Hard incompatibilism and the participant attitude

ABSTRACT

Following P. F. Strawson, a number of philosophers have argued that if hard incompatibilism is true, then its truth would undermine the justification or value of our relationships with other persons. In this paper, I offer a novel defense of this claim. In particular, I argue that if hard incompatibilism is true, we cannot make sense of: the possibility of promissory obligation, the significance of consent, or the pro tanto wrongness of paternalistic intervention. Because these practices and normative commitments are central to our relationships as we currently conceive of them, it follows that hard incompatibilism has radically revisionary conclusions.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral responsibility
• hard incompatibilism
• Derk Pereboom

Acknowledgement

For helpful feedback on these ideas, I’m especially grateful to Derk Pereboom, Neal Tognazzini, and two anonymous referees from this journal.

Notes

1. As I understand it, hard incompatibilism is ultimately a thesis that concerns moral responsibility, since the kind of free will that hard incompatibilists are skeptical of is identified as the kind of freedom or control that’s necessary for moral responsibility. This means that hard incompatibilists also stand opposed to semi-compatibilists (see, e.g., Fischer 1994), even though semi-compatibilists deny that free will (understood as the ability to do otherwise) is necessary for moral responsibility.

2. Cf. Wolf (1981), Anglin (1990), Kane (1996), Ekstrom (2000), Shabo (2012), Watson (2014), Helm (2017), and author’s published work.

3. In addition to Pereboom, see Sommers (2007, 2012), Milam (2016), and Smuts (2016).

4. For more on this point, see especially Sommers (2007).

5. See, among others, Shabo (2012), Coates (2013), and Helm (2017) for a full development of the idea that meaningful human relationships necessarily implicate responsibility-emotions.

6. To be clear, I don’t take these to be the only features of our lives with others that implicate morally responsible agency. See Nelkin (2015) for more on the connections between the existence of special obligations and morally responsible agency.

7. I say ‘apparently’ here because, as I’ll discuss in §5, the hard incompatibilist will no doubt want to object to this argument.

8. See Pereboom (2014), esp. chapter 2.

9. See Pereboom (2014), esp. chapter 4.

10. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.

11. This is quick, but in Coates (2017) I argue that moral responsibility skeptics rely on this (or a related) thought to secure their claim that ultimacy is necessary for moral responsibility.

12. As an anonymous referee has rightly pointed out to me, morality itself can be a high stakes affair; we can be obligated to perform significant and burdensome tasks not as a result of our own agency but simply because those are the demands of morality. This is correct, and such a conception of morality is straightforwardly consistent with the truth of hard incompatibilism. So the point here isn’t just that it’s the burdensome nature of (some) promises that shows them to be incompatible with hard incompatibilism. Instead, it’s the fact that these obligations only arise because the agent has exercised her agency in a particular way.

13. In emphasizing the obligation of promissory obligation, I might be failing to fully appreciate the full range of related phenomena, many of which are quite compatible with hard incompatibilism. Pereboom himself makes this point about moral obligation more generally, when he writes, ‘the role of moral obligation in a relationship has a near functional equivalent whose constituents are care and its resulting commitments, together with the appropriateness of moral protest in cases in which commitments are not honored,’ (Pereboom 2017). There’s something to this point, it seems, but it also seems to rely on Pereboom being correct about in his claims that Strawsonians have failed to show that attitudes adjacent to care (like love) don’t implicate morally responsible agency. On this point, I and many others demur (again, see Shabo 2012; Coates 2013; and Helm 2017), but I do recognize that perhaps what this objection does show is that it’s not as easy as I’ve suggested to separate the question of whether our interpersonal emotional engagement with others requires morally responsible agency and the question of whether many of our ordinary social practices require morally responsible agency. Thanks to an anonymous referee for helping me see this point.

14. Or never at all if Elinor Mason (2005) is correct.

15. What I say in §5 serves as a distinct argument against this thought. There I focus on promissory obligation, but I offer a schema for extending that argument to one about the kind of freedom implicated in the thought that it’s free consent that is normatively significant.

