Bruce Waller

Bruce Waller (August 20, 1946 – February 8, 2023) was a contemporary American philosopher notable for his theories about the nature of free will and its implications for human society. Waller died on February 8, 2023, at the age of 76.

Philosophy Waller is a determinist who believes that everything that happens, had to happen, and could not have happened otherwise, and that all events are necessitated to happen by the process of cause and effect, that is, that past, present, and future consist of an essentially unbreakable chain of circumstances of which no single link in such a chain could possibly be avoided or altered. Since he believes that determinism and moral responsibility are mutually incompatible, he has sometimes been identified as an incompatibilist. He views praise and blame and other related notions as being illogical in a scientific sense and impossible to justify; for example, it does not make sense to blame a person for doing what they did, if they couldn't have helped it, he argues. Accordingly, in Waller's view, it is proper to discourage people from being lazy, but wrong to blame them for their laziness since the reason for their laziness can be found in a deterministic assessment of the "blind lottery of biology and environment", that is, it's not their fault. The Injustice of Punishment, 2020, Routledge Restorative Free Will: Back to the Biological Base, 2015, Lexington Books