Project 4:
This project is based on the hypothesis that what is called “personal freedom” is not only a
matter of “off-line,” detached and distanced, processes of rational reflection and deliberation.
Rather, it is, crucially and ineliminably, a matter of the ongoing “on-line” fine-tuning of the
situated actions of embodied agents, i.e., a matter of achieving and retaining control in fluid
and flexible real-time interactions with the environment. The first goal is to develop a theoretical
account of free will as personal freedom, i.e., as a complex capacity that is based on, or
emerges out of, a set of more basic cognitive and affective core capacities, including, e.g.,
being able to formulate goals, memorize them, devise means to achieve them, being able to
revise beliefs, goals, or preferences, being able to regulate and motivate oneself or being able
to overcome inhibiting factors or discount short term temptations. By developing such an
account, and by detailing the ways in which it still captures essential features of traditional
approaches to free will, the project overcomes the skeptical attitude the empirical sciences
have regarding free will and also the skeptical attitude some philosophers have vis-à-vis
empirical contributions to discussions of free will. The second goal is to show in what sense
the relevant cognitive and affective core capacities may be situated. For instance, whether or
not one is in control is not simply a matter of detached rational reflection, but depends upon
bodily factors as well. A decreasing blood sugar level, e.g., is known to lead to a loss of selfregulation (e.g., Baumeister 2013; Gailliot/Baumeister 2007), which in turn leads to behavior
that the agent herself would not want to wholeheartedly identify with as being truly “her own”
(e.g., Danziger et al. 2011; Levav et al. 2010). Moreover, many of us hire personal fitness
trainers in order to “outsource” part of the control they want to have over themselves, ensuring
they satisfy their second-order desire to exercise despite contravening first-order desires. In
these cases, behavioral control and self-regulation are not only a matter of an agent’s brain or
body, but of her embedding in and interaction with an environment she herself has actively
structured (e.g., Vierkant 2014, 2015). Many of the cognitive and affective core capacities
relevant for personal autonomy will arguably turn out to be situated in this way. The goal of the
project is to develop a situated account of personal freedom that takes this fact into account.