Abstract
The compatibilism debate revolves around the question whether moral responsibility and free will are compatible with determinism. Prima facie, this seems to be a substantial issue. But according to the triviality objection, the disagreement is merely verbal: compatibilists and incompatibilists, it is maintained, are talking past each other, since they use the terms “free will” and “moral responsibility” in different senses. In this paper I argue, first, that the triviality objection is indeed a formidable one and that the standard replies to it are unconvincing. This, however, does not mean that the objection succeeds. Starting with the debate about moral responsibility, I attempt to show that there is an account of moral responsibility which enables us to defend the compatibilism debate against the charge of triviality—namely, the normative conception of moral responsibility. If “moral responsibility” is defined in normative terms, then we cannot distinguish between a compatibilist and an incompatibilist sense of “moral responsibility”, because such a disambiguation would be inconsistent with the essential action-guiding force of normative expressions. Finally, I examine how the normative conception of moral responsibility can help us to defend the free will debate against the triviality objection and draw some general conclusions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In these discussions, it is mostly compatibilists who are accused of “changing the subject” or “redefining the term ‘free will’”, but incompatibilists are also sometimes criticized as presupposing an “inflated concept” of freedom or responsibility. Early versions of such arguments can be found in Hume (1748/1975: 81) and James (1884/1956: 149).
Balaguer’s triviality objection is directed against the entire compatibilism debate, i.e. against the debate about free will and moral responsibility. The objection discussed by Chalmers only concerns free will.
This is the step in the argument that Chalmers (2011: 532) calls the “subscript gambit”. When one participant in the debate “says, ‘X is such-and-such’, while the other says, ‘X is so-and-so’ […], we bar the term X and introduce two new terms X1 and X2 that are stipulated to be equivalent to the two right-hand sides” (Chalmers 2011: 532). If the two participants do not have nonverbal disagreements involving X1 and X2 (i.e., in our case, moral responsibilityin and moral responsibilityco), then this suggests, at least prima facie, that the dispute is merely verbal. Chalmers does not apply this strategy to the debate about moral responsibility. Balaguer (2009: 15–16, 2010: 40–41), however, can be interpreted as doing just that. Having first distinguished between several different kinds of freedom, e.g. between “L-freedom”, which is incompatible with determinism (Balaguer 2010: 15), and “Humean freedom”, which is compatible with determinism (Balaguer 2010: 4), he writes: “we could define a series of kinds of moral responsibility […] corresponding to the different kinds of freedom” (2010: 40), e.g. “Hume-responsibility” and “libertarian-responsibility” (Balaguer 2010: 41). Balaguer claims that the only interesting non-semantic question that remains after these distinctions are drawn is the following: ‘which of these kinds of moral responsibility do humans actually have?’ (cf. Balaguer 2010: 41). By contrast, the questions ‘what is moral responsibility simpliciter?’ and ‘is moral responsibility simpliciter compatible with determinism?’ turn out to be merely semantic, and Balaguer even suggests that there may be “no fact of the matter” as to what the correct answer to these questions is (Balaguer 2010: 63).
On some accounts of word meaning, e.g. on the neo-descriptivist account defended by Jackson (1998), the facts cited here—stable differences in judgments about hypothetical cases—constitute almost conclusive evidence for the thesis that the term “moral responsibility” is used in two different senses. But the proponent of the triviality argument need not presuppose such an account, because on any plausible theory of word meaning, stable differences in judgments about hypothetical cases constitute at least good prima facie evidence for the ambiguity thesis.
Cf. the position called the “OL view” by Balaguer (2010: 28–29).
Cf. Nahmias et al. (2005, 2006, 2007) and Nichols and Knobe (2007). In some experiments, 83 % of the participants accepted a compatibilist description of the hypothetical scenario they were presented with (Nahmias et al. 2005: 568), in other experiments, this number dropped to 23 % (Nichols and Knobe 2007: 676). But it is clear in all the surveys that public opinion is split on the issue of compatibilism.
This would, of course, be an ambiguity of a rather subtle kind, one that is not always detected by ordinary speakers—comparable e.g. to the ambiguity of “lying”, where some competent speakers insist that lies must be false, while others maintain that it is enough that the lying person believes that her assertion is false.
In a similar vein, Balaguer (2010: 41) argues that the question whether humans have moral responsibility in the ordinary sense is essentially “a question about ordinary language meaning” that “is not relevant in any metaphysically interesting way to any questions about humans”.
Except for cases where the action is not under my control because of an earlier action that was under my control. For example, if I freely and knowingly choose to take a drug which causes me to loose control and to set your car on fire, then I am at least partially responsible for setting your car on fire. These cases show that a refinement of (R1) is required, cf. Fischer and Ravizza (1998: 49–51).
