Forgiveness as Renunciation of Moral Protest

In this chapter, Derk Pereboom defends the claim that forgiveness is essentially the renunciation of a stance of moral protest. Forgiveness need not be preceded by actual resentment or by any angry emotion. Rather, by virtue of regarding wrongdoers as blameworthy for past wrongdoing, forgivers regard the stance of moral protest against them as having been appropriate. In forgiving, they then renounce this stance. This renunciation is norm-changing, first of all because it involves moral protest changing from being appropriate to being inappropriate. Other alterations in norms may also accompany this change: earlier the wronged party perhaps legitimately demanded apology and amends, while upon forgiving, the request for new apologies and additional amends becomes inappropriate.

A response to the problem of wild coincidences

Derk Pereboom has posed an empirical objection to agent-causal libertarianism: The best empirically confirmed scientific theories feature physical laws predicting no long-run deviations from fixed conditional frequencies that govern events. If agent-causal libertarianism were true, however, then it would be virtually certain, absent ‘wild coincidences’, that such long-run deviations would occur. So, current empirical evidence makes agent-causal libertarianism unlikely. This paper formulates Pereboom’s ‘Problem of Wild Coincidences’ as a five-step argument and considers two recent responses. Then, it offers a different response: The Problem of Wild Coincidences does not show that current empirical evidence makes agent-causal libertarianism unlikely, even if all events are governed by physical laws featuring fixed long-run conditional frequencies and even if agents can ‘overrule’ normal physical laws.

Moral Psychology with Nietzsche

This book offers both a reading and defense of Nietzsche’s moral psychology, drawing on both empirical psychological results and contemporary philosophical positions and arguments. Among the views explained and defended are: anti-realism about all value, including epistemic value; a kind of sentimentalism about evaluative judgment; epiphenomenalism about certain conscious mental states, including those involved in the conscious experience of willing; and radical skepticism about free will and moral responsibility. Psychological research, from Daniel Wegner’s work on the experience of willing to the famed Minnesota Twin studies, is marshalled in support of the Nietzschean picture of moral psychology. Nietzschean views are brought into dialogue with contemporary philosophical views defended by, among many others, Harry Frankfurt, T.M. Scanlon, Gary Watson, and Derk Pereboom. Nietzsche emerges not simply as a museum piece from the history of ideas, but as a philosopher and psychologist who exceeds David Hume for insight into human nature and the human mind, one who repeatedly anticipates later developments in empirical psychology, and continues to offer sophisticated and unsettling challenges to much conventional wisdom in philosophy.

Nietzsche’s Theory of Agency

Nietzsche’s repudiation of free will and moral responsibility is documented throughout his corpus, and his arguments for this conclusion—arguments from his distinctive kind of fatalism, his skepticism about the causal efficacy of the will, and his particular brand of epiphenomenalism about the conscious mental states crucial to deliberation—are shown to undermine both compatibilist and incompatibilist views about free will and moral responsibility by engaging the views of many contemporary philosophers working on these topics, including Harry Frankfurt, Galen Strawson, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, Gary Watson, and others. In particular, the chapter argues that both “alternate possibilities” and “control” views of free will are vulnerable to Nietzsche’s critique. Some empirical evidence is adduced in support of Nietzsche’s view.

It’s Okay to Be Angry

Recently, the view that anger is bad, even wrong, to feel and express has gained popularity. Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Derk Pereboom posit that anger is fundamentally tied to a desire for retribution (i.e., getting even for past events), which they argue is immoral, counterproductive, and irrational. Thus, they argue, we should try our best to stop ourselves from feeling and expressing anger whenever it arises. I argue that anger is not inherently retributive, and that feeling and expressing anger are sometimes the most adaptive response to unfairness in one’s environment. I draw on robust psychological literature to characterize the dangers of overregulating anger in terms of the practical, psychological, and humanitarian costs associated with not feeling and expressing anger. In the appropriate contexts, anger is crucial to prepare people to communicate disapproval, motivate necessary confrontation, and change wrongdoers’ harmful behaviors. Thus, the functions of anger are not focused on getting even for past events, but rather on protecting individuals from future harm. Importantly, the overregulation of anger is likely to cause the most harm to individuals and communities that experience routine unfairness, thereby reinforcing social injustices. By adopting a functionalist perspective of emotions, we can shift our focus away from policing experiences of anger and toward enhancing its functional qualities through thoughtful reflection on the sources of people’s anger and resolutions for that anger.

Hard-Incompatibilist Existentialism

Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso’s chapter on hard-incompatibilist existentialism explores the practical and existential implications of free will skepticism, focusing on punishment, morality, and meaning in life. They consider two different routes to free will skepticism: the route that denies the causal efficacy of the types of willing required for free will, which receives impetus from pioneering work in neuroscience, and the route that does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that, whether deterministic or indeterministic, it does not achieve the level of control to count as free will. They argue that while there are compelling objections to the first route, the second remains intact and that free will skepticism allows for adequate ways of responding to criminal behavior—in particular, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alternation of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justified and sufficient for good social policy.