Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Free will — free will and volition, as philosophy and as science — compatibilism and its rivals, manipulation and responsibility, and the neuroscience of voluntary action such as the readiness potential (group: philosophy; ADR-025).
37 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-197 v3 | The Enigma Unveiled: How AI Compromises Free Will in Decision-Making | Sharman (2024), DOI-10.1109/ICAPAI61893.2024.10541271. Argues that AI compromises human free will by shaping decisions, manipulating emotions and lacking responsiveness to reasons, while admitting the debate is unresolved. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and no full text could be obtained (closed access on IEEE Xplore; no copy found via OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, CORE, Europe PMC or the Wayback Machine). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-291 v2 | Compatibilism | McKenna & Coates (2004), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/. The entry sorts compatibilism by which incompatibilist premise it denies: that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, that determinism precludes it, or that free will requires ultimate sourcehood. It argues that every “mesh” compatibilism has the same weak point: its sufficient conditions (hierarchies, reasons-responsive mechanisms, values) can be installed by manipulation, so each must either show what is wrong with manipulation cases or accept them. Its §4.2.1 is the fullest statement of Frankfurt 1971 in this batch. It covers first- and second-order desires, the will as the “effective first-order desire” that moves one “all the way to action” (1971, p. 84, Watson-1982 reprint pagination), the therapist’s mere second-order desire versus a second-order volition (pp. 84–5), the unwilling and willing addicts, and “One acts of her own free will if and only if her action issues from the will she wants.” The current revision has dropped the wanton/person distinction. The 2004–2015 revisions had it (“passive bystanders to their wills”, 1971, p. 89) and have to be read for it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-270); worth reading as the most complete reachable second-hand statement of Frankfurt’s 1971 apparatus and of the two structural objections (higher-order alienation per Watson 1975; manipulation), with Frankfurt’s own bullet-biting quotation on manipulation (2002, p. 27). For wantons and persons, read the 2004–2015 revisions (e.g. the Fall 2019 archive edition). Its account of Frankfurt’s later replies (supplement §A) dates from 2009, omits “satisfaction” (1992), and dates wholeheartedness to 1994. |
| LIT-293 v2 | I. Taking Ourselves Seriously; II. Getting It Right | Frankfurt (2004), https://tannerlectures.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/frankfurt_2005.pdf. Frankfurt grounds practical reason and normativity in the will rather than in reason. Reflexive self-division makes higher-order attitudes possible (pp. 170–171). Identification, a largely default “willing acceptance” (p. 173), turns a desire from “a problem” into a reason (p. 175). Free will is “volitional unanimity” between the governing desire and higher-order volitions (p. 177), and caring is wanting to go on wanting (p. 180). Final ends and their normative authority come from love, “strictly volitional” (p. 196): its involuntary, wholehearted “volitional necessities” are “irresistible, but … not coercive” (p. 197) and are “the only legitimate authority” for our normative convictions (p. 201). The 1971 wanton/person taxonomy is gestured at in a single phrase and its apparatus is not restated. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-264); worth reading as the only openly available statement by Frankfurt himself of his mature view (identification, volitional unanimity, caring, love, volitional necessity); read it knowing that it is a lecture with no self-citation and no engagement with critics (Watson is never named, the regress is not discussed), and that it does not restate the 1971 apparatus, which must still be sourced second-hand. |
| LIT-294 v2 | Moral Responsibility and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities | Robb (2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alternative-possibilities/. PAP (“a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise”) has no decisive positive argument: it is not self-evident, and the moral arguments from fairness, OIC and the W-defense cover blame at most. Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) are the strongest attack, because the factor that makes the act inevitable plays no role in producing it. The entry lays out three defences of PAP: - general-ability readings (PAP-general); - “flickers of freedom”, which Fischer answers with the robustness requirement; - the Kane/Widerker/Ginet dilemma, answered by Fischer’s causal-irrelevance reply on the first horn and by Pereboom’s buffer case, Hunt’s blockage and Mele & Robb 1998 on the second. Robb reports “not much consensus” (§5). He treats the fall of PAP as re-energising compatibilism, with Frankfurt’s 1971 identification view and Fischer & Ravizza’s guidance control as the two replacement accounts. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-269); worth reading as the standard, even-handed map of the PAP debate and the best available stand-in for Frankfurt 1969. It gives the recipe, both of Frankfurt’s own cases, and the main defences and replies, with precise citations. It is a stand-in for the argument’s reception, not for the 1969 text, which it quotes only through Fischer’s retelling, and it links FSCs to the hierarchical theory in a single paragraph (§5.1). |
| LIT-431 | Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain | Dennett & Kinsbourne (1992), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(2):183–201, with open peer commentary. There is no place in the brain where “it all comes together” for consciousness. Discriminations are made once, locally, and revised in parallel “drafts”, none canonical. The brain represents temporal order by content, not by the timing of its own vehicles, as a dated letter does. Colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit and Libet’s timing results stop looking anomalous. Whether a revision was pre-experiential (Stalinesque) or post-experiential (Orwellian) has no answer at that scale. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-367), the target article only; worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the Multiple Drafts model and of the case against “Cartesian materialism”, worked out on four timing phenomena (colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit, Libet’s backward referral and his delayed intention). Its sound core is the distinction between the time a content is represented and the time it represents. Its strong claim, that the Orwellian/Stalinesque distinction “need have no answer” below a few hundred milliseconds, is an argument from indistinguishability, not a demonstration. The open peer commentary (pp. 201–247) was not read. |
