Freedom and Responsibility [Core Textbook ed.] 9781400822737

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FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

Hilary Bok

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright  1998 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bok, Hilary, 1959– Freedom and responsibility / Hilary Bok. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN 1-4008-0078-1 1. Free will and determinism. 2. Responsibility. I. Title. BJ1461.B64 1998 123'.5—dc21 98-21288 CIP This book has been composed in Times http://pup.princeton.edu

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

3

1. The Problem

10

2. Theoretical and Practical Reason

52

3. Freedom

92

4. Holding Ourselves Responsible

123

5. The Adequacy of My Account

141

Excursus on Guilt

167

6. Holding Others Responsible

180

Conclusion

199

Bibliography

215

Index

221

Acknowledgments

I AM INDEBTED TO Alyssa Bernstein, Chris Bobonich, Abigail Bok, Sissela Bok, Sarah Buss, Sam Fleischacker, Harry Frankfurt, Paul Hurley, Mark Johnston, Elijah Millgram, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, Tim Scanlon, Margaret Wilson, and several reviewers, who read and commented on all or part of this manuscript; to Pomona College and the Princeton University Center for Human Values for providing stimulating and supportive places to work on it; to the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation and Laurance S. Rockefeller for support during my year at Princeton; and to Andy Klein, who did not insert puns throughout this manuscript though he was sorely tempted to do so. Without my father’s cheerful pep talks, my mother’s constant support, my brother’s sense of humor, the unfailing friendship and understanding of my sister Viki and her husband Dick, and the joy of meeting their son Cameron, this project would have been a much lonelier undertaking. To my family and my friends I owe as well the inspiration for my work: were I to wonder what the point of studying moral philosophy was, I would have only to look to their decency, their kindness, their integrity, and their unqualified commitment to the autonomy and empowerment of all persons to find my answer.

FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

Introduction MECHANISM is the view that human actions can be explained as the result of natural processes alone; that the “mechanistic style of explanation, which works so well for electrons, motors, and galaxies,”1 also works for us. If mechanism is true, then just as our explanations of the motions of planets no longer require the existence of prime movers to supplement natural processes, so our actions could in principle be explained by a complex neurophysiological theory, without reference to a nonnatural self that causes them. All libertarians in the free will debate believe that one form of mechanism— determinism—is incompatible with freedom. If determinism is true, then any action can in principle be explained as the necessary result of the state of the universe at any previous time—say, at some moment in the Cretaceous period—together with the natural laws that show why those conditions had, eventually, to produce that action. Since neither the state of the world at a time preceding her existence nor the nature of the physical laws that govern it is the agent’s doing, and since, given those conditions and those laws, she could not have performed at that time any act other than the one she actually performed, it is hard to see why we should say that she performed it freely. Some libertarians believe that freedom might be compatible with indeterministic mechanism, which holds that our actions might be explained not only by prior conditions and natural laws but also by the occurrence of various indeterministic natural events—for instance, by the fact that a uranium atom emitted a particular particle at a particular time. In this work I will assume that they are wrong: that the central issue between libertarians and compatibilists is the compatibility of freedom not with determinism but with mechanism; that determinism threatens freedom because it is a version of mechanism; and that libertarians should take no comfort from the idea that our actions might be caused by indeterministic natural events.2 Libertarians want to show not only 1

Daniel Dennett, “Mechanism and Responsibility,” in Dennett, Brainstorms, 1981, p. 233. I could not make this assumption if my purpose in this book were to argue directly that libertarianism is false, since in that case my arguments would be directed only against a view that some libertarians do not hold. But this is not my aim. As I explain in what follows, my purpose in this book is to provide a compatibilist account of freedom of the will and moral responsibility that meets libertarians’ concerns. In assuming that those concerns attend any account of freedom that is compatible with any form of mechanism, whether deterministic or indeterministic, and therefore that they cannot be met simply by supposing that our choices might involve indeterministic natural events, I make my task more difficult, not less. If I succeed in showing that libertarians’ concerns can be met if any plausible form of mechanism is true, I will a fortiori have shown that they can be met if determinism is true; in so doing I will have addressed the concerns of all libertarians, whether they believe that freedom is incompatible with any version of mechanism or only with determinism. 2

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INTRODUCTION

that antecedent events do not determine our conduct but that we do; that our choices are not just indeterministic but self-determined. The claim that our choices reflect indeterministic natural events in our brain does not help us to see what this self-determination might amount to or how we might exercise it. And, as Gary Watson has argued,3 to the extent that libertarians try to answer these questions by invoking, for instance, our ability to act for reasons, they make it unclear why self-determination requires that our choices be causally undetermined. Libertarians who regard freedom and mechanism as incompatible also believe that we are free and therefore that mechanism is false. In the words of Roderick Chisholm: “We have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing—or no one—causes us to cause those events to happen.”4 This view is remarkable in that it is supported neither by evidence nor by apparent plausibility. It is impossible, for obvious practical reasons, to see whether or not two people in exactly the same physical state will always perform the same actions unless some indeterministic event causes them to behave differently; barring the discovery that they will not, it is hard to imagine what evidence could support the libertarian position.5 Nor is it plausible to claim that we, alone among natural beings, have this sort of power; and no libertarian, to the best of my knowledge, has given a clear account of what it is, or of how, exactly, we use it. That libertarianism is implausible is, I take it, hardly news to libertarians. It is not credible that someone could maintain, as Chisholm does, that we are “prime movers unmoved”6 who cause our actions by an unanalyzable faculty of “immanent causation,”7 without being aware of the oddness of her position. Libertarians, I assume, are not drawn to their position by its theoretical elegance and explanatory power but driven to it, despite its implausibility, because they believe that mechanism implies conclusions so deeply unacceptable that any alternative that allows us to avoid those conclusions is preferable, however “obscure and panicky”8 its metaphysics might be. 3

Gary Watson, “Free Action and Free Will,” pp. 164–5. Roderick Chisholm, “Human Freedom and the Self,” p. 32. 5 Daniel Dennett makes this argument in Elbow Room, pp. 135–6. Of course, by the same token we cannot have any evidence against the libertarian position. But this fact cannot be used in support of libertarianism in the absence of some other reason—theoretical simplicity, explanatory power, or another of the considerations which I have lumped together under the name of ‘plausibility’—to believe that libertarianism is true. We also have no evidence for or against the hypothesis that subatomic particles are actually conscious beings whose regular behavior should be described not as “obedience to natural laws” but as “joyful participation in the cosmic dance.” But the absence of evidence against this idea is not enough to make it a reasonable one. 6 Chisholm, “Human Freedom and the Self,” p. 32. 7 Ibid., p. 28. 8 P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” p. 80. 4

INTRODUCTION

5

My purpose in this book is to persuade libertarians to abandon their position. If my account of their motivation is correct, there are three ways of doing this. First, one could attack the libertarian position directly. Second, one could try to show that libertarianism does not allow us to avoid the unacceptable implications of mechanism. Finally, one could try to argue that mechanism does not imply those conclusions. The first two tactics might persuade libertarians. If they were convinced that libertarianism was untenable, libertarians would have to accept mechanism in the interests of intellectual honesty, unacceptable implications and all. If they were convinced that libertarianism did not allow them to escape those implications, then the salient difference between libertarianism and mechanism would be the implausibility of libertarianism, the reasons not to be a libertarian would leap to the foreground, and libertarians would probably abandon their position of their own accord. However, both of these tactics would succeed not by helping libertarians out of their predicament but by closing off the one route by which they had thought they might escape it. What one makes of this fact will depend on what one thinks of that predicament. If one believes that the supposedly unacceptable implications of mechanism are in fact quite harmless, or that they obviously do not follow from mechanism, then one will not be particularly disturbed by this—although in either case it would be an act of kindness to show libertarians the error of their ways. In either case, one’s interest in the problem of freedom of the will would presumably be an interest in clearing up unfortunate misunderstandings in the name of mental hygiene. On the other hand, one might feel that libertarians’ concerns are in fact serious and legitimate—that the conclusions the libertarian fears are as unacceptable as she thinks they are, and that she has some reason to think that mechanism might actually imply them. In this case, one would share libertarians’ dismay at the outcome of the first two tactics. One would think that, whatever the merits of their position, libertarians have noticed a gap in our thought that needs to be filled. And one would be driven to investigate the third option, not solely as an act of kindness to the distressed, but because that distress is one’s own: to answer the libertarian in oneself. Libertarians are afraid that, if mechanism were true, the claim that we are autonomous persons, morally responsible for our characters and our actions, would no longer be justifiable. This claim seems to rest on the idea that we are the authors of our lives, free to invent for ourselves, through our choices, as splendid or tawdry a character as we please, and that those choices are made freely, among alternatives that are truly open to us, by a self whose will is not determined by anything outside it. But if mechanism were true, we would instead have to view ourselves as beings whose entire lives have in a sense simply unrolled in accordance with natural laws. Our moral struggles, our

6

INTRODUCTION

hardest-won victories and our slow, deadening slides into vice, our strangest idiosyncrasies, our moments of illumination and our failure to live by them, our terrors and shames, our loves and our hatreds—all would turn out to be the result of factors beyond our control. It would therefore seem that nothing about our characters, our choices, or our actions could be attributed solely to us; that we would have to view ourselves not as the originators of our choices but as the scene on which events that occur elsewhere work out their consequences. And it is not clear why, if we view our actions and our choices thus, we should hold ourselves morally responsible for choosing well or badly; why we should see our good and bad choices as displaying our virtue or vice, not just our good or bad luck. Various authors have tried to explain how, if mechanism is true, we can nonetheless be said to be morally responsible for our actions. However, I do not think that they have fully answered the libertarians’ concerns on this score. In saying this, I do not mean to deny all that they have done. Their work is interesting and very suggestive; in particular, some of their accounts of when we should say that someone has chosen freely, or that she is morally responsible for her conduct, seem to me substantially correct. On this score I make no claims to originality: my accounts of these issues do not differ greatly from standard compatibilist accounts, and I will draw on existing compatibilist literature at many points in this book. But I do not think that compatibilists have succeeded in showing libertarians that their theories allow us to justify the claim that we are morally responsible for our conduct. Libertarians have an argument that seems to show that no compatibilist account of freedom could allow us to justify that claim; and I do not think that compatibilists have shown, in a way that ought to satisfy libertarians, that their theories can meet that objection. Until they do so, libertarians will continue to feel that compatibilist accounts of freedom have failed to register the seriousness of mechanism’s threat to our moral responsibility, and they will—quite reasonably—remain unconvinced that that threat can be parried. They will therefore feel that compatibilist theories do not describe true freedom and genuine responsibility at all, but cheap facsimiles which they are asked to accept as the real thing. The claim that compatibilists have not fully addressed libertarians’ concerns about moral responsibility is not a criticism of their work, unless the failure explicitly to defuse any concern that someone might have about one’s view is taken to be a fault. But my purposes in writing this book require that I go further than (I think) they have gone. The point of this project is to remove one of libertarians’ main motives for adopting their position, on the assumption that until this obstacle is removed, mechanism will seem to them to be at best an awful conclusion forced on them by theoretical consistency and compatibilism a shallow attempt to duck its consequences. In order to accomplish this, I must not simply provide a good account of freedom and moral responsibility.

