Free Will and Moral Responsibility
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 10:20 AM
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3 Comments |
Eddy Nahmias started an interesting thread some time ago. His project is to count heads, and thereby discover whether compatibilism is the majority position or not among specialist philosophers. On Nahmias's first count, the compatibilists come out ahead.
The exercise is an interesting one, but I think a clarification is in order (and Fritz Warfield points this out early on in the thread): compatibilism with respect to what? -- Free will and determinism? Moral responsibility and determinism?
This distinction is important to mind. First, there are philosophers who affirm different answers to the two compatibility questions, and any classification worth its beans needs to account for them (ie, John Martin Fischer and Company). Second, there just is a distinction between free will and moral responsibility. An agent acts freely just in case she has certain metaphysical abilities, while an agent acts in the morally responsible way just in case she is an apt candidate for moral appraisal (praise, blame, etc.).
Further, notice that free will and moral responsibility are not coextensive. Even if free will is a necessary condition of acting in the morally responsible way (I deny this), it is not sufficient. Assume that there are morally neutral acts, acts which do not have attached to them any duties, superduties, or subduties. Such neutral acts are just not worthy for moral appraisal. Now see that one can, with all the free will in the world, perform such a morally neutral action (raising one's hand, say). No matter how freely the agent performed the action, it is not one for which she is morally responsible. Free action, causal responsibility, and perhaps even such things as legal responsibility do not suffice for moral responsibility.
Back to the counting heads discussion. There are two relevant sets of experts we must consult, then, to find a useful generalization about what specialists believe about compatibilism. And the camps are distinct; there are experts on free will, and there are experts on moral responsibility, and a much smaller group that specializes in both.
My sense is that the van Inwagen/Warfield claim is dead on with respect to the first camp; the majority of philosophers who specialize in free will are incompatibilists with respect to freedom and determinism. My initial guess is that this is not true about the second camp; specialists in moral responsibility seem by and large to be compatibilists. Many find Frankfurt-style counterexamples persuasive, for example, and on this basis reject both Direct and Indirect arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility.
3 Comments:
Noumena at 5:08 PM said... There are at least two ways we might talk about the extension of properties like free will and moral responsibility, in terms of agents and in terms of acts. For example, if we're asking about whether or not the properties are coextensive, we might be asking 'Are all and only agents with free will also morally responsible?' or we might be asking 'Are all and only freely-performed actions also capable of being evaluated morally?' (That's a little awkward, but hopefully my point is clear.)
Note that these two questions are independent: an incompatibilist could say 'yes' to the former, but (as per your argument) say 'no' to the latter.
at 10:53 PM said... For what it's worth (which may not be much), my initial response to your claims in the last paragraph is one of agreement. If it's correct, it's natural to wonder *why*, though. I can't think of any obvious reasons for the divide (again, if indeed there is one). Perhaps it just means that Fischer is right...and so we should all be semi-compatibilists!
[Btw, glad to see a post on FW/MR. I've been lurking around your blog a bit since seeing you at Biola a few weeks back and decided to come out of the woods]
Andrew Bailey at 12:46 PM said... Hey Daniel, it was good to see you at Biola. Thanks for dropping by, I'm sure if you stick around we'll find something in free will to argue about. =)
