I recently defended my dissertation at the University of California, Riverside and am currently a visiting assistant professor at Biola University.  My research focuses primarily on issues in human agency at the intersection of ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind.  In my dissertation, as well as extended work, I develop a theory of free will and moral responsibility--the theory construction taking place through three successive stages.  The first stage concerns isolating the notion of moral responsibility I am after and the norms that govern it.  I endorse a broadly Strawsonian interpretation of moral responsibility, in which an agent is responsible for an action just in case it is appropriate for oneself and others to experience a range of moral emotions (such as gratitude or resentment, which can be categorized under the generic labels of ‘praise’ and ‘blame’) in response to one's action.  With this notion of responsibility in hand, I turn to inquire after the norms that govern the appropriateness of these practices.  I defend a theory of the normative force of pleas—justifications, excuses, and exemptions—that entails that free will is necessary for an agent’s being blameworthy for a particular action.  This result leads quickly to questions about the nature of free will.  In the second stage I develop a reductive libertarian account that analyzes free will entirely within an indeterministic web of causal interactions.  I argue that free will is constituted by an agent's abilities and opportunities and that the opportunity to do otherwise is both incompatible with determinism and control enhancing.  I complete the second stage of my theory by warding off worries about luck that many think threaten indeterminsitic accounts of freedom and responsibility.  The third stage turns from these mostly a priori investigations to questions about the contingencies of our actual world: How well does this theory fit with what we know about ourselves and the world from the sciences?  After clarifying the often misunderstood empirical commitments of libertarianism, I argue both that there is no conflict between my theory and contemporary deliverances of science, and that much of what we currently observe in the workings of the brain are exactly what we would expect to observe if we satisfied my theory. 

    The theory that emerges from my work, which I call ‘Strawsonian libertarianism’, is a comprehensive and unified theory of free will and moral responsibility that promises to furnish agents with robust freedom and deep responsibility, without violating the contours of a scientifically informed, morally insightful, and metaphysically nuanced theory.