INTRODUCTION

7

I must also try to determine, as clearly and sympathetically as possible, why this account might nonetheless fail to satisfy libertarians, and to provide as complete and meticulous a response to their concerns as I can. I should note at the outset several limitations on the topics I will discuss. First of all, while the view I develop in this book is a Kantian one, I have not presented it as an interpretation of Kant’s work. I am less interested in presenting Kant’s views accurately than in putting (what I take to be) his ideas to use. For this reason I do not engage with the massive exegetical literature. Moreover, I have for the most part avoided using Kant’s terminology.9 Since I understand noumenal causes, transcendental freedom, and the like differently from many authors on this topic, invoking them in the course of my arguments would, I thought, only court needless confusion. I have cited relevant passages from Kant’s works at various points in my argument. But these citations can only begin to suggest the extent of my indebtedness to Kant’s work, which I here acknowledge. Second, my aim in this book is to show that the fact that our actions and choices can be explained mechanistically does not imply that we are not free; and therefore that the claim that we are free and morally responsible does not presuppose a libertarian account of human agency. To establish this conclusion I must show that some compatibilist account of freedom and moral responsibility is correct: that we are free whenever our actions are in some sense up to us. But I do not need to determine precisely when we should say that our actions are up to us in the relevant sense or to answer such questions as: Should we hold addicts morally responsible for continuing to abuse their drug of choice? At what point should we begin to hold children morally responsible for what they do? Can a person legitimately be held to act freely when she engages in compulsive behavior or acts under the influence of some powerful unconscious motive? I would have to answer these questions if I wanted to provide a comprehensive and detailed account of freedom and moral responsibility. But my purpose in this book is not to provide such an account of human freedom and responsibility but simply to show that mechanism in particular does not threaten them. To do this, I need only show that some persons can be free and responsible moral agents even if mechanism is true. Since, presumably, sane adults in normal circumstances are free if anyone is, I will concentrate in this book on 9

Many of my arguments in this book might, I think, have been stated in Kantian terms. Thus, the argument in the penultimate section of chapter 2 could be described as working out some implications of the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal selves, and this book as a whole could be seen as a diagnostic exercise one of whose (ancillary) purposes is to see how much mileage one can get out of ‘acting under the idea of freedom’ alone, to see whether, at what point, and for what purposes, ‘transcendental freedom’ must be invoked, and thus, perhaps, to help us to see what it might be. (My answers to these questions are contained in the concluding chapter of this book.)

8

INTRODUCTION

showing that they are free and responsible moral agents and leave aside the question when exactly we should hold that a person is not, or has ceased to be, morally responsible for her conduct.10 Third, I will not discuss a whole range of issues that might be thought to be an integral part of any work on this more limited topic. Among them are various issues an investigation of which might provide a solution of the problem I seek to address: for instance, the nature of the conception of causality employed in mechanistic explanations, the type of necessity, if any, enjoyed by natural laws, or the kinds of causal connections that might exist between physical and mental events. My silence on these issues does not imply that I do not think that they might profitably be examined. I can see no reason, in principle, why the problem of freedom of the will should not have more than one solution, and, for all I can see, it might be possible to resolve it by considering topics that I will not discuss. Fourth, its threat to our freedom and moral responsibility is, presumably, not the only troubling implication of mechanism. Some writers on this subject seem to be concerned by the thought that all our behavior might in principle be predictable; others by the possibility that human actions, for all their occasional grandeur, sublimity, poignance, or tragedy, might have such mundane causes; still others by the very idea that we might be no more than parts of the messy tangle we call “nature.” In this book I will not be concerned with these problems directly (although I may touch on some in the course of arguments directed at other targets). This is partly because it seems foolish to try to address all of mechanism’s potentially troubling features at once; and partly because, since I do not myself find these possibilities troubling, whatever I might say about them would probably not satisfy anyone who did. Finally, I will say nothing about the issue of punishment, with which moral responsibility is often supposed to be intimately connected. Those who think that to hold someone morally responsible for an action is just to claim that they should be punished or rewarded for it will find my discussion of this topic almost wholly unenlightening. To them I can only say that since I do not regard ascriptions of moral responsibility primarily as forms of punishment and re10

Of course, my account will have some implications about the kinds of considerations that should lead us to conclude that an agent does not act freely or that she is not morally responsible for her conduct. But I will not try to develop these considerations into a comprehensive account of these issues. I avoid doing so not only because my present project does not require that I develop such an account but because I am not confident that I understand the nature of conditions like insanity, compulsion, and brainwashing well enough to settle questions about the moral responsibility of agents who suffer from them. Certainly the role of the agent’s will in, for instance, compulsive behavior is more complicated than it is made out to be by those writers who describe compulsive persons as the hapless victims of irresistible desires. And compulsive behavior seems almost straightforward by comparison to phenomena like dissociation and severe depression, which are much easier to describe from the outside than to make sense of from the point of view of those who suffer them; that is, to understand as conditions that beset persons.

INTRODUCTION

9

ward, this problem has never presented itself to me in that light. My account will also fail to satisfy those who seek a justification of a conception of moral responsibility strong enough to justify eternal damnation or beatitude. This requirement cannot, I think, be met by any coherent conception of freedom of the will and of moral responsibility; and therefore I will not try to meet it.

1 The Problem

THE PURPOSE of this chapter is to set out what I take to be the central problem of freedom of the will. This chapter has three sections. In the first I describe a prereflective view of freedom of the will—the view which, I believe, most people start out with and from which my discussion of this topic will therefore begin. I try to show that this view breaks down under the pressure of questions which mechanism forces it to address and that some standard compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will likewise fail to address these questions satisfactorily. In considering these compatibilist accounts, I hope both to block some apparent solutions to the problem of freedom of the will and, by explaining why they are not solutions, to bring the problems they do not resolve into clearer focus. In the second section, I provide a more general account of the difficulties faced by compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will and try to show what any such account must do if it is to satisfy libertarians. I do not try to provide an airtight argument for the libertarian claim that no compatibilist account of freedom of the will can satisfactorily resolve these problems; if such an argument existed, my task in this book would be an impossible one. I do, however, try to explain why libertarians doubt that any satisfactory compatibilist solution to these problems exists and to make their doubts as plausible as I can. Finally, I argue that libertarianism itself cannot satisfactorily resolve the problem of freedom of the will. Libertarian accounts of freedom of the will are designed to avoid the particular problems that beset compatibilist accounts, and in this they succeed. But they do so only at the cost of incurring a different set of problems for themselves, problems which I argue that they cannot escape. I argue in the first section of this chapter that the prereflective view of freedom of the will breaks down when confronted by questions that mechanism forces it to address; libertarians’ mistake, I believe, is to assume that they can avoid confronting these questions by simply denying mechanism. I argue instead that the truth or falsity of mechanism does not affect the legitimacy of these questions; that while they may originally have been suggested to us by mechanism, they remain to haunt any account of freedom of the will, whether or not that account assumes that mechanism is true. And I argue that no libertarian account of freedom of the will can resolve these questions satisfactorily. The problem of freedom of the will is, I think, insoluble once one adopts a libertarian characterization of that problem and of the issues on which its reso-

THE PROBLEM

11

lution depends. If I am right, then any successful justification of the claim that we are free must show that characterization to be mistaken. But it is not obvious that it is mistaken. The libertarian characterization of the problem of freedom of the will is in many ways a natural refinement of our prereflective view of that problem. Its roots in our ordinary understanding are the source of its power and attraction, which must be matched by any alternative characterization of that problem that libertarians will not rightly dismiss. It is not obvious that an alternative characterization that is as natural an extension of our ordinary view of freedom exists or that it could be defended against the libertarian characterization of that problem. But unless such an alternative can be found, I argue, the situation is worse than even libertarians suspect, since not even their position allows us to defend the claim that we are free and responsible beings.

The Prereflective View and Its Demise I usually think of myself as having a character that I have constructed through innumerable choices. Each of my thoughts and actions changes me slightly, tracing, like a tiny stylus, grooves in the surface of my character. By now my character has many such paths, some deep and others barely traced, some freshly worn and others long neglected. Each is a way of responding to some type of situation; their broader patterns make up character traits, ways of thinking and acting that come naturally to me. They offer me, in virtually any situation I might encounter, a path of least resistance: some way of seeing that situation and of responding to it. But I also think that I can choose whether or not to take that path; that I can, at any point, step back from my character, ask whether the response it offers me is the best one, and, if I wish, choose another. I think that I make the choices that form my character, and that I can choose to oppose my strength to the habits I have created. There may come a point when I will no longer be able to prevail against them, either because my habits have worn too deep, or because I have allowed my self to atrophy so far that I no longer have the strength to choose a different path. But until that point, I think, it is always open to me to look beyond my character, to see how it might be improved, and to begin the long, slow process of changing it. If I did not have this capacity, I would be bound by my character, which would itself be created not deliberately but by something like a process of erosion. The stylus that carves out my character, once set in motion, would wander over its surface, impelled by external forces and by its own inertia, taking whatever course offered it least resistance. Since I could not choose its path, I would not be morally responsible for my character or my actions; there would, in a sense, be no “me” to whom moral responsibility could be attrib-

12

CHAPTER 1

uted. But because I choose my actions freely, I can see my character as something that I have created and for which I am morally responsible. I may not always exercise this responsibility wisely, or at all; I may act haphazardly or thoughtlessly, thereby creating a character I will later regret. But because I could have chosen to do otherwise, the failure in such cases is mine alone. This intuitive view is silent on the issues with which the literature on freedom of the will is concerned. It is a prereflective view: one to which no difficult questions have yet been addressed. It is committed neither to a detailed conception of my capacity to reject the courses of action suggested by my character, on which so much seems to turn, nor to any account of the sense in which I could have chosen to do otherwise than I did. Most important, it takes no position on the question: what, if anything, causes me to choose as I do? This last question is forced on us by the success of modern science, and by the mechanistic worldview that modern science presupposes. Mechanism was of course conceivable—and conceived—in earlier eras. But in those eras, the idea that the behavior of any living creatures, let alone of human beings, could be explained in the same way as the motions of rocks or planets would have been easy to dismiss; if anything, it might have suggested the possibility of explaining the motions of inanimate objects by invoking a directing intelligence. There was too great a gap between the kinds of motions that could be explained mechanistically and our own behavior for a thoroughgoing mechanism to be plausible on any grounds other than antecedent ideas about the structure of the world. Nowadays, however, mechanism does not seem so far-fetched. Science has turned out to be able to explain much more than the average Renaissance scholar, thinking of pendulums and projectiles and planets, would have thought possible. It has complicated the distinction between the organic and the inorganic beyond recognition, allowing us to explain the behavior of living organisms without reference to the “vital principles” once thought necessary for that purpose. And its explanations have begun to reach into the human mind, thereby raising the possibility that our own behavior is, in principle, explicable in the same terms. Mechanism is compatible with a rather flat and literal reading of the intuitive view outlined above. It is true that each of us does have a character in the sense in which I have used that term: a collection of habits and character traits that result, in large part, from the choices we have made. It is also true that, unless we allow this capacity to atrophy completely, each of us can step back from that character, ask ourselves whether the course of action that it suggests is really what we want to do, and decide to accept or reject it. Those who claim that freedom of the will is compatible with mechanism usually argue that it is because we have this capacity that we can claim to be free and morally responsible.