| LIT-560 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | Ryan & Deci (2006), Journal of Personality 74(6):1557–1586. SDT’s defence of autonomy as a psychological construct. Philosophers (phenomenologists from Pfänder and Ricoeur; hierarchical accounts from Frankfurt and Dworkin) agree that autonomy is self-endorsement, not independence. On that definition, the critiques fail: behaviourists and Bandura define autonomy as independence from the environment; reductive neuroscience mistakes levels of explanation; nonconscious priming shows autonomy can be compromised, not that it is illusory; too many options is not self-determination; and autonomy matters across cultures. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-441), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the place where SDT states its concept of autonomy against both philosophy and psychology. Autonomy is “regulation by the self”, its opposite “heteronomy”, regulation “without self-endorsement” (abstract). It is “a matter of degree” (p. 1562), compatible with dependence and with having one option, and lies “not in being independent causes but in exercising their capacity to reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). It answers Skinner, Bandura, Pinker, Bargh, Wegner, Schwartz and Iyengar. Its engagement with Frankfurt is thin: two citations of the 1971 paper inside one paragraph on hierarchical accounts, with the analytic detail taken from Dworkin. |
| LIT-605 | An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement | Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene (2012), PNAS 109(42). In Libet’s spontaneous movement task, a leaky stochastic accumulator, δx = (I − kx)Δt + cξ√Δt, with weak constant urgency I and a threshold, fitted only to waiting times, reproduces the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96): time-locking to threshold crossings averages up the autocorrelated noise that produced them. Fast responses to random interruptions were preceded by a slow negativity, as predicted. The “neural decision to move now” is the late threshold crossing, about 150 ms before movement, so Libet’s inference of an unconscious decision a half-second earlier is unfounded. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-462); worth reading as the model that reinterprets the readiness potential. A leaky stochastic accumulator with a weak constant input (“urgency”), fitted with three parameters to 14 participants’ waiting times in Libet’s task, reproduces the shape of the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96) because averaging epochs time-locked to threshold crossings recovers the noise that happened to carry the accumulator there. Its prediction, that fast responses to unpredictable clicks are preceded by a slow negativity, was confirmed (13 participants). On this account the “neural decision to move now” is the threshold crossing about 150 ms before movement, not the onset of the readiness potential, and Libet’s inference that the brain decides before awareness is “unfounded”. The authors say plainly that this shows the readiness potential could reflect spontaneous fluctuation, not that it does. |
| LIT-684 v4 | Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility | Fischer & Ravizza (1998), Cambridge University Press. Unread seed. The most influential reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. Responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control (the control that involves alternative possibilities), and Frankfurt-type cases show the two come apart. An agent has guidance control of an action when it issues from her own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism: regularly receptive to reasons, including moral ones, and at least weakly reactive to them. The mechanism is her own when she has taken responsibility for it, which makes responsibility historical. Guidance control so described is compatible with causal determinism, which is the position Fischer calls semicompatibilism. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, from Crossref’s book and chapter records, the chapter openings Cambridge Core displays, the record’s second-hand readings, the SEP entry Moral Responsibility (LIT-691) and Fischer’s own summary in “Stories and the Meaning of Life” (LIT-689, read), not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is paywalled at Cambridge Core, and Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy (oa_status closed, no repository holding). The shorter work the record’s book rule asks for is the authors’ own précis (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(2), September 2000, first page 441, DOI 10.2307/2653660), also closed: JSTOR answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. Fischer’s UC Riverside pages post no papers that could be reached, and the copies of the précis in two third-party collections of his papers (andrewmbailey.com/jmf and its wixsite continuation) are not the author’s, a publisher’s or a repository’s, so they were not opened. A web search also shows a PDF titled “Fischer Guidance control and RR” on a UNAM institute’s site, whose search snippet is the book’s series page; it is a course file with no statement of permission, so it was not opened either. A person with Cambridge Core or library access can supply the book (Cambridge UP, 1998, DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511814594); chapters 2, 3 and 8 (pp. 28–91 and 207–239) are the parts to read first, and the short précis is the quickest way to an Active reading. Update 2026-10-05: the précis is now read (LIT-728), with chapter 1 to p. 19 from the publisher’s preview. |
