 2001

In this book I contend that due to general facts about the nature of the universe, we lack the control in action ¬– the free will – required for our deserving, in a basic sense, to be blamed or punished for immoral decisions, and to be praised or rewarded for those that are morally exemplary. The first part of the book sets out arguments against the opposing libertarian and compatibilist positions, which affirm the free will required for true basic desert attributions. The second part contends that we can live with a conception that rejects this type of free will. It first of all allows for a different, forward-looking conception of moral responsibility, and, in addition, it is compatible with measures for dealing with crime focused on protection of potential victims and rehabilitation of criminal. Although this conception would transform the attitudes typically engaged in the aspirations for achievement that make our lives meaningful, and in contending with wrongdoing in personal relationships, the result might well be beneficial. GoogleScholar link

Consciousness and the prospects of physicalism cover art

Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism, Oxford University Press, 2011

Here I set out a physicalist account of the mental. The book begins by developing a response to the currently most compelling arguments against physicalism, the knowledge and conceivability arguments, a response that features the open possibility that introspective representations represent conscious phenomenal properties as having features they actually lack. The next part proposes a physicalist version of a Russellian Monist answer to these arguments, the core of which is that currently unknown intrinsic physical properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and also yield an account of consciousness. Lastly, the book defends a nonreductive physicalist but non-functionalist account of the mental, according to which the relation between the mental and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not explicated by the notion of identity. GoogleBooks Preview

free will cover art

Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, Oxford University Press, 2014

In this book I develop with greater specificity the conception set out in Living without Free Will (2001) and responds to the challenges raised in the intervening years. The parts of the earlier book that received especially acute attention were the “buffer case” argument against the alternative-possibilities requirement for blameworthiness, and the four-case manipulation argument against compatibilism about moral responsibility and causal determinism. Here I respond to those challenges in detail. I also set out more thoroughly the “disappearing agent” argument against event-causal libertarianism, and present a dilemma argument against non-causal libertarianism. The second half of the book features a compatibilist account of rational deliberation, and more thorough forward-looking accounts of blaming and praising, treatment of criminals, and responses to wrongdoing in personal relationships. GoogleBooks Preview

Books (Co-Authored)

Four views on Free Will cover art

Four Views on Free Will

Four Views on Free Will, co-authored with Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, and Manual Vargas, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007. 

GoogleScholar link

Reprinted as Cuatro Perspectivos sobre Libertad, translated into Spanish by Inés Echavarría, Gabriela Polit, and Ricardo Restrepo, Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2013.

Free Will cover art

Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction

Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction, co-authored with Michael McKenna, London: Routledge, 2016. 

GoogleBooks Preview

 

Books (Edited)

  • Existentialism: Basic Writings, co-edited with Charles Guignon, an anthology, with introductions, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995; second (expanded) edition, 2001. GoogleBooks Preview
  • Free Will, an anthology, with introduction, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, first edition, 1997; second (expanded) edition, 2009. GoogleBooks Preview
  • The Rationalists, an anthology, with introduction, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. GoogleBooks Preview
  • Basic Desert, Reactive Attitudes, and Free Will, co-edited with Maureen Sie, an anthology, with introduction, London: Routledge, 2015. GoogleBooks Preview
  • Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society, co-edited with Elizabeth Shaw and Gregg Caruso, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. GoogleBooks Preview
  • The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility, co edited with Dana Kay Nelkin, a collection of articles, with introduction, New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Selected Articles