THE PROBLEM

13

However, mechanists also insist that the self is a part of the natural world and that its activities are caused in accordance with natural laws. Though I can step back from my character and evaluate it, whether or not I do so at a given time depends on my physical state at that time, the stimuli I encounter, and any indeterministic natural events that affect me. These causes also determine the course of my deliberations and their outcome. Given sufficient knowledge, a scientist could predict the course of my deliberations in a given situation: which considerations I would take to be particularly relevant, with what force a given reason would strike me, the significance of which facts I would overlook, to which temptations I would be susceptible, how much resistance I would offer, and what, as a result, I would do. If mechanism is true, then, given that the world was as it was and that the indeterministic natural events that affected my choice occurred as they did, I could not have done anything but what I actually did; I could not even have thought anything but what I actually thought. To accept the literal reading of the prereflective view and conclude from it that mechanism does not call our freedom into question, one must believe that these implications of mechanism are not relevant to the question whether or not we are free; that since the prereflective view holds that we are free if we have the capacity to step back from our characters, and since mechanism does not imply that we do not have this capacity, it follows straightforwardly that mechanism does not affect our freedom. To accept this conclusion on these grounds, however, is to overlook the possibility that mechanism might call into question not our ability to meet our prereflective criteria for freedom but our reasons for thinking that those criteria can be used to decide whether or not we are free. Mechanism clearly alters our view of the self that can step back from its character, the character it steps back from, and the relations and differences between the two. In so doing, it raises the question whether our capacity to step back from our characters, as newly understood, suffices to show that we are free. To answer this question, one would have to determine what it was about the self that originally led us to claim that those who are not bound by their characters are free, and whether or not we can still claim that we have this feature if we accept the truth of mechanism. Libertarians contend that once we confront this question, we cannot maintain that mechanism and human freedom are compatible. The prereflective view must rely on the assumption that there is some crucial difference between those beings that are bound by their characters and those that are not, a difference that allows us to claim that only the latter are free. Mechanism obliterates many of the differences that one might have thought distinguish the two. On a libertarian reading of the prereflective view, among the distinctions that mechanism denies are those that underlie the prereflective claim that beings who can step back from their characters and evaluate the courses of action that their characters would lead them to perform are free. Libertarians might sup-

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port this claim in a variety of ways; what follows is a reconstruction of one possible line of reasoning. As long as mechanistic explanations of human behavior could be rejected as obviously implausible, we could simply assume that there is some radical difference in kind between the ways in which humans and animals cause their behavior and the ways in which inanimate objects are caused to move. Inanimate objects are entirely passive, acted upon rather than acting. A car’s brake lever, for example, does not in any sense initiate that car’s stopping: when the brake pedal is depressed, the brake lever must engage the brake. It might be said to contribute to that car’s stopping simply by existing in the form it does: if the lever were not there, or were not connected to the brake, or were made not of metal but of elastic bands, depressing the brake pedal would not stop the car. But the lever did not cause itself to exist in this form: it did not choose to manifest itself as just this brake lever or cause itself to have just these properties. Its existence, properties, and subsequent motions are all wholly determined by events that occur elsewhere, and to whose eventual effects it makes no independent contribution. Mechanism, as I have said, is the view that the same principles that we use to explain the movements of such objects can be used to explain human behavior. To reject mechanism as obviously implausible is, therefore, to assume that human behavior is in some sense quite unlike the movements of a brake lever; that however our actions are to be explained, we will not turn out to be simply the media in which the effects of previous events reveal themselves. We must, instead, be in some sense active and spontaneous, contributing to our behavior not simply by existing in a particular form at a particular place and time but by initiating courses of action. What this spontaneity comes to is, as I have said, left obscure by the prereflective view. But our prereflective vagueness on this point is understandable, since a precise account of spontaneity is not essential to the argument. If, prereflectively, we were truly in doubt as to whether we had the capacity spontaneously to initiate courses of action, then we would have to clarify exactly what this capacity involved in order to determine whether or not we possess it. If our freedom required that we possess some particular form of spontaneity, then we would have to determine more precisely the sense in which we can act spontaneously in order to determine whether we are spontaneous in the right way. But if, prereflectively, we assume that mechanism is false, then any plausible explanation of our actions must hold that we have the capacity spontaneously to initiate courses of action and that this capacity marks a difference in kind between our actions and the motions of inanimate objects. And if human freedom requires only that some account that meets these conditions be true, then determining precisely what form of spontaneity we actually possess would not be a matter of great urgency.

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15

If we assume that mechanism is obviously false, then the dominant issue that an account of freedom of the will must address will concern the differences between the behavior of humans and that of animals, who would seem to possess something like our capacity for spontaneous action but to lack freedom of the will.1 If an animal is not deprived of freedom of action, then, one might think, its behavior is not determined by external events as the motions of an inanimate object are. However, because animals cannot step back from their characters, their behavior is in another sense determined by the instincts and habits that make up what we might call their nature. An animal cannot represent possible future courses of action to itself and decide between them; it cannot evaluate its instincts and habits; it cannot so much as frame the question whether some course of action other than that suggested by its nature would better suit its purposes. It must therefore act blindly, without the intervention of reflection, reason, or choice. Because the behavior of animals is spontaneous, it is within their power to do as they please; but because they cannot step back from their nature and evaluate its dictates, what it is their pleasure to do depends entirely on their instincts and on the accretions of experience that we call learned behavior. The capacity to exercise the freedom that their spontaneity places within their reach depends on the possession of the capacity to step back from their characters; since they lack that capacity, they cannot be said to be free in any but a nominal sense. Nonetheless, the unfreedom of animals differs from that of inanimate objects in something like the way in which the unfreedom of a man who cannot imagine the possibility of leaving his room differs from that of a prisoner. Animals’ capacity for spontaneous action means that the doors to their cells are open; that there are no external impediments to their freedom. But because they are unable to reflect on and evaluate the courses of action suggested by their characters, they will never walk out into liberty. If we assume that mechanism is false, then we could lack freedom of the will only if our actions were as reflexive as those of an animal. It is this possibility—which is, if mechanism is false, the worst we can envisage—that the distinction between beings with only a character and beings with a self is meant to address. If we were truly the slaves of habit, incapable of asking ourselves whether what our character suggests that we do is really what we want to do, then even when nothing outside us forced our hand, our behavior would be entirely determined by our character, the product of our (equally determined, and hence equally unfree) “choices.” But because we have the capacity spontaneously to evaluate the courses of action available to us, and to decide among them, our wills are free. 1 Theists would also have to discuss the possibility of reconciling human freedom with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient creator. Since this problem is not related to my present arguments, I will not consider it here.

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On this account, the prereflective view is concerned with freedom from determination not only by our habits in particular but by the past as a whole. The world may present me with a particular choice, and past events, including my past choices, may predispose me to respond to that choice in a particular way; they may even make that response seem so natural to me as to make it almost inevitable that I will adopt it. But I am truly free, on this account, only if it is never strictly inevitable that I choose as past events dictate. When one takes account of all the causes that might in any way affect my choice, then, if I am free, one finds that these causes do not determine that I will choose to perform one action rather than another, either in the strict sense in which external causes determine the motions of a stone, or in the sense in which an animal’s behavior is determined by its nature. My choice is still open, and what I will do depends on what I choose. On this account, the prereflective view describes freedom as ‘being able to step back from one’s character’, rather than as ‘not having one’s choices determined by past events’, because it assumes that human behavior might always be determined by past events only if we lacked that ability. And it equates freedom with the possession of a self because it assumes that to have a self is to escape the only form of determination by past events with which we are seriously threatened. If this account is correct, then mechanism implies that we are not free. Compatibilists are right to claim that mechanism does not imply that we do not have a self or that we are incapable of reflecting on our character. But, libertarians might think, compatibilists infer from this that mechanism does not threaten our freedom only because they have not stopped to ask why, on the intuitive view, our having a self implies that we are free. Had they done so, they would have discovered that this implication depends on the assumption that we have the capacity spontaneously to initiate courses of action, which amounts to the assumption that mechanism is false. The assumption that we can act spontaneously underwrites the argument outlined above at three points. First of all, it is this assumption that allows us to disregard entirely the problem of distinguishing our actions from the motions of inanimate objects, and to concentrate instead on distinguishing them from the behavior of animals. The claim that we are capable of reflecting on and evaluating the courses of action suggested by our characters is designed to perform the latter task; but it is not at all clear that it can counter the threat posed to our freedom by the supposition that our deliberation and our conduct are determined as fully, and in the same ways, as the motions of a clock or a billiard ball, or that we, like the brake lever described above, are simply the media through which antecedent events work out their consequences. By removing what had seemed to be a fundamental difference between the motions of inanimate objects and the behavior of humans and animals, mechanism exposes our freedom to a threat that the argument outlined above did not attempt to counter.

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Second, that argument does not hold that our ability to reflect on and evaluate the courses of action suggested by our characters is simply equivalent to, or a sufficient condition of, our freedom, but that it enables us to develop the nominal freedom of action which our capacity for spontaneous action affords us into genuine freedom of the will. If we lacked the capacity spontaneously to initiate courses of action, however, our selves could not perform this function, since they would have no such nominal freedom to develop and exploit. The libertarian argument outlined above therefore implies that spontaneity is a necessary condition of freedom of the will, one which mechanism implies that we do not meet. Finally, mechanism obliterates what this reading takes to be the salient distinction between the self and the character. Intuitively, the distinction between my self and my character separates not only my habits from my ability to evaluate them, but that in me which is the fixed and determinate product of my past from that which is not. If we assume that mechanism is false, we can use our unanalyzed notion of spontaneity to explain why the self and the character differ in this way. Because the activities of the self—reasoning, deliberation, and choice—involve the ability to conceive of various possible courses of action and to decide among them, they are not dictated by instinct or habit. And because those activities, like all our actions, are spontaneous and selfcaused, no external causes force them to follow a particular path. It is only because we think that our deliberation and choices meet both of these conditions that we can believe the actions of a being with a self to be radically different from those of a being with only a character, and different in a way that allows us to claim that only the former are free. If mechanism is true, however, my character and the activities of my self are equally determined by past events. If I have only a character, then I must follow the course it lays out for me; if I also have a self, then I may at times turn away from its tracks and try to lay down new ones. But mechanism implies that I do so not because I can wander at liberty through vast fields of possibilities, unconstrained by antecedent events, but because those events cause me, at this particular point, to reject the course of action suggested by my character. The difference between a being with a self and a being with only a character is not that the behavior of the latter is determined by previous events while that of the former is not; the past lays out a path for each of them, from which neither can deviate. The two differ only in that the paths the former must travel will not always follow the contours of its character. Therefore, while in one sense mechanism allows us to retain the distinction between the self and the character, in the sense that is important for freedom it implies that we are character all through.2 2 In describing my prereflective view of the self, I claimed that because I have the kind of self I described, I can view my self as the author of my character; but that without it, I would see my character as formed by something like a process of erosion. These two metaphors for the self seem, intuitively, to be opposed to one another; the difficulty for a compatibilist account of freedom of the will and moral responsibility is to explain how both could be true at once.

