ABSTRACT
The problem of specifying the right conditions for acting freely, or of one's own free will, is connected to the topic of moral responsibility. This chapter discusses the free will and moral responsibility that usually relies upon intuitions concerning particular cases, and of course this is a natural place to start. But often philosophers depend upon such intuitions without bringing out explicitly the views regarding the function and nature of moral responsibility behind the intuitive judgments. Several important objections diminish the force of the purely pragmatic notion of moral responsibility. The pragmatic view states that the point of holding persons responsible is to mold the future behavior of the actor and other members of the society. The expressive theory acknowledges this as one function of moral responsibility ascriptions but adds what its proponents see as the central function, which is to express natural reactive attitudes toward the agent for his or her deed.