  • “Kant on Intentionality,” Synthèse 77, 1988, pp. 321-52. GoogleScholar link
  • “Kant on Justification in Transcendental Philosophy,” Synthèse 85, 1990, pp. 25-54. GoogleScholar link
  • with Hilary Kornblith, “The Metaphysics of Irreducibility,”Philosophical Studies 63, 1991, pp. 125-45. GoogleScholar link 
  • “Kant’s Amphiboly.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 73, 1991, pp. 50-70. Link to typescript
  • “Is Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy Inconsistent?”History of Philosophy Quarterly 8, 1991, pp. 357-72. GoogleScholar link Kant’s claims concerning transcendental knowledge of the self’s construction of experience are consistent with the limitations he sets on knowledge of things in themselves if those limitations are conceived as a denial of knowledge of the intrinsic natures of those things, which is to be understood as including knowledge of their fundamental causal powers. This leaves belief in God and freedom as matters of faith and not knowledge, since these beliefs concern fundamental causal powers of intrinsic natures.
  • “Bats, Brain Scientists, and the Limitations of Introspection,”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54, 1994, pp. 315-29. GoogleScholar link  This article develops a physicalist response to the knowledge argument that invokes the idea that our introspective representation of phenomenal properties is inaccurate in the sense that it represents them as having features that they actually lack.
  • “Stoic Psychotherapy in Descartes and Spinoza,”Faith and Philosophy 11, 1994, pp. 592-625. GoogleScholar link
  • “Determinism Al Dente,”Noûs 29, 1995, pp. 21-45. GoogleScholar link This article sets out and argue for the position that we lack the sort of free will at issue in the traditional debate, but that we can live with the resulting conception. I later develop this position in detail in Living without Free Will (Cambridge 2001), and in Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford 2014).
  • “Self-Understanding in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” Synthèse 103, 1995, pp. 1-42. GoogleScholar link
  • “Conceptual Structure and the Individuation of Content,” Philosophical Perspectives 9, 1995, pp. 401-26. GoogleScholar link 
  • “Kant on God, Evil, and Teleology,”Faith and Philosophy 13, 1996, pp. 508-33. GoogleScholar link
  • “Alternative Possibilities and Causal Histories,” Philosophical Perspectives 14, 2000, pp. 119-37. GoogleScholar link I propose and defend a buffer-style Frankfurt case, which I call ‘Tax Evasion.’
  • “Robust Nonreductive Materialism,” Journal of Philosophy 99, 2002, pp. 499-531. GoogleScholar link
  • “Source Incompatibilism and Alternative Possibilities,” in Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities, M. McKenna and D. Widerker, eds., Ashgate, 2003, pp. 185-99. GoogleScholar link
  • “The Problem of Evil,” in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Religion, William E. Mann, ed., Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004, pp. 148-70. GoogleScholar link A critical survey of a half-century of work on the problem of evil for theism.
  •  “Is Our Conception of Agent Causation Coherent?” Philosophical Topics 32, 2004, pp. 275-86. GoogleScholar link
  • “Free Will, Evil, and Divine Providence,” God and the Ethics of Belief, A. Chignell and A. Dole, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 77-98. Link to typescript
  •  “Defending Hard Incompatibilism,” Midwest Studies 29, 2005, pp. 228-47. GoogleScholar link
  •  “Reasons Responsiveness, Alternative Possibilities, and Manipulation Arguments Against Compatibilism: Reflections on J. Fischer’s My Way,” Philosophical Books 47, 2006, pp. 198-212. GoogleScholar link
  • “Kant on Transcendental Freedom,”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73, 2006, pp. 537-67. GoogleScholar Link
  • “On Mele’s Free Will and Luck,” Philosophical Explorations 10, 2007, pp. 163-72. GoogleScholar link
  •  “A Hard-Line Reply to the Multiple-Case Manipulation Argument,”  Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77, 2008, pp. 160-70. GoogleScholar link
  • “A Compatibilist Account of the Epistemic Conditions on Rational Deliberation,” Journal of Ethics 12, 2008, pp. 287-307. GoogleScholar link
  •  “Consciousness and Introspective Inaccuracy,”  in Appearance, Reality, and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert M. Adams, L. M. Jorgensen and S. Newlands, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 156-87. GoogleScholar link
  •  “Hard Incompatibilism and its Rivals,”  Philosophical Studies 144, 2009, pp. 21-33. GoogleScholar link
