
Alfred MeleFlorida State University | FSU · Department of Philosophy
Alfred Mele
Ph.D.
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375
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Introduction
Alfred Mele currently works at the Department of Philosophy, Florida State University. Alfred does research in Philosophy of Mind and Action. His current project is free will.
Publications
Publications (375)
This paper develops a challenge to standard libertarian views that is based on an imagined neuroscientificdiscovery that is incompatible with satisfaction of a standard libertarian requirement for mainstream free decision making, and it explores potential libertarian responses to this discovery. The requirement at issue may beformulated as follows:...
The neuroscience of volition is an emerging subfield of the brain sciences, with hundreds of papers on the role of consciousness in action formation published each year. This makes the state-of-the-art in the discipline poorly accessible to newcomers and difficult to follow even for experts in the field. Here we provide a comprehensive summary of r...
Although much human action serves as proof that irrational behaviour is remarkably common, certain forms of irrationality-most incontinent action and self-deception-pose such difficult problems that philosophers have rejected them as logically or psychologically impossible. Here, Alfred Mele shows that incontinent action and self-deception are inde...
Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explan...
This paper is a critique of the current version of Derk Pereboom’s “disappearing agent argument” against event-causal libertarianism. Special attention is paid to a notion that does a lot of work in his argument—that of settling which decision occurs (of the various decisions it is open to the agent to make at the time). It is argued that Pereboom’...
Neuroscience of volition is an emerging neuroscience subfield with hundreds of papers on the role of consciousness in action initiation published each year. This makes the state-of-the-art of the discipline poorly accessible for newcomers, as well as difficult to follow for already engaged researchers. The aim of this text is to provide a complex i...
This entry provides an overview of various theories of free will. It links free will to ethics by way of a connection between free will and moral responsibility. Free will is conceptualized as the ability to act freely, making free action the more basic notion. The kind of free action at issue is earmarked to moral responsibility. Among the major t...
In 1983 Benjamin Libet and colleagues published a paper apparently challenging the view that the conscious intention to move precedes the brain's preparation for movement. The experiment initiated debates about the nature of intention, the neurophysiology of movement, and philosophical and legal understanding of free will and moral responsibility....
Updated and expanded to represent the fundamental questions at the heart of philosophical ethics today, the 2nd edition of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics covers the key topics in metaethics and normative ethical theory. This edition includes 12 fully revised chapters, and 3 newly commissioned contributions from a range of esteemed academics who...
Benefiting from recent work in neuroscience, this paper rebuts a pair of neuroscience-based arguments for the non-existence of free will. Well-known neuroscientific experiments that have often been cited in support of skepticism about free will are critically examined. Various problems are identified with attempts to use their findings to support t...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
What is it to be able to intend to do something? At the end of her ground-breaking book, Agents’ Abilities, Romy Jaster identifies this question as a topic for future research. This article tackles the question from within the framework Jaster assembled for understanding abilities. The discussion takes place in two different spheres: intentions for...
Do we have free will? This book is an opinionated guide through a philosophical maze that leads to an answer. The main philosophical theories and arguments about free will are explained, and their pros and cons are explored. Topics discussed include the meaning of “free will,” connections between free will and moral responsibility, compatibilism an...
This chapter sketches a view about how paradigmatic weak-willed actions are produced that it contrasts with competing views, including some ancient views. Along the way, it explores the entanglement of weakness of will with such issues as how our intentional actions are to be explained, the power of practical reasoning and practical evaluative judg...
Moral psychology is the study of how human minds make and are made by human morality. This state of the art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha. The volume’s 50 chap...
This chapter performs two main tasks. First, it sets the stage for an answer to the question of how we can determine whether or not we have free will by articulating two competing proposals about what would suffice for freely making a decision to do something. Second, it identifies what we would have to learn in order to know that the conditions se...
This chapter examines the most prominent neuroscientific source of skepticism about the existence of moral responsibility. This source is a collection of studies that purport to show that various decisions are made unconsciously—that is, that they are made at times at which we are not conscious of making them. The author has argued elsewhere that t...
The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility is a collection of 33 articles by leading international scholars on the topic of moral responsibility and its main forms, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. The articles in the volume provide a comprehensive survey on scholarship on this topic since 1960, with a focus on the past three decades. Chapter...
What is free will? Can it exist in a determined universe? How can we determine who, if anyone, possesses it? Philosophers have been debating these questions for millennia. In recent decades neuroscientists have joined the fray with questions of their own. Which neural mechanisms could enable conscious control of action? What are intentional actions...
In Autonomous Agents, I argued that among the obstacles to autonomous action are facts of certain kinds about an agent’s beliefs. For example, someone who is deceived into investing her savings in a way that results in her losing the entire investment to the person who deceived her may correctly be said to make that investment nonautonomously. But...
