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Freedom and Responsibility in Context argues for a contextualist account of freedom and moral responsibility. It aims to challenge the largely unarticulated orthodoxy of invariantism, by arguing that contextualism is crucial to an understanding of both freedom and moral responsibility. The argument for contextualism regarding freedom and moral responsibility focuses upon their respective control conditions. Abilities are argued to be central to an understanding of the control required for freedom and moral responsibility. A unified, ability analysis of control is developed, which supports the thesis that attributions of freedom and moral responsibility are context dependent. The resulting contextualism offers a rapprochement of compatibilism and incompatibilism. By going beyond the false dichotomy of invariant compatibilism and invariant incompatibilism, it is argued that both positions can be given their due, since there is no 'right' answer to the question of whether or not determinism undermines freedom and moral responsibility.
List of contents
- Introduciton
- 1: Agential Modal Contextualism
- 2: Abilities and Incompatibilism
- 3: All-in Abilities in Context
- 4: A Contextualist Account of Regulative Freedom
- 5: Problems for Alternative Analyses
- 6: Control
- 7: Defending an Ability Analysis of Control
- 8: A Contextualist Account of Moral Responsibility
- 9: The Problem of Unfairness
- Conclusion
About the author
Ann Whittle is Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Manchester where she has been since 2007. She studied at Oxford (BA) and University College London (MPhil and PhD). After her PhD, she was a Jacobsen Research Fellow at the University of London and then a lecturer at Trinity and Churchill Colleges, Cambridge). Her main areas of interest are Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, and Ethics. She is interested in how our agency can be accommodated in the natural world and her recent research has focused on the area of abilities, freedom, and moral responsibility.
Summary
Ann Whittle offers a fresh approach to questions about whether our actions are free and whether we are morally responsible for them. She argues that the answers to these questions depend on the contexts in which we make claims about our abilities and our control over our actions.
Additional text
The book is packed full of arguments and engagement with other thinkers, and covers a wide range of topics, including various forms of the Consequence Argument, both compatibilist and incompatibilist views of freedom, and the context-sensitivity of claims about knowledge, causation, and prevention. Yet Whittle is also careful, conscious of the limitations of the arguments presented, and aware of exactly what claims she needs to arrive at her main conclusions. And for seemingly every major claim, she provides multiple, independent arguments and thorough discussion of objections.
