Research

My research interests lie in philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and metaphysics. I have published on topics related to free will, causation, agency, philosophy of neuroscience, neuroethics, philosophy of psychiatry, and biomedical ethics.

Lately, my research has focused on the issue of autonomy in terms of philosophical accounts of free will as well as how these accounts intersect with neuroscience and psychiatry.

See Publications for a list of abstracts of my published work.

See Contact for recent talks and research affiliations.

See C.V. for my dissertation abstract and long form list of presentations, workshops/seminars, grants, and fellowships.

RESEARCH SYNOPSIS AND WORKS IN PROGRESS (Drafts upon request)

Philosophical Accounts of Free Will and Moral Responsibility

In both previous work and these in-prep papers I defend a compatibilist view of free will -- one in which free will is compatible with determinism. Free will is often understood as the control condition for moral responsibility. An agent must exercise appropriate control over her actions and decisions to be, say, blamed for a morally bad action, or praised/credited for a morally good action. Freedom-relevant control is understood in one or both of the following ways:

*Leeway*: To decide (or act) freely, the agent must have alternatives to so deciding (or so action)

*Sourcehood*: To decide (or act) freely, the agent must be the (or a significant) source of her decision (or action)

Among the free will accounts on offer, one's answer to the compatibility question is orthogonal to an endorsement of one or both leeway and sourcehood conditions.

In Waller (2014 ETMP) I endorsed a sourehood compatibilist view, a modified version of Fischer and Ravizza (1998)'s reasons responsive account of responsibility.

In Waller (2015 Philosophia) I defended compatibilism against a version of the manipulation argument for incompatibilism via the relevance of the manipulator's intentions and intervention.

In Waller and R. L. Waller (2015 Philosophia) I challenged the dominant motivation for and formulation of incompatibilist leeway conditions.

In "A Case for Classical Compatibilism: Manipulation and Perspectival Judgments" (2020 Grazer Philosophische Studien); special journal issue on Lehrer on free will), I argue that compatibilist sourcehood-based accounts require an addtional leeway condition to capture a more robust sense of moral responsibility. This is a break from earlier mere sourcehood committments and introduces both a new variant of Frankfurt cases from the perspective of the counterfactual intervenor as well as a novel distincition between kinds of manipulation.

A book manuscript proposal detailing a fleshed-out version of this hybrid sourcehood-leeway compatibilist account is in prep.

Neuroethics and Philosophy of Cognitive Science

My central focus in philosophy of neuroscience is the neuroscience of action, especially those results concerning intention and intentional action.

In Waller (2012 Monist) I argue that the neuroscience of free will studies (to date) haven't addressed the kinds of decisions and actions we typically care about as agents. I outline two prospective studies that could be run to test the efficacy of conscious intentions qua conscious and the role of conscious intentions in dynamic and deliberative moral contexts.

In Waller (2019 John Templeton Foundation (JTF) white paper) I review and assess recent and cutting edge research on free will from neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.

In Waller (forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Free Will) I survey the major studies on neuroscience of agency and evaluate three proposed threats to intentional and free agency on the basis of these studies.

A popular press version of this work on the "Beautiful Minds" blog in Scientific American (March 2020) can be accessed here.

I am planning a set of studies, as a co-PI, on sense and initiation of agency and sleep (IRB stage).

An overview of neuroscience of free will as well as a literature review of this planned research is forthcoming in a MIT anthology in 2022.

In August 2019 I co-ran a JTF/Duke-funded workshop at Stanford University "Locating Representations in the Brain using Neuroimaging" with Jessey Wright (Stanford), Sarah Robins (Kansas), and Petra Vetter (Royal Holloway).

As an outgrowth of the workshop, I contributed a paper to the topical collection in Synthese on that same theme: In "Weighing in on Decisions in the Brain: Neural Representations of Pre-awareness Practical Intention" (2021), I survey the prospects for finding the neural realizers of practical intention using neuroimaging and the implications for arguments about agency and free will.

Recently I have been working on the nature of intention and its operationalization in neuroscientific research, collaborating with neuroscientists at Trinity College Dublin.

I have also been active in neuroethics and biomedical ethics more broadly with research concerning ethics of cognitive enhancement, challenges to dual process models of moral judgment, and individualized models of informed consent in medical (B. Waller & Repko [Waller] 2008).

I am also collaborating with R. L. Waller on a paper (under review) on the ethics of machine learning.

Autonomy and Psychotherapy for Disorders of Agency

In Waller (2014 ETMP) I sketched an argument that the control capacities of patients both pre- and post- talk therapy gave insight into the threashold for responsible agency.

In "Taking Control with Mechanisms of Psychotherapy" (forthcoming, OUP anthology) I fill in this approach. Here I set out the foundation for a philosophical framework of control in which we can understand the agential capacities of various clinical populations, marrying clinical discussion of effective psychotherapies to philosophy of free will.

Related experimental philosophy

In Clarke et al. (2015) we report studies of nonphilosophers' ascriptions of causation and to what degree omissions and non-normative events are judged to be causes of events.

During the summer of 2018, I founded the short-lived Agency and Responsibility Lab at Franklin and Marshall College, where we ran studies of nonphilosophers' ascriptions of free action and moral responsibility in manipulation cases.