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MEETING THE ELIMINATIVIST BURDEN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2019

Kelly McCormick
Kelly McCormick*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Texas Christian University
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Abstract:

In this essay I identify two burdens for eliminativist accounts of moral responsibility. I first examine an underappreciated logical gap between two features of eliminativism, the gap between descriptive skepticism and full-blown prescriptive eliminativism. Using Ishtiyaque Haji’s luck-based skepticism as an instructive example, I argue that in order to move successfully from descriptive skepticism to prescriptive eliminativism one must first provide a comparative defense of the conflicting principles that motivate the former. In other words, one must fix the skeptical spotlight. I then present and assess a second burden for eliminativists, they must meet what I call the motivational challenge. In order to meet this second burden, eliminativists must motivate their prescriptive account over preservationist competitors, and I assess two potential strategies for doing so. The first is to offer arguments that appeal to the gains and losses of abandoning our responsibility-related attitudes and practices, and the second is to offer direct arguments that we cannot retain these attitudes and practices. I conclude that the adequacy of either strategy remains at best an open question, but that making these burdens explicit might better position eliminativists to meet their competitors on more equal ground.

Keywords

moral responsibilityeliminativismrevisionismpreservationismskepticismbasic desert
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Summer 2019 , pp. 132 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2019 

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References

1 For arguments for the implausibility of ultimate sourcehood see Pereboom, Derk, Living without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For arguments regarding the incompatibility of moral responsibility and the pervasiveness of luck see Levy, Neil, Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) andCrossRefGoogle Scholar Haji, Ishtiyaque, Luck’s Mischief: Obligation and Blameworthiness on a Thread (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For arguments regarding logical incoherence and the power to be causa sui seeCrossRefGoogle Scholar Strawson, Galen, “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies 75 (1993): 5–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 I have elsewhere discussed this challenge as it applies to eliminativists’ preservationist competitors, especially revisionists. See McCormick, Kelly, “Anchoring a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility,” The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 7 (2013): 1–19, andCrossRefGoogle Scholar McCormick, Kelly, “Revisionism,” in Timpe, Kevin, Griffith, Meghan, and Levy, Neil, eds., The Routledge Companion to Free Will (New York: Routledge, 2017), 109–120.Google Scholar I take this challenge to bear equally on both eliminativists and preservationists, though thus far little attention has been paid to the question of how eliminativists about moral responsibility might meet it. I discuss these issues further in Section V.

3 I credit Nichols, Shaun, Bound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014): 57–62,Google Scholar for introducing this term. Here Nichols characterizes the dispute between eliminativists and preservationists in terms of disagreement over what is required for a term or concept to refer. In allowing for a distinction between conceptually and ontologically motivated kinds of eliminativism, I here depart from Nichols in restricting the use of these terms to views defined primarily in terms of reference success. I discuss these distinctions further in Section II below. Nichols also characterizes what I here call preservationist prescriptive views as those that recommend we retain the “status quo,” and what I here call eliminativist views as those that recommend “revolution,” in Shaun Nichols, “After Incompatibilism: A Naturalistic Defense of the Reactive Attitudes,” Philosophical Perspectives 21, no. 1 (2007): 405–428.

4 Thanks to Wesley Cray for helpful and insightful discussion of this distinction in conversation.

5 There is considerable disagreement about what our folk concept of moral responsibility amounts to. Here I wish to avoid making a commitment to any particular view of concept individuation and the distinctions between concepts, conceptions, and mere beliefs. One’s stance on these issues will be particularly relevant to assessing versions of descriptive skepticism—in order to show that our concept is fatally flawed, the skeptic will of course have to say something about what this concept amounts to in the first place. I leave this as a task for the skeptic, and here take the following stipulative, working definition of the “folk concept” to be sufficient for my current purposes: our folk concept is a set of widely shared semantic commitments about moral responsibility, in particular those commitments that allow us to avoid talking past one another on the topic. For further discussion of these points see McCormick, “Anchoring a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility,” and “Revisionism.”

