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Moral Anchors and Control

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Ishtiyaque Haji
Ishtiyaque Haji*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Morris, Morris, MN56267, USA
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Extract

Determinism is the thesis that ‘there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future.’ When various compatibilists discuss determinism and moral responsibility, they champion the view that although determinism is inconsistent with freedom to do otherwise, it is nevertheless consistent with responsibility. Determinism, then, does not, in the view of these compatibilists, threaten one sort of moral appraisal — the sort we make, for example, when we say that someone is blameworthy for some deed. Call moral deontic normative statuses like those of being morally right, wrong, or obligatory, ‘moral anchors.’ A key objective of this paper is to show that even if compatibilists can secure moral responsibility against the threat of determinism, possibly, by establishing that freedom to do otherwise is not the right sort of freedom required for responsibility, they will not be able to secure the very anchors of morality by any similar line of reasoning. Specifically, I argue that if certain principles of moral obligation are true, nothing can be morally right, wrong, or obligatory in a world in which we lack alternative possibilities. Thus, whereas unfreedom to do otherwise may be compatible with responsibility, it is incompatible with moral anchorage.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 175 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1999

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References

1 Inwagen, Peter van An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983), 3Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Dennett, Daniel C. Elbow Room (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1984)Google Scholar; Frankfurt, Harry G.; ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,’ Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971) 5–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fischer, John Martin and Ravizza, Mark Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For discussion of such breaks, see Clarke's, Randolph ‘Indeterminism and Control,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1995) 125–38Google Scholar; Kane's, Robert ‘Two Kinds of Incompatibilism,’ in O'Connor, T. ed., Agents, Causes, Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press 1995), 115–50Google Scholar; and Mele's, Alfred Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (New York: Oxford University Press 1995), esp. ch.12Google Scholar.

4 Difficulties for the traditional variety of agent causation have been raised by Kane, Robert ‘Two Kinds of Compatibilism,’ and The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press 1996), 120–23Google Scholar; Ginet, Carl ‘Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency,’ The Journal of Ethics 1 (1997) 85–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Clarke, Randolph ‘Agent Causation and Event Causation in the Production of Free Action,’ Philosophical Topics 24 (1996) 19–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Zimmerman, Michael J. The Concept of Moral Obligation (New York: Cambridge University Press 1996), 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Zimmerman notes, Fred Feldman makes very similar remarks as well. See Feldman's, Doing The Best We Can (Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1986), 24–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Lemos, Ramon M. ‘Duty and Ignorance,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (1980) 301–12, at 301CrossRefGoogle Scholar. McCloskey, H.J. also seems to believe that ignorance of facts can be ‘obligation subversive.’ See his ‘Utilitarianism: Two Difficulties,’ Philosophical Studies 24 (1973) 62–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See Kadri Vihvelin, ‘Libertarian Compatibilism.’

8 On Frankfurt-type cases, see, for example, Frankfurt, Harry G. ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,’ Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969) 828–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fischer, John Martin The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell 1994)Google Scholar.

9 For simplicity, I ignore temporal indices.

10 One has an objective moral obligation as of time t, to do action a, if and only if as of t one ought to do a. In contrast, one has a subjective moral obligation as oft to do a if and only if one believes that, as of t, one ought to do a.

11 I owe this concern to Jarrett Leplin.

12 See Doing The Best We Can, esp. ch. 2.

13 Doing The Best We Can, 19. Feldman cautions that, in the event that for every world accessible to agent s, at t, there is a better one accessible too, MO be formulated in this way: s morally ought, as oft, to see to the occurrence of p if and only if p occurs in some world accessible to s at t, and it is not the case that the negation of p occurs in any accessible world as good as (or better than) that one (38).

14 The Concept of Moral Obligation,27 -31. Note, with MO's explicit emphasis on intrinsic value, MO is itself a particular substantive theory and so it isn't correct to say that MO is compatible with almost all substantive theories of obligation. Rather, my claim is that a theory structurally like MO with its emphasis on deontic value and not intrinsic value is compatible with almost all substantive theories of obligation. Zimmerman defends such a theory in the Concept of Moral Obligation.

15 I suggest that under the condition that no one has freedom to do otherwise, ‘permissible’ does not follow from ‘not wrong.'

16 For arguments for (a), see, for example, van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will; Ginet's, Carl On Action (New York: Cambridge University Press 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fischer's The Metaphysics of Free Will. For a recent important defense of Principle K, see Zimmerman's The Concept of Moral Obligation, ch. 3.

17 This sort of response is suggested by Widerker, David in ‘Frankfurt on ‘Ought Implies Can’ and Moral Responsibility,’ Analysis 51 (1991) 222–4Google Scholar.

18 See Haji, Ishtiyaque Moral Appraisability: Puzzles, Proposals, and Perplexities (New York: Oxford University Press 1998), esp. ch. 2Google Scholar.

19 As van Inwagen explains, an agent S, does A and is not causally determined to do A when S does A if and only if S does A, there is a possible world that is exactly like the actual one in every detail up to the moment just prior to the one at which S does A, is governed by the same laws of nature as the actual world, and is such that, in it, S does other than A. See An Essay on Free Will, 136

20 Kane summarizes the crux of the notion of ultimate responsibility in this way: An agent is ultimately responsible for some (event or state) E's occurring only if (R) the agent is personally responsible for E's occurring in a sense which entails that something the agent voluntarily (or willingly) did or omitted, and for which the agent could have voluntarily done otherwise, either was, or causally contributed to, E's occurrence and made a difference to whether or not E occurred; and (U) for every X and Y (where X and Y represent occurrences of events and/or states) if the agent is personally responsible for X, and if Y is an arche (or sufficient ground or cause or explanation) for X, then the agent must also be personally responsible for Y (The Significance of Free Will, 35).

21 See my ‘Indeterminism and Frankfurt-Type Examples,’ forthcoming in Philosophical Explorations.

22 See Alfred Mele, ‘Ultimate Responsibility,’ forthcoming in Social Philosophy and Policy; and ‘Kane, Luck, and the Significance of Free Will,’ forthcoming in Philosophical Explorations.

23 See Mele's Autonomous Agents, ch. 12 and ‘Ultimate Responsibility.’ It should be noted that Mele does not commit himself to the view that indeterministic initiation of action is required for moral responsibility or autonomy. See Autonomous Agents and ‘Soft Libertarianism and Frankfurt-Style Scenarios,’ Philosophical Topics 24 (1996), 136-9.

24 See Autonomous Agents, 216 and ‘Soft Libertarianism and Frankfurt-Style Scenarios.’

25 See Autonomous Agents, ch. 12, and ‘Ultimate Responsibility,’ sec. 4.

26 As Michael Zimmerman explains, if Sought at t to do A at t*, and t is earlier than t*, then S's obligation is remote; otherwise it is immediate. See The Concept of Moral Obligation, 97.

27 See Clarke's, ‘Towards A Credible Agent-Causal Account of Free Will,’ Nous 27 (1993) 191–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘On the Possibility of Rational Free Action,’ Philosophical Studies 88 (1997) 37–57; ‘Indeterminism and Control’; and ‘Agent Causation and Event Causation.’

28 ‘Towards A Credible Agent-Causal Account,’ 197-8; and ‘Agent Causation and Event Causation,’ 22-3.

29 I am very grateful to Randy Clarke, Al Mele, and Michael Zimmerman for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. Also, many thanks to members of the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, for their helpful comments on a version of the paper that I presented to them.