Abstract
This article’s guiding question is about bullet biting: When should compatibilists about moral responsibility bite the bullet in responding to stories used in arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility? Featured stories are vignettes in which agents’ systems of values are radically reversed by means of brainwashing and the story behind the zygote argument. The malady known as “intuition deficit disorder” is also discussed.
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Notes
Determinism is “the thesis that there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future” (van Inwagen 1983, p. 3). There are more detailed definitions of determinism in the literature, but this one will do for my purposes. I define compatibilism about determinism and moral responsibility as the thesis that in some possible world determinism is true and there is at least one being who is morally responsible for something, and I define incompatibilism as the denial of compatibilism.
Readers will notice that these stories assume the existence of morally responsible agents. This assumption begs no questions against compatibilist believers in moral responsibility.
As I understand valuing, “S at least thinly values X at a time if and only if at that time S both has a positive motivational attitude toward X and believes X to be good” (Mele 1995, p. 116). When values are understood as psychological states, I take them to have both of these dimensions by definition. This account of thinly valuing and the corresponding thin account of values are not intended as contributions to the theories of valuing and values; their purpose is to make my meaning clear.
Some readers may worry that Beth has been replaced by “another person.” I lack the space to discuss worries about personal identity here, but see Mele (1995, p. 175, n. 22).
For related indeterministic cases of manipulation, see Mele (2006, pp. 139–144).
For E* see (Mele 2009a, p. 173).
To say that a value is unsheddable by an agent over a stretch of time is, very roughly, to say that the agent is incapable both of eradicating it and of significantly attenuating it over that stretch of time. For a fuller account of unsheddable values, see Mele (1995, pp. 153–154).
In Mele (2006), I suggest that it would be useful to run premise 1 by “reflective agnostics” (p. 190). For discussion, see pp. 191–195.
As I observed in Mele (2006, p. 190), although the argument for premise 2 sketched here sounds a bit like the consequence argument, it is significantly different. The consequence argument is an argument for incompatibilism. The argument for premise 2 is, by itself, consistent with compatibilism. The thesis that the cross-world difference in what caused Z does not support any cross-world difference in moral responsibility is consistent with Ernie’s acting freely and morally responsibly in both worlds, as is premise 2.
The closest Fischer comes to a vignette like this in the article at issue is the following passage:
And even if we changed the story to build into it that John and Mary had quite specific and even detailed desires with respect to the baby they hoped to create, this should not in any way affect our views about Ernie’s moral responsibility 30 years later. It does not affect my evaluation of Ernie's moral responsibility, even if we add that John and Mary had sexual intercourse at the precise moment they did in the belief that, by so doing, they would ensure that Ernie would behave as he does in the future—perhaps even in the specific context in question some 30 years later. We could also add the supposition that, not only did they have intercourse with the relevant belief, but that John and Mary intended that their intercourse lead to Ernie’s performing A and bringing about E 30 years hence. The intentions of John and Mary, and their acting in the belief that they are providing (relative to the background) a sufficient condition for something they want in the future, do not in any way bear on the intuitive basis for Ernie’s moral responsibility in that context 30 years later. (Fischer 2011, p. 268).
Consider just Ernie’s doing A 30 years later. In my story, Diana exercises the power to intentionally bring it about that this happens and, indeed, the power to intentionally ensure that it happens. Her exhaustive knowledge of the state of her universe at a time and the laws of nature puts her in a position to do this. That is why the first step I took in augmenting Fischer’s story was to bestow knowledge of this kind on John and Mary. Readers are invited to compare their intuitions about Ernie’s A-ing in the story by Fischer quoted here with their intuitions about this in my augmented John and Mary story.
As I pointed out in Mele (2006, pp. 194–195), the truth of a Humean view of natural laws would undermine my thought experiment about Ernie. According to a Humean view, some of the ontological ingredients of the laws of nature of Ernie’s universe—namely, future regularities—are not in place at the time of his creation. The natural laws might turn out to characterize a deterministic or an indeterministic universe, and even on the hypothesis that the universe turns out to be deterministic, it is open at the time of Ernie’s creation precisely what its laws will be. So Diana, who is supposed to benefit from her knowledge of the laws of nature in designing Ernie, is in no position to know the laws of nature: her complete knowledge of the past does not include knowledge of the laws; nor does it constitute a basis for deducing them. Even if Diana makes a true, educated guess about what the collection of natural laws will turn out to be on the basis of her complete knowledge of the past, it is open when she creates Ernie and right up to t both that she will be wrong about what the laws will be and that Ernie will not A at t. If Ernie were to B at t, something that is consistent with the entire past of his universe (given a Humean view of laws), that fact would be one of the facts to be accounted for by a web of contingent generalizations that appear as theorems (or axioms) “in each of the true deductive systems that achieves a best combination of simplicity and strength” (Lewis 1973, p. 73): that is, it would be among the facts to be accounted for by the laws of nature. On a Humean view of laws, in Gideon Rosen’s words, “it may turn out in the end [that] the laws are as they are in part because” Ernie acted as he did (Rosen 2002, p. 705). Some agnostics about compatibilism may find themselves in that position partly because they are agnostic about Humeanism about laws of nature.
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Acknowledgments
The author presented a draft of this article at a workshop on manipulation arguments at the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary). The author is grateful to Kristin Demetriou and Ben Matheson for their commentaries, to the audience for their feedback, and to John Fischer, Ish Haji, Stephen Kearns, and Michael McKenna for discussion of some of the ideas in this article. This article was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Mele, A.R. Manipulation, Moral Responsibility, and Bullet Biting. J Ethics 17, 167–184 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-013-9147-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-013-9147-9