Freedom, Responsibility, and Value : Essays in Honor of John Martin Fischer

This volume celebrates the career of John Martin Fischer, whose work on a wide range of topics over the past forty years has been transformative and inspirational. Fischer's semicompatibilist view of free will and moral responsibility is perhaps the most widely discussed view of its kind, and his emphasis on the significance of reasons-responsiveness as the capacity that underlies moral accountability has been widely influential. Aside from free will and moral responsibility, Fischer is also well-known for his work on freedom and foreknowledge, the problem of evil, the badness of death, the meaning of life, and the allure of immortality. This volume gathers new essays by leading scholars on some of the major themes of Fischer's work, and it also includes a new piece by Fischer in which he offers a systematic reflection on and defense of the motivations that have shaped his theorizing about moral responsibility. Freedom, Responsibility, and Value will be of interest to scholars and students working on a variety of issues in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion. This volume celebrates the career of John Martin Fischer, whose work on a wide range of topics over the past 40 years has been transformative and inspirational.Fischer's semicompatibilist view of free will and moral responsibility is perhaps the most widely discussed view of its kind, and his emphasis on the significance of reasons-responsiveness as the capacity that underlies moral accountability has been widely influential. Aside from free will and moral responsibility, Fischer is also well-known for his work on freedom and foreknowledge, the problem of evil, the badness of death, the meaning of life, and the allure of immortality. This volume gathers new essays by leading scholars on some of the major themes of Fischer's work, and it also includes a new piece by Fischer in which he offers a systematic reflection on and defense of the motivations that have shaped his theorizing about moral responsibility.Freedom, Responsibility, and Value will be of interest to scholars and students working on a variety of issues in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Contributors Introduction PART I: Freedom and Responsibility 1. A Simple but Powerful Idea: Actual Sequences and Free Will 2. Responsibility and Reasons-Responsiveness 3. Fischer on Epistemic and Freedom Requirements for Moral Responsibility 4. Meaning in the Middle: Responsibility, Narrative, and Agential History 5. Retributivism and the Relevance of Metaphysics to Practice 6. Control Over and Responsibility for Belief 7. Losing Free Will? Three Thought Experiments 8. Accounting for Failure 9. The Peculiar Moral Position of Psychopaths PART II: Interlude 10. The Resilience of Moral Responsibility PART III: Value 11. The “Range” Argument from Evil 12. Is Temporal Bias Key to Justifying Fischer’s Asymmetry? 13. Music, Death, and Grief Complete Works of John Martin Fischer Index