Responsibility and the Reason View

Stephen Morris

= Complete Essay =

In her book Freedom Within Reason, Susan Wolf puts forth a compatibilist view of human freedom/responsibility in which she offers what she considers to be sufficient conditions for both free and responsible good actions and free and responsible bad actions (i.e., actions which are deserving of praise and blame, respectively). Through the use of counterexamples, I argue that neither of her conditions are sufficient. I also challenge her view that questions about freedom and responsibility can be resolved without having to attend to primarily metaphysical questions.