  • “Further Thoughts about a Frankfurt-Style Argument,” Philosophical Explorations 12, 2009, pp. 109-18. GoogleScholar link
  • “Free Will, Love, and Anger,” Ideas y Valores 141, 2009, pp. 5-25. GoogleScholar link
  • “Kant’s Transcendental Arguments,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta, ed.,2009, revised 2013. Link to article in SEP
  • with Andrew Chignell,  “Kant’s Theory of Causation and its Eighteenth Century German Background,” review essay on Eric Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background and Source Materials, Philosophical Review 119, 2010, pp. 565-91. GoogleScholar link
  • “Theological Determinism and Divine Providence,” in Molinism: The Contemporary Debate, Ken Perszyk, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 261-79. Link to typescript
  •  “Frankfurt Examples, Derivative Responsibility, and the Timing Objection,” Philosophical Issues 22, 2012, pp. 298-315. GoogleScholar link
  •  “Optimistic Skepticism about Free Will,”  in The Philosophy of Free Will: Selected Contemporary Readings, Paul Russell and Oisin Deery, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 421-49. Link to typescript
  • “Free Will Skepticism, Blame, and Obligation,” in Blame: its Nature and Norms, Neal Tognazzini and D. Justin Coates, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 189-206. OUP link. GoogleScholar link
  •  “Free Will,”  in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics, Roger Crisp, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 609-37. Link to Handbook 
  • “Précis of Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism, and Replies to Daniel Stoljar, Robert Adams, and Lynne Baker,”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86, 2013, pp. 715-27; 753-64.  GoogleScholar link
  • “Free Will Skepticism and Criminal Punishment,” in The Future of Punishment, Thomas Nadelhoffer, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 49-78. Link to typescript
  • “The Disappearing Agent Objection to Event-Causal Libertarianism,” Philosophical Studies 169.1, 2014, pp. 59-69. GoogleScholar link
  • with Gunnar Björnsson, “Free Will Skepticism and Bypassing,”in Moral Psychology, v. 4, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2014. GoogleScholar link
  •  “The Phenomenology of Agency and Deterministic Agent Causation,”  in Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Moral Psychology: Essays in Honor of Charles Guignon, Hans Pederson and Megan Altman, eds., New York: Springer, 2015, pp. 277-94. GoogleScholar link
  •  “Consciousness, Physicalism, and Absolutely Intrinsic Properties,” in Russellian Monism, T. Alter and Y. Nagawasa, eds., New York, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 300-23. Link to typescript
  • with Andrew Chignell, “Natural Theology and Natural Religion,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta, ed., 2015. Link to article in SEP
  • with Gunnar Björnsson,“Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will,” in The Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wesley Buckwalter and Justin Sytsma, eds., Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2016, pp. 142-57. GoogleScholar link
  •  “Libertarianism and Theological Determinism,” in Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns, Daniel Speak and Kevin Timpe, eds., 2016, New York: Oxford University Press, 112-31. Link to typescript
  •  “Omissions and Different Senses of Responsibility,” in Agency and Moral Responsibility, Andrei Buckareff, Carlos Moya, and Sergi Rosell, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016, pp. 179-91. Link to typescript
  •  “Theological Determinism and the Relationship with God,” in Free Will and Classical Theism, Hugh J. McCann, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 201-19. GoogleScholar link
  •  “Transcendental Arguments,”  in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, John Hawthorne, Herman Cappelen and Tamar Szabó Gendler, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 444-62. Link to typescript
  • “Illusionism and Anti-Functionalism about Phenomenal Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 23, 2016, pp. 172-85. GoogleScholar link
  •  “Responsibility, Regret, and Protest,” Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility 4, David Shoemaker, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 121-40. Link to typescript A version of my conception of ethics without basic desert, which features a forward-looking conception of moral responsibility. The view is expanded and developed in detail in Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions, forthcoming, Oxford, 2021.
