Sir Peter Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" was a landmark in the philosophical understanding of the free will problem. Building upon it, I attempt to defend a novel position, which purports to provide, in outline, the next step forward. The position presented is based on the descriptively central and normatively crucial role of illusion in the issue of free will. Illusion, I claim, is the vital but neglected 'key' to the free will problem. The proposed position, which may be called 'Illusionism', is shown to follow both from the strengths and from the weaknesses of Strawson's position.

I consider an old and forceful argument that often features in discourse on the free will problem, but of which there has not been any thorough discussion. According to the free will "Turn-Around" Argument, the idea that one may not be accountable for one's actions is turned in upon itself, such that treating as accountable also becomes something for which no one can be held accountable. The "Turn-Around" Argument is, at least rhetorically, a very effective weapon against attempts at escaping moral accountability. However, neither its nature nor its strengths are straightforward as they may first seem.

In the following essay, I attempt to defend a novel position on 'the free will problem'. In particular, I intend to provide (in outline) a position based on the descriptively central and normatively crucial role of illusion in the free will issue. Illusion, I claim, is the vital but neglected key to the free will problem. The proposed position, which can be called 'Illusionism', can be defended independently from its derivation from P.F. Strawson's 'reactive-naturalism'. (edited)

TBA

Recent political philosophy has tended to neglect and discount the free will issue and this attitude has had important consequences, since the implications of the free will issue have a profound significance for our understanding of issues such as distributive justice. By discussing what I take to be the most intuitively coherent form that egalitarianism has taken, G.A. Cohen's, I attempt to show the crucial importance of the free will issue for the egalitarian agenda.

In his 1995 'Mind' paper, Fred Feldman claims that our central philosophical way of thinking about the connections between responsibility and desert and between time and desert is misguided. I believe that we have the resources to handle Feldman's doubts, and maintain the conceptual connection between responsibility and desert. My detailed interpretation of the connection between responsibility and desert satisfies our intuitions concerning Feldman's examples, and accords with the general structure of our thought concerning justice, insofar as it involves desert. I also briefly consider the issue of time and desert.

In 'Mind' of January 1996 I proposed an outline of a theory of responsibility and desert, which I claimed both a) enables us to see responsibility as a condition for desert even in the major apparent counter-examples such as those proposed by Fred Feldman; and b) represents the ordinary way of seeing the connection between responsibility and desert better than previous formulations. Behind this proposal lies a crucial distinction between 'two ways' in which responsibility can be a condition for desert. From Feldman's reply in the same issue it seems that this crucial distinction was not sufficiently brought out in my paper. This I attempt to do here.

Hard determinism is commonly thought to have grave moral consequences. Without attempting to fully deny this, I explore a previously unnoticed apparent ethical advantage of a belief in hard determinism. The lack of concern with personal desert which accompanies belief in hard determinism seems to make possible a form of purer morality' than ordinary morality. In the process I briefly consider some perplexities of Kantianism, the personal' difficulty of being a hard determinist, and the question as to whether non- utilitarian ethical considerations are possible with hard determinist premises.

At the core of the free will debate lies the Compatibility Question', the question of whether there can be moral responsibility in a deterministic world; or in a world without libertarian free will. Compatibilists affirm and incompatibilists deny such a possibility. This question is almost invariably discussed under an Assumption of Exclusiveness', the assumption that one must be either a compatibilist or an incompatibilist. After giving various examples of the prevalence of this assumption in contemporary analytic philosophy, I attempt to show why it is mistaken. And I try to indicate how the acceptance of the Assumption of Exclusiveness' has hindered progress in the free will debate. I conclude by outlining a Dualistic' position with regard to the Compatibility Question', a position which attempts to extract the significant insights both of compatibilism and of hard determinism, while avoiding their inadequacies.

I argue that William James indulged in self-deception with regard to the free will problem. My argument differs from previous ones in two ways: firstly, in pointing out specific features of James's philosophical writing with indicate the self-deception. Secondly, in presenting an integrated case, based not only on the much discussed issue of his "Will to Believe" position, but on James's autobiographical writing as well as on specific features of his philosophical writing. The conclusion is said to cast doubts about the "Will to Believe" position. Finally, I briefly consider the general issue of philosophical self-deception.

The question whether libertarian free will is 'worth wanting' was emphasized (and given a negative answer) by Dennett in his recent Elbow Room. I argue that this question is seriously ambiguous, and includes two different sorts of questions, which I attempt to elucidate. I then go on to argue that once the two questions are clearly perceived, the compatibilist case is hardly as strong. Even if libertarian free will is impossible (and is thus in one sense 'not worth wanting'), in another sense libertarian free will is 'worth wanting'.

The paper points out a crucial difficulty in Van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will--his claim for the direct obviousness of the existence of libertarian moral responsibility. Van Inwagen's attempt to discredit the beliefs of the people who doubt the existence of libertarian moral responsibility is shown not to succeed. And since virtually all of Van Inwagen's case for the existence of libertarian free will depends on his case for the "obviousness" of libertarian moral responsibility, the failure of the latter undermines the former.