16. Of course, here we must also imagine (per impossible?) that his consent is not made under the kind of duress that Marxists imagine to be lurking in the background of all post-industrial capitalist societies.

17. How significant this point seems depends on how antecedently plausible you take Kantian moral theories to be. Pereboom (2014) seems to have shifted towards a more consequentialist moral theory, so he in particular might not be worried about this point. On this point Pereboom and I might agree. But this point is still worth keeping in mind for those hard incompatibilists who are inclined in more Kantian ways.

18. On this point, see Pereboom (2001), especially pgs. 150–52.

19. See Gary Watson (1975) and Harry Frankfurt (1971). I do not mean to suggest that these exhaust all theories of self-governance. But these two theories are importantly representative of such theories.

20. To be fair, it’s his term, so he can define it however he wants. But insofar as he’s picking a real practical orientation that we have towards others, it seems like characterizing it exclusively in terms of the so-called reactive attitudes is a mistake.

21. See Pereboom (2001, 2014), particularly 2014, pgs. 104–152.

22. See Sher (2006) and Scanlon (2008) for two theories of blame that are not desert-entailing. Pereboom (and other responsibility skeptics) can also avail himself of compatibilism with respect to forward-looking forms of blame. See Pereboom (2013) for more on this point.

23. Cf. Wisdom (1934), Pereboom (1995, 2001, 2013, 2014), and Kane (1996), among others.

24. Trevor Pisciotta (2009) develops a similar argument against Pereboom’s hard incompatibilist account of meaning and fulfillment.

25. Pereboom (2014): 76–77.

26. The rational capacities I have in mind here are whatever capacities compatibilists take to be sufficient for moral responsibility.

27. For reference, here is the text of Pereboom’s Case 2.

Case 2. Plum is just like an ordinary human being, except that a team of neuroscientists programmed him at the beginning of his life so that his reasoning is often but not always egoistic (as in Case 1), and at times strongly so, with the intended consequence that in his current circumstances he is causally determined to engage in the egoistic reasons-responsive process of deliberation and to have the set of first and second-order desires that result in his decision to kill White. Plum has the general ability to regulate his actions by moral reasons, but in his circumstances, due to the strongly egoistic nature of his deliberative reasoning, he is causally determined to make his decision to kill. Yet he does not decide as he does because of an irresistible desire. The neural realization of his reasoning process and of his decision is exactly the same as it is in Case 1 (although their causal histories are different), (Pereboom 2014, 77).

28. Furthermore, if there is a relevant difference, then it’s hard to see how that same difference can’t be exploited by the compatibilist in response to Pereboom’s original Four-Case Argument.

29. As an anonymous referee has pointed out to me, there are, perhaps, avenues available for the hard incompatibilist to soften the blow here. Pereboom (2014) argues that although sometimes obligations can be deontological in nature, they can also be axiological. On this second reading of an obligation, there is no must, but only the thought that the action prescribed by the obligation would be good or valuable or worthy of undertaking. Hard incompatibilists could thus reinterpret our practices of promising in light of this distinction. Perhaps if hard incompatibilism is true then we only have the power to make it such that it’s good or valuable or worthy of undertaking the activity of keeping one’s promises. This is not the same power that we ordinarily take ourselves to have, but it might be close enough.

This seems right, as far as it goes, but then we might wonder whether, on hard incompatibilism, we might not also have the power to exercise our agency in ways that make us not deserving of praise or blame but that make praise or blame good, valuable, or especially appropriate ways of responding to our actions. If so, then the line between hard incompatibilism and say, certain forms of compatibilism becomes very thin indeed. But if not, then it’s curious (again) that our agency can ground obligations (in the axiological) sense but not the axiological analog to desert.

30. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.

31. Or they must accept the parallel claims that could be made about consent and paternalism: (i) that your consent can be normatively significant even if you weren’t morally responsible for consenting, and (ii) that your imprudent and even personally disastrous actions cannot be paternalistically interfered with even if you were not morally responsible for performing those actions.