Smith & Franklin Academic Publishing Corporation www.smithandfranklin.com Science, Religion & Culture October 2014 | Volume 1 | Issue 3 | Page 178 Article heme: AUTHOR MEETS CRITICS Gregg D. Caruso Corning Community College (SUNY ) Email: gcaruso@corning-cc.edu Derk Pereboom’s Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (2014) provides the most lively and comprehen- sive defense of free will skepticism in the literature. It contains a reworked and expanded version of the view he irst developed in Living without Free Will (2001). Important objections to the early book are answered, some slight modiications are introduced, and the overall account is signiicantly embellished—for ex- ample, Pereboom proposes a new account of rational deliberation consistent with the belief that one’s ac- tions are causally determined (ch.5) and develops a forward-looking theory of moral responsibility con- sistent with free will skepticism (ch.6). A signiicant contribution to the ield, Free Will, Agency, and Mean- ing in Life is destined to become a classic and is es- sential reading for anyone interested in free will and moral responsibility. he goal of the book is to advocate for free will skep- ticism: the view that what we do, and the way we are, is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control and because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions in the basic desert sense—the sense that would make us truly deserving of blame or praise. Per- eboom follows tradition here in deining “free will” in terms of the control in action required for a core sense of moral responsibility. “his sense of moral respon- sibility, the one at issue in the free will debate, is set apart by the notion of basic desert (Feinberg 1970; Per- eboom 2001, 2007a; G. Strawson 1994; Fischer 2007: 82; Clarke 2005; Scanlon 2013). For an agent to be morally responsible for an action in this sense is for it to be hers in such a way that she would deserve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve to be praised if she understood that it was morally exemplary” (2). Such desert is ba- sic in the sense that “the agent would deserve to be blamed or praised just because she has performed the action, given an understanding of its moral status, and not, for example, merely by virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations” (2). Pereboom’s argument against this sort of free will is known as hard incompatibilism, which amounts to a rejection of both compatibilism and libertarianism. Hard incompatibilism maintains that the sort of free will required for basic desert moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control and also with the kind of indeterminacy in action required by the most plausi- ble versions of libertarianism. In addition to hard in- compatibilism, Pereboom also defends optimistic skep- ticism—which maintains that life without free will and desert-based moral responsibility would not be as devastating to our conceptions of agency, morality, and meaning in life as some suggest, and in certain respects it may even be beneicial. “In particular, this conception is wholly compatible with rational delib- eration, with practically viable notions of morality and moral responsibility, with a workable system of deal- ing with criminal behavior, and with a secure sense of meaning in life” (4). Pereboom’s overall argument can be sketched as fol- lows: Against the view that free will is compatible with the causal determination of our actions by natural fac- tors beyond our control, Pereboom argues that there is no relevant diference between this prospect and our actions being causally determined by manipulators. Against event causal libertarianism, he advances the disappearing agent objection, according to which on this view the agent cannot settle whether a decision Précis of Derk Pereboom’s Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life