| LIT-685 v3 | Freedom Within Reason | Wolf (1990), Oxford University Press. Unread seed. The book-length Reason View: free will is “the freedom to be good, or the freedom to do the right thing for the right reasons” (publisher’s abstract). It sets up the dilemma of autonomy, argues that the Real Self View (Hume, Frankfurt, Watson, Taylor) and the Autonomy View both fail, states the Reason View, defends its notion of ability against determinism, and asks what the True and the Good must be for the view to hold. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, from Crossref’s book and chapter records (whose abstracts are each chapter’s opening paragraph), the SEP entry the record holds and an MIT lecture handout, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book is paywalled at Oxford Academic, Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed), and no author or repository deposit turned up. A person with Oxford Academic or library access can supply it (Oxford University Press, 1990, 153 pp., DOI 10.1093/oso/9780195056167.001.0001); chapter 4, “The Reason View” (pp. 67–93), and chapter 2, “The Real Self View” (pp. 23–45), are the parts to read first. |
| LIT-686 v2 | The Importance of What We Care About | Frankfurt (1982), Synthese 53(2):257–272; reprinted as the title essay of The Importance of What We Care About (CUP 1988), pp. 80–94. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it is the source of two of Frankfurt’s later themes: caring as a category of the will (Buss and Westlund, SEP Personal Autonomy §2) and volitional necessity, the inability to will otherwise that Luther’s “I can do no other” illustrates (Robb, SEP PAP §3.3). Frankfurt’s own preface calls it his first “stab” at “a theory of ideals”. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 from Crossref, the record’s second-hand readings and Frankfurt’s own preface to the 1988 collection, not read. No lawful full text was found. The article is paywalled at Springer, whose page answered a plain request with a script challenge, so I stopped there; Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy (oa_status closed), and the one repository location OpenAlex gives (a Georgetown handle, 10822/792792) does not resolve. The chapter in the 1988 collection is at Cambridge Core, which sells this collection’s chapters (as found for LIT-575), and Cambridge’s publisher preview of the collection stops in chapter 1. The copies a web search turns up are Scribd uploads and an academia.edu discussion, not the essay on a course page, an author’s page or a repository, so none was opened. A person with library access to Synthese 53(2), pp. 257–272 (DOI 10.1007/BF00484902), or to The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 80–94, can supply the 16 pages; a reading would move this to Active. |
| LIT-687 v3 | Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility | Fischer (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 81–106; read in its My Way reprint. Frankfurt-type cases show responsibility does not need the ability to do otherwise, so the mechanism that actually issues in action, not the agent, must be reasons-responsive, and weak responsiveness suffices. Responsibility is historical and compatible with determinism (semicompatibilism). | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-579): in full, in the reprint in Fischer’s My Way (OUP 2006), from Andrew M. Bailey’s collection of Fischer’s papers, used on the owner’s instruction. Worth reading as the first statement of mechanism-based reasons-responsiveness. Frankfurt-type cases move the requirement from the agent to the mechanism that actually issues in the action; weak responsiveness is held sufficient; the result is named semicompatibilism. Fischer concedes an insane-agent counterexample (note 11), which his later book with Ravizza (LIT-684) answers. |
| LIT-688 v3 | Asymmetrical Freedom | Wolf (1980), The Journal of Philosophy 77(3):151–166. Unread. By the SEP’s report it is the origin of the Reason View’s asymmetry: an agent who acts in accord with the True and the Good is praiseworthy even if psychologically determined so that she could not have done otherwise, but one who acts against it is blameworthy only if she could have done otherwise. Blame therefore needs regulative control and praise needs only guidance control, and Wolf answers the threat from determinism by denying that physical determination entails psychological determination. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Crossref, the record’s own second-hand readings and the SEP entry it already holds, not read. No lawful full text was found. The article is paywalled at JSTOR (stable 2025667) and the Philosophy Documentation Center, and JSTOR’s free Early Journal Content stops long before 1980. Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed). The author’s UNC faculty page posts no papers. PhilPapers (WOLAF) answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. The PDFs a web search turns up are a JSTOR download re-posted on an unrelated Squarespace site, a syllabus-collection upload on Weebly, and Scribd and Course Hero uploads; none is the author’s, a publisher’s or an institutional repository’s, so none was opened. A person with JSTOR or PDCnet access can supply the 16-page PDF (Journal of Philosophy 77(3), pp. 151–166, DOI 10.2307/2025667); a reading of it would move this to Active and is the text the asymmetry THEORY candidate needs. |
| LIT-689 | Stories and the Meaning of Life | Fischer (2009), Philosophic Exchange 39(1), pp. 3–15. Section I sketches his framework for moral responsibility: guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; it consists in acting from one’s own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism; responsibility is historical and compatible with causal determinism; and the moral of Frankfurt-style cases is that it depends on how the actual sequence unfolds. The paper’s thesis is that the value of acting freely is the value of artistic self-expression: free action makes a life a story with narrative value, though the life is judged mainly by moral and prudential standards. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-547); worth reading as the only first-hand, lawful statement by Fischer that the record holds of his framework for moral responsibility: guidance control, not regulative control, is the freedom-relevant condition; guidance control is mechanism ownership plus moderate reasons-responsiveness; responsibility is historical and compatible with causal determinism; and the moral of Frankfurt-style cases is that responsibility depends on the actual sequence. Its own thesis is that the value of acting freely is the value of artistic self-expression, which gives a life narrative value. It lists the framework’s elements without arguing for them. |
