Living without Free Will

In Living Without Free Will, Derk Pereboom argues that our best scientific theories indeed have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform, and that because of this, we are not morally responsible for any of them. He seeks to defend the view that morality, meaning, and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible, and furthermore, that adopting this perspective would provide significant benefit for our lives.

Most people assume that, even though some degenerative or criminal behavior may be caused by influences beyond our control, ordinary human actions are not similarly generated, but rather are freely chosen, and we can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for them. A less popular and more radical claim is that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform. It is this hard determinist stance that Derk Pereboom articulates in Living Without Free Will. Pereboom argues that our best scientific theories have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform, and that because of this, we are not morally responsible for any of them. He seeks to defend the view that morality, meaning and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible, and furthermore, that adopting this perspective would provide significant benefit for our lives.

Acknowledgments; Introduction: Hard incompatibilism; 1. Alternative possibilities and causal histories; 2. Coherence objections to libertarianism; 3. Empirical objections to agent-causal libertarianism; 4. Problems for compatibilism; 5. The contours of hard incompatibilism; 6. Hard incompatibilism and criminal behavior; 7. Hard incompatibilism and meaning in life; Bibliography; Index.

Derk Pereboom argues that our best scientific theories have the consequence that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform, and that because of this, we are not morally responsible for any of them. In addition, adopting this perspective would provide significant benefit for our lives.