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Mechanism holds that our deliberation and choices are as fully determined as other natural events, and that they can be explained in the same terms. When we are tied up, our trajectories through space-time are determined by coarse and obvious means; when we are not, external events determine them by causing us to want to achieve one end rather than another or to follow one line of reasoning while leaving others unexplored; by dictating the entire course of our deliberation, thereby determining what we will choose. In so doing it opens the claim that we are free to serious objections that, prereflectively, we did not think it necessary to address, and to which we have no obvious response. It removes the foundation of our prereflective arguments for the claim that our ability to reflect on and evaluate the courses of action suggested by our character shows that we are free. And it obliterates what had seemed to be the salient distinction between the self and the character, without which the self cannot play the role our prereflective view requires. Neither the distinction between the animate and the inanimate nor that between the self and the character survives in the form required by our prereflective view of freedom of the will; without them, libertarians argue, that view cannot be maintained. Some libertarians have written that, if mechanism were true, we would be like puppets or slaves. In doing so, I think, they obscure the main issue. For the peculiar horror of being a conscious puppet would surely be the fact that the strings would be attached to one’s limbs. I might be an ardent pacifist, a lover of all humanity, wanting desperately to play the part of St. Francis or Gandhi; but that would not prevent a puppeteer from dressing me as Punch and sticking a papier-maˆ che´ club in my hand. I might look on, appalled, as the puppeteer’s strings jerked my arm up and down and pulled the corners of my mouth into an evil leering grin; but there would be nothing that I could do to resist them. If mechanism is true, however, the strings are attached not to our limbs but to our minds. If I want to play the part of St. Francis or Gandhi, and I have the capacity and talent and perseverance to do so, then nothing need prevent me from playing it. But the fact that that is the particular role I want to play can be completely explained as the result of my genetic endowment, the environment I found myself in, the stimuli I encountered, and the outcome of any indeterministic events that affected me. Anyone who knew enough about these things, and about natural laws, could explain why I had to end up as a pacifist and a lover of humanity, however precarious and uncertain my progress towards that state might have seemed to me. Similarly, an argument suggested by Harry Frankfurt’s article “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” seems to miss mechanism’s particular threat. Frankfurt claims that when we excuse someone because he tells us that he could not have done otherwise, “[w]e understand the person who offers the excuse to mean that he did what he did only because he was unable to do otherwise, or only because he had to do it. And we understand him to mean,

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more particularly, that when he did what he did it was not because that was what he really wanted to do.”3 He supports this claim by considering the case of someone whose action was overdetermined: the agent wanted to perform a particular action, and it was his decision to perform it that actually caused him to perform it; but, had he felt differently, someone would have prevented him from doing anything else. In such cases, Frankfurt argues, we are not inclined to excuse the agent simply because someone else was ready, if necessary, to prevent him from doing anything but what he actually did: if that person never had to exercise his power because the agent in fact chose to perform that action, he is just as responsible for performing it as he would have been had that person not been ready and able to force him to perform it, despite the fact that, because that person was there, he could not have done otherwise. Frankfurt is surely right to claim that we would ordinarily hold such an agent morally responsible for his actions, and to point out that this constitutes an objection to what he calls the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (the principle that we can be morally responsible for an action only if we could have done otherwise).4 It therefore implies that we cannot regard determinism or mechanism5 as a kind of global coercion. The claim that someone was forced to do something does, as Frankfurt claims, imply that she really wanted to do something else and that, had she not been coerced, she would in fact have done something else. It can therefore be applied only when there is a meaningful contrast between what the agent really wanted to do and what she was caused to do; when we can ask what she would have chosen to do had she not been thus compelled. But if mechanism is true, then in the cases in which we nor3

Harry Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” p. 10. Frankfurt draws the following conclusion from his argument: “The principle of alternate possibilities should thus be replaced, in my opinion, by the following principle: a person is not morally responsible for what he has done if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise. This principle does not appear to conflict with the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism” (ibid., p. 10). On the weakest reading of this passage, Frankfurt is claiming only that we could be responsible for our actions even though we could never have done anything but what we actually did—if, for instance, someone was always ready and able to force us to do what she wanted us to do, but never had to use her power because it happened that we always chose to do what she would otherwise have forced us to do. Thus the fact that determinism implies that we could never do anything other than what we actually did does not directly imply that we are not responsible for what we do; whether or not it implies this depends on how determinism deprives us of alternate possibilities. It is possible, however, to interpret Frankfurt as making the stronger claim that he has shown that the fact that determinism implies that we could never do anything other than what we actually do is not relevant to the question whether or not we are morally responsible for our conduct. (In “What We Are Morally Responsible For,” p. 97, he describes his argument as entailing “the irrelevance to questions concerning moral responsibility of the relationship between determinism and free will.”) As I will try to show, he is not entitled to this conclusion. 5 Frankfurt discusses the conflict between determinism and freedom. Henceforth I will substitute mechanism for determinism, since Frankfurt’s arguments seem equally applicable to mechanism. 4

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mally regard ourselves as free, external events bring it about that we will do something by bringing it about that we will choose to do that something. There is, therefore, no contrast between what we were caused to do and what we really wanted to do in those cases; if mechanism is true and we are wholly natural beings, it makes no sense to ask what, but for nature, we would really want to do. And for this reason we cannot simply conclude from the fact that our actions and choices are determined under natural laws that we can extend to all actions the exemption from moral responsibility that we invoke in cases of coercion. But by the same token, we cannot simply claim that the actions that we usually call free are the sorts of actions Frankfurt considers, in which what we really want to do and what we cannot avoid doing happen to coincide. If mechanism is true, then the natural world is not waiting offstage, ready to force us to do what it wants if we do not choose to do so on our own; it does not refrain from using its power over us as long as we do what it wants; nor is it merely a happy accident that the action which it provides sufficient conditions for our performing and the action we want to perform often coincide. We cannot even sensibly ask the question, on the possibility of an answer to which Frankfurt’s analysis depends, whether it was our choice or external events that caused us to act as we did. Since mechanism implies that, in the cases in which we normally say that we act ‘freely’, external events bring it about that we perform a particular action by bringing it about that we choose in a particular way, the two are not distinct in the way that that question requires them to be. If we cannot describe mechanism as a kind of global coercion on the grounds that it implies that we can never do anything other than what we actually do, then by the same token we cannot claim that it does not interfere with our liberty on the grounds that it often leaves us free to do exactly what we want. For both descriptions rely on the existence of a real distinction between what we want to do and what we are caused to do; on the idea that when something outside us brings it about that we perform a particular action, that action is at best accidentally identical with the action we want to perform. Neither our ordinary concept of coercion nor our ordinary concept of liberty, therefore, is capable of addressing the problems raised by mechanism. For mechanism’s particular threat to the idea that we are free and responsible beings stems from its implication that we are caused to want what we want, and to choose what we choose. As far as these arguments are concerned, mechanism is an entirely new kind of threat, to which no simple extension of our ordinary conditions of moral responsibility is appropriate. If mechanism is true, then, in the cases in which we normally say that we acted freely, it is true both that causes external to us determined that we would do what we did—and that these causes were not simply ready to prevent us from doing anything else but actually brought it about that we did what we

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did—and that we did what we wanted to do because it was what we wanted to do. Mechanism forces us to decide which of these facts is crucial to the claim that we are free. Incompatibilists choose the first: we are free, they argue, only when our actions are not determined by anything external to us, whether those external causes determine our actions by determining our choices or in some other way. Compatibilists choose the second: we are free whenever we can do what we really want to do, whether or not what we really want to do is itself determined by external causes. I do not think that it is obvious which view is correct. Both compatibilists and incompatibilists have based their views on aspects of the intuitive view outlined above, aspects that really are implicit in that view, and that might easily be thought central to it. Just as the Civil War pulled apart a naive view of the American republic by forcing Americans to choose between their belief in the importance of maintaining that republic while protecting the liberty of all of its citizens, and their belief in the right of states and citizens to withdraw from the compact on which that republic was based; so mechanism pulls apart the naive view of freedom of the will, forcing us to decide which of its aspects—freedom from external determination or the freedom to decide what we really want to do and to act on that decision—we think lies at its heart. Unfortunately, many compatibilists have simply assumed that their answer to this question is the correct one, instead of actually trying to show that it is. This is most obviously true of those who use a simple appeal to ordinary language to support the compatibilist position.6 A. J. Ayer, for instance, simply states that ‘freedom’ is ordinarily used in contrast not to determination but to constraint, and that statement, variously repeated, forms almost the whole of his positive argument on this issue.7 Ayer rightly attributes to libertarians the question: Is there any essential difference between what we normally call ‘free acts’ and other acts?8 If my reconstruction of the problem is accurate, this question could be paraphrased as: do those acts that we normally call free and those we normally call unfree differ in that respect which is essential to our freedom? Is the central condition of freedom our ability to do what we really want to do, in which case there is an essential difference between being free (in Ayer’s sense) and being coerced? Or is it the fact that our actions are not determined by anything outside ourselves, in which case, if mechanism is true, there is no difference essential to freedom between the acts we normally call free and other acts? What is essential, the similarities between the two kinds of action or their differences? 6

By a simple appeal to ordinary language I mean one which consists, essentially, in pointing out that we do not ordinarily describe actions we choose to perform in noncoercive situations as unfree. I do not mean here to rule out the possibility of any solution to the problem of freedom of the will based on an appeal to ordinary language. 7 A. J. Ayer, “Freedom and Necessity.” 8 Paraphrased from Ayer, “Freedom and Necessity,” p. 20.

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Unfortunately, in his answer to this question Ayer omits the crucial word ‘essential’ entirely, and simply states that the two kinds of action “do differ.”9 This answer would address libertarians’ concerns only if they had failed to notice any differences at all between coercion and its absence. But libertarians must know that coercion differs from what Ayer calls freedom. Their question is not whether the two differ at all but whether these differences are essential: whether the obvious differences between the ropes that tie me to the railroad track and the subtler filaments that bind my thoughts are such that they could support our views about freedom, personhood, and moral responsibility. And while Ayer acknowledges the existence of this question, he does not answer it. Those writers who have attempted to solve the problem of freedom of the will by providing “conditional analyses” of the phrase ‘could have done otherwise’ likewise fail to address libertarians’ most basic concerns. These writers note that we ordinarily say that we act freely when we could have done otherwise and argue that ‘could have done otherwise’ ordinarily means, roughly, ‘could have, or would have, or something, done otherwise had one chosen to do so’. They then attempt to formulate a precise analysis of the meaning of ‘could have done otherwise’ that avoids counterintuitive conclusions, logical inconsistency, and regress. But they rarely stop to argue for their most basic assumption: that we act freely when our actions depend on our choices. If my account of the problem is correct, it is this assumption, rather than any unclarity in the conditional analysis, that will most deeply trouble libertarians. In adopting it without argument, conditional analysts will seem to libertarians to have begged the question on which the problem of freedom of the will turns. It is true that, ordinarily, we use ‘free’ in opposition to ‘coerced’, ‘enslaved’, ‘imprisoned’, and so forth. But to offer this fact as a response to libertarians makes sense only if one assumes that they do not know how this word is ordinarily used, or that they need to be reminded that mechanism does not imply that we are literally enslaved or imprisoned all the time. If we do not wish to make such assumptions, we might instead suppose that libertarians take themselves to be, in Stanley Cavell’s words, projecting this word into a new context: trying to make out its application to cases to which it has not ordinarily been applied and in which the ordinary criteria for its application cannot be used.10 Ordinary language provides us with a number of excusing conditions for actions. We are not morally responsible for what we do if we do it unintentionally, by mistake, or inadvertently; and we are not morally responsible for what we do if we do not do it freely. When we suspect that someone might have done what she did because of external coercion or internal compulsion, we may try to discover whether she did it freely, and thus whether we 9

Ibid., p. 21. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, especially pp. 180–90.

