Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility - Hardcover

The problem of free will has fascinated philosophers since ancient times: Do we have free will, or at least the kind of free will that seems necessary for moral responsibility? Does determinism - the idea that everything that happens is necessitated to happen, given the past and the laws of nature - threaten the commonly held assumption that we are indeed free and morally responsible? Although these questions have been widely discussed in the past, the present volume offers a variety of new perspectives from philosophers who have made significant contributions to this debate over recent years, including Derk Pereboom, Robert Kane, Ishtiyaque Haji, Michael McKenna, John Martin Fischer, David Widerker and Saul Smilansky. The emphasis in these essays is not merely on free will, but on allied notions such as moral responsibility, moral obligation, fairness and meaningfulness, and on whether any room can be made for these notions in a deterministic or an indeterministic universe.

Nick Trakakis is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at Monash University. Recent publications include The God Beyond Belief (Springer, 2007) and The End of Philosophy of Religion (Continuum, 2008). Daniel Cohen is a lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Charles Sturt University and a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University.