Diotima: What is the relationship between your views on free will and your views in moral philosophy?
Dr. Sartorio: It’s not like I think you have to have a specific view of morality in order to hold people morally responsible for what they do. But there are certain kinds of moral judgments about people, judgments about moral responsibility or accountability (holding each other blameworthy or praiseworthy for what we do), that I think you cannot make unless we have free will. Fortunately, I believe we have free will (most of us most of the time, anyway), and that we can have free will pretty much regardless of how our world is, at bottom (in particular, regardless of whether it’s deterministic or indeterministic).
Diotima: Are there any philosophers that were particularly informative in you deciding to pursue philosophy academically?
Dr. Sartorio: I went to college in Argentina, at the University of Buenos Aires. There you have to make up your mind about your major before starting college, when most people still don’t know what they want to do. I started out doing math, but then I switched and took a few philosophy classes to see what it was like, and I was hooked. These were classes taught by a small group of analytic philosophers at the University of Buenos Aires (mostly logicians, philosophers of language, and philosophers of science). I liked the “mathy” aspects of analytic philosophy combined with the deep philosophical questions, and I wouldn’t have become a philosopher had it not been for those early influences. But I wasn’t really introduced to most of the “core" of analytic philosophy until later, when I started graduate school at MIT. There I met a group of philosophers in other areas, who would become my advisors (Steve Yablo was my main advisor, and Ned Hall and Judy Thomson were also on my dissertation committee). I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with them.
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