The same holds for definitional conditions which require morally responsible agents to be the “origin” or “source” of the action.
Like (R1), the “control”-condition, (R2) needs to be modified to accommodate cases where an agent cannot refrain from doing x because of an earlier action y for which she was fully responsible. Cf. Kane (1996: 35) for such an account.
Van Inwagen makes this remark in the context of the free will debate, but since he holds that free will is a necessary condition for moral responsibility (van Inwagen 1983: 161), he would surely say the same about the use of “able” in the context of the debate about moral responsibility.
More precisely, their main motivation stems from Frankfurt-type counterexamples. These examples are similar, but not necessarily identical to the cases discussed by Frankfurt (1969). For an overview over the recent debate about Frankfurt-type examples and the principle of alternative possibilities, cf. Levy and McKenna (2009: 98–102).
I’m presupposing here that all incompatibilists accept (R2), but strictly speaking, not even this much is true, cf. Levy and McKenna (2009: 103–107) on “source incompatibilism”.
Hawthorne (2001: 70) seems inclined to accept such a contextualist interpretation of the debate about moral responsibility. But this is a quite radical position to take, and I will try to show in the following sections that there is a much more attractive alternative available.
The view is called “Strawsonian” because it is strongly influenced by Strawson’s (1962/2003) treatment of moral responsibility.
Cf. Wallace (1994: 66, fn 22) for this distinction between indignation and resentment.
According to Wallace, these responses are not independent of our reactive emotions, they “serve to express the reactive emotions to which we are subject when we blame people for their moral failings” (Wallace 1994: 67; my emphasis). This claim, however, is not part of the proposal that I am discussing here.
This fits well with the fact that the term “morally responsible” is closely related to the term “blameworthy” (cf. Sect. 2). If someone is “worthy of blame”, then it is appropriate to blame her—and blame plausibly involves reactive attitudes and sanctions.
This is, in my opinion, a decisive advantage of the normative conception over non-normative or “metaphysical” (Wallace 1994: 88) conceptions of moral responsibility—even though it is routinely overlooked in the literature.
Cf. Balaguer (2009: 16–17), who responds in exactly this way to a proposal linking the notion of moral responsibility to the notion of fairness. Balaguer writes: “it’s hard to believe that we could make any progress here by appealing to the notion of fairness because, presumably, each kind of responsibility brings with it its own kind of fairness” (17).
This claim about normative terms does not commit me to non-cognitivism. Note that I have said that normative terms are not merely used to describe actions. This is a thesis that non-cognitivists and (many) cognitivists will agree on, since cognitivists can say that normative statements have directive or action-guiding force in virtue of being descriptions of normative reality.
Incompatibilists need not, of course, hold that we must let Jerry go free. If it is very probable that Jerry will harm other people in the future, then incompatibilists are in a position to justify measures that keep him away from other people. Their justification will be analogous to the justification we give for quarantining people who are suffering, through no fault of their own, from a contagious disease (cf. Pereboom 2001: 174–177). It is clear, however, that the treatment of criminals that can be justified in this way will be very different from the standard treatment which is (more or less) accepted in Western societies today. (For example, it would be reasonable on such a view to compensate criminals for the losses they suffer by being kept away from society.)
Chalmers (2011: 543) agrees with this assessment. He describes the disagreement between Kantians and consequentialists as a “substantive dispute” which cannot be resolved by making terminological distinctions. However, he does not explain why this is the case.
It is important to note how radical this last point is. Selma does not only think that it is inappropriate to express resentment or indignation towards Jerry, but also that it is inappropriate to have these feeling towards him.
An example for such a theorist is Smart (1961). He claims that moral responsibility and determinism are compatible, and is therefore usually categorized as a compatibilist, but he also claims that blame—in the ordinary sense of the word, in which blaming people involves judging them—is inappropriate in a deterministic world (Smart 1961: 305–306). He writes: “we should be quite as ready to grade a person for his moral qualities as for his non-moral qualities [e.g. intelligence, physical beauty, etc.; PS], but we should stop judging him. […] Moreover, if blame in general is irrational, so must be self-blame or self-reproach, unless this comes simply to resolving to do better” (Smart 1961: 306). These remarks make it clear that Smart, while being a compatibilist about thin moral responsibility, is an incompatibilist about thick moral responsibility. Incidentally, his position is strikingly similar to Pereboom’s (2001) version of incompatibilism (as noted by Chalmers 2011: 531, fn 12).
