Ultimate Responsibility in a Deterministic World

Abstract

Life is getting difficult for us compatibilists. You won't find respectable ones relying on conditional analyses anymore. And the hierarchical version's dismissive attitude towards worries about the character of origins invites the rebuttal of incompatibilists like Robert Kane who concede the desirability of the compatibilist freedoms stressed by hierarchical theorists, yet wish as well to accommodate our deep-seated yearning to be the ultimate source of our own natures. And the two flanking strategies of compatibilists have also come under fire. The first, P. F. Strawson's celebrated proposal to construe freedom and responsibility as constitutive of human society failed to convince enough of us that metaphysical issues cannot have a bearing on the attitudes and perhaps even the practices associated with these notions. The second is a familiar fallback strategy adopted by most compatibilists. Perhaps I cannot convince you that freedom is compatible with determinism, says the compatibilist. No matter. For an even stronger position can be defended, to wit, that freedom presupposes determinism. Ever since reading Philippa Foot's critique of this position' I have believed (and have written2) that this compatibilist strategy fails. There have been rebuttals since Foot, but none as brilliant or utterly convincing as that of Kane. Moreover, given Kane's refusal to appeal to a conception of self-determinism that rests on an obscure metaphysics of the self, along with his effort to replace a dualistic metaphysics traditionally associated with libertarianism with an account of the self congenial to contemporary scientific findings, we are confronted with the most powerful statement of an incompatibilist theory of free will that I have seen. Kane's central complaint against compatibilists, to wit, that they fail to take seriously our yearning for ultimate responsibility, targets compatibilists other than hierarchical theorists. In general, compatibilists can hold their own