Comparing deterministic agents: A new argument for compatibilism

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a new argument for compatibilism about moral responsibility by drawing attention to some overlooked implications of incompatibilism. More specifically, I argue that incompatibilists are committed to some unsavory claims about pairs of agents in deterministic worlds. These include comparative claims about moral responsibility, blameworthiness, desert, punishment, and the fittingness of reactive attitudes. I argue that we have good reasons to reject such comparisons because they fail to account for key differences between deterministic agents. This provides us with reason to embrace compatibilism and reject incompatibilism.

KEYWORDS:

• Compatibilism
• incompatibilism
• moral responsibility
• determinism

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank Stephen Kearns for his comments on many drafts of this paper. I am also very grateful to Randy Clarke, Al Mele, Thomas Reed, and the two anonymous referees for helping me improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Some further direct arguments for compatibilism include the Paradigm Case argument (Flew 1955) and its semantic counterpart (Turner 2013), the Mind argument (Hobart 1934), and the defense and developments of new dispositionalism (Clarke and Reed 2015). Though such arguments are often for the compatibility of free will and determinism, minor adjustments can make them arguments for the compatibility of moral responsibility and determinism.

2 If moral responsibility requires free will (which is extremely plausible), this paper also serves as an argument that compatibilism about free will is true. I shall not explore this idea further in what follows.

3 When I say that Sam is more praiseworthy for donating blood than Dean is for stealing it, I do not mean to claim that Dean is praiseworthy to any (positive) degree, though this may often be conversationally implicated by such a comparison (but I do not think it is entailed). The important point is that there is a difference between Sam and Dean with respect to their praiseworthiness. While Sam is praiseworthy to some (positive) degree, Dean is not. I take this to entail that Sam is more praiseworthy than Dean (which is precisely why I formulate my claims in this way).

If one disagrees that there is any such entailment, my point can be expressed differently (though slightly more verbosely): Sam is praiseworthy to a degree greater than any degree, if there is any, to which Dean is praiseworthy. This claim is certainly entailed by the fact that Sam is praiseworthy to some positive degree and Dean is not. The same basic point applies to blameworthiness, guilt, desert, etc., mutatis mutandis. See also endnote 6 for a similar issue regarding the below equality theses. Thank you to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to these issues.

4 One may take fittingness (like truth) to be something that doesn’t come in degrees. Perhaps surprisingly, nothing of importance turns on this for my purposes. A claim such as ‘it is more fitting to resent Dean than Sam’ may be read as ‘it is fitting to be more resentful of Dean than of Sam’, which does not require fittingness to come in degrees, but rather the attitudes which the claim concerns.

5 Some might claim that No Moral Responsibility thesis just is incompatibilism. Nothing important turns on this.

6 Certain uses of the phrase ‘equally morally responsible’ may conversationally implicate some positive degree of moral responsibility. My use has no such implicature for the EMR principle, or any other of the below principles, mutatis mutandis.

A deeper worry concerns whether it is acceptable to infer the claim that all deterministic agents are morally responsible to the same degree—degree zero—from the claim that no (deterministic) agents are at all morally responsible. Similar inferences are arguably mistaken. For instance, Bykvist (2007) argues that it is wrong to move from ‘non-existence lacks value’ to ‘non-existence has value zero’. Consider another example—logic lacks temperature, but this doesn’t mean that logic has a temperature of zero (in whatever unit of temperature we are using). Logic simply cannot be appropriately described as having any degree of temperature. One may similarly maintain that, if there is no moral responsibility, then no degrees of responsibility apply to agents at all, instead of everyone’s having responsibility to degree zero. Seeing as the following equality theses arguably rest on the idea that agents without responsibility have responsibility to degree zero, the questionable nature of this inference casts doubt on these theses. My thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this issue and Bykvist’s paper, and for providing the logic example.

