Abstract
In the debate on free will and moral responsibility, Saul Smilansky is a hard source-incompatibilist who objects to source-compatibilism for being morally shallow. After criticizing John Martin Fischer’s too optimistic response to this objection, this paper dissipates the charge that compatibilist accounts of ultimate origination are morally shallow by appealing to the seriousness of contingency in the framework of, what Paul Russell calls, compatibilist-fatalism. Responding to the objection from moral shallowness thus drives a wedge between optimists and fatalists within the compatibilist camp.
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Notes
Smilansky’s view cannot, strictly speaking, be called “hard determinist” in the classical sense. For that reason Robert Kane (2002b, p. 27) calls views like that of Smilansky, Ted Honderich, Derk Pereboom and Galen Strawson “Successor Views to classical hard determinism”. Smilansky’s successor view is a form of hard source-incompatibilism.
Only non-causalist libertarians, such as Ginet (1990), will not add this condition.
To be more precise (Fischer and Ravizza 1998), moderate reasons-responsiveness consists in regular reasons-receptivity, and at least weak reasons-reactivity, of the actual-sequence mechanism that leads to action. Reasons-receptivity is the capacity to recognize the reasons that exist, and reasons-reactivity is the capacity to translate reasons into choices (and subsequent behaviour). Regular reasons-receptivity involves an understandable pattern of actual and hypothetical reasons-receptivity. A mechanism of the agent that issues in the agent’s performing some action in the actual world is weakly reasons-reactive if there is some possible world (with the same laws) in which a mechanism of this very kind is operative in the agent, there is sufficient reason to do otherwise, the agent recognizes this reason, and the agent does otherwise for this reason.
Elsewhere, we argued that although Fischer’s account of ultimate origination is highly sophisticated, it is left with serious troubles and that, therefore, our account is the better one. See Haji and Cuypers 2008, pp. 15–41, 189–95.
This immediate sense of seriousness should be distinguished from the reflective attitude of irony as an (over)intellectualized reaction to the contingency and fragility of human life. For this latter attitude, see Rorty 1989.
Although I do not accept her Reflective-Endorsement view of moral responsibility and, moreover, think that she is still too optimistic an orthodox compatibilist, Lynne Rudder Baker (2006, p. 325) struggles with the same predicament, as she writes: “… the ubiquity of luck should lead us … to temper judgments of moral responsibility with pity (e.g., pity for the child molester who was himself molested as a child). … Reality is tragic; we might wish that it where otherwise, but what’s shallow is such wishful thinking. Compatibilism-cum-pity is an appropriate and profound response to the way things really are.” “Compatibilism-cum-pity” is her label for compatibilism-fatalism.
For helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper I am indebted to members of audiences at Free University of Amsterdam, Ghent University and University of Hamburg and I am very grateful to two anonymous referees for Ethical Theory and Moral Practice for their incisive critical remarks and fruitful suggestions.
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Cuypers, S.E. Moral Shallowness, Metaphysical Megalomania, and Compatibilist-Fatalism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 173–188 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9318-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9318-3