Abstract
In this paper, I articulate an argument for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism. My argument comes in the form of an extended story, modeled loosely on Peter van Inwagen’s “rollback argument” scenario. I thus call it “the replication argument.” As I aim to bring out, though the argument is inspired by so-called “manipulation” and “original design” arguments, the argument is not a version of either such argument—and plausibly has advantages over both. The result, I believe, is a more convincing incompatibilist argument than those we have considered previously.
Highlights
In this paper, I articulate an argument for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism
It has become increasingly common for incompatibilists about moral responsibility and determinism to invoke what have come to be called manipulation scenarios—roughly, scenarios in which a given agent’s behaviour is somehow ‘‘set up’’ in advance by various powerful manipulators or designers working ‘‘behind the scenes’’
I wish to move the debate forward, not by defending the ordinary incompatibilistic judgment in a standard manipulation case, but by building on the manipulation scenarios considered far to provide a new kind of argument for incompatibilism
Summary
Alfred Mele has asked us to consider the story of a goddess who actualizes a set of initial conditions that (deterministically) guarantee that there comes to exist a certain person—Ernie—who subsequently performs various actions. once we do that, we can imagine such a goddess creating many distinct sets of these conditions, thereby creating many scenarios in which there come to be distinct ‘‘Ernies’’, all of whom live type-identical lives, down to the finest details. Since we are philosophers, we can further imagine that all of these ‘‘universes’’ are somehow present on one physically located planet—that is, since we are philosophers, we can imagine that the architect has a way of setting up what we might call ‘‘pods’’ on a given planet (not unlike, in some respects, the ‘‘pod’’ depicted in ‘‘The Truman Show’’). Each of these pods represents, a deterministic universe unto itself—and each is suitable to house (and does come to house) a community of agents whose lives and activities, from the outside, appear to be exactly like our own. A planet precisely such as this is the scene of the following story
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