AFTER INCOMPATIBILISM: A NATURALISTIC DEFENSE OF THE REACTIVE ATTITUDES

From the first time I encountered the problem of free will in college, it struck me that a clear-eyed view of free will and moral responsibility demanded some form of nihilism. Libertarianism seemed delusional, and compatibilism seemed in bad faith. Hence I threw my lot in with philosophers like Paul d'Holbach, Galen Strawson, and Derk Pereboom who conclude that no one is truly moral responsible. But after two decades of self-identifying as a nihilist, it occurred to me that I had continued to treat my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances as morally responsible. Hardly ever did I call on my philosophical views to excuse people's actions. I'm increasingly inclined to think that my practice was appropriate and that it was my philosophical view that was defective. In this essay, I defend the practice. The guiding vision is provided in the epigraph from MacIntyre. Even though we are committed to incompatibilism about responsibility, we needn't be completely hostage to this commitment. We might relinquish or ignore the commitment rather than give up our practices that depend on moral responsibility. In this paper, I will assume that incompatibilism is intuitive. More precisely, I will assume that the folk find it intuitive that if determinism is true, moral responsibility is undermined (see Nichols & Knobe 2007; but cf. Nahmias et al. 2006 and Woolfolk et al. 2006). Further, I will assume that determinism is true.(1) The questions of interest will be subsequent to this. If people came to believe in determinism, would this lead to major changes in our everyday lives? Should it lead to major changes? Nihilists tend to answer yes to both questions. Determinism would and should lead to major changes in our everyday interactions.(2) I'll maintain that the answer to both questions is likely no. In the case of the descriptive question, the evidence is fragmentary, but it suggests that people will pretty much stick with the status quo. I'll then turn to the prescriptive question, and for the bulk of the paper, I will draw on work in emotion theory to argue that there are good reasons to resist the cries for a revolution in our everyday lives. In the final section, I'll briefly consider the major positive case for a revolution-the argument from fairness-and I'll argue that the argument is currently too underdeveloped to be at all persuasive.