2026 Theses Doctoral

Mea Pulpa: A Musical Response to the Problem of Moral Agency and Determinism

Cekem, Artun

Recent developments in neuroscience, the social sciences, and anthropomorphic technologies have revitalized long-standing debates concerning human physicality and its implications for agency and moral responsibility. One strand of this discourse, termed hard incompatibilism by Derk Pereboom, adopts a skeptical position that seeks to reconcile the apparent implausibility of free will with constructive models of moral behavior. This perspective suggests that a forward-looking approach to moral responsibility not only advances truth-seeking humanistic inquiry but also lays the groundwork for more just and egalitarian ethical systems. In alignment with this view, I present Mea Pulpa, a new musical composition informed by the hard incompatibilist literature on moral responsibility.

This dissertation develops an artistic response to the philosophical discourse on free will by articulating the aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of Mea Pulpa in relation to two other works: Peter Ablinger’s Quadraturen III and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Luci mie traditrici. I begin by providing an overview of the three major positions within the contemporary philosophical literature on free will—libertarianism, compatibilism, and skepticism—and outline the skeptical moral framework advanced by hard incompatibilism. I then examine key elements in Quadraturen III and Luci mie traditrici to argue that music can serve as a site for embodying monistic conceptions of the human subject consistent with the skeptic view.

Specifically, I argue that the material reproduction of the human voice in Quadraturen III destabilizes Cartesian models of personhood by invoking the uncanny, while the tragic determinism of Luci mie traditrici emphasizes the inseparability of will from its corporeal source. These aesthetic and thematic elements are synthesized in Mea Pulpa, where non-human extensions of the subject— including 3D-printed vocal tract tubes and a frame drum—construct a physicalist picture of the human, while a dialogue between the self and the body enacts the friction between corporeal agency and guilt central to the free will debate. At its core, Mea Pulpa calls for a reassessment of normative values shaped by notions of basic desert and advocates for a forward-looking model of moral responsibility as a viable alternative.