On Wed May 20, 4-6pm UK time (in the Law Library, and online), Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) will give an SCLP seminar. The abstract is in below. The paper itself is available here, and the proposal for the wider monograph is available here to give you more context.To join the online session click here.

In Minds Matter (Gifford Lectures 2024, PUP forthcoming), I hope to unwind the philosophical problem of free will and moral responsibility. I believe the problem can be unwound because I believe it is a philosophical problem, born of two inadequate philosophical models. First, our idea of what it is to control a thing is too narrow. I suggest a natural expansion. Second, our idea of what it is to be morally responsible is off center. I suggest a recentering. With this remodeling, the problem is unwound.

The paper for our meeting (Lecture Three: “The Ethical Challenge”) begins the project of recentering of moral responsibility. I start by locating the relevant notion of responsibility, which I call the “merited consequences” conception. The remainder of the paper has two functions. First, it presents a contractualist justification of sanctions. This justification does not require libertarian freedom but (unlike consequentialist justifications) is not “forward-looking.” The paper thus details a compatibilist justification of one kind of “merited-consequence” (a sanction). Second, the paper makes an important concession to incompatibilists. It argues that, if we adopt the contractualist justification of sanction and also presume an extremely strong form of freedom, anyone who freely does wrong will thereby stand “condemned” in a specific, technical sense: they will have no complaint to make on their own behalf, on the basis of fairness, against potentially unlimited sanction. I suspect this “condemnation” is part of what incompatibilists have in mind when they talk about “basic desert.” I suggest we can and should set it aside.