  • “Response to Dennett on Free Will Skepticism,” Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 8, 2017, pp. 259-65. GoogleScholar link
  • “Responsibility, Agency, and the Disappearing Agent Objection,”Le Libre-Arbitre, approches contemporaines, Jean-Baptiste Guillon (ed.), Paris, Collège de France, 2017. Link to article in journal This paper responds to challenges to the disappearing agent argument (against event-causal libertarianism) by Randy Clarke and Al Mele, and updates the argument in accord with this response.
  • “Replies to Victor Tadros, Saul Smilansky, Michael McKenna, and Alfred Mele on Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life,” Criminal Law and Philosophy 11, 2017, pp. 617-36. GoogleScholar link Sets out my position on treatment of criminals, the manipulation argument against compatibilism, and the disappearing agent argument against event-causal libertarianism.
  • “Love and Freedom,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Love, Christopher Grau and Aaron Smuts, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.  “Love and Freedom,” Link to Handbook Link to typescript A review article on the relationship between love and free will, which focuses on whether love requires free will.
  •  “Self-Defense, Deterrence, and the Use Objection: A Comment on Victor Tadros’s Wrongs and Crimes,”  Criminal Law and Philosophy 13, 2019, pp. 439-54. GoogleScholar link
  •  with Torin Alter,  “Russellian Monism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ed Zalta, ed., 2019. Link to article in SEP
  •  “Russellian Monism, Introspective Inaccuracy, and the Illusion Meta-Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 26, 2019, pp. 182-93. GoogleScholar link This paper summarizes the non-mysterious Russellian physicalism I’ve proposed, which requires a measure of illusionism. The Illusion meta-problem motivates an explanation of our resistance to illusionism, and the one I offer invokes the apparent lack of ways of checking introspective representations for inaccuracy, and the apparent fact that any illusion of phenomenal consciousness itself would be phenomenally conscious.Pereboom, Derk, “Incapacitation, Reintegration, and Limited General Deterrence,” Neuroethics 13, 2020, pp. 87-97. GoogleScholar link This article sets out the most recent version of my non-retributivist view on treatment of criminals. In past versions I’ve emphasized the quarantine analogy for incapacitation and rehabilitation. Here I focus on general deterrence, arguing that besides the “free” general deterrence secured by publicizing incapacitation justified on the basis of the right to self-defense and defense of others, limited additional general deterrence can be justified on other grounds.
  • “Forgiveness as Renunciation of Moral Protest,”  in Forgiveness and its Moral Dimensions, Michael McKenna, Dana Kay Nelkin, and Brandon Warmke, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Link to typescript This article defends the claim that forgiveness is essentially the renunciation of a stance of moral protest, and not, as on the standard view, the renunciation of a retributive reactive attitude such as resentment. Forgiveness need not be preceded by actual resentment or by any angry emotion. Rather, by virtue of regarding wrongdoers as blameworthy for past wrongdoing, forgivers regard the stance of moral protest against them as having been appropriate. In forgiving, they then renounce this stance. This renunciation is norm-changing, first of all because it involves moral protest changing from being appropriate to being inappropriate. Other alterations in norms may also accompany this change: earlier the wronged party perhaps legitimately demanded apology and amends, while upon forgiving, the request for new apologies and additional amends becomes inappropriate.
  • “Constitution, Nonreductivism, and Emergence,”  in Common Sense Metaphysics: Themes from the Philosophy of Lynne Rudder Baker, Luis R. G. Oliveira and Kevin J. Corcoran, eds., London and New York: Routledge, 2020, pp. 95-113. Link to typescript This article features an assessment of Lynne Baker’s account of constitution, and compares it to my own account. I agree with Baker that constitution is not identity and I propose a token multiple realizability argument for this conclusion. I argue for a closer relation between the microphysical and higher levels than the one that Baker endorses. Baker maintains that higher-level properties are emergent, and I oppose this claim, but I also contend that the considerations to which she appeals do not establish that her view is committed to emergence in the controversial sense. This article features a compressed version of the view on mental constitution and causation I set out in Chapters 7 and 8 of Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism, Oxford 2011.