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ought to hold her morally responsible for her action. But we do not ask this question when there is no reason to suspect that any of these things is true. About normal actions performed in normal circumstances such questions simply do not arise. Libertarians, however, want to raise the question whether or not we act freely about all actions, whether or not we have any reason to suspect that one or another of the ordinary excusing conditions obtains, and whether or not there is anything at all unusual about the action in question. To raise this question in such cases without offering any reason to do so would not be to project the word ‘freedom’ into a new context but to try to apply it wrongly to cases about which ordinary language is unambiguous. Had libertarians in fact raised this question without offering any explanation, Ayer’s response would have been entirely appropriate. But libertarians have an explanation for what they do. They can say that our ordinary usage relies on the distinction between what I want to do and what I am caused to do by something outside me, and on the idea that if I do what I really want to do because I really want to do it, then nothing other than my self brings it about that I do it; that either I or the world, but not both, determines my actions. If I perform an action because I choose to do so, then I perform it freely; if I perform it because something else causes me to do so, then I do not. But mechanism implies that I choose as I do because something other than myself causes me to do so; that the actions I normally call ‘free’ are determined both by my will and by the world which causes me to choose as I do. Mechanism, that is, leads us to understand our ‘normal’, ‘voluntary’ actions differently, as actions that ordinary language seems to give us reason to describe both as free and as unfree.11 By casting our ordinary actions in this new light, mechanism prevents us from using our ordinary criteria to determine whether or not we perform them freely. In so doing it creates a new context, within which the question whether we should regard those actions as free can legitimately be raised.12 11 Here I agree with Double’s claim that “there is not anything that answers to the prephilosophical notions of ‘free will’ and ‘moral responsibility’” (Richard Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will, p. 7), at least if “answering to” those concepts means meeting all the conditions that, prephilosophically, we take them to require. I differ from Double in the moral I draw from this claim: I regard it as setting the terms for further philosophical exploration of those concepts, not as showing that such exploration cannot succeed. 12 If libertarians are right to claim that mechanism implies that the conditions in which our ordinary concept of freedom can be used straightforwardly are not met by any of our actions, then any resolution of the problem of freedom of the will, whether libertarian or compatibilist, will involve a projection of our ordinary concept of freedom of the will. This may account for the persisting sense that compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will are shallower than those of libertarians: libertarians at least seem to recognize that projection is called for, while compatibilists often seem to rely unreflectively on our ordinary usage of the word ‘freedom’, without recognizing that the conditions in which it can be applied straightforwardly are absent.

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If libertarians are arguing that theirs is a legitimate projection of our ordinary concept of freedom, then we should expect that ‘freedom’, used in this new way, will be like the ordinary kind of freedom in some ways (this is what makes it a projection of that concept) and different in others (this is what makes it a projection of that concept). Compatibilists can, of course, ask whether this proposed projection is similar in the right ways (whatever those are) to the projected concept as we ordinarily employ it; whether we will count libertarians’ proposed projection as a projection of our concept of freedom; whether what we mean to communicate when we say that an action was not performed freely is sufficiently preserved when libertarians say that mechanism implies that no action is performed freely; or whether the concept of freedom can withstand that projection and still remain essentially the same. To answer these questions, however, one must try to make out what it is about that concept that must be preserved in any new projection of it.13 And to convince one’s opponents that one is right, one must also try to figure out why they are tempted to project that concept wrongly; what exactly leads them to think that we cannot be free if mechanism is true. But it is not helpful simply to deny the proposed projection, assuming without argument that one knows how it ought to be projected, and denying that this projection meets those criteria; or to refuse to recognize that what is at issue is a projection of our ordinary concept of freedom, as those who rely on a flat appeal to ordinary language do. If what is at issue is the legitimacy of a proposed projection, then those who propose it must know that they are not using the projected concept exactly as we ordinarily do. The claim that they are projecting that concept acknowledges this fact and offers an explanation of why their usage is nonetheless legitimate, a new employment of the same concept. To take the fact that libertarians are not using ‘freedom’ in exactly the usual way as a refutation of their view misses the point of their arguments entirely. This book is an attempt to address libertarians’ concerns about compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will. Therefore, instead of trying to argue for the claim that some particular feature of our concept of ‘freedom’ must be preserved by any acceptable projection, I can try to show that compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will can preserve that feature of it which libertarians take to be central. Whether or not this approach holds any prospect of success depends on whether libertarians believe that any acceptable projection of our concept of freedom of the will must hold that we are not caused to choose as we do because this is itself the criterion of a projection’s acceptability, or that only those projections are acceptable because only they can meet some other criterion. If libertarians dismiss compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will 13

This is not meant to imply that what must be preserved is one thing, rather than (say) a “family resemblance,” but that if one proposed projection preserves some features of our ordinary concept, and another preserves others, one has to argue for the claim that the projection one prefers has preserved something essential that is lost in the other.

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because they believe any such account to be intrinsically unacceptable, then compatibilists would have to argue that libertarians’ beliefs about the feature that any acceptable account of freedom of the will must preserve are themselves mistaken. If, however, libertarians believe that any acceptable projection of our concept of freedom of the will must preserve some feature other than freedom from determination by antecedent causes, then a compatibilist might accept this claim, and argue instead against the claim that only libertarian accounts of freedom of the will preserve this feature. I believe that libertarians hold the views they do because they believe that any satisfactory conception of freedom of the will must allow us to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility.14 They might be persuaded to accept a compatibilist account of freedom of the will if it could be shown that the fact that we are free, in that sense, could be used as the basis for a justification of the claim that we are morally responsible for our actions. But because they do not think that any compatibilist account of freedom of the will could be used to justify that claim, they believe that only those accounts of freedom of the will that involve complete freedom from external determination are acceptable projections of our ordinary conception of freedom of the will—that only they describe genuine, rather than ersatz, freedom. In what follows, I assume that any acceptable projection of our concept of freedom of the will must allow us to justify the claim that we are, in some satisfactory sense, morally responsible for our conduct. Those who do not think that any satisfactory account of freedom of the will must allow us to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility will think that compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will must be defended on other grounds, and therefore that my arguments do not constitute a defense of compatibilism. But the success or failure of those arguments as arguments for the claim that moral responsibility is compatible with mechanism will be unaffected by one’s view of this assumption. Some compatibilists have argued that we can justify our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons simply by appeal to the various practices 14 For instance, Roderick Chisholm states that the problem of freedom of the will is forced on us by the need to explain how we can be morally responsible agents (“Human Freedom and the Self,” p. 24). In “Is ‘Freewill’ a Pseudo-problem?” C. A. Campbell discusses freedom of the will exclusively as a condition of moral responsibility, and claims that any worthwhile analysis of ‘could have done otherwise’ must analyze the meaning of that term “not in the abstract, but in the context of the question of man’s moral responsibility” (p. 126, emphases in text). David Wiggins reconstructs libertarians’ objections to compatibilist accounts of various distinctions, including that between freedom and constraint, as follows: “But determinism undermines their whole point. . . . It whittles away too much that is important from the notion of responsibility. It transforms it out of recognition” (“Towards a Reasonable Libertarianism,” p. 35). Robert Kane writes that “[l]ibertarians and incompatibilists do not want indeterminism for its own sake. If the truth be told, indeterminism is something of a nuisance for them. . . . What they want is ultimate responsibility, and ultimate responsibility requires indeterminism” (“Two Kinds of Incompatibilism,” p. 121).

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of which they are a part. For instance, P. F. Strawson, in “Freedom and Resentment,” claims that we adopt “reactive attitudes”—attitudes such as “gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings”15—only towards competent agents, and that our ascriptions of moral responsibility, and our belief that in certain circumstances persons act freely, acquire both meaning and all the support they need from this “general framework of attitudes.”16 According to Strawson, our practice of taking reactive attitudes towards persons “neither calls for, nor permits, an external ‘rational’ justification.”17 Therefore, while libertarians are right to think that mechanism implies that our intuitive justification of our belief that persons are free and responsible agents cannot succeed, they are wrong to think that this is a problem, since that belief does not stand in need of any justification beyond that provided by our reactive attitudes themselves. Strawson argues that we do not need to justify our practice of adopting reactive attitudes towards persons on two grounds. First, he claims that while we can decide to withhold our reactive attitudes on particular occasions, our commitment to those attitudes is so deep that it would be, in practice, impossible for us to give them up entirely. Since abandoning the reactive attitudes is not an option for us, we need not justify our refusal to do so. I am less certain than Strawson that we are so deeply committed to holding reactive attitudes that we could not give them up. But even if Strawson is right on this point, to offer this response to libertarians would be as misguided as trying to console a theist whose reasons for believing in God seem to her to have crumbled by arguing that she needs religion too much to give it up for merely intellectual reasons. Such a theist might think that if she continued to believe in God, but knew this belief to be rationally unjustifiable, a mere “lifelie,” then her faith would degenerate. She would recognize that it is unclear in what sense one can believe something while believing that belief to be rationally unjustifiable, and she would recognize the difference between belief in a God who demands that we blind ourselves and deny the minds he gave us, and belief in a God faith in whom perfects our whole selves, our reason included. Moreover, she would realize that if she came to regard her faith in God not as a recognition of his existence and goodness but as a consoling psychological mechanism that she could not bring herself to abandon, both her relation to God and the quality of her faith would be radically altered; and she might wonder whether the product of this alteration would deserve the name of faith at all.18 15

P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” p. 62. Ibid., p. 78. 17 Ibid. 18 Christians have always thought that faith and reason are different and have opposed the two in certain contexts, but generally they have thought of faith as supplementing reason, not as requiring that we deny it. I find it instructive, in this context, to compare the attitudes towards God revealed in Christian theology written when it was assumed that faith required and supplemented reason to those revealed in modern theology, as an illustration of the degeneration of attitudes we supposedly cannot live without that follows our loss of confidence in our ability to rationally 16

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Similarly, a libertarian might think that if we knew that we could not justify either our attitudes towards others or our belief that they are morally responsible, we would not hold those attitudes or that belief in the same way that we would if we thought them rational. Our ascriptions of moral responsibility and our reactive attitudes are closely tied to our beliefs about others. I would not, for instance, hold others responsible for their actions in just the same way if I believed that my ascriptions of moral responsibility were simply a habit I could not give up as I would if I believed that they were justified. Moreover, if I believed that my attitudes towards others reflected not their natures but my needs, I would find it easier to put those attitudes aside when it was convenient to do so, and I would have no reason to try to maintain and strengthen them. If Strawson is right to claim that we cannot give up the reactive attitudes, it does not follow that we would continue to hold those attitudes as we now know them even if we no longer held the beliefs which support them; but only that we would continue to hold reactive attitudes in some degenerate and vestigial form. And libertarians might well fear this degeneration of our reactive attitudes as much as their loss. Libertarians’ unease would only be strengthened by Strawson’s second argument: that if we could choose whether or not to hold reactive attitudes towards others, “we could choose rationally only in the light of an assessment of the gains and losses to human life, its enrichment or impoverishment; and the truth or falsity of a general thesis of determinism would not bear on the rationality of this choice.”19 As Gary Watson and others have pointed out, it is unclear why Strawson thinks that these are the only grounds on which such a choice could rationally be made, and why, in particular, it would not be more rational to ask whether the beliefs that reactive attitudes reflect are in fact true.20 Strawson clearly thinks that some people, and all things, are not appropriate objects of the reactive attitudes. This is lucky, since otherwise he would be unable to explain not only why we regard insanity as an excusing condition but what would be wrong with falling deeply in love with an oyster or nursing an abiding resentment towards a manhole cover. He therefore needs an account of what the appropriate objects of such attitudes are and of why those attitudes are appropriate to those objects. But this is exactly what libertarians are asking for: an account of why, once we appreciate the implications of mechanism for our understanding of ourselves, we ought still to view ourselves as appropriate objects of reactive attitudes. Even if we grant for the sake of argument that no such account can be given, that for this reason we can decide whether or not to adopt reactive attitudes towards others only “in the light of an assessment of the gains and losses to justify them. We have not yet seen the full effects of a similar transformation of our attitudes to one another, which makes Strawson’s apparent equanimity about it easier to understand. 19 P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” p. 70, emphasis in text. 20 Watson, “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme,” especially pp. 262–3.

