120 Book Reviews
Derk Pereboom Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 219 pp. isbn 978-0-19-968551-6 (hbk). £30.00.
In Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, Derk Pereboom defends free will skepticism and hard incompatibilism, positions according to which we do not have the free will required in the core sense of moral responsibility: the basic desert sense (p. 2). According to this sense of moral responsibility, central in the free will debate, “[f]or an agent to be morally responsible for an action in th[e basic desert] sense is for it to be hers in such a way that she would de- serve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve to be praised if the understood that it was morally exemplary” (p. 2). More specifically, Pereboom’s position is that we do not have the strong under- standing of free will implied by the basic desert sense of moral responsibility. In the first chapter Pereboom defends a source incompatibilism, as opposed to a leeway incompatibilism. The difference between both positions is that the former defends that an agent S is morally responsible for doing x insofar as she decides to do x, while the latter defends that S is morally responsible for doing x only if she had access to alternate possibilities. In other words, for the source incompatibilist, the accessibility of alternate possibilities is irrelevant to determine whether an agent is morally responsible or not, while it is central for the leeway incompatibilist. To be morally responsible, an agent “must be the source of her action in an appropriate way” (p. 28). In the second and third chapters, Pereboom critiques libertarian positions according to which we have the capacity qua agents to freely will actions that are not causally determined by factors beyond ours control (p. 30). He presents arguments against three different versions of libertarianism: event- causal, non-causal, and agent-causal. All these positions are incompatibilist in the sense that they defend that free will is incompatible with determin- ism. However, according to Pereboom, all these positions are unsustainable. Against event-causal libertarianism, Pereboom maintains it is susceptible to the disappearing agent objection, while agent-causal libertarians present an understanding of causation as substance not supported by our leading physi- cal theories. Finally, regarding non-causal libertarians, they either present the non-causal relation between an agent and an action in causal terms or they lack the resource to explain the control an agent must have over her actions to be accountable for them. In the fourth chapter, Pereboom presents his multiple-case manipula- tion argument against compatibilism. According to compatibilists in the free will debate, the basic desert sense of moral responsibility is compatible with
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determinism. In other words, S is morally responsible for x even though S is “being causally determined so to act by factors beyond her control” (p. 71). Pereboom’s intention is to present four cases in which someone is causally de- termined by factors beyond her control. The first case of his multiple-case ma- nipulation argument relates a situation where an agent – Plum – is forced by a neuroscientist into killing another agent – White. The neuroscientist forces Plum to kill White by pressing a button. In this case, Plum is determined to act by factors beyond his control, i.e. the intervention of the neuroscientist. In the second case, the neuroscientist programmed Plum at the beginning of his life in such a way that he will kill White later. In the third case, Plum has been brainwashed by his community and he has been causally determined to kill White by this indoctrination. In the last case, Plum is living in a universe just as ours where everything “is causally determined by virtue of its past states to- gether with the laws of nature”, and he decides by himself to kill White (p. 79). Pereboom’s reasoning goes in the following way: Plum cannot be held morally responsibly for the death of White in the first case because he was forced to kill White by the intervention of the neuroscientist, then we must conclude that Plum is not morally responsible in the last case because all four cases are similar – the agent is in all these cases causally determined by factors beyond his control. All this means that compatibilists are not in a very good position to defend that moral responsibility in the basic desert sense is compatible with determinism. This constitutes the first half of Pereboom’s book. At this stage, his manipu- lation argument against compatibilism conjointly with his arguments against libertarian positions provided in the second and third chapters constitute his defense for hard incompatibilism and free will skepticism. In the second half of his book, Pereboom deals with some practical implications of his view. This is very important because the main problems with free will skepticism are practical. Indeed, as Pereboom says (p. 104): “Can we live with the belief that [free will skepticism] is true?” In the following paragraphs, I will briefly present what I consider to be the most important issues of the second half of the book. In chapter six, Pereboom presents an account of moral responsibility that is compatible with free will skepticism, which is essentially a forward-looking sense of responsibility. Then, even though free will skepticism is irreconcilable with moral responsibility in the basic desert sense, free will skeptics could ground moral blame in three moral desiderata: protection, reconciliation, and moral formation (p. 135). It is in this sense that blame is essentially forward- looking: it aims to protect the community in the future from undesirable behaviors. While it is not the sense of moral responsibility involved in the basic desert sense, it is a conception of moral responsibility compatible with journal of moral philosophy 14 (2017) 105-123