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Book Cover for: Free Will's Value: Criminal Justice, Pride, and Love, John Lemos

Free Will's Value: Criminal Justice, Pride, and Love

John Lemos

This book defends an event-causal theory of libertarian free will and argues that the belief in such free will plays an important, if not essential, role in supporting certain important values.

In the first part of the book, the author argues that possession of libertarian free will is necessary for deserved praise and blame and reward and punishment. He contends that his version of libertarian free will - the indeterministic weightings view - is coherent and can fit with a scientific, naturalistic understanding of human nature. However, the author also notes that we don't have sufficient evidentiary grounds to believe that human beings have this kind of free will. Despite this, he argues there are sufficiently strong value-based/axiological reasons to believe we have such free will and to live and act as if we have it. In the second part of the book, the author makes the case that the belief in such libertarian, desert-grounding free will is very important to defending human dignity in the context of criminal justice, making sense of justified pride and its value, and adding value to our relationships.

Free Will's Value will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, action theory, ethics, and the philosophy of law.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Routledge
  • Publish Date: Oct 8th, 2024
  • Pages: 272
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.60in - 0.85lb
  • EAN: 9781032452364
  • Categories: Free Will & Determinism

About the Author

John Lemos is the Joseph McCabe Professor of Philosophy at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He is the author of Commonsense Darwinism: Evolution, Morality, and the Human Condition (2008), Freedom, Responsibility, and Determinism (2013), and A Pragmatic Defense of Libertarian Free Will (2018). He has also published over 30 articles in various philosophical journals such as The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Dialectica, Law and Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Philosophia, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy.

Praise for this book

"In Free Will's Value, John Lemos has developed a rich, rigorous, and plausible account of classic libertarian free will and provided a deeply insightful guide to its personal and social implications. Anyone rejecting libertarian free will without considering Lemos' powerful pragmatic version of that position is attacking a strawman."

Bruce N. Waller, Youngstown State University, USA