| LIT-690 v3 | Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility | Wolf (1987/88), in Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (CUP), pp. 46–62. Unread. By second-hand reports it argues that the “deep self” views of Frankfurt, Watson and Taylor, on which an agent is responsible when her actions flow from desires and values she identifies with, are insufficient. JoJo, raised by a vicious dictator, identifies wholly with the values he inherits yet is not responsible, because his upbringing leaves him unable to see right from wrong. What must be added is sanity: the ability to know and appreciate what one is doing and that it is right or wrong. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from Cambridge’s chapter record and opening extract, the record’s second-hand readings and an MIT lecture handout about the essay, not read. No lawful full text was found. The chapter is paywalled at Cambridge Core (the page shows only the opening paragraph). Unpaywall lists no open copy (oa_status closed). The author’s UNC faculty page posts no papers, and PhilPapers (WOLSAT) answered with a bot challenge, so I stopped there. The PDFs a web search turns up are an anthology reprint re-posted on an unrelated Squarespace site and Scribd and Course Hero uploads; none is the author’s, a publisher’s or an institutional repository’s, so none was opened. A person with library access to Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge UP, chapter 3, pp. 46–62, DOI 10.1017/CBO9780511625411.003), or to any reprint (it is widely anthologised, including in Watson’s Free Will), can supply the 17 pages; a reading of them would move this to Active and is the first-hand text the Reason View THEORY candidate needs. |
| LIT-691 | Moral Responsibility | Talbert (2019; revised 2024), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A survey of moral responsibility: its relation to free will and determinism, forward-looking, Strawsonian and reasons-responsiveness accounts, the attributability/accountability distinction that grew from Wolf and Watson, the moral competence condition (Wolf’s JoJo), conversational views, standing to blame, outcomes, skepticism, moral luck, ultimate responsibility, manipulation and the epistemic condition. Its §2.3 is a page-referenced summary of Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-548); worth reading as the record’s map of moral responsibility apart from the free-will question, and as its most exact second-hand source for two accounts the record cannot read first-hand: Fischer and Ravizza’s guidance control (§2.3, with page references to the 1998 book) and Wolf’s critique of Real Self views and her moral-competence condition, including the JoJo case (§§3.1.1, 3.2). It reports Wolf’s praise/blame asymmetry only in one sentence of its preamble. |
| LIT-692 | Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person | Frankfurt (1971), The Journal of Philosophy 68(1):5–20. What is essential to a person is the structure of the will. A person’s will is the effective first-order desire, the one that moves him “all the way to action” (p. 8). A second-order volition is wanting a desire to be one’s will; persons have them, and wantons, who “do not care” about their wills, do not (pp. 10–11). Forming one is identifying with one desire and withdrawing from another (p. 13). Freedom of the will is having the will one wants, “securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions” (p. 15), and a decisive identification “resounds” through all higher orders (p. 16). Moral responsibility needs neither a free will nor alternatives: the willing addict acts “of his own free will” (pp. 18–20). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-545); worth reading as the source of the hierarchical account of the will, which the record has so far held only second-hand: first- and second-order desires, the will as the effective desire, second-order volitions, wantons and persons, freedom of the will as having the will one wants, decisive identification that “resounds” through higher orders, and a responsibility that needs neither a free will nor alternatives. Read it knowing that it is short and programmatic, that identification is stated, not analysed, and that it already contains both the decisive commitment (p. 16) and the acceptance of an addict made by another (n. 10), which the record’s surveys date later. |
| LIT-693 v2 | The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays | Frankfurt (1988), Cambridge University Press: thirteen essays from 1969 to 1988, twelve reprinted “with minor stylistic changes” and “Rationality and the Unthinkable” new. Not read as a book. Its preface, read in the publisher’s preview, says the essays’ considerations are “primarily structural rather than historical”, that volition rather than reason is the faculty they explore, and that necessity is “in certain respects essential” to autonomy. The record cites its pagination as IWWCA. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 as a seed, from Crossref and from Cambridge’s publisher preview of the book (front matter, contents, sources, the three-page preface and reprint pp. 1–9 of chapter 1), not read as a book. The book is sold at Cambridge Core and Unpaywall lists no open copy. Its essays are filed one by one where they matter: chapters 1 and 2 (LIT-694, LIT-692) were read in full from their journal versions, and chapters 7 and 12 (LIT-686, LIT-575) are Deferred. The seed is kept because the record cites the book’s pagination (“IWWCA”) throughout and because its preface states Frankfurt’s method first-hand. A person with library access can supply the remaining essays; chapters 5, 8 and 12 are the ones the record’s theories lean on. |
