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Truthmakers, Moral Responsibility, and an Alleged Counterexample to Rule A

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Abstract

Charles Hermes argues that the Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility fails because one of the inference rules on which it relies, Rule A, is invalid. Rule A states that if a proposition p is broadly logically necessary, then p is true and no one is, or ever has been, even partly morally responsible for the fact that p. Hermes purports to offer a counterexample to Rule A which focuses on agents’ moral responsibility for disjunctions. Hermes’s objection is motivated by the idea that the logic of moral responsibility ought to be based on the logic of truthmakers rather than the logic of propositions. I show that the logic of moral responsibility does not track the logic of truthmakers and defend the validity of Rule A against Hermes’s objection.

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Notes

  1. Joseph Campbell (2007) has argued that, since they rely on the contingently true assumption that there was a time prior to the existence of any human beings, even if sound, arguments of this sort will show only that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility in worlds of that sort. It would not show that determinism itself is logically incompatible with moral responsibility. (Campbell makes this point in connection with van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument, but it applies equally here.)

  2. Cf. Kearns (2011).

  3. Whether this implication serves to bolster the case against Rule A or undercut the plausibility of R, readers can determine.

  4. One’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, as the saying goes.

  5. Here, one point bears mention. Hermes takes van Inwagen, in appealing to these necessary truths, to be offering an argument for Rule A—one which Hermes says is “shockingly similar” to the following argument: “Nobody can be responsible for the fact that dinosaurs existed, nobody can be responsible for the fact that there are many stars in the universe, and nobody can be responsible for the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun. Therefore, nobody can be responsible for any contingent proposition” (2014b, pp. 388–389). Hermes is right, of course, when he says that “This is clearly a bad argument” (p. 389). I think it is just as clearly a mistake, however, to read van Inwagen as offering this kind of argument—or any argument at all, for that matter—for the validity of Rule A. At one point, van Inwagen compares his acceptance of the inference rules he offers to his acceptance of modus tollens (1983, p. 124). Regarding Rule B, he writes, “I think the only thing I can do to persuade the reader that (B) is valid is to ask him to consider such instances of it…and to attempt to construct counterexamples to it” (1983, p. 187). In light of van Inwagen’s view that there is no argument he could offer for Rule B whose premises would be more intuitively plausible than Rule B itself, it is more than reasonable to suppose that he thinks the same of Rule A, which he regards as being “unquestionably valid” and even more certain than Rule B (1983, p. 184). Thus, a more charitable reading of van Inwagen would be to see him as using the necessary truths he mentions not to establish or argue for Rule A but, rather, simply to illustrate this rule of inference which he clearly takes to be “beyond dispute” (1983, p. 184).

  6. I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer for this journal.

  7. One who is already inclined to reject T will have even less reason to accept R since R is inspired by T, along with the assumption that the logic of responsibility tracks the logic of truthmakers. More on this shortly.

  8. An anonymous reviewer for this journal worries that one who rejects R while endorsing T would thereby be committed to saying that moral responsibility for propositions does not derive from responsibility for those things that make the propositions true. Fortunately, this is not an implication of that position, which we can see by considering the kidnapping example from earlier. In that case, I am morally responsible for the truth of the disjunction, “Either you are going to fall to your death in Arizona, or you are going to fall to your death in Nevada.” In virtue of what am I responsible for this? My responsibility for this derives from my responsibility for your being located in midair directly over the Arizona-Nevada border, which is what guarantees the truth of the disjunction (and which itself derives from my responsibility for the cause of your being so located—namely, my throwing you out of the plane). It is only because I am morally responsible for your being located in midair directly over the border that I am morally responsible for the disjunction. If I were not responsible for the former, I would not be responsible for the latter. Similarly, you are the one who is responsible for the truth of the disjunct, “You are going to fall to your death in Nevada,” and your responsibility for this derives from your responsibility for your falling in the way that you do, which is what makes the disjunct true (and which itself derives from your responsibility for the cause of your falling in the way that you do—namely, your moving your body in particular ways). So, even if one who rejects R while endorsing T is committed to the view that the logic of moral responsibility does not track the logic of truth making, this does not preclude one from thinking that one’s moral responsibility for the truth of propositions derives from one’s responsibility for those things that make the propositions true.

  9. Hermes suggests that his acceptance of T derives from his acceptance of what Greg Restall (1996) calls the Disjunction Thesis, which states that s makes it true that pq if and only if either s makes it true that p or s makes it true that q. (T is the right-to-left reading of this biconditional, limited to cases involving only one true disjunct.) Insofar as it is correct to say of the kidnapping case that my throwing you out of the plane (1) makes it true that either you are going to fall to your death in Arizona or you are going to fall to your death in Nevada but (2) does not make it true that you are going to fall to your death in Arizona and (3) does not make it true that you are going to fall to your death in Nevada, then this case also serves as a counterexample to the Disjunction Thesis. For further objections to the Disjunction Thesis, see Read (2000) and López de Sa (2009).

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Al Mele, Michael Wolf, and the anonymous reviewers for this journal for their extraordinarily thorough and helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I am grateful to my commentator, Andrew McAnnich, and the audience there for their feedback.

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Correspondence to Michael Robinson.

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Robinson, M. Truthmakers, Moral Responsibility, and an Alleged Counterexample to Rule A. Erkenn 81, 1333–1339 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9798-y

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