Resolve Issues about Free Will ? ”

Can Neuroscience Resolve Issues about Free Will? ” Adina Roskies knits together traditional and modern philosophical ideas with emerging concepts arising from the neuroscience of decision making. It is an elegant and nuanced synthesis. Roskies feels the neurobiology of decision making offers insight into the machine behind the mind while arguing that mechanism does not undermine mindedness or threaten cherished ideas. While she believes that the neuroscience bears on traditional philosophical debates about free will and responsibility, its role is limited. In particular, neuroscience cannot settle fundamental issues like the truth of determinism. To her fellow compatibilists, her message is that understanding the machinery is relevant. Her message to libertarians is that the neurobiology supports indeterminism, although not the right kind of indeterminism. I think she has more to offer libertarians, as I will explain. Roskies ’ s grasp of the neuroscience is impressive, leaving me very little to say. However, two themes might benefit from elaboration. The first concerns a component of the neural mechanism that I will refer to as a policy: a higher-level setting that governs the basic mechanism for converting evidence to a decision. The second concerns the nature of neural noise. These points are likely to be most interesting to libertarians and hard incompatibilists, but let me preface this with an appeal to Roskies ’ s fellow compatibilists. The most compelling arguments for compatibilism would render the neurobiology as irrelevant as the proposition of determinism itself. From the perspective of many writers, ethical responsibility does not rest on the validity of determinism or many other philosophical propositions. Instead, ethics lies beyond the limits of propositional construction; ethics rests on a form of contractualism ( Williams, 1985 ) between human beings who choose (or are built) to socialize. Nonetheless, mental capacities are often relevant in considerations of culpability, credit, regret, and the like. At the 3.2 Comments on Adina Roskies, “ Can Neuroscience Resolve Issues about Free Will? ”