Dana Nelkin is a contemporary analytic philosopher at the University of California, San Diego, whose work spans free will, moral responsibility, and practical reason. She is best known for examining how metaphysical questions about freedom are inseparable from normative questions about desert and moral responsibility. Her research has shaped contemporary compatibilist debates by showing that disputes about free will cannot be resolved without engaging both ethics and metaphysics.
Authored Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (2011), a major contribution to compatibilist theory
Argued that free will debates are inherently entangled with questions in normative ethics and metaphysics
Advanced the literature on moral luck and its implications for moral responsibility
Developed accounts of rational self-governance as the basis for attributions of responsibility
Contributed to debates on the relationship between reasons-responsiveness and moral desert
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