In order to be doing something intentionally, must one know that one is doing it? Some philosophers have answered yes. Our aim is to test a version of this knowledge thesis, what we call the Knowledge/Awareness Thesis, or KAT. KAT states that an agent is doing something intentionally only if he knows that he is doing it or is aware that he is doing...
To decide to A, as I conceive of it, is to perform a momentary mental action of forming an intention to A. I argue that ordinary instances of practical deciding, so conceived, falsify the following two theses: (1) Necessarily, S intentionally A-s only if S intends to A; (2) In every actual case of intentionally A-ing, the agent intends to A. But I...
This précis kicks off an invited symposium on Alfred R. Mele (Manipulated Agents: a Window to Moral Responsibility, Oxford University Press, 2019).
This article is part of a symposium on Alfred Mele’s Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility. It is Mele’s response to John Fischer, Ishtiyaque Haji, and Michael McKenna. Topics discussed include the bearing of manipulation on moral responsibility, the zygote argument, the importance of scenarios in which manipulators radically reverse...
There is a longstanding debate in philosophy concerning the relationship between intention and intentional action. According to the Single Phenomenon View, while one need not intend to A in order to A intentionally, one nevertheless needs to have an A-relevant intention. This view has recently come under criticism by those who think that one can A...
Taylor Cyr offers a novel argument against, as he puts it, “all versions of historicism” about direct moral responsibility (Philos Stud. 10.1007/s11098-019-01315-y, 2019). The argument features constitutive luck and a comparison of manipulated agents and young agents performing the first actions for which they are morally responsible. Here it is ar...
This article explores the alleged “selectivity problem” for Alfred Mele’s deflationary position on self-deception, a problem that can allegedly be solved only by appealing to intentions to bring it about that one acquires certain beliefs, or to make it easier for oneself to acquire certain beliefs, or to deceive oneself into believing that p. This...
There is a longstanding debate in philosophy concerning the relationship between intention and intentional action. According to the Single Phenomenon View, while one need not intend to A in order to A intentionally, one nevertheless needs to have an A-relevant intention. This view has recently come under criticism by those who think that one can A...
Compatibilists about free will maintain that free will is compatible with determinism, and incompatibilists disagree. Incompatibilist believers in free will have been challenged to solve a problem that luck poses for them—the problem of present luck. This article articulates that challenge and then explores a novel compatibilist view recently propo...
This article has two primary aims. The first is to identify relationships among direct control, direct moral responsibility for an action, and directly free action. The second is to provide a partial map depicting the bearing of some familiar competing views about moral responsibility and free action – traditional compatibilism, semicompatibilism,...
In the simplest case, a proximal intention is an intention one has now to do something now. Recently, some philosophers have argued that proximal intentions do much less work than they are sometimes regarded as doing. This article rebuts these arguments, explains why the concept of proximal intentions is important for some scientific work on intent...
Compatibilists who reject even the modest externalist theses defended thus far in this book seem to be stuck biting some extremely hard bullets. A question about bullet biting is this chapter’s focus. It is roughly this: When should compatibilists about moral responsibility bite the bullet in responding to stories used in arguments for incompatibil...
Thought experiments featuring manipulated agents and designed agents have played a significant role in the literature on moral responsibility. What can we learn from thought experiments of this kind about the nature of moral responsibility? That is this book’s primary question. An important lesson lies at the core of its answer: Moral responsibilit...
This chapter addresses a range of issues, including the bearing of manipulation on the project of constructing an incompatibilist analysis of moral responsibility for actions, the difference between direct and indirect moral responsibility, the significance of reversal stories in which the change in an agent’s values is localized, and the author’s...
Two general kinds of view about moral responsibility are discussed—internalism and externalism. An agent’s internal condition at a time may be defined as something specified by the collection of all psychological truths about the agent at the time that are silent on how he came to be as he is at that time. Internalists maintain that—at least in the...
Thought experiments about three kinds of agent—instant agents, minutelings, and radically reversed agents—are used in developing the book’s argument for an externalist view of moral responsibility. Instant agents come into being all at once as adult agents with full psychological profiles. Minutelings are instant agents who live only for a minute a...
This chapter identifies three lines of thought that build bridges from compatibilism to internalism about moral responsibility and argues that all three are seriously defective. The three lines of thought are due to Richard Double, Harry Frankfurt, and Gary Watson. Thought experiments discussed include radical reversal stories and an original-desig...
While the question whether free will exists or not has concerned philosophers for centuries, empirical research on this question is relatively young. About 35 years ago Benjamin Libet designed an experiment that challenged the common intuition of free will, namely that conscious intentions are causally efficacious. Libet demonstrated that conscious...
