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Sofia Jeppsson PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVE COMPATIBILISM Sofia Jeppsson Practical Perspective Compatibilism Sofia Jeppsson ©Sofia Jeppsson, Stockholm 2012 ISSN 0491-0877 ISBN 978-91-86071-84-4 Printed in Sweden by US-AB, Stockholm 2012 Distributor: Department of Philosophy, Stockholm Uni- versity I thank my supervisors Ragnar Ohlsson and Gunnar Björnsson, for their invalua- ble help. I thank my husband Alexander, who was always there for me during hard times. I thank my loving fam- ily, my parents Jan-Erik and Lena Nordin as well as my sisters Anna Nordin and Elin Pellberg, for their support. Contents Introduction ............................................................................................... 9 1. Moral Agency and Moral Responsibility .............................................. 14 2. Practical Freedom: Historical Background of the Concept ................. 18 2.1. Deliberation and Determinism ......................................................................... 19 2.2. Kant on Freedom and Morality ........................................................................ 25 2.3. Kierkegaard ..................................................................................................... 29 2.4. Korsgaard ........................................................................................................ 30 2.5. Bok on Moral Responsibility ............................................................................ 32 3. The Freedom Sufficient for Morality .................................................... 38 3.1. The Principle of Deliberative Relevance .......................................................... 38 3.1.1. Morality as Action-guiding ....................................................................... 39 3.1.2. Morality from a Second and Third-Person Perspective ........................... 45 3.1.3. Moral responsibility and Perspectives ..................................................... 48 3.2. A stipulative Definition of Practical Freedom ................................................... 51 3.2.1. Minimal and Maximal Practical Freedom ................................................ 52 3.2.2. Unconsidered Options ............................................................................. 58 3.2.3. More or Less Practical Freedom ............................................................. 67 3.2.3. Diminished Practical Freedom Compared to Weakness of Will .............. 69 3.2.4. Free Choice of Values ............................................................................. 75 3.2.5. The Things We Just Do ........................................................................... 77 3.2.6. The Importance of Being Able to Act on One’s Own Values ................... 79 3.3. Practical Perspective Compatibilism Compared to Causal Compatibilism ...... 83 4. Different Perspectives ......................................................................... 88 4.1. Different Perspectives – Contradictory Beliefs? .............................................. 88 4.2. A contextualist Interpretation ........................................................................... 95 4.2.1. Lewis-style Contextualism ....................................................................... 95 4.2.2. Williams-style Contextualism ................................................................ 102 4.2.3. Contextualism about the Moral Words .................................................. 109 5. Moral Responsibility .......................................................................... 112 5.1. Desert-entailing Moral Responsibility ............................................................ 112 5.2. Formal Arguments for Incompatibilism .......................................................... 118 5.2.1. A General Problem with these Arguments ............................................ 118 5.2.2. Galen Strawson’s Argument for the Impossibility of Moral Responsibility .............................................................................................................................. 119 5.2.3. The Consequence Argument and Frankfurt Responses ....................... 127 5.3. Thought experiments for incompatibilism ...................................................... 140 5.3.1. Hardline and Softline Replies ................................................................ 141 5.3.3. A Softline Reply for Vehicle Scenarios .................................................. 142 5.3.4. A Hardline Reply for Walden Two ......................................................... 144 5.3.5. A Hardline Reply for Professor Plum .................................................... 148 5.3.6. A Hardline Reply for Alice ..................................................................... 152 5.4. Arguments for Causal Compatibilism ............................................................ 160 5.4.1. A Hardline Reply for Mele’s Manipulation Cases .................................. 161 5.4.2. Kaye’s Mitigating Factors ...................................................................... 167 5.5. Summary of Chapter 5 .................................................................................. 173 6. Moral Agency, Responsibility and Metaethics .................................. 175 6.1. What Determinism Can and Cannot Imply .................................................... 175 6.2. Korsgaard and Constructivism ...................................................................... 176 6.3. Contractualism ............................................................................................... 180 6.4. Peter Strawson’s Naturalism ......................................................................... 183 6.5. Realism .......................................................................................................... 186 7. Conclusion ........................................................................................ 193 Bibliography .......................................................................................... 201 Introduction It can only be true that agents acted morally right or wrong if they acted freely. This statement is rather uncontroversial. However, any particular interpretation of “freely” will be controversial. Some philosophers believe that we cannot be free if the universe is deterministic, others that we cannot be free if it is indeterministic, and some think the morally relevant kind of freedom is impossible regardless of how the universe works. Moral philoso- phy thus has a problem; we discuss the right- and wrong-making features of actions and talk about people as being responsible for what they do, but it is not clear if there can be such things as rightness, wrongness and moral re- sponsibility in the world. The purpose of this dissertation is to solve this problem. The free will problem is an old one; it has now haunted philosophy for a couple of thousand years. The problem has changed shape over the centuries, but the enduring core of the problem is this: How can I act freely, if some- thing outside me (be it the laws of logic, the laws of nature, or the almighty will of God) determines everything that will happen, including my actions? Determinism, as the term is used in the contemporary debate, means that the past and the laws of nature together determine everything that will happen in the future. Nevertheless, if that is so, how can I be free? Or to put it a little more stringently; suppose that P is a proposition describing the state of the entire world at some arbitrary point in the distant past, and suppose that L is a proposition describing all the laws of nature. Proposition F describes a future action of mine. Now if P and L imply F, is it not the case that F had to 9 happen? Was I not, in that case, powerless to falsify F, powerless to do any- thing but the action that F describes? Other philosophers have contested this and argued that determinism is no threat to freedom; some have even argued that determinism is necessary for freedom. They argue that I am free when I do what I want, when my actions are caused by my desires. If my desires did not determine what I do, these doings would seem like random events rather than free actions. The philoso- phers who hold this view are called (classic) compatibilists, while their op- ponents are called incompatibilists. When it comes to free will and determin- ism, incompatibilists may believe either that we can be free if the world is indeterministic in the right way or that the only alternative to determinism is a regrettable sort of randomness. Incompatibilists who believe in free will are called libertarians (not to be confused with the political group of the same name). There are different libertarian theories of what makes us free. Some think it is a little bit of quantum indeterminacy at the right time and place in our brains, while others think it is agent causation, a special kind of causation whereby agents can initiate completely new causal chains. Almost all philosophers who have written on the subject fall rather neatly into one of the two camps; compatibilist or incompatibilist. Either they be- lieve that the right kind of deterministic causation is no threat to freedom, and may even be a necessary prerequisite for freedom, or they believe that determinism and freedom are mutually exclusive. There is an interesting exception to this rule: Immanuel Kant. Most philosophers place him in the incompatibilist camp, some in the compatibilist, but I think Ted Honderich is right when he argues
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