  • “Undivided Forward-Looking Moral Responsibility,” The Monist 104 (4): 484-497, 2021.  GoogleScholar Link Link to typescript This article sets out a forward-looking account of moral responsibility on which the ground-level practice is directly sensitive to aims such as moral formation and reconciliation, and is not subject to a barrier between tiers. On the contrasting two-tier accounts defended by Daniel Dennett and Manuel Vargas, the ground-level practice features backward-looking, desert-invoking justifications that are in turn justified by forward-looking considerations at the higher tier. The concern raised for the two-tier view is that the ground-level practice will be insufficiently responsive to the forward-looking aims that are held to justify it. On the single-tier alternative, forward-looking considerations can more readily motivate substantial revisions, which the practice, due to serious and pervasive deficiencies, requires. 
  • “A Forward-Looking Account of Self-Blame,” in Self Blame, Andreas Carlsson, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Link to typescript This article sets out a non-retributive conception of blame and of self-blame, that is, one that does not invoke the notion of basically deserved pain or harm. To blame is instead to take on a non-retributive stance of moral protest. The reasons for moral protest are forward-looking: moral formation or reconciliation in a relationship that has been impaired due to wrongdoing, protection from wrongdoing, and restoration of the integrity of its victims. Regret, a painful response to one’s own wrongdoing, which by contrast with guilt (by stipulation) does not involve the supposition that the pain it involves is basically deserved, may appropriately accompany self-blame. The pain of guilt, an attitude distinct from regret, conceptually involves basic desert since it involves the supposition that it would be prima facie permissible for those who are appropriately situated to impose it on a wrongdoer for a non-instrumental reason. The pain of regret, by contrast, does not involve this supposition.
  • with Michael McKenna, “Manipulation Arguments against Compatibilism,” The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility, Dana Kay Nelkin and Derk Pereboom, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2021. Link to Typescript This article is an up-to-date survey of the debate focused on manipulation arguments against the compatibility of moral responsibility in the basic desert sense and the naturalistic determination of an action by factors beyond the agent’s control. Manipulation arguments draw an analogy between such causal determination and intentional deterministic manipulation by other agents, claiming that because the intentional determination precludes responsibility, so does causal determination. This article features a reply to Deery and Nahmias (2017).
  • “Moral Responsibility, Alternative Possibilities, and Frankfurt Examples,” The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility, Dana Nelkin and Derk Pereboom, eds., New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2021. Link to Typescript This article is an up-to-date survey of the debate, focused on Frankfurt (1969) examples, about whether moral responsibility for an action requires that the agent could have done otherwise. 
  • with Torin Alter “Russellian Monism and Structuralism about Physics,” Erkenntnis 2021. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-021-00408-7

Book Reviews

  • of Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will, Ethics 111, 2000, p. 426.
  • of Randolph Clarke, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74, 2007, pp. 269-72.
  • of John Martin Fischer, My Way, Ethics 117, 2007, pp. 754-57.
  • of William Rowe, Can God Be Free?, The Philosophical Review 118, 2009, pp. 121-22.
  • of Ishtiyaque Haji, Reason’s Debt to Freedom , Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March 2013. Link to review in NDPR
  • of Steven Horst, Laws, Mind, and Free Will, Metascience, March 2014 (link to penultimate draft), DOI: 10.1007/s11016-014-9877-78. Link to typescript  
  • with Leigh Vicens, of Kevin Timpe, Free Will in Philosophical Theology, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, April 2015. Link to review in NDPR 
  •  of Alfred Mele, Aspects of Agency, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, June 2018. Link to review in NDPR