Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility

Dana Kay Nelkin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She received her PhD from UCLA, and her BA from the University of Texas. She is the author of a series of articles on freedom and responsibility, as well as on other topics, including self-deception and the lottery paradox about the nature of rationality. She is currently exploring the relationships between such philosophical questions and a variety of legal issues concerning criminal responsibility as well as psychological research on attitudes that appear to presuppose attributions of responsibility. She is an affiliated scholar with the University of San Diego Law and Philosophy Institute, a member of an interdisciplinary collaboration on the topic of forgiveness, and a member of the Human Research Protections Board at UCSD.

• Introduction ; 1. A Rational Abilities View of Responsibility ; 2. Deep Assessment and Good Action ; 3. Abilities ; 4. A Compatibilist Account of Agent Causation ; 5. A Rationale for the Rational Abilities View: Praise, Blame, and the Ought Implies Can Principle ; 6. Deliberation and Alternatives ; 7. The Sense of Freedom, or Acting under the Idea of Freedom ; Concluding Thoughts ; Bibliography ; Index

this profound book ... is exemplary for its rigorous examination and thought-provoking ideas and this is a must read for philosophy students and those interested in the theories of human freedom and responsibility.