| LIT-694 | Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility | Frankfurt (1969), The Journal of Philosophy 66(23):829–839. The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), “a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise”, is false. Coercion excuses only when the agent acts because of it (§§II– III). Black, ready to make Jones4 act as he wants and never needing to, shows that circumstances can make an action unavoidable without playing any role in bringing it about (§IV); such a fact “does not help in any way to understand” the action and cannot excuse it (§V). PAP should be replaced by: not responsible “if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise”, which “does not appear to conflict” with compatibilism (pp. 838–839). | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-546); worth reading as the origin of Frankfurt-style cases and the shortest first-hand statement of the argument against the principle of alternate possibilities: a fact that makes an action unavoidable but plays no role in bringing it about cannot excuse, so PAP should give way to “a person is not morally responsible for what he has done if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise” (p. 838). Read it knowing that its case is schematic (Black, Jones4 and “a certain action”; the voting and shooting versions in the record’s surveys are later retellings), that its prior sign is in a footnote, and that it leaves “could have done otherwise” and “morally responsible” unanalysed on purpose (n. 1). |
| LIT-695 v2 | The Faintest Passion | Frankfurt (1992), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66(3):5–16, his Eastern Division Presidential Address; reprinted in Necessity, Volition, and Love (CUP 1999), pp. 95–107. Unread. By the record’s second-hand reports it replaces decisive commitment with “satisfaction”, an absence of “restlessness or resistance” toward one’s motives (Buss and Westlund, SEP Personal Autonomy n. 1), and holds that wholeheartedness needs the person to be “resolutely on the side of one of the forces struggling within him”, not untroubled by opposition (as Velleman quotes it, NVL 100). | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-04 from Crossref and the record’s second-hand readings, not read. No lawful full text was found. Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no open copy of the address or of its reprints (oa_status closed): it is at JSTOR (stable 3130658), the APA Centennial Series reprint of 2013 is at the Philosophy Documentation Center, and the chapter in Necessity, Volition, and Love is at Cambridge Core. I did not open those pages. The copies a web search turns up are student-notes sites and academia.edu or ResearchGate discussions, not the address on a course page, an author’s page or a repository, so none was opened. A person with access to Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66(3), pp. 5–16 (DOI 10.2307/3130658), or to Necessity, Volition, and Love (CUP 1999), pp. 95–107, can supply the 12 pages; a reading would move this to Active and is one of the readings THEORY-029’s promote_when asks for. |
| LIT-718 | The Conversable, Responsible Corporation | Pettit (2017), in Orts & Smith (eds), The Moral Responsibility of Firms, OUP, pp. 15–35. Corporations are agents and, through authorised spokespersons, conversable ones that avow attitudes and make promises. Because majority voting on connected judgments can be inconsistent, a conversable corporation must correct its aggregate and so forms a mind of its own. Conversable agents are fit to be held responsible, so corporations are. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-569): in full, from the manuscript Pettit circulated for a master class at the European University Institute. Worth reading as the short statement of his case that corporations are fit to be held responsible. A corporation is a conversable agent: it speaks for itself through authorised spokespersons and commits itself, rather than reporting its members’ attitudes. It must correct for the inconsistency any mechanical aggregation produces, so it has a mind of its own. Conversable agents meet the three conditions of fitness to be held responsible. The chapter stands in for the unread 2007 paper LIT-742. |
| LIT-728 | Précis of Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility | Fischer & Ravizza (2000), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(2):441–445. Moral responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control over alternatives. Guidance control is acting from a mechanism that is one’s own, because one has taken responsibility for it, and that is moderately reasons-responsive: regularly receptive to reasons, some of them moral, and at least weakly reactive. The view is historical and compatible with causal determinism. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-575): in full, from Andrew M. Bailey’s collection of Fischer’s papers, used on the owner’s instruction. Worth reading as the authors’ own five-page statement of the account of Responsibility and Control (LIT-684). It says moral responsibility requires only guidance control, which has two parts: the agent’s ownership of the mechanism that issues in the action, acquired by taking responsibility for it, and that mechanism’s moderate reasons-responsiveness. It summarises and does not argue; the arguments are in the unread chapters. |
| LIT-742 v2 | Responsibility Incorporated | Pettit (2007), Ethics 117:171–201. Incorporated groups face significant choices, can recognise the relative value of their options, and can choose in sensitivity to those values, so they meet the conditions for being fit to be held responsible. Unread: the argument is read in his 2017 chapter LIT-718. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached (SSRN’s download is blocked to this client, and the journal is closed). Its argument is read first-hand in Pettit’s later chapter “The Conversable, Responsible Corporation” (LIT-718), which restates the three conditions of fitness to be held responsible and argues that corporations meet them. Filed because the owner’s essay needs an account of corporate responsibility, and this is the paper usually cited for it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-747 | Responsibility, Moral and Otherwise | Wolf (2015), Inquiry 58(2):127–142, the 2013 Routledge Lecture. The causal/moral contrast runs together two distinctions, shallow vs deep and moral vs nonmoral; we are deeply responsible for nonmoral traits and art too. Attributability and accountability are independent, not levels: accountability needs only wrongdoing, a position to know it, and its being up to the agent. The fit target of reactive attitudes is, tentatively, an “intelligent” self. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-565): in full, from the author’s typescript of the 2013 Routledge Lecture in Cambridge’s Apollo repository. Worth reading as the only lawful full text by Wolf on responsibility the record holds. It argues that deep responsibility is not limited to the moral, and that attributability and accountability are independent, not two levels. Accountability may need nothing metaphysically robust. What makes a self a fit target of the reactive attitudes is, on her “hunch”, that it is an “intelligent” self. Limits: the positive view is offered as a hunch, the psychopath is a stipulated case, and the lecture does not restate the Reason View of Freedom Within Reason (LIT-685). |