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human life,” and that the costs of abandoning the reactive attitudes would greatly outweigh the benefits of doing so, Strawson’s argument would not provide an adequate basis for our reactive attitudes. As I argued above, our attitudes towards others are affected by our reasons for holding them. In particular, it does not seem to me possible to take reactive attitudes towards others because of their instrumental value. We can, of course, try to treat someone in the throes of psychosis as a responsible person because we think that this will help her in some way. Nonetheless, at bottom our attitude towards her will be what Strawson calls an objective attitude: one that involves seeing her not as a responsible agent, but as “a subject for what, in a wide range of sense, might be called treatment.”22 In this case, we regard treating a person as a responsible agent as itself a form of treatment, and we try to treat someone thus only because we think that this particular therapeutic technique will be effective. In such cases, while we might succeed in treating another person as a responsible agent, it is not clear that we could succeed in regarding her as one, nor that we could be said without qualification to have adopted any of the reactive attitudes towards her. Similarly, were we to recognize that we had no reason to regard persons as appropriate objects either of our reactive attitudes or of our ascriptions of responsibility, we might nonetheless decide to try to adopt those attitudes towards persons, and to regard them as morally responsible, because of the instrumental value of doing so. However, it is not clear that we could succeed in adopting those attitudes for those reasons. And what prevents us from doing so is precisely the fact that we hold those attitudes towards others not because we think those attitudes appropriate to them but because holding those attitudes towards them will produce desirable results. In so doing we show that our attitudes towards others are already objective.23 Strawson rightly claims that mechanism seems to libertarians to imply “a thoroughgoing objectivity of attitude,”24 within which our ordinary notion of moral responsibility has no place; and that this explains why they “recoil from this picture.”25 If my arguments are correct, however, Strawson’s account does not show that we can avoid this “thoroughgoing objectivity of attitude” without providing a justification either of our ascriptions of responsibility or of the reactive attitudes with which they are so closely connected. To take a genuinely reactive attitude towards another person, we must believe that that person is an appropriate object of that attitude. In order to believe this, we must either be able to justify it or feel confident that it can be justified. If we do not have such confidence, we might try instead to take reactive attitudes towards others 21

P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” p. 70. Ibid., p. 66. 23 Susan Wolf makes a similar argument in Freedom Within Reason, pp. 20–1. 24 P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” p. 76. 25 Ibid. 22

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either because we believe that we cannot help adopting them or because of their instrumental value. But since we cannot hold genuinely reactive attitudes on those grounds, we will at best succeed in adopting objective analogs of those attitudes. And since the replacement of our reactive attitudes by their objective counterparts is what libertarians fear, compatibilists who wish to address their concerns must argue not that our ascriptions of moral responsibility are embedded in our existing practices or that our lives would be impoverished without them, but that we are justified in regarding ourselves as free and responsible agents.

Why Libertarians Think That Compatibilism Cannot Work Any satisfactory account of freedom of the will and moral responsibility must allow us to answer questions like: Why do we hold persons morally responsible for their behavior in some cases but not others? Why do we claim that persons are free while nonpersons are not? Why, when we look back over the causes of an action, do we stop at a choice or volition and ascribe responsibility to the person who made it? In order to answer such questions, we must be able to cite some difference between the entities or events under discussion and to explain why the existence of that particular difference justifies us in ascribing freedom of the will and moral responsibility as we do. Libertarians believe that the only differences that can be used to answer these questions satisfactorily are the metaphysical differences that mechanism denies. While they recognize that mechanism leaves intact many differences between persons and non-persons, voluntary actions and other events, and acts of will and other causes, they do not believe that any of these differences can provide a sufficient basis for a satisfactory justification of the claim that persons alone are free and morally responsible. They will therefore find compatibilists’ decision to invoke these differences arbitrary, and will feel that compatibilists have raised them to prominence not because they are in fact more important than others but because only the claim that they are especially deep or central allows compatibilists to arrive at the conclusion they wish to reach. In what follows, I trace libertarians’ reasons for dissatisfaction with compatibilists’ positions on two issues related to freedom of the will and moral responsibility; similar arguments could, I think, be developed about other issues.

Looking Back along the Causal Chain Imagine that we are trying to figure out whom or what to hold responsible for something, say a death by strangulation. We spread out before us a chart of the causes of that event: the victim died because not enough oxygen was reach-

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ing her brain; oxygen could not reach her brain because it could not reach her lungs; it could not reach her lungs because her windpipe was constricted; her windpipe was constricted because fingers were wrapped tightly around her throat, and so on. And we wonder: exactly which of the entities that appears on this chart is responsible for the death? Not, we feel sure, the fingers or the windpipe. But why not? Why, when we look back along the causal chain, do we always stop when we reach a choice made by an agent and say, “The buck stops here”? Libertarians have an answer to this question, and their answer is not wholly implausible. They begin with a general assumption: that when we find that some event which is a part of this chain was entirely determined by that cause (or those causes) which preceded it, we do not hold the entity whose behavior was thus determined responsible for its consequences. Instead, we turn to its predecessor(s) and ask whether it or they can be held responsible. Responsibility, in other words, flows backwards along the causal chain. If it does not encounter a terminus, an event which is not caused by previous events, it continues until it is lost in the obscurities of prehistory (or, on other accounts, until it comes to rest with God). But if it encounters a choice made by a free agent, it stops: since that choice was not determined by any previous event, it could not possibly continue. Compatibilists might point out that this cannot be the whole story. For this account cannot explain why the buck does not also stop at other indeterministic events—why, that is, we do not hold uranium atoms responsible, in exactly the same sense in which we hold ourselves responsible, for whatever effects their emitting one electron rather than another happens to produce. It also seems to imply—on the assumption that there is no God—that the Big Bang is morally responsible for everything that was not caused by an indeterministic event. Finally, it does not allow us to explain why we hold ourselves responsible only for those effects of our actions that we either did foresee or could possibly have foreseen to be the results of our choices. If, for instance, it should turn out that, in tracing back the causes of some appalling natural catastrophe several centuries from now, the first choice one arrived at was my decision to write on freedom of the will, this account would imply that I would be as responsible for the ensuing destruction as I would have been had I chosen to write on this of all unfortunate topics because I knew that it would produce that destruction. Libertarians might reply that while not being caused to choose as we do is clearly not a sufficient condition for moral responsibility, it is a necessary condition. They might, that is, claim that once we arrived at a terminus in the causal chain, we would still have to examine that terminus in order to ascertain whether or not it met some further conditions for moral responsibility, and they might try to answer the objections outlined above by appealing to those further conditions.

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But in that case compatibilists might ask why we could not simply eliminate the requirement that our choices be termini in the causal chain. If even libertarians must concede the need to discover whether further conditions are satisfied before ascribing moral responsibility, then why not claim that these further requirements are the only requirements we need? Libertarians might reply that, on their account, those further requirements do not do all the work needed to determine who or what is responsible for some action or event, and that there is no reason to suppose that any set of further requirements that they might come up with could do so. By following the causal chain until they reach a terminus, they discover what, if anything, was responsible for the event in question; they narrow the field to one individual. Their further requirements need only determine whether that individual could have been responsible for that event, whether it is (so to speak) a candidate for that responsibility at all. If it could have been responsible for that event, and if it is the terminus at which the chain of causes of that event ends, then it is responsible for that event. Analogously, a will specifies who, if anyone, will receive a particular bequest. But the legatee will be entitled to that bequest only if she meets certain further conditions—for instance, only if she did not murder the deceased. These further conditions serve only to specify the class of persons who could possibly be entitled to a bequest from a particular person; they do not tell us who is entitled to it. The existence of these further requirements does not allow us to construct a theory of entitlements to bequests that makes no reference to the will of the deceased—such an account would be unable to determine who, among all the people who did not murder the deceased or violate any of the other conditions on eligibility, is actually entitled to a particular bequest. Since libertarians’ further requirements play a role analogous to the requirement that a legatee not have murdered her benefactor, compatibilists cannot simply take over these further conditions, eliminate the requirement that our choices represent termini in the causal chain, and assume that this will leave them with a coherent explanation of why we ascribe moral responsibility when we do. Such an explanation will give us no way of determining where on that chain we ought to stop, and therefore no way of deciding which of the possible candidates for responsibility for that event is in fact responsible for it.26 Compatibilists might object to libertarians’ assumption that there is a causal chain leading up to every event, a causal chain of the kind that would render intelligible the idea of looking back along it in order to discover at which point 26

I do not assume either that the necessity of coming up with (and explaining) such further requirements will not cause problems for libertarians or that those requirements could not possibly do the work compatibilists need them to do. I wish to argue only that compatibilists must show that those requirements can do that work if they want to use them to address the problem with which this section deals. And this, obviously, is exactly what compatibilists would have had to do had libertarians not introduced any further requirements at all.

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we should ascribe responsibility. They might argue that when I claimed (in the example above) that the tightening of the murderer’s fingers around the victim’s throat caused her to be unable to breathe, what I really meant, or should have meant, was that that was the cause which seems most salient to us. For obvious practical reasons, we commonly overlook such other causes as: the failure of any other person to insert a breathing tube into her windpipe at a point below the murderer’s hands; the murderer’s not having been struck by lightning, swallowed by an earthquake, or deprived of her strength by a sudden fit of paralysis; the victim’s failure to have discovered and then applied to herself a technique of absorbing oxygen through her fingernails; and, in general, the nonoccurrence of any of the events that might have prevented those tightening fingers from having the effects they had. But while we are right not to pay attention to such causes in most cases, they are real causes nonetheless; and any genuine causal chain must take account of them. To make sense of the idea of ‘tracing back the causal chain’, and to ensure that doing so leads to any remotely plausible results, we need a causal chain with (at most) the complexity of a fairly elaborate decision tree. We can make sense of that notion while conceding that several events can combine to cause another. But we cannot make sense of it if this account of causality is correct, since it implies that every event has infinitely many causes and that, even if it were possible to list the causes of an event, by the time we had moved three or four steps back along this vastly expanded causal chain, we would have implicated most of the known universe in our explanation of that event. I will not consider the merits of this view of causality since, while it might create difficulties for libertarians, it cannot help compatibilists. The compatibilist’s problem is to explain how, if mechanism is true, we are to determine who or what (if anything) is responsible for a particular event. I have assumed that the field from which the bearer of responsibility is to be selected is the set of entities whose behavior figures in the causal chain; that is, that causal responsibility is a necessary condition of moral responsibility. The compatibilist’s task is to explain how that entity is to be selected, how we narrow the field to one or none. It may be that I and libertarians have been operating with too narrow a conception of the initial set of entities from which the bearer of responsibility must be selected. But that, if true, can only make the compatibilist’s task more difficult. Compatibilists will surely object to libertarians’ assumption that whenever an event is fully determined by some previous event(s), responsibility must flow backwards to those previous causes, rather than coming to rest on the event which they caused. One must, after all, reject that assumption if one wishes to maintain that responsibility does not continue to flow backwards when the fully determined event in question is a person’s choice; and compatibilists can rightly claim that this assumption begs the question against them.