This strategy is proposed e.g. by Hawthorne (2001: 69): “debates about free will have always been anchored by the topic of moral accountability. The reason why the libertarian and the compatibilist both refuse to admit that each is talking past the other, and why each refuses to allow a generous multiplication of senses of ‘freedom’ as a mode of reconciling differences, is that each claims to be providing an account of the sense of ‘free’ in which freedom is required for moral accountability” (my emphasis). Cf. also Strawson (1986/2010: 1), who writes at the beginning of his book: “the word ‘free’ will be used in what I call the ordinary, strong sense of the word, according to which to be a free agent is to be capable of being truly or ultimately responsible for one’s actions.”
This is the standard definition of semi-compatibilism (cf. Fischer 1994: 180). Sometimes, the term “semi-compatibilism” is also used for the stronger thesis that “responsibility is compatible with determinism, but freedom […] is not compatible with determinism” (Kane 2005: 115). However, this difference is irrelevant for our purposes.
Perhaps it is possible to formulate a normative definition of “dignity” that is closely analogous to (N), the core claim of the normative conception of moral responsibility presented in Sect. 3. A candidate for such a definition would be the following: “S has dignity if and only if it would be appropriate to treat S with respect”. If “dignity” is defined in this way, then it is clear how the introduction of free willD can give rise to a substantial compatibilism debate.
Further relevant questions might concern the appropriateness of admiration and respect, cf. the discussion at the end of Sect. 6.
References
Balaguer, M. (2009). The metaphysical irrelevance of the compatibilism debate (and, more generally, of conceptual analysis). Southern Journal of Philosophy, 47, 1–24.
Balaguer, M. (2010). Free will as an open scientific problem. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chalmers, D. (2011). Verbal disputes and philosophical progress. Philosophical Review, 120, 515–566.
Eshleman, A. (2009). Moral responsibility. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/moral-responsibility/.
Fischer, J. M. (1994). The metaphysics of free will. Malden: Blackwell.
Fischer, J. M., & Ravizza, M. (1998). Responsibility and control. A theory of moral responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frankfurt, H. G. (1969). Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. Journal of Philosophy, 66, 829–839.
Hare, R. M. (1952/1970). The language of morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hawthorne, J. (2001). Freedom in context. Philosophical Studies, 104, 63–79.
Horgan, T. (1979). ‘Could’, possible worlds, and moral responsibility. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 17, 345–358.
Hume, D. (1748/1975). An enquiry concerning human understanding. In L. A. Selby-Bigge & P. H. Nidditch (Hg.), Enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals by David Hume (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackson, F. (1998). From metaphysics to ethics. A defense of conceptual analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
James, W. (1884/1956). The dilemma of determinism. In The will to believe (pp. 145–183). New York: Dover Publications.
Kane, R. (1996). The significance of free will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kane, R. (2002). Responsibility, reactive attitudes and free will: Reflections on Wallace’s theory. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64, 693–698.
Kane, R. (2005). A contemporary introduction to free will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levy, N., & McKenna, M. (2009). Recent work on free will and moral responsibility. Philosophy Compass, 4, 96–133.
Lewis, D. (1976). The paradoxes of time travel. American Philosophical Quarterly, 13, 145–152.
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8, 339–359.
Nahmias, E., Coates, D. J., & Kvaran, T. (2007). Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: Experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31, 214–242.
Nahmias, E., Morris, S., Nadelhoffer, T., & Turner, J. (2005). Surveying freedom: Folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. Philosophical Psychology, 18, 561–584.
Nahmias, E., Morris, S., Nadelhoffer, T., & Turner, J. (2006). Is incompatibilism intuitive? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 73, 28–53.
Nichols, S., & Knobe, J. (2007). Moral responsibility and determinism: The cognitive science of folk intuitions. Nous, 43, 663–685.
O’Connor, T. (2010). Free will. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2010 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/freewill/.
Pereboom, D. (2001). Living without free will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smart, J. J. C. (1961). Free-will, praise and blame. Mind, 70, 291–306.
Strawson, P. (1962/2003). Freedom and resentment. In G. Watson (Ed.), Free will (pp. 72–93). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strawson, G. (1986/2010). Freedom and belief. Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Inwagen, P. (1983). An essay on free will. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
van Inwagen, P. (2008). How to think about the problem of free will. Journal of Ethics, 12, 327–341.
Wallace, R. J. (1994). Responsibility and the moral sentiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wallace, R. J. (2002). Replies. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64, 707–727.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Vuko Andric, Ezio Di Nucci, Neil Roughley and an anonymous referee for this journal for helpful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schulte, P. Beyond Verbal Disputes: The Compatibilism Debate Revisited. Erkenn 79, 669–685 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9530-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9530-8