Free will Pereboom's position in the
free will debate is known as
hard incompatibilism. He maintains that due to general facts about the nature of the universe, we can conclude that we lack the metaphysical free will required for the aspect of deep
moral responsibility at issue in the traditional debate. That is, whether our actions are deterministically or indeterministically caused, we will not have the control in action required for our deserving to be blamed or punished for immoral decisions, and to be praised or rewarded for those that are morally exemplary or praiseworthy. Pereboom nevertheless proposes that forward-looking aspects of blaming and praising, those that aim, for instance, at improving character and reconciliation in relationships, remain valuable and are still compatible with our lacking free will. He also contends that denying free will is likely to diminish anger and the
desire to punish, and in this way can potentially benefit human
relationships, both personal and societal. In this respect his position is inspired by the view of
Baruch Spinoza, who argues in his
Ethics that denying free will would enhance the quality of human life by promoting compassion and forgiveness and letting go of remorse and regret.
Philosophy of mind The physicalist position Pereboom proposes in
philosophy of mind develops two responses to the
hard problem of consciousness, which is explicated by
Frank Cameron Jackson's knowledge argument and
David Chalmers' conceivability argument against physicalism. The first response invokes the possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental properties as they are in themselves; specifically, that introspection represents phenomenally conscious properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures which these properties actually lack. This position is related to the more general illusionism about consciousness advanced by
Daniel Dennett and to an illusionist view set out by neuroscientist
Michael Graziano. The second response draws on the
Russellian monist proposal that currently unknown fundamental
intrinsic properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and also yield an account of consciousness. There are non-physicalist versions of this position, but some are amenable to physicalism, and Pereboom highlights such views in his treatment. Pereboom defends a version of
nonreductive physicalism, a view proposed by
Hilary Putnam in the 1960s, according to which types of mental states are not identical to types of states at lower levels, such as the neural and the microphysical. The nonreductive position he defends departs from others in that it also rejects all token-identity (i.e., specific-instance-identity) claims for the relation between mental states and states at lower levels. The relation between the mental and the microphysical is material constitution, with the provision that this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity. But mental properties are nevertheless identical to higher-level compositional properties, properties that things have by virtue of the natures of their parts and relations among them. Pereboom contends that this view secures genuine mental causation, by contrast with the more commonly endorsed
functionalist alternative. In this respect his position is perhaps a compromise with
type-identity theory. Still, his view is not a reductive identity theory, since he holds that mental compositional properties are
multiply realizable at any level more fundamental than the mental (e.g., the neural). ==Selected publications==