Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and the Desire to be a God explores the hidden corridors of the moral responsibility system to discover why that system is so widely accepted and passionately defended. The moral responsibility system has obvious charms: it provides justification for our powerful strike-back motives, transforms selfishness into the virtuous defense of our justly deserved special benefits, draws a radical distinction between humans and the other species we exploit, and prote...

Restorative Free Will argues for an account of free will that takes seriously the evolutionary development of the key elements of free will. It emphasizes a biological understanding of free will that rejects the belief that free will belongs exclusively to humans and seeks to understand free will by examining it writ large in the adaptive behavior of many species. Drawing on resources from primatology, biology, psychology, and anthropology, Restorative Free Will examines the major compatib...

A vigorous attack on moral responsibility in all its forms argues that the abolition of moral responsibility will be liberating and beneficial.In Against Moral Responsibility, Bruce Waller launches a spirited attack on a system that is profoundly entrenched in our society and its institutions, deeply rooted in our emotions, and vigorously defended by philosophers from ancient times to the present. Waller argues that, despite the creative defenses of it by ...

Focusing on why neoliberalism gained such a unique strong hold in the United States, philosopher Bruce N. Waller in this book traces the source back to the country’s origins and the entwined core values of the nation’s Founding Fathers. Their extreme commitment to private property rights (as evinced in a unanimous vote for the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause), an aversion to widespread democracy, and a deep belief in the uniquely just nature of their new country together created the i...

The Injustice of Punishment emphasizes that we can never make sense of moral responsibility while also acknowledging that punishment is sometimes unavoidable. Recognizing both the injustice and the necessity of punishment is painful but also beneficial. It motivates us to find effective means of minimizing both the use and severity of punishment, and encourages deeper inquiry into the causes of destructive behavior and how to change those causes in order to reduce the need for pun...

Providing a series of lively essays which reflect the skills that historians have to master when challenged by problems of evidence, interpretation, and presentation, this important new text covers the topics of France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Russia, as well as analyzing the themes of political thought, cultural trends, the economy and warfare, international relations and imperialism.Six distinguished scholars, all of whom are regularly involved in student teaching, provide a...

Philosophers, legal scholars, criminologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists have long asked important questions about punishment: What is its purpose? What theories help us better understand its nature? Is punishment just? Are there effective alternatives to punishment? How can empirical data from the sciences help us better understand punishment? What are the relationships between punishment and our biology, psychology, and social environment? How is punishment understood and administe...

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility investigates the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications. Skepticism about free will and moral responsibility has been on the rise in recent years. In fact, a significant number of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists now either doubt or outright deny the existence of free will and/or moral responsibility—and the list of prominent skeptics appears to grow by the day. Give...

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone.From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society—and especially parents—to transform them from little sociopaths into civilized beings. In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardw...

**The classic, myth-shattering history of the American family.“The Way We Never Were effectively demolishes the normal, traditional nuclear family as neither normal nor traditional, and not even nuclear.” ―Nation**Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man’s home has never been his castle, the “male breadwinner marriage” is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. I...