Abstract
There are two standard theoretical responses to putative errors in ordinary thinking about some given target property: eliminativism or revisionism. Roughly, eliminativism is the denial that the target property exists, and revisionism is the view that the property exists, but that people tend to have false beliefs about it. Recently, Shaun Nichols has proposed a third option: discretionism. Discretionism is the idea that some terms have multiple reference conventions, so that it may be true to say with eliminativists that the property does not exist, and true to say with revisionists (and others) that the property does exist. This article explores the viability of discretionism, and argues that it faces serious difficulties. Even if the difficulties faced by discretionism can be overcome, it is unclear that discretionism secures anything beyond what is already available to standard revisionist views. The article concludes with some reflections about Nichols’ account of the bare retributive norm.
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Notes
There are various ways these details could be filled out. For example, on one version of this story, excelsience practices help agents resist pressures to favor immediate gratification, while also discouraging people’s toleration for abuse and mistreatment. Or, excelsience practices could enable prediction and coordination among psychologically complex agents. Or, excelsience practices could encourage efforts at moral repair, and foster pro-social cooperative behavior that would otherwise quickly degrade (for a version of this, see Nichols 2015, 158, 161).
I’m setting aside cases where one insists on the inappropriateness or falsity of some ascription, not because it doesn’t refer, but because its ongoing usage perpetuates social practices that we wish to disavow or reject. I might, for example, recognize how the term “usury” works and be able to reliable identify cases on which there is widespread convergence that the case counts as usury. However, I might mark my rejection of the social practice by refusing to use the term even when recognizing the referential rules that govern me within my community. See also Nichols’ related and insightful discussion on the role of social considerations in settling questions of reference (2015, 67–69).
Preservationism just is revisionism. Here are some details that may serve as a non-pharmaceutical cure for insomnia. Pace Nichols, canonical forms of revisionism in debates about free will and moral responsibility are consistent with all the non-eliminativist options he identifies in his taxonomy (2015, 59). Nichols attributes to me the narrower view that revisionists hold that errors are specified and that a specific revision is offered. That is at odds with the explicit definition of revisionism given in Vargas (2011, 2013). So far as I can tell, the passage he cites from Vargas (2011) as evidence of the “specified error” interpretation (see Nichols 2015, 60 n. 6) is one where I don’t rule out “unspecified” revisionist possibilities, i.e., cases in which the error or the particular prescription is unidentified. To be sure, my discussion there concerns forms of revisionism that had thus far been salient in the literature on moral responsibility, and those have tended to be specified errors views. A further clarification: my positive account of moral responsibility (Vargas 2013) is neutral between the options Nichols characterizes as “replacement” and “revision.” Moreover, Nichols’ preferred term—“preservationist”—does not distinguish between those who would preserve the considered term because they find no error and those who would preserve the term despite finding an error. Although these are relatively esoteric terminological disputes, the upshot is simple: there is no reason to avoid characterizing the issue as a dispute between eliminativists and revisionists.
Notice that if one wants to say that eliminativists are talking about something other than the practices, attitudes, and judgments identified by the revisionist, then there is no disagreement between revisionists and eliminativists. But it would also mean that the revisionist proposal is uncontested by eliminativists. Also notice, though, that this is deeply unflattering to eliminativists, for it renders their view such that it turns out that what they are interested in has nothing to do with the everyday judgments, attitudes, and practices of blame that are the subject of revisionist accounts. Thus, any philosophical victory for eliminativists would be remarkably pyrrhic (Hurley 2000; Vargas 2015b, 2668–2869).
For example, Nichols argues that, “often there are ethical reasons to abandon the incompatibilist commitment rather than give up the attitudes and practices surrounding moral responsibility” (13). He goes on to say that “even if the right view is eliminativism about free will and responsibility, that by itself does not mean that we should instigate a revolution in our practices, which is what the revolutionary is urging … In the future, our notion of moral responsibility (or a nearby replacement for the notion) might have different features than our current notion of moral responsibility” (157).
In another passage, Nichols writes that “[i]n some contexts, the prevailing practical considerations suggest that we should deny the existence of free will and moral responsibility; in other contexts the practical considerations suggest that we should affirm free will and moral responsibility” (11).
Whether these two characterizations are coextensive is not obvious. Consider the possibility of norms that start off not being the product of consciously available inferences from other norms or facts (so, not inferentially basic in the first characterization), but which come to be inferentially dependent on other norms or facts (so, inferentially basic in the second characterization).
I depart from Nichols’s terminology—he calls it the “incest norm”.
Among Incan royals, perhaps it wasn’t that the anti-incest norm was present but trumped, but instead, that they had entirely abandoned it. If so, then those Incans were living out the moral permissions defended by ‘incest-allowing’ philosophers.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Heather Battaly, Rebecca Mason, Shaun Nichols, Jay Odenbaugh, and Daniel Speak for feedback on this paper, or discussion of ideas in it. Thanks, too, to audience members at the 2015 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
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Vargas, M.R. Contested terms and philosophical debates. Philos Stud 174, 2499–2510 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0740-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0740-1