Neuroscience and free will, is there really a problem?

Contemporary philosophical debates about freedom of the will operate under a common set of assumptions

that have been mostly unquestioned for at least the last few centuries.

Primary among these presuppositions is that morally significant actions must in one way or another

be caused by the will of an agent who

performs such actions. That is, the kind of actions for which we hold people responsible,

for which we might reward or punish people, for which we might laud or shame people, and

so forth, must be explained in terms of a certain sort of psychological faculty, the will.

For example, if Cormac is to be praised for his having acted in such and such a way,

then Cormick must have willed to have acted in that manner.

And likewise, if Cormac is to be shamed for having acted in such and such a way, then Cormac must

have willed to have acted in that manner.

It seems pretty odd to us either to praise or blame Cormac for having done something he

had no intention of doing, but only happened to do so accidentally.

Thus, so the story goes, morally significant action, in some sense, requires

our conscious intention to so act, usually when there were other options available. In this context,

the will is taken as a conscious deliberative power to weigh or evaluate distinct courses of

action, which a moral agent wields as the

final determining factor in a decision. That's the standard story. Notice that this

conscious intention is supposed to play the final determining role in bringing about a

morally significant action. When we talk about an exercise of the will in this context,

we typically mean just a conscious state,

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