| LIT-991 v2 | Beyond the Moral Influence Theory? A Critical Examination of Vargas’s Agency Cultivation Model of Responsibility | Harland (2020). Manuel Vargas’s agency cultivation model of responsibility claims to improve on the moral influence theory by aiming praise and blame at moral agency, but its notion of responsiveness to moral considerations is so capacious that the model is the old theory renamed and inherits its defects. Vargas’s counterfactual test of free will is calibrated to what makes blaming effective, so it can be applied only once we know whether blaming such agents is good policy. Given the model, freedom follows blameworthiness and inquiry into counterfactual freedom does no work. The abstract states this last conclusion without the restriction to the model. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-847) in full; worth reading as a compact argument that a free-will condition defined by what makes blaming effective cannot ground blame: to apply Vargas’s counterfactual test one must already know whether blaming such agents is good policy, so freedom follows blameworthiness. Also argues that Vargas’s agency cultivation model is the old moral influence theory renamed, since its responsiveness to moral considerations reduces to intrinsic motivation to act morally. Read it knowing that Vargas is read only through Harland’s quotations and stipulations, that the redundancy argument works class by class, and that the abstract states unconditionally a conclusion the body restricts to Vargas’s model. Filed for QUESTION-068, which is Deferred; the account is THEORY-310. |
| LIT-1006 v3 | Living without Free Will | Pereboom (2001). Defends hard incompatibilism. Moral responsibility in the basic-desert sense is incompatible with determinism and with the indeterminacy of standard quantum mechanics. Agent-causal libertarianism may be coherent and would secure it, but we have no evidence for the indeterminacy it needs, so we have no evidence that we are morally responsible. Frankfurt-style cases defeat alternative-possibilities conditions but not the core incompatibilist condition on an action’s causal history. Chapter 4’s four-case argument holds that determination threatens responsibility no less than covert manipulation does. The cases themselves are as standardly reported (an agent manipulated by neuroscientists, through programming and upbringing, to ordinary determinism) and were not read here. The record meets the argument secondhand (LIT-294, LIT-684, LIT-691). Read in part: the Introduction and Chapter 1 pp. 1–10. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 and read only in part: the Introduction (pp. xiii–xxiii) and Chapter 1 pp. 1–10, from the front matter and excerpt that Cambridge University Press publishes for the book (assets.cambridge.org), read in full in NOTE-823 (Skimmed). The rest was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex and Unpaywall report it closed; the Cambridge Core book page (reached through the DOI) offers the chapters only behind an access check; no author-posted draft was found; the full copies found are on file-sharing sites and were not opened. The four-case argument (Chapter 4) is therefore not read here, and THEORY-040’s call for a first-hand reading of it is not met. It stays Unavailable until a full copy is supplied (ADR-041): the search for one is recorded, and only the publisher’s samples were read. THEORY-316 is filed from Chapter 1’s opening. |
| LIT-1045 | Manipulation Cases in Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Part 1: Cases and Arguments | De Marco and Cyr (2024), Philosophy Compass 19(12):e70009, open access. Survey of manipulation cases. Quotes Pereboom’s Case 1 (Plum, made strongly egoistic by neuroscientists just before he reasons) and describes Cases 2 to 4: programming at the start of life, an egoistic upbringing, ordinary determinism. Pereboom argues that no relevant difference separates adjacent cases and that causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control best explains why none of the Plums is responsible. The generic schema is No-FR plus No-Diff. Hard lines deny No-FR, and soft lines deny No-Diff, but original-design cases defeat bypassing views and natural-force cases defeat manipulator- focused views. Parallel indeterministic cases press libertarians too, and Todd’s variants need only mitigated blame. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-856) in full; worth reading as an even-handed open survey of manipulation arguments: it quotes Pereboom’s Case 1 verbatim in its 2024 wording, describes Cases 2 to 4, states the argument’s schema (No-FR, No-Diff) and notes that Pereboom’s own version concludes by best explanation. It sorts the classic cases into mid-life and original-design manipulation, and shows how original-design cases (Ernie) defeat bypassing views while natural-force cases (Natalie) defeat manipulator-focused views. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1006, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1047 | Skepticism About Moral Responsibility | Caruso (2018), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Moral responsibility skepticism denies or doubts basic-desert responsibility, which Pereboom defines as deserving blame or praise just because one acted, not on consequentialist or contractualist grounds. Hard incompatibilism rejects compatibilism by the manipulation argument, event-causal and non-causal libertarianism by the luck objection, and agent-causal libertarianism as unreconciled with physics. The entry quotes Pereboom’s Case 2 and gives the four-case argument’s structure, the hard-line and soft-line replies, and the difficulty for soft lines that a revised vignette can meet any condition they name. It reports Strawson’s Basic Argument and Levy’s Luck Pincer, which argues that historical compatibilism cannot let agents take responsibility for constitutive luck. Its section 3 sets out optimistic skepticism. