Dr. Bradford E Stockdale

Epiphenomenalism is the thesis that though physical events may cause mental events, those mental events never cause physical events. In this paper, I will be concerned with the claim that our thoughts, intentions, and awareness play no causal role in producing actions. Though epiphenomenalism has been defended with a priori philosophical arguments, the majority of the support that it has gained in recent years has come from advances in neuroscience. At the center of these experiments is the Libet paradigm that aims to show that our actions are initiated by unconscious brain processes prior to our awareness of the intention or decision to perform the corresponding actions. It has been widely suggested that these studies support the view that consciousness is epiphenomenal, and if Libet-style experiments support this conclusion, the results have direct implications for free will. I argue by way of a dilemma that any study that relies on reports of subjects' awareness in its methodology cannot be used to support epiphenomenalism because the experimenters would have to rule out the possibility that consciousness plays a causal role in order to do so.

The problem of luck is one of the most formidable obstacles currently facing libertarian theories of free will. Some have argued that there is no problem, while others have argued that the problem is not a unique one for libertarians. Still others acknowledge the problem and aim to address it with their preferred libertarian theory. Steward (2012a) takes the latter strategy with her agency incompatibilism. She develops a version of the problem of present luck and argues that agents who possess a two-way power, which is a power to either perform some action or refrain from performing it, avoid the problem. If she is successful this would be a big point in favor of agency incompatibilism, and it could indicate a successful strategy for others to follow. I argue that just as Steward insists that we ought to move from more robust abilities to the ability to refrain, the proponent of the problem of luck can do the same, and, once doing so, they can posit a very similar luck objection to refraining. Moreover, I suggest that the ability to settle that Steward defends is not robust enough to ground moral responsibility.

Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) have famously served as counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). The fine-grained version of the flicker defense has become one of the most popular responses to FSCs. Proponents of this defense argue that there is an alternative available to all agents in FSCs such that the cases do not show that PAP is false. Specifically, the agents could have done otherwise than decide on their own, and this available alternative is robust enough to ground moral responsibility. In this paper, I argue that, when relying on definitions of ‘on one’s own’ within the literature on FSCs, a case can be constructed in which the agent could not have done otherwise than make a decision on his own. Insofar as this new case is successful, it will be able to avoid arguments about robustness while showing that moral responsibility does not require alternative possibilities of the type argued for by proponents of the fine-grained version of the flicker defense.