My response to this worry is twofold. First, and fortunately for me, nothing of importance turns on this issue for the purposes of my argument. Even if it is strictly-speaking mistaken to claim that, for the incompatibilist, all deterministic agents are responsible (or blameworthy, etc.) to (the same) degree zero, we may treat this way of putting things merely as shorthand for the incompatibilist’s denial that such agents differ in their degrees of responsibility (or blameworthiness, etc.). Indeed, we can reformulate the equality theses to reflect this idea. Thus reformulated, EMR reads as follows:

(EMR*) Necessarily, if determinism is true, no agents are any more morally responsible than any others.

The remaining equality theses discussed in this section are reformulated in a similar way in endnote 7.

Second, one way of taking the initial worry is as follows: by claiming that deterministic agents are responsible to degree zero, we are making some kind of category mistake. If there is no moral responsibility to be had, it is unfitting to talk about agents as having even non-positive degrees of responsibility. Indeed, this seems to be what is going on in the logic and temperature case: to say that logic has a temperature of zero is a category mistake. However, in my view, the responsibility case does not involve a category mistake and is thus disanalogous to the logic/temperature example. Incompatibilists do not claim that it is a category mistake to say that agents are responsible in a deterministic world, but merely that (deterministic) agents are not responsible. In general, we (correctly) think of responsibility as supervening on certain agential properties that we can have to greater or lesser degrees. Given this, it is fitting to think of agents as having various degrees of responsibility, including zero, depending on the nature and degree of such agential properties. Most importantly, making equality judgments about even non-responsible agents involves no category mistakes. (An impossibilist about responsibility may demur here, maintaining that agents just aren’t the type of thing that can be responsible to any degree, even degree zero. Even if this is right, I need not insist otherwise, given that my first point shows that we may put my main point without such a contention).

7 In response to a concern mentioned in endnote 6, I here provide reformulations for the remaining equality theses that do not invoke the idea that deterministic agents are equally blameworthy, praiseworthy, etc.:

(EB*) Necessarily, if determinism is true, no agents are any more blameworthy than any other agents.

(EP*) Necessarily, if determinism is true, no agents are any more praiseworthy than any other agents.

(EDP*) Necessarily, if determinism is true, no agents are any more deserving of punishment than any other agents.

(EDR*) Necessarily, if determinism is true, no agents are any more deserving of reward than any other agents.

(EDP+*) Necessarily, if determinism is true, no agents are any more deserving of any kind or any degree of severity of punishment than any other agents.

(EDR+*) Necessarily, if determinism is true, no agents are any more deserving of any kind or any degree of greatness of reward than any other agents.

(EFRA*) Necessarily, if determinism is true, no agents are any more fitting objects of any reactive attitude than any other agents.

(EFRA+*) Necessarily, if determinism is true, no agents are any more fitting objects of any degree of any reactive attitude than other agents.

8 To ram this last point home, note that not only are consequentialist justifications of punishment independent of desert-based justifications of punishment, but it is also possible (at least in principle) that purely consequentialist considerations may lead to advocating that, for example, Crowley receives a harsher punishment than Castiel, despite Castiel’s being, in a sense incompatibilism simply cannot capture, more guilty. Consequentialist justifications of punishment do not necessarily deliver verdicts which correspond with how Castiel and Crowley (or our other pairs) deserve to be treated. In essence, it is perfectly consistent with my argument that what punishment should be awarded, or even how one ought to be (morally) treated is strongly influenced by considerations which are not desert-based. The point is that such views cannot account for some of the moral differences (those grounded in desert/responsibility) between deterministic agents like our three pairs.

9 Much the same point can be made against another proposed error theory. One might claim that we find it plausible that Dean is more blameworthy than Sam because we see that he meets more of the requirements for blameworthiness than does Sam, and we conflate these two points. Again, we ostensibly have the skills required for making subtle judgments about these cases, and to avoid what would clearly be an egregious conflation of two very different claims. We do not seem to make such a mistake in other cases: we clearly judge, for instance, that a suitably Gettiered individual lacks knowledge (Gettier 1963), despite her meeting more of the requirements of knowledge than someone who has an unjustified true belief, or a justified false belief.

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Marcela Herdova

Marcela Herdova is Assistant Professor at Florida State University. Her research interests are moral psychology, free will, action theory, philosophy of mind, and applied ethics.