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The responses by Erman Misirlisoy and Patrick Haggard (M&H) and Gunnar Björnsson and Derk Pereboom (B&P) provide very useful ways to highlight the issues I raise in my chapter and the disagreements between competing positions in debates about free will. I thank the four of them for providing such thoughtful and challenging responses. I will begin by pointing out where we agree, and then, of course, I will point out why I think they are mistaken.1 My commentators and I agree that humans lack what many incompatibilists think is essential to free will and moral responsibility, including agent-causal powers or the power to be “ultimate difference makers” (as B&P define it). We also agree that scientific evidence and philosophical arguments provide convincing reasons to reject dualism and to accept physicalism or naturalism, defined loosely as the view that everything that exists, including minds, is composed only of things that physics can study and is subject to the laws of nature. This view entails, as M&H put it, that “There is no thinking ‘I’ independent of the brain.”2 Finally, we all agree that we should be concerned primarily with free will understood as the set of powers or abilities required to be morally responsible—that is, potentially to deserve blame or praise, punishment or reward. This is the concept of free will that M&H tie to “a strong concept of personal and social responsibility” and that B&P define in terms of “basic desert.”3 With these agreements laid out, we can see more clearly that we disagree about what is required for this type of free will: 1. B&P reject my view that free will does not require “ultimate difference making” and disagree that my view best accords with the ordinary understanding of free will and responsibility. 1.3 Response to Misirlisoy and Haggard and to Björnsson and Pereboom Eddy Nahmias 44 Eddy Nahmias 2. M&H similarly reject my understanding of free will and of ordinary intuitions about it, and they conclude that the “intuitive sense of free will cannot readily be reconciled with the available scientific evidence.” I believe my experimental evidence undermines these claims about ordinary intuitions about free will and responsibility.4 In my response here, however, I will not focus on that evidence, but instead I will try to diagnose the sources of my commentators’ views and challenge their apparent appeal. To do so, I will first pick up on B&P’s useful introduction of the terms “difference maker” and “independent variable,” and I will then extend the hypothetical neuroscientific study presented in my chapter to argue that our conscious reasoning can be the sort of difference maker that matters to free will. B&P define “ultimate difference making” as requiring “that the difference maker is an independent variable in the causal system of the universe, that is, a variable the value of which is not determined by the value of other variables in that system.” This sense of “difference making” may be, as they suggest, “perfectly legitimate,” but if so, it is remarkably stringent and not very useful. If our universe is deterministic, then their definition would entail that there are simply no independent variables (or at most, there could be just one if there is an initiating cause of the universe that still counts as a variable in the system). All variables in a deterministic system would be “determined by the value of other [earlier] variables in that system” since “other variables” can encompass the entire state of the universe, or whatever parts of it are causally relevant to the variable in question. Of course, incompatibilist arguments work by pointing out that determinism has precisely this consequence and by defining free will and responsibility such that they require that agents are “independent variables” in precisely this sense. (As B&P point out, indeterminism would not allow any variables to influence the objective probabilities of what happens based on preceding events, so the causal powers of indeterministic variables would also be ultimately “determined by the value of other variables.”) Because these notions of ultimate difference making and independent variables are so stringent, they are also essentially useless. They cannot help us individuate variables or discern or dispute which things, events, or processes ultimately make a difference in the real world, in our interactions with each other, or in our scientific explanations.5 For instance, since neuroscientists cannot know whether determinism is true, they are not in a position to discern, according to B&P’s definitions, whether the firing of [3.143.168.172] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08...

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