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Still, however questionable this assumption might be, it does compatibilists no good simply to point out that libertarians have given us no very strong reason to think that responsibility does flow backwards. For compatibilists will need to invoke some variant on this assumption in order to explain why we ought to trace the causal chain back far enough to arrive at our choices in the first place. In the example used at the beginning of this section, the murderer’s decision to strangle her victim did not immediately result in the victim’s death. It caused that death via all sorts of other events: motor impulses, tightening fingers, the closing of the victim’s windpipe, her oxygen starvation, and so forth. To raise general doubts about the claim that responsibility flows backwards along the causal chain might lead us to wonder whether we have any reason to think that it does in fact continue past the murderer’s decision to strangle her victim; but by the same token it should lead us to wonder whether we have any reason to think that it flows back past the tightening fingers to the motor impulses which caused them to tighten, or past those motor impulses to those events in the murderer’s brain that produced them. The problem, briefly, is this. Both libertarians and compatibilists must explain why, of all the entities whose behavior figures among the causes of some event, we ascribe responsibility to persons by virtue of their choices. And both must assume that, in general, responsibility flows back along the causal chain. Libertarians can claim that this rule holds without exception: that responsibility always flows back until it reaches a terminus. Because, on their account, our choices are not caused by anything, they need not claim that we have reason to disregard the rule that responsibility flows backwards when we encounter a choice made by an agent. Because libertarians do not claim that our choices are exceptions to this rule, they need not show that we have reason to make such exceptions; and their account of why, in tracing back the causes of some event, we stop when we reach a person’s choice cannot be accused of arbitrariness. Compatibilists, by contrast, cannot appeal to the structure of the causal chain in order to explain why we ascribe moral responsibility to persons. For mechanism implies that our choices are as fully determined as other natural events and that they are determined in the same sorts of ways. If mechanism is true, then as far as metaphysics is concerned, the causal chain looks like a series of indistinguishable links leading back either to indeterministic natural events or to the dawn of time. Nothing sets the choices of free agents apart; nothing about them suggests that this is where we should stop and ascribe responsibility. Compatibilists must instead claim that because we or our choices have some particular natural property, we have reason to disregard the general rule that responsibility flows backwards along the causal chain when we encounter the choice of an agent. They must therefore explain what it is about our possession of this property that warrants such special treatment. In the absence of such

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an explanation, libertarians will feel that compatibilists’ ascription of moral responsibility to persons is essentially arbitrary. Libertarians will want to know how any natural property could give us reason to ascribe moral responsibility to those who possess it. Should we say that our choices stand out from the crowd because they occur in brains? Because they are more than usually complex? Because they involve the particular kind of natural process we refer to as ‘deliberation’? But why should any of these facts do more than allow us to classify our choices as one rather than another type of natural event? How could they allow us to explain why, in looking back along the causal chain, we stop at choices and ascribe responsibility to the person who made them, or why the general rule that responsibility flows backwards should be abrogated at precisely this point and no other? Compatibilists will, no doubt, give something like the following response: the crucial thing about our choices is that they are made on the basis of reasons, after deliberation, and that they are made by persons who can be asked to explain and justify their behavior and on whom praise and blame might be expected to have some influence. If mechanism is true, however, a given agent’s reasoning and deliberation must be sequences of natural events, and the claim that her choices are the result of reasoning and deliberation can mean only that they had one rather than another type of natural cause. To explain why we have reason to hold persons responsible for the effects of their choices, compatibilists must not only cite some property which only our choices possess (in this case, the property of being caused by reasoning and deliberation) but explain why the fact that choices have this property gives us reason to ascribe moral responsibility to the persons who make them. Therefore, while the fact that our choices are the result of reasoning and deliberation might figure in a compatibilist justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons, it does not constitute such a justification. Nor is it obvious why the fact that persons sometimes respond to praise and blame, or that they are capable of explaining why they behave as they do, should be significant, unless one takes the question ‘why are persons answerable for their behavior?’ in the most literal sense imaginable. One can imagine things that meet both of these conditions but that we would not regard as morally responsible for their behavior. Consider a computer program that was designed to respond to questions about why it did something by offering explanations; that was self-correcting; and that was designed to discover and remedy errors in response not only to failure but to criticism. (“BAD PROGRAM!” we type, and—because it was designed to respond to this input—it searches itself for faults and, if it finds some, corrects them.) While such a program might be able to explain why it does what it does, we do not think it genuinely answerable for its conduct; and while criticism might be an effective form of behavior modification for such a program, praise and blame do not seem to

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be truly appropriate to it in the same sense in which they are appropriate to persons. One way of explaining why we do not take such a program to be either answerable or an appropriate object of moral criticism is that computer programs are written by people. Its programmer completely determined what shape the program took, and its quality depends entirely on her skill (or lack thereof). For that reason we praise or blame the programmer, not the program itself, for whatever flaws or merits it might contain, whether or not it is capable of explaining why it did what it did and whether or not it was designed to correct itself in response to criticism. But if mechanism is true, it is not clear why precisely the same reasoning should not serve to excuse the programmer. She, after all, was also caused to have certain “design flaws”; given those flaws, she can no more avoid writing atrocious code than her program can avoid losing game after game of chess. Both could have avoided their failures had they spotted their errors in time and corrected them; but things, and in particular their “programs,” being as they were, neither could have met this condition. Nothing I have said so far proves, or is intended to prove, that compatibilists could not answer these questions. Perhaps compatibilists could show that some particular natural property of our choices does make it rational for us to ascribe moral responsibility to the persons who make them, despite the fact that those choices are as fully determined by previous events as any other link in the causal chain. But until compatibilists explain this satisfactorily, libertarians will feel that if mechanism is true, we act arbitrarily and without justification when we single out choices from a sea of apparently similar causes, and say: because of this particular event we ascribe moral responsibility to this agent. They will feel that our ascriptions of moral responsibility can only be justified given assumptions which are incompatible with mechanism; and therefore that compatibilists who maintain that their accounts of freedom allow us to explain why we hold ourselves morally responsible for what we do have not really faced the implications of their own views.

Moral Evaluation and Mere Grading Our moral evaluation of persons differs from our evaluation of other objects (or of persons in other respects) in two ways. First, the standards and terms of criticism that we apply to persons when we evaluate them morally are different from those we apply to other objects. Second, our moral evaluation of persons differs from other sorts of evaluation in that it involves not just what J. J. C. Smart calls “grading” or “telling people what people are like,”27 but the imputa27

J. J. C. Smart, “Free-Will, Praise and Blame,” pp. 303–4.

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tion of moral responsibility for their virtues and vices. When we hold persons morally responsible for their conduct, we are not only evaluating them by different standards or using different terms of criticism to describe them. Were this the only difference between moral evaluation and mere grading, we would be unable to distinguish moral evaluation from merely grading a person’s will, since in this case neither the object of evaluation nor the terms of criticism applied to it would differ. But we can and do distinguish the two. We do not think that a stone or an insect could be liable for anything it did, however grave the defects in its stony or buggy nature that its conduct revealed. Nor would it occur to us to think that when we tell people what pool cues are like or discuss the various merits and drawbacks of different strains of wheat, we are morally judging them. By the same token, we do not believe that when we call someone a deliberate, cold-blooded murderer we are simply describing her, or remarking on her defects or her unfortunate constitution, as we would be doing were we to say that she was grotesquely ugly or entirely devoid of talent. When we ascribe a moral fault to a person, we imply that her defects can be attributed to her in some sense that goes beyond the mere imputation of a fault to an object. In so doing, we deploy a type of evaluation that differs from our grading of other things not only in its object and in its standards and terms of criticism, but in kind. To explain the first kind of difference between moral evaluation and our evaluation of other beings, it is sufficient to point out that persons differ from other objects in some way that makes different standards of evaluation appropriate to them. For instance, one might argue that our moral evaluation of persons is essentially concerned to assess the quality of their wills,28 and use this claim to explain why we take some of their behavior to be irrelevant to such assessment (since it does not reflect their wills) and why we regard some persons as exempt from moral evaluation (since their wills are, temporarily or permanently, dysfunctional). One might then try to show that the terms of criticism that we use in moral evaluation reflect what we have reason to want people’s wills, including our own, to be like. The claim that the object of moral evaluation is the quality of the agent’s will allows us to explain why we accept the excuses we do and to understand the rational basis of the terms of criticism we use in moral evaluation. It therefore plays an essential role in an account of moral evaluation. For without a clear understanding of the objects and structure of moral evaluation we would not be in a position to explain why our moral evaluation of persons differs from our evaluation of other objects in the second sense: why only persons can legitimately be held morally responsible for their conduct. 28

This claim is made by P. F. Strawson (“Freedom and Resentment,” pp. 64–7), and by T. M. Scanlon (“The Significance of Choice,” pp. 166–7). The discussion that follows is meant to bring out the limitations on what this claim can establish by itself and not to respond to either Strawson’s or Scanlon’s view as a whole.

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However, this claim does not itself provide that explanation. For we can provide similar accounts of types of evaluation which do not involve ascriptions of moral responsibility. For instance, we evaluate television sets’ quality of reception. We generally want television sets to transmit clear, sharp pictures and fault their reception when they do not. But we also recognize that not every failure to produce such an image reflects badly on a television set’s reception. If, for instance, I put my television’s antenna in my icebox, or if the station to which it is tuned is broadcasting snow, we will not fault its reception. And if I have removed its cathode tube, we will not attempt to evaluate its reception at all. Any type of evaluation, whether or not it transcends mere grading, will be directed at some type of object. If we identify this object and explain in what respect it is to be evaluated, we can explain why not all apparently faulty behavior is to be imputed to it, and try to show that the terms of criticism we apply to it reflect what it is rational to value in a thing of that kind. The particular conditions that we regard as excusing apparent faults and the terms of criticism we use will, for obvious reasons, vary, depending on the object under assessment. The claim that moral evaluation is concerned with the quality of people’s wills identifies the objects of such evaluation, and the respect in which they are to be evaluated. It therefore allows us to explain why we take some behavior to be irrelevant to such evaluation and some persons to be, temporarily or permanently, exempt from it. Explaining why our moral evaluation of persons differs from other kinds of evaluation in these ways is no more problematic than explaining why we regard the ability to cut quickly through a large log as a virtue in a chainsaw but not in a turnip, or why we do not regard persons as exempt from moral evaluation because they lack cathode tubes. But this is because such an explanation simply identifies the objects of moral evaluation as persons’ wills and shows that such evaluation therefore involves accepting certain excuses and employing certain standards. The claim that the objects of moral evaluation are persons’ wills is entirely compatible with the assumption that our evaluation of those objects is mere grading. Therefore, the very feature of this sort of explanation that makes it so unproblematic precludes its serving to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons. To justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons, we have to justify the second sort of difference between our moral evaluation of persons and other kinds of evaluation. Presumably, this justification must appeal to some particular difference between persons and nonpersons in virtue of which persons alone can be said to be appropriate objects of the kind of moral evaluation that transcends mere grading. Generally, this difference is taken to consist in the fact that persons are free and nonpersons are not. But in order to use this claim to justify our attribution of moral responsibility to persons alone, we have to explain exactly which difference between persons and nonpersons