6 For arguments that our folk concept of moral responsibility might be fragmented, see Feltz, Adam and Cokely, Edward, “The Fragmented Folk: More Evidence of Stable Individual Differences in Moral Judgments and Folk Intuitions,” in Love, B. C., McRae, K., and Sloutskey, V. M., eds., Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society, 2008): 1771–76, andGoogle Scholar Feltz, Adam and Cokely, Edward, “Do Judgments about Freedom and Responsibility Depend on Who You Are?” Consciousness and Cognition 18 (2009): 342–50. For arguments that it is naturalistically and normatively implausible, seeCrossRefGoogle Scholar Vargas, Manuel, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 58–72. And for arguments that our folk concept of moral responsibility might actually be inconsistent, seeCrossRefGoogle Scholar Weigel, Chris, “Experimental Evidence for Free Will Revisionism,” Philosophical Explorations 16 (2013): 31–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Consider here the classic example of our elimination of phlogiston from scientific theory and discourse.

8 Nichols’s characterization of at least one path to skepticism about moral responsibility in Bound might be a notable exception. While Nichols does not endorse an explicitly skeptical or eliminativist view, arguing instead that we should be discretionists about free will and moral responsibility, it is facts about reference success that primarily motivate the distinctions that he draws between these positions. One might also offer an ontologically motivated skeptical position via appeal to claims about the metaphysical nature of the universe. If, say, the falsity of determinism is necessary in order for the term “moral responsibility” to refer to any form of control or agency in the actual world, and it turns out determinism is true, this could also lay the groundwork for an ontologically motivated variety of skepticism. Thanks to Michael McKenna for suggesting the possibility of this kind of view. However, given the unlikelihood of our ever truly discovering or verifying that determinism is in fact true, this kind of skeptical view would of course be quite difficult to motivate.

9 For a comprehensive look at Vargas’s revisionism, see Vargas, Building Better Beings, Vargas, Manuel, “Revisionist Accounts of Free Will: Origins, Varieties, and Challenges,” in Kane, R., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 457–74,Google Scholar Vargas, Manuel, “Revisionism About Free Will: A Statement and Defense,” Philosophical Studies 144 (2009): 45–62, andCrossRefGoogle Scholar Vargas, Manuel, “The Revisionist’s Guide to Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies 125 (2005): 399–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 See Vargas, Building Better Beings, 60–70, and Vargas, “The Revisionist’s Guide to Responsibility,” 52.

11 See Vargas, Building Better Beings, 88.

12 Ibid., 88. See also Nichols, Shaun, “Free Will and Error,” in Caruso, G., ed., Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013): 203–218,Google Scholar and Nichols, Bound, for an alternative characterization of this distinction in terms of causal-historical and descriptive views of reference.

13 For arguments that revisionists would do well to abandon connotational revision in favor of denotational revision see McCormick, “Revisionism,” 116–17. Here I will grant Vargas’s claim that both versions of revisionism are tenable.

14 Here it may be helpful to identify a related problem for arguments like Haji’s—a problem of intricacy. It is perhaps obvious that the more background commitments one depends on to build her argument, the more avenues there are for potential objectors to target. It will therefore be natural for those who wish to resist arguments like Haji’s to immediately press back on what he claims are independently plausible principles. In particular, they are likely to target the chosen formulation of these principles. Though perhaps independently plausible at a certain level of generality, how precisely we should interpret them is an ongoing and controversial question (thanks to Michael McKenna for making this point). This is in part what I mean to capture in thinking about the moving skeptical spotlight below. But there may also be a related problem for arguments like Haji’s: the very fact that each of the background commitments to which Haji appeals requires such a complex, intricate, and somewhat technical defense might itself give us pause in assessing the claim that such principles are indeed even independently plausible (thanks to Manuel Vargas for suggesting this point).

15 The following is my reconstruction of the argument presented and developed in Haji, Luck’s Mischief.

16 Ibid., 132.

17 Ibid., 20.

18 Ibid., 50.

19 Ibid., 158.

20 Ibid., 9.

21 Ibid., 339.

22 Insofar as we also accept Haji’s own interpretation of these commitments.

23 The fact that Haji himself devotes significant attention to defending Kant’s Law (ibid., chap. 3) from numerous arguments against the principle itself suggests that it might be a good candidate. One might also argue that Motivation/Ability is not nearly as independently plausible as Haji suggests. For example, in regard to actions with a moral valence it looks as though this principle presupposes a Humean picture of moral motivation, and perhaps even some variety of reasons internalism (see Williams, , Moral Luck [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981]).CrossRefGoogle Scholar These are both substantive, controversial commitments (see, for example, Anscombe’s argument in Intention [Oxford: Blackwell, 1963] that the former is incoherent).

