Abstract
The Direct Argument for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility is so christened because this argument allegedly circumvents any appeal to the principle of alternate possibilities – a person is morally responsible for doing something only if he could have avoided doing it – to secure incompatibilism. In this paper, I first summarize Peter van Inwagen’s version of the Direct Argument. I then comment on David Widerker’s recent responses to the argument. Finally, I cast doubt on the argument by constructing counterexamples to a rule of inference it invokes.
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Notes
One might reserve the label ‘Consequence Argument’ for the line of reasoning that terminates with the intermediate conclusion, that is, the line of reasoning that unfolds, roughly, from the assumption of determinism and the unavoidability of the past and the laws, to the unavoidability of our actions. The label ‘Extended Consequence Argument’ might then be used to refer to an argument that contains the Consequence Argument as a sub-argument and that proceeds from the conclusion of this sub-argument, together with the principle of alternate possibilities, to the final conclusion that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility. In the remainder of this piece, I stick with the former label; the context should make abundantly clear whether the Consequence Argument or the Extended Consequence Argument is at issue.
In (1983, p. 184), van Inwagen uses ‘N’ instead of ‘NR,’ taking ‘N’ to stand for ‘no one is, or ever has been, even partly responsible for the fact that...’
References to this paper are to a pre-publication manuscript.
Helen Beebee and Alfred R. Mele (2002) argue that on a Humean conception of the laws, there is a robust sense in which the laws are ‘up to us.’
For an excellent overview of the pertinent literature, see Kane 1996, ch. 4.
Fischer and Ravizza develop a similar case in (1998, p. 65).
Not all libertarians accept conditions (i) and (ii). Non-traditional libertarians reject the requirement that a decision is free only if one could have refrained from performing it. Libertarians who are traditional agent-causalists endorse the alternative possibilities requirement and insist that a free decision has no event as its cause but has, instead a substance – its agent – as its cause.
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Acknowledgments
I thank two anonymous referees for Erkenntnis for their valuable comments and suggestions. I am especially grateful to Michael McKenna for highly penetrating and helpful discussion.
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Haji, I. Reflections on the Incompatibilist’s Direct Argument. Erkenn 68, 1–19 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9056-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9056-z