Dr. Bradford E Stockdale

The opportunity to write a senior thesis during his undergraduate career started him thinking about issues surrounding free will and moral responsibility, which has become the focus of his research. His article “Moral Responsibility, Alternative Possibilities, and Acting on One’s Own,” which was published in The Journal of Ethics, argues that certain abilities to do otherwise are not required to be directly morally responsible. In his article “The Libet Paradigm and a Dilemma for Epiphenomenalism,” published in Philosophical Psychology, he responds to a series of prominent neuroscientific experiments that have been used to question the efficacy of consciousness.

He has given presentations at national and international conferences, including at meetings of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, Florida Philosophical Association, Alabama Philosophical Society, and Toward a Science of Consciousness. As a graduate student, he served as a research assistant to Alfred Mele on the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project, a multi-million dollar interdisciplinary project devoted to improving our understanding of the nature of self-control and how to enhance it.