24 See Moore, G. E., “Proof of the External World,” in Philosophical Papers (New York: Collier Books, 1962): 127–50.Google Scholar

25 I argue for this response to Haji elsewhere, see Kelly McCormick, “Varieties of Skepticism: Meeting the Prescriptive Burden,” Criminal Justice Ethics (forthcoming).

26 Haji, Luck’s Mischief, defends Kant’s Law extensively in chapter 3, pp. 45–128, and Motivation/Ability in chapter 4, pp. 129–54.

27 Thanks to Manuel Vargas for suggesting this possible further line of objection.

28 For Pereboom’s arguments that we would be no worse off without the attitudes and practices that rationally depend on basic desert of praise and blame, see Pereboom, Living without Free Will (especially chaps. 5-7), Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (especially chaps. 6-8), Derk Pereboom, “Free Will, Love, and Anger,” Ideas Y Valores 141 (2009): 5-25, and Pereboom, Derk, “Free Will Skepticism and Meaning in Life,” in Kane, R., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 407–424.Google Scholar

29 In light of the discussion about stakes at the end of Section III, it is important to here flag the fact that the stakes of Pereboom’s own prescriptive view are somewhat unclear. In what follows I will first assume for the sake of argument a “high stakes” reading of the practical implications of hard incompatibilism, but return shortly to questions about how the way these practical implications turn out might influence the way we assess the adequacy of attempts to meet the motivational challenge.

30 Here I follow Vargas and others in using the term “success theory” to refer to views about moral responsibility that claim we can be and sometimes are praiseworthy or blameworthy in the basic sense.

31 See Pereboom, Living Without Free Will, Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, and Pereboom, “Free Will, Love, and Anger.”

32 Ibid.

33 Pereboom makes (AP1) explicit in his arguments against compatibilism, event-causal libertarianism, and agent-causal libertarianism. In regard to (AP2), matters are a bit trickier. Pereboom does defend an explicitly forward-looking, non-basic account of blame which he argues even responsibility skeptics like hard incompatibilists can accept. He defends this view of blame in Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, 127-38, and in Pereboom, Derk, “Free Will Skepticism, Blame, and Obligation,” in Tognazzinni, Neal and Justin Coates, D., eds., Blame: Its Nature and Norms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189–206.Google Scholar This view of blame focuses heavily on the appropriateness of altering our interpersonal relationships as a response to wrongdoing, though Pereboom is explicit that the appropriateness relation at issue is not one of basic desert. Here I cannot dive too deeply into whether or not this kind of forward-looking view should be categorized as an account of genuine blame; but if it is so categorized, then Pereboom’s repeated explication of the kind of moral responsibility denied by the hard incompatibilist as the kind that delivers basic desert of praise and blame is puzzling. Furthermore, if we are to accept this kind of “desert-free” account of blame as capable of sustaining our responsibility-related practices, then it would be unclear that Pereboom’s prescriptive position is in fact a variety of full-blown eliminativism.

34 For further discussion of how we might analyze this relation, see Kelly McCormick, “Basic Desert and the Appropriateness of Blame,” in Joseph Klein Campbell, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Free Will (forthcoming).

35 See Scanlon, T. M., Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008),CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pereboom, “Free Will Skepticism, Blame, and Obligation,” and Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life.

36 Here my characterization of the work of our concept of moral responsibility borrows heavily from Vargas, Building Better Beings.

37 See Strawson, “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility,” 5.

38 Ibid., 9–11.

39 Ibid., 9–11.

40 See Strawson, Galen, “On Freedom and Resentment,” in Fischer, John Martin and Ravizza, Mark, eds., Perspectives on Moral Responsibility (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 67–100.Google Scholar

41 See McKenna, , Conversation and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 See McCormick, “Basic Desert and the Appropriateness of Blame.”

43 Vargas adopts this kind of strategy in meeting the motivational challenge for revisionism—he appeals to empirical considerations to support the claim that libertarian strands are a significant feature of our folk concept, but then goes on to argue that they are not needed to do the relevant work of the concept. See also Nichols’s general characterization of something like the fairness argument that eliminativists need in “After Incompatibilism.”

44 See McCormick “Anchoring a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility,” and “Revisionism.”

45 For a defense of this kind of preservationist argument, for example “metasemantic security arguments,” see Turner, Jason, “(Metasemantically) Securing Free Will,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 2 (2013): 295–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar