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Agency and Answerability$
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Gary Watson

Print publication date: 2004

Print ISBN-13: 9780199272273

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199272273.001.0001

Introduction

Chapter:
(p. 1 ) Introduction
Source:
Agency and Answerability
Author(s):

Gary Watson (Contributor Webpage)

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199272273.003.0001

This volume collects most of the author's publications on free will, agency, and responsibility. They chronicle an attempt to answer two complementary questions: ‘What makes us agents?’ and ‘What makes us responsible to one another for how we live our lives? ’ The author's answers to both questions appeal to our capacity for normative competence. We are agents because we have this capacity and to the extent that we exercise it; we are responsible to each other for our lives together as reflections of our exercise of this capacity. The volume groups these 12 essays according to three prominent themes: (1) one's own motivational states as possible impediments to one's freedom; (2) causal determination and reductive mechanism as alleged threats to freedom; and (3) the nature of responsibility.

Keywords:   free will, agency, responsibility, normative competence, determinism, freedom

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