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-862) in full; worth reading as the standard survey of free will skepticism and the best open statement of hard incompatibilism: Pereboom’s definition of basic-desert responsibility, the argument against compatibilism by manipulation, against event-causal libertarianism by luck, and against agent-causal libertarianism by physics. It quotes Pereboom’s Case 2 verbatim (2014 wording), and sets out the hard-line and soft-line replies and the soft-liner’s difficulty. It also reports Levy’s luck argument against historical compatibilism, which targets the taking of responsibility. Survey strength: the four-case argument is summarised, not reproduced. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1006, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1229 v2 | Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy | Mele (1995). Self-control is the contrary of akrasia, and even an ideally self-controlled agent falls short of autonomy; the book adds a history-sensitive account of control for compatibilists and a causal openness without agent causation for libertarians, and defends “agnostic autonomism”, the disjunction of the two. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed; its other location is an institutional e-book handle that needs a licence. Oxford Academic offers it only to subscribers, PhilArchive holds a bibliographic entry with no file, and web searches found only catalogue and bookseller listings. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1429 | Why Corporations Are Not Morally Responsible for Anything They Do | Velasquez (1983), Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2(3):1–18. The classic denial that a corporation, as an entity distinct from its members, is morally responsible for anything it does; the members who originate its acts are. Unread: no lawful copy reached. The later restatement is Velasquez (2003), also unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The publisher (Philosophy Documentation Center) sells the article; Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy; the PhilArchive record (dc2.philarchive.org/rec/VELWCA), and philarchive.org and philpapers.org with it, refused this client behind a Cloudflare check, so whether PhilArchive holds a copy is unknown; web searches for an author-posted or course-page copy found none. Filed because the owner is filing the thesis that a corporation is a psychopathic entity, and this is the classic objection to the corporate responsibility that thesis presupposes and that French (LIT-727) and Pettit (LIT-718) defend. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1432 v2 | Debunking Corporate Moral Responsibility | Velasquez (2003), Business Ethics Quarterly 13(4):531–562. The core argument that a corporation is a separate moral agent rests on the fallacy of division; members are always causally responsible for any corporate act, and intentions ascribed to corporations are only “as if”. Unread beyond the publisher’s abstract: no lawful copy reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Cambridge Core, the journal’s host, offers it behind “Get access”; Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy (OpenAlex’s RePEc and DigitalGeorgetown entries are catalogue records, not texts); ResearchGate lists no full text; PhilPapers and PhilArchive refused this client behind a Cloudflare check; an academia.edu page under the title refused automated requests, and its uploader could not be seen, so it was not treated as an author copy. Only the publisher’s abstract was read. Filed with the 1983 paper (LIT-1429) as the developed form of the classic objection to corporate moral responsibility, for the owner’s corporate-psychopathy question. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1867 | Source Incompatibilism and Its Alternatives | Timpe (2007), American Philosophical Quarterly 44(2), 143–155. The received taxonomy splits incompatibilists into leeway (alternative possibilities matter most) and source (ultimacy matters most). No leeway incompatibilist can rest on mere alternatives, which raise the luck objection, so every acceptable incompatibilism appeals to ultimacy. And ultimacy requires that the agent not be causally determined by anything outside her, which entails more than one open future and so some alternative possibility, however weak. So the best source incompatibilism is “wide”, holding a weak alternative-possibilities condition entailed by ultimacy, and the taxonomy should be rejected. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1459) in full, from the author’s upload of the published pages (https://kevin-timpe.publicplatform.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2018/12/source.pdf), an author’s upload under ADR-064. Worth reading as the argument that the best source incompatibilism is “wide”: ultimacy requires indeterminism, indeterminism leaves some alternative, so an alternative-possibilities condition is entailed by the ultimacy condition, and the dichotomy between leeway and source incompatibilism should be dropped. Read it knowing that the entailed alternatives may be non-robust and do no explanatory work, and that it quotes Pereboom’s book (LIT-1006, unread) at three places only. |
| LIT-1868 | The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories | Fischer (2010), Philosophical Review 119(3). The moral of the Frankfurt cases is that if causal determinism rules out moral responsibility, it is not in virtue of eliminating alternative possibilities. Against the Dilemma Defense: on the indeterministic horn, buffer cases (Hunt, Pereboom) remove every robust alternative; on the deterministic horn, assume determinism without assuming it removes alternatives, and determinism plus Black’s counterfactual device together remove them, so Black does not “drop out”, and the argument runs unchanged even granting that determinism removes alternatives. Widerker’s requirement that the case satisfy IRR is rejected. Fischer allows that determinism may still undermine responsibility by another route, such as sourcehood. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1457) in full, from the published PDF on andrewmbailey.com (https://andrewmbailey.com/jmf/Frankfurt_Cases_Moral_of_the_Stories.pdf), which the owner ruled a lawful copy on 2026-10-30. Worth reading as Fischer’s reply to the Dilemma Defense: a deterministic Frankfurt case in which determinism and Black’s device together, and neither alone, rule out alternatives, giving the conclusion that if determinism rules out responsibility it is not by eliminating alternative possibilities. Read it knowing that Fischer concedes causal determination may still matter, for instance by removing “sourcehood”, and that Pereboom’s buffer cases and Widerker’s dilemma are reported, not argued in full. |
| LIT-1961 v2 | Chaos | Bishop, ‘Chaos’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008; substantive revision 2024-10-11). Chaos is a property of deterministic, nonlinear models with sensitive dependence and aperiodicity; unpredictability is not indeterminism. The argument that chaos amplifies quantum events is conditional on the interpretation of QM, damping and the sign of local Lyapunov exponents, and in the brain parallel redundancy may block it. For Kane, sensitivity is not sufficient for incompatibilist freedom under determinism, and under indeterminism agents must still be shown to harness it. §§6.2–6.3 state contextual emergence: larger-scale stability conditions constrain and enable smaller-scale possibility and actualization. | Active — skimmed 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1535), from the live SEP page, §§4 and 6 and the stock-taking sections read closely; worth reading for its case that chaos is not indeterminism, that amplification of small perturbations is physically conditional, and that Kane’s use of chaos leaves the harnessing of indeterminism to be shown. The 2024 revision also states Bishop’s contextual emergence as an ontological account of constraint. |
| LIT-1963 | Attention as the Source of a Free Will | Jennings (2026), forthcoming in Synthese. Attention is prioritization of mental processing by a subject, and the subject is a collection of fixed, formed and fluid interests with the power to constrain those interests. That power is contextually emergent: the collection’s parts are necessary but not sufficient, and a boundary from its context, the skull, meninges and brain stem, is what lets macro-level patterns constrain micro-level ones. Phase-amplitude coupling is offered as its signature and ephaptic coupling as evidence against weak emergence. Attention breaks stalemates between equally weighted interests and so forms new interests, which the paper offers in place of Kane’s indeterminism as the source of a free will, placing itself “in between libertarianism and compatibilism”. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1508), from the manuscript of 2026-10-29 the owner supplied; worth reading as a worked attempt to make attention the mechanism of a will without a homunculus, and for its one original move, a boundary between an emergent phenomenon and its context as what keeps contextual emergence from collapsing into supervenience. Read it knowing that its neural evidence (phase-amplitude coupling, ephaptic coupling) is consistent with the weakly emergent models it rejects, and that its step from a non-reducible subject to free will is asserted. |
| LIT-1984 v3 | Libertarianism | Kane (2009), Philosophical Studies 144: 35–44. Free will is “the power to be the ultimate creator and sustainer of one’s own ends or purposes”, and requires ultimate responsibility (UR): an agent must be responsible for anything that is a sufficient cause or motive of the act. UR requires that some acts in a life, self-forming actions, were undetermined, and Frankfurt cases do not touch them. SFAs occur under conflict, when a “stirring up of chaos” in the brain makes it sensitive to micro-indeterminacy; the indeterminacy is a hindrance within each of two competing efforts, both willed, so either outcome is the agent’s success. Indeterminism lessens control without lessening responsibility, and what responsibility needs is macro-control, not control of neurons. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1518), from the JSTOR download reposted on cooperative-individualism.org, at the owner’s direction. Worth reading as Kane’s own compact statement of ultimate responsibility, self-forming actions and his reply to the luck objection: the “stirring up of chaos” that makes the brain sensitive to micro-indeterminacy is his, and his answer to the control objection concedes that indeterminism diminishes control and denies that it diminishes responsibility. |
| LIT-1985 v2 | The Significance of Free Will | Kane (1999), doi:10.1093/0195126564.001.0001. Registered unread from the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” of 2026-11-02 (A15, A20). Kane’s ultimate responsibility and self-forming actions, and ch. 8’s chaotic amplification of indeterminacy in conflict, which the owner’s U20 links to formal chaos (CLAIM-533). The record held Kane only second-hand (THEORY-316, LIT-1867, NOTE-548). | Unavailable — searched 2026-11-03 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports it closed; its two other locations are a CiNii catalogue record and a UCLouvain DIAL ebook record (hdl.handle.net/2078/ebook:67558), a licensed library ebook, which timed out; Crossref lists only Oxford Academic, which is subscription access. Web searches found no author copy of the book or of ch. 8. What Kane’s text says about chaos, which CLAIM-533 leans on as “the standard reading”, is therefore still unchecked here. A whole in-copyright book on a file host would not count (ADR-064). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1992 v2 | Decision-making through irruption theory: how to use and interpret the Haken-Kelso-Bunz model | Sánchez-Cañizares (2026), Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. The HKB potential V = −a cos φ − b cos 2φ with parameters switched in time, from no landscape to two wells to one, makes the across-trial spread of the relative phase rise and then fall, which is compared by eye with post-stimulus quenching of ERP trial-to-trial variability in Sergent et al. 2021, Wolff et al. 2019 and 2021 and Hua et al. 2025. Irruption Theory is revised as IAT*: irruption is the onset of the bistable landscape and absorption its passage to one attractor, reversing Froese 2024’s variance hypothesis. The mind sets the control parameters by “selecting the relevant physical coarse-graining”. The author calls the agreement “only qualitative” and IAT* untestable without further assumptions. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1506), from the publisher’s open-access PDF; worth reading as the one place Irruption Theory is tied to a dynamical model and to data: the HKB potential with time-switched parameters, compared qualitatively with trial-to-trial variability in decision tasks, with the mind cast as setting the landscape rather than pushing the state. The fit is by eye; the model’s late-time spread is misdescribed for the stated noise. |