Abstract
In his book, Building Better Beings, Manuel Vargas argues that we should reject libertarianism, on the grounds that it is naturalistically implausible, and embrace revisionism rather than eliminativism, on the grounds that the former is a shorter departure from ordinary thinking about moral responsibility. I argue that Vargas fails to adequately appreciate the extent to which ordinary judgments about moral responsibility involve ascriptions of basic desert as well as the centrality of basic desert in the ordinary conception of moral responsibility. Insofar as this is correct, we have good reason to think, first, that libertarianism is much more naturalistically plausible than Vargas maintains and, second, that we ought to opt for eliminativism over revisionism in the event that libertarianism turns out to be implausible.
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Notes
Vargas readily acknowledges that there is also evidence that suggests that there are contexts in which the folk tend to think about free will and moral responsibility in ways that are more compatibilist-friendly (p. 39). Whereas philosophical incompatibilism can allow that there are some features or ascriptions of moral responsibility that do not require indeterminism, philosophical compatibilism cannot allow that there are significant aspects of freedom and moral responsibility that require indeterminism. Thus, the fact that there are significant portions of ordinary thinking that involve incompatibilist commitments, he says, is enough to warrant acceptance of folk conceptual incompatibilism.
The restriction of considerations to those that are truth-relevant is meant to preclude “considerations that might speak in favor of accepting a theory, even if they have little connection with whether the theory is correct,” such as “whimsy, emotional appeal, or coherence with one’s preferred self-image” (p. 59).
References
Strawson, G. (2002). The bounds of freedom. In Robert Kane (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of free will (pp. 441–460). New York: Oxford University Press.
Vargas, M. (2013). Building better beings: A theory of moral responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Robinson, M. Revisionism, libertarianism, and naturalistic plausibility. Philos Stud 172, 2651–2658 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0479-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0479-0