Short description:

This volume celebrates the career of John Martin Fischer. It gathers new essays by leading scholars on some of the major themes of Fischer's work and 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.

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

Introduction Taylor W. Cyr, Andrew Law, and Neal A. Tognazzini  Part 1: Freedom and Responsibility  1. A Simple but Powerful Idea: Actual Sequences and Free Will Carolina Sartorio  2. Responsibility and Reasons-Responsiveness Dana Kay Nelkin and Manuel Vargas  3. Fischer on Epistemic and Freedom Requirements for Moral Responsibility Alfred R. Mele  4. Meaning in the Middle: Responsibility, Narrative, and Agential History Meghan Griffith  5. Retributivism and the Relevance of Metaphysics to Practice Derk Pereboom  6. Control Over and Responsibility for Belief Matthias P. Steup  7. Losing Free Will? Three Thought Experiments Kadri Vihvelin   8. Accounting for Failure Randolph Clarke  9. The Peculiar Moral Position of Psychopaths Gary Watson  Part 2: Interlude  10. The Resilience of Moral Responsibility John Martin Fischer  Part 3: Value  11. The ?Range? Argument from Evil Peter van Inwagen  12. Is Temporal Bias Key to Justifying Fischer?s Asymmetry? Travis Timmerman  13. Music, Death, and Grief Martha C. Nussbaum