While the question whether free will exists or not has concerned philosophers for centuries, empirical research on this question is relatively young. About 35 years ago Benjamin Libet designed an experiment that challenged the common intuition of free will, namely that conscious intentions are causally efficacious. Libet demonstrated that conscious...
This chapter provides some theoretical background on free will and then takes up a striking claim in some scientific literature on free will – the claim that the existence of free will depends on the existence of souls. That claim is rebutted – largely on empirical grounds. Studies in experimental philosophy provide evidence that the claim at issue...
This article addresses two influential lines of argument for what might be termed “scientific epiphenomenalism” about conscious intentions – the thesis that neither conscious intentions nor their physical correlates are among the causes of bodily motions – and links this thesis to skepticism about free will and moral responsibility. One line of arg...
In the final chapter of her Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio offers (among other things) a novel reply to an original-design argument for the thesis that determinism is incompatible with free will and moral responsibility, an argument that resembles Alfred Mele’s zygote argument in Free Will and Luck. This article assesses the merits of h...
Open Access Link until May 5, 2018
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Four experiments supported the hypothesis that ordinary people understand free will as meaning unconstrained choice, not having a soul. People consistently rated free will as being high unless reduced by internal constraints (i.e., things that impaired people's mental...
From Descartes and Cartesian mind-body dualism in the 17th century though to 21st-century concerns about artificial intelligence programming, The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness presents a compelling history and up-to-date overview of this burgeoning subject area.
Acknowledging that many of the original concepts of conscious...
Libertarianism about free will is the conjunction of two theses: the existence of free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism, and at least some human beings sometimes exercise free will (or act freely, for short). ¹ Some libertarian views feature agent causation, others maintain that free actions are uncaused, and yet others – event-ca...
This article’s aim is to shed light on direct control, especially as it pertains to free will. I sketch two ways of conceiving of such control. Both sketches extend to decision making. Issues addressed include the problem of present luck and the relationship between direct control and complete control.
This article identifies and assesses a way of thinking that might help to explain why some compatibilists are attracted to what is variously called an internalist, structuralist, or anti-historicist view of moral responsibility—a view about the bearing of agents’ histories on their moral responsibility. Scenarios of two different kinds are consider...
Benjamin Libet?s findings lead him to the following conclusions: ?the brain ?decides? to initiate or, at least, prepare to initiate [certain actions] before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place?; ?conscious free will? is not involved in the production of these actions; and once we become conscious of our...
This article answers a question about luck, control, and free will that Bernard Berofsky raises in Nature's Challenge to Free Will. The article focuses on a positive element of a typical libertarian view: namely, the thesis (LFT) that there are indeterministic agents who sometimes act freely when their actions-and decisions in particular are not de...
This article is a critical discussion of Derk Pereboom’s “disappearing agent objection” to event-causal libertarianism in his Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (2014). This objection is an important plank in Pereboom’s argument for free will skepticism. It is intended to knock event-causal libertarianism, a leading pro-free-will view, out of c...
The “problem of present luck” (Mele, Free Will and Luck, chapters 3 and 5) targets a standard libertarian thesis about free will. It has been argued that there is an analogous problem about luck for compatibilists. This article explores similarities and differences between the alleged problems.
This essay sketches a problem about luck for typical incompatibilist views of free will posed in A lfred M ele, Free Will and Luck (2006), and examines recent reactions to that problem. Reactions featuring appeals to agent causation receive special attention. Because the problem is focused on decision making, the control that agents have over what...
This article explores the conceptual connections between free action and action for which the agent is morally responsible. Questions addressed include the following. Can agents who are never morally responsible for anything sometimes act freely? Can agents who never act freely be morally responsible for some of their actions? Various compatibilist...
It is sometimes claimed that certain experiments show that free will is an illusion by showing that all decisions are made unconsciously. I have argued elsewhere that these experiments do not show that any decisions are made unconsciously. But suppose I am wrong about that. Even then, I argue, these experiments do not pose a serious threat to free...
This article’s guiding question is about bullet biting: When should compatibilists about moral responsibility bite the bullet in responding to stories used in arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility? Featured stories are vignettes in which agents’ systems of values are radically reversed by means of brainwashing and the story behin...
This article explores the significance of agents’ histories for directly free actions and actions for which agents are directly morally responsible. Candidates for relevant compatibilist historical constraints discussed by Michael McKenna and Alfred Mele are assessed, as is the bearing of manipulation on free action and moral responsibility.
Do people sometimes exercise self-control in such a way as to bring it about that they do not act on present-directed motivation that continues to be motivationally strongest for a significant stretch of time (even though they are able to act on that motivation at the time) and intentionally act otherwise during that stretch of time? This paper exp...