Abstract
In this paper I critically assess Derk Pereboom’s book, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. In it, I resist Pereboom’s manipulation argument for incompatibilism and his indictment of desert-based accounts of moral responsibility.
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Notes
Derk Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, Oxford: UK, Oxford University Press, 2014. References to this text will made with parentheses and page numbers only.
This is a weaker position than the one Pereboom had previously advanced. Pereboom (2001) had argued that acting freely as a product of agent causation was conceptually coherent and metaphysically possible. But in this book (2014) Pereboom grants that the content of the positive conception of ourselves as agent causes may be “ephemeral, and our conception of ourselves as agent-causes may turn out to be empty after all” (58). However, he concludes that we lack “decisive warrant for this verdict” (58).
To be clear, I put “manipulation” in quotations here since the examples in question do not literally involve one agent manipulating another. This should not be objectionable to Pereboom, as he has granted that this is not essential to his argument. (In subsequent discussion, I will drop the quotation marks, bearing in mind the point I make here).
In what follows, I present in a slightly different way arguments developed more fully in my recent “Resisting the Manipulation Argument: A Hard-Liner Takes it on the Chin” (2014).
There is one interesting difference between the real-life manipulation cases and cases like Case 1 and Case 2, but this difference is unfriendly to Pereboom’s thesis. In the real-life cases, an agent has a fairly robust moral personality that is revised in some substantial way. In Pereboom’s Case 1 and Case 2, the interventions are designed to be personality-sustaining. (I am grateful to Al Mele for pointing this out.) One would think that if incompatibilist intuitions had some grip on us in the real-life cases, they would come out more forcefully due to the special detail of personality-alteration. But the examples tend not to illicit that effect, and this helps confirm even more forcefully a compatibilist diagnosis.
This can be so, I argued (2014), even if the overall effect of Case 1 weighed against the effect of the real-life manipulation cases and the further arguments I advance results in the neutral inquirer lowering somewhat her credence toward (M) in the direction of an incompatibilist diagnosis instead. (Space does not permit adequate development of this point).
Robert Wallace has pointed out that a slightly weaker point is available to me. Rather than argue for the thesis that the more ordinary cases are more reliable, simply argue that they are at least as reliable. Both the extraordinary and the ordinary cases come with some liabilities and some advantages. But this is consistent with the ordinary cases casting light on the debate in a way that is useful to compatibilists. I am still prepared to commit to the stronger thesis, but I do wish to acknowledge that a weaker one might be adequate for present purposes.
See McKenna (2012, Chapter 7).
See McKenna (2012, Chapter 4).
Although I might quibble at a few points, such as with Pereboom’s suggestion that my proposal makes unrealistic assumptions about the cognitive sophistication of normal adults (133), and the contention that I think of a second stage in a moral responsibility exchange in such a way it is completed even before error can be corrected (133).
If this seems puzzling, consider this: you decide to head to the grocery store for some staples, thereby acquiring an intention to do get them. Intending to do this, you put on your shoes, grab your keys, head to the car, drive to the grocery store, grab a cart, head to the vegetable section, and so on. It is plausible to suppose you do each of these things intentionally: put on your shoes, grab your keys, and so on. But do you intend each of them? This seems implausible. Rather what you do intentionally is encompassed by what you do as part of a plan to execute your intention (head to the store for some staples).
What about things you do knowingly but not intentionally? As you drive off to the store, you are aware that by doing so, you are liable to wake your spouse, who is sleeping in this morning, and you will deplete the little bit of gas left in the car, resulting in the need for someone to fill it up later. Do you do any of these things intentionally? It seems not—rather, you do then knowingly while not intending to do them.
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For helpful comments, I would like to thank Justin Capes, Ishtiyaque Haji, Alfred Mele, Dana Nelkin, Derk Pereboom, Carolina Sartorio, Robert Hamilton Wallace, and Brandon Warmke. I would also like to thank Massimo Renzo for arranging this symposium on Pereboom’s book and for inviting me to contribute.
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McKenna, M. Manipulation Arguments, Basic Desert, and Moral Responsibility: Assessing Derk Pereboom’s Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life . Criminal Law, Philosophy 11, 575–589 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-015-9388-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-015-9388-8