Ben Vilhauer
Assistant Professor

Department of Philosophy

William Paterson University of New Jersey

Office: 269 Atrium Building, (973) 720-2415

Email address: vilhauerb@wpunj.edu

Mailing address: 265 Atrium Building, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne NJ 07470

My main research areas are in free will and moral responsibility, ethics, and the history of modern philosophy. I have published several exegetically-oriented articles on Kant's theory of free will, and several articles on free will skepticism.

I teach classes on ethics, political philosophy, comparative philosophy, and the history of modern philosophy.

Recent Papers:

"Free Will and the Asymmetrical Justifiability of Holding Morally Responsible", unpublished. abstract full text

"Free Will Skepticism and Personhood as a Desert Base", forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. abstract full text

"Free Will and Reasonable Doubt", forthcoming in the American Philosophical Quarterly. abstract full text

"The Scope of Responsibility in Kant's Theory of Free Will", forthcoming in The British Journal for the History of Philosophy. abstract full text

"Incompatibilism and Ontological Priority in Kant's Theory of Free Will", forthcoming in Rethinking Kant, ed. Pablo Muchnik (Cambridge Scholars Press). abstract full text

"Hard Determinism, Humeanism, and Virtue Ethics", Southern Journal of Philosophy,Vol. 46, No. 1, 2008, pp. 121-144. abstract full text

"Hard Determinism, Remorse, and Virtue Ethics", Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 42, No. 4, 2004, pp. 547-564. abstract full text

"Can We Interpret Kant as a Compatibilist?", The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2004, pp. 719-730. abstract full text

Comments on both published and unpublished papers are received with gratitude.

Current Research:

I am currently working on a book, which I've tentatively entitled Kantian Free Will Skepticism. Kant holds that we can only have free will if we are agent-causes with special causal powers, and that while it is possible that we are such agent-causes, there is no empirical evidence that we are. I argue that he is right about this, and that he can consistently hold that determinism is true and also that it is possible for us to have robust alternative possibilities of action. This is because in Kant's system it it is possible for an agent-cause to be metaphysically responsible for the deterministic causal laws governing her free choices. But Kant holds that the mere possibility that we are such agent-causes is enough to license us in believing that we have free will, at least when it comes to thinking about how we should act. I think that Kant is only partly right about this. The mere possibility that we have free will is probably enough to justify praise, at least in cases where there are no morally significant downsides to praising somebody (such as damaging the self-esteem of third parties who are excluded from praise). But the mere possibility is not enough to justify retribution, at least not when serious harm is at stake. People deserve the benefit of the doubt.

So, Kant makes a mistake about the burden of proof in the free will debate. This means that the belief in free will cannot be the kind of foundation for Kant's ethics that he wants it to be. But a substantial part of his ethics can be preserved despite this. Here is an example. Kant thinks that, to regard ourselves as having moral reasons, we must believe that we have free will. This is because of the way he interprets the "can" in the "ought implies can" principle. But I argue that it is enough to support the "can" in the "ought implies can" principle to believe that it is possible that we have free will. It is not necessary to believe that we actually have it. Here is another example. Many philosophers suppose that all claims about what we deserve are based on claims about freely willed actions. Kant seems to be among these philosophers. If we accept this view, and we doubt that anyone has free will, then we should doubt that anyone deserves anything. But when we properly analyze desert claims, we will see that some desert claims are not based on claims about freely willed actions. Some are based on the sheer fact of our personhood, and worries about the metaphysics of free will do not undermine these desert claims. Personhood-based desert claims include our claims to deserve respect, access to our rights, and to be treated equally before the law. There is nothing any person could conceivably do that would justify us in disregarding such desert claims, so we cannot suppose that they are based on claims about freely willed actions. We deserve to be treated in these ways simply because we are persons. I argue that the categorical imperative can also be formulated as such a desert claim: persons deserve not to be treated as mere means, simply because they are persons.