A will of one's own: consciousness, control, and character.

Talk of dthe willT has something of an anachronistic air about it today. Many people believe that the concept of the will is a holdover from an earlier, prescientific view of the human being: Before we began to unravel the connections between external stimuli, brain impulses, and action, we needed to invoke the will to explain human behavior, but reference to this mysterious entity is no longer necessary now that the cognitive sciences are deconstructing the ghost in the machine. As Daniel Wegner puts it in the title of his recent book, many think that the conscious will is an illusion; (Wegner, 2002). We do not share Wegner’s view. We think that reference to the will is perfectly legitimate: Certain neurobiological and psychological conditions are exculpatory precisely because they involve pathologies of the will. A full understanding of the reactive stance—our practice of applying what Strawson (1962) called bthe reactive attitudes,Q such as praise and blame—must be informed by a model of the will and its pathologies. Indeed, a full account of legal responsibility must be informed by a model of the will and its pathologies. This article is a contribution toward such a model.