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we are appealing to when we claim that persons alone are free, and why the fact that persons are free in this sense and nonpersons are not justifies the claim that persons alone are morally responsible for their conduct. There are, of course, any number of differences between persons and nonpersons. But not just any difference could be used to justify the claim that only persons are responsible for their conduct. A difference in the way we describe persons, or in the role which the quality of persons’ wills play in our lives, would seem to license only the application of different standards to persons; a difference in the amount of importance which we place on the quality of their will would seem to imply only that we ought to be more than usually concerned with the outcome of our grading of them.29 No such difference could allow us to explain why we think that only persons are accountable for their actions, or that moral evaluation is appropriate to persons but mere ‘grading’ to things. What seems to be required to justify these claims is, instead, some way of making out the claim that our wills are our own, or that we create the characters we have and initiate the actions we perform, in some way in which we do not create or own our beauty or talent and in which nonpersons do not own or create any of their attributes. Libertarianism is obviously designed to meet precisely these requirements. If libertarianism is true, then we do create our characters and cause our actions in a way in which we do not create our beauty or talent and in which no nonperson creates any of its attributes: specifically, we create them without being caused to do so by anything outside ourselves. And our wills are our own in a sense in which no attribute of any nonperson is its own: specifically, what we will is determined solely by us, not (mediately or immediately) by anything outside us. There is therefore nothing other than ourselves that might so much as advance a claim to be responsible for the shape our wills take. The question whether or not we are morally responsible for our choices seems, if libertarianism is true, to be easy to answer: on the one hand, we obviously have a very strong reason to say that we are morally responsible for them; on the other, there is no reason at all to claim that anything else could be. And the difference between our moral evaluation of persons and our evaluation of nonpersons is equally easy to explain: we are un29 The idea that we are justified in ascribing responsibility to persons because of the importance of our evaluation of their quality of will is also open to the following objection: one can imagine that someone might regard some quality for which we do not hold persons responsible as more important than the quality of their will. Academics, for instance, can take the discovery that they are not, in fact, geniuses to be far worse, and far more deeply wounding, than the discovery that the quality of their will is appallingly bad. Yet such discoveries more often lead those who make them to blame fate than to blame themselves, and we think that this is as it ought to be: if someone were to blame herself for not being ravishingly beautiful or tremendously gifted, we would think that she was (in addition) badly confused. But if the basis of our ascriptions of responsibility to persons were the peculiar importance we place on the quality of persons’ wills, those who blame themselves for their lack of talent would simply differ from us about what was important; given that they feel as they do, they would be completely justified in blaming themselves.

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moved movers, while they are caused to behave as they do by other events, according to natural laws. There is therefore every reason to say that we should be held accountable for our behavior whereas they should not. Libertarianism, that is, allows us to explain why we are morally responsible for our conduct by appealing to a difference in kind between the causes of our actions and those of other events. Mechanism, by contrast, implies that no such differences in kind exist. The point of mechanism is to postulate a kind of total metaphysical homogeneity between persons and nonpersons, and between the causes of our actions and those of other events. As I look back at the causes of my actions, I will see a causal chain extending back either to indeterministic events or to the dawn of time. Some links in this chain are the natural events I call “my choices,” and others are not, but there is no difference in kind between the two. If I want to explain why I assign responsibility to myself rather than to any of the other objects which could, with equal justice, be claimed to have caused my action, I will not be able to invoke any unique sense in which I could have done something else while they could not; if mechanism is true, there is no special sense in which persons alone ‘could have done otherwise’.30 I will have to base my explanation instead on the fact that among the causes of my action are my deliberation and choices, and that those phenomena are somehow particularly significant. My explanation of their significance will have to turn either on some particular (“accidental”) feature of deliberation and choice, or on the fact that they are mine. And there is no obvious reason why such an explanation should work—why singling out just these phenomena for special attention does not reflect only favoritism, or a desire to think ourselves important. For all their differences, writers on freedom of the will seem to agree on two points: first, that in order to be morally responsible for something, one must have helped to bring it about; and second, that such causal responsibility is not a sufficient condition of moral responsibility. From the assumption that causal responsibility is a necessary condition of moral responsibility and the libertarian claim that our choices are not caused by any previous event, it follows that no one other than the agent could possibly be morally responsible for her choice. For this reason, libertarians do not have to explain why the agent should be selected from a large field of potential bearers of responsibility, and their account of why we regard her as morally responsible for her choices cannot be accused of arbitrariness. Libertarians can also use their account of human agency to explain the distinction between causal and moral responsibility. One can be causally responsible for something only if one’s behavior figures among its causes, and one can be morally responsible for it only if that behavior was not caused, mediately 30 Both persons and nonpersons could have done otherwise had some cause of their behavior been different; neither could have done otherwise given that things were as they were.

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or immediately, by anything outside oneself. This account of the distinction between causal and moral responsibility allows us to explain both the kinship between the two concepts and the differences between them. On the one hand, each is clearly a type of responsibility: a way in which we can be said to have played a part in bringing something about. On the other, they are clearly different kinds of responsibility. I am causally responsible for something if I played some part in bringing it about. I am morally responsible for something if I not only played some part in bringing it about but chose to initiate the chain of events which led to its occurrence when I might have refrained from doing so, since no antecedent causes forced my hand. The libertarian account of human agency therefore allows us to explain how, in such cases, I can be responsible for something in a sense in which its other causes are not. If mechanism is true, however, our choices are determined as fully, and in the same ways, as other natural events. For this reason, compatibilists cannot use the assumption that causal responsibility is a necessary condition of moral responsibility to show that the only being who could possibly be morally responsible for a choice is the person who made it, since mechanism implies that any number of entities might meet that condition. Compatibilists must therefore explain why we pick out the agent from that field of contenders, and their explanation cannot rely solely on uncontested assumptions about the nature of moral responsibility. Unless compatibilists provide a convincing explanation of this point, libertarians will find their insistence that persons alone are free and morally responsible arbitrary. Nor can compatibilists explain the distinction between causal and moral responsibility as libertarians do. For while compatibilists, like libertarians, can claim that one is causally responsible for something if one’s behavior figures among its causes, they will substitute for the libertarian account of moral responsibility the claim that one is morally responsible for something if one’s contribution to its occurrence included a choice or a volition. This account is less satisfactory than the libertarians’, since it does not seem to allow us to explain the significance of moral responsibility. On the compatibilist account, the claim that I am morally responsible for something states that my contribution to its occurrence included a natural event of a particular kind. If compatibilists could claim that we initiate events of that kind in some sense in which other beings do not initiate their behavior, then the claim that an agent caused something to occur by initiating an event of that kind would allow us to explain why she is responsible for that occurrence in a sense in which its other causes are not. But because compatibilists must claim that our choices are as fully determined as other natural events, it is hard to see how they could show that moral responsibility transcends causal responsibility, rather than being one among the many forms that causal responsibility might take.

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It is for this reason that libertarians see mechanism as a threat to moral responsibility. Why, libertarians will ask, do we hold murderers but not landslides responsible for the deaths they cause? Ought implies can, and therefore the claim that the murderer ought not to have killed her victim implies that she could have refrained from doing so. But if mechanism is true, then her murder, and all that led up to it, were as inevitable as the landslide’s course. The murderer could have refrained from killing her victim had she chosen to do so; likewise, the landslide could have slid harmlessly down the hill had it miraculously changed its course. Things being as they were, both events were equally likely. Compatibilists might claim that the murderer can choose not to kill her victim in the same sense in which an oxygen atom can unite with two hydrogen atoms, whether or not it actually does so.31 This is undoubtedly true. But the claim that moral responsibility depends on this sort of capacity only serves to highlight compatibilists’ difficulties. For they must still explain why we hold murderers but not oxygen atoms or landslides responsible for what they do; all three, after all, ‘could have done otherwise’ in the relevant sense. Mechanists believe that the causal laws which lead the landslide down its course lead us down ours as well. Persons, on the mechanist view, are among the many conduits through which natural processes cause events; the actions of persons differ from other events in that their causes can include the activities of a self: deliberation, evaluation, choice. But since mechanism implies that there is no metaphysical difference in kind between the self and the rest of the world, or between its actions and other natural phenomena, compatibilists can point to no sense in which persons could have done otherwise while nonpersons could not. Neither could have done otherwise in an absolute sense; both could have done otherwise had some natural cause of what they did been different. The claim that persons are free, on the mechanist view, can mean only that the natural processes on which their actions depend may take the rather baroque forms we call deliberation, evaluation, and choice. But since, if mechanism is true, a person’s choice is simply one among many natural events, all equally determined by past events, it is not clear why the fact that the murderer’s actions depend on states of her brain, while the landslide’s depend on meteorological and geological conditions, should lead us to hold her but not the landslide responsible for what she does. In the absence of an explanation of this point, compatibilists’ insistence that the fact that we can choose our actions makes us morally responsible will seem to libertarians merely arbitrary. To libertarians, it will seem that mechanism, in subsuming the self in the world, has sacrificed precisely those features of the distinction between persons and nonpersons that might have led us to think that distinction fundamental, 31

This response is discussed by Daniel Dennett in Elbow Room, p. 145.

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and to see in it the basis of a justification of our intuitive beliefs about moral responsibility. Mechanism weakens the intuitive distinctions between persons and nonpersons and between freedom and its absence, and implies that many of their features must be rejected. Libertarians suspect that the slender structures that remain are too slight to bear the weight of our humanity. And their suspicion has at least a prima facie plausibility, since among the features of those distinctions with which mechanism is incompatible are those on which our intuitive justification of moral responsibility relies. Mechanism implies that our intuitive justification of our belief that persons are free and responsible agents, and that they are appropriate objects of the reactive attitudes, is untenable. This does not show that no justification of our belief that persons are morally responsible is compatible with mechanism. It does, however, show that compatibilists need to explain how, given their conception of freedom, one could justify that belief. Since mechanism removes our intuitive justification for that belief, it leaves it in need of support. And since mechanism implies that there is no difference in kind between persons and nonpersons, or between the senses in which persons and nonpersons could have done something other than what they did, it is not obvious that compatibilists can explain why, given their account of freedom, the claim that persons are free and responsible moral agents does not reflect a merely arbitrary attitude towards a particular kind of natural causation. In the absence either of a justification of our ascriptions of responsibility or of any reason to think that one can be constructed, we can maintain neither our ascriptions of responsibility, our reactive attitudes, nor our conception of personhood. To lose these things would impoverish both our lives and our conceptions of ourselves; and libertarians are rightly horrified by this “fantasy of the vanishing of the human.”32 For these reasons libertarians’ demands that compatibilists justify their claim that we can be said to be free and responsible moral agents if mechanism is true do not reflect a desire to “overintellectualize the facts”33 or an inexplicable philosophical perversity, but serious and legitimate concerns.

Why Libertarianism Does Not Help Since we need to justify our belief that we are free and responsible moral agents, and since it is unclear that compatibilists can provide such a justification, it is natural to turn to libertarian accounts in the hope that they might show us how our freedom and moral responsibility might be secured. However, libertarian accounts of freedom and moral responsibility are no more success32 33

Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 468. P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” p. 78.

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ful in this regard than their compatibilist counterparts. Libertarians, I have argued, are trying to protect our selves from being subsumed by the world, and so to preserve our intuitive views about moral responsibility and personhood. To do so, they claim that our actions must be caused by selves whose choices cannot be explained mechanistically. But I will argue that they cannot meet the problems raised by mechanism simply by denying that our choices can be explained in its terms.34 Some libertarians claim that our choices are indeterministic natural events. This approach might seem to allow us to claim that our choices are not determined by antecedent events without committing us to such metaphysical extravagances as agent causation. However, if our choices are indeterministic natural events in our brains, it is unclear why we should be held responsible for choosing to perform one action rather than another. If nothing causes those events to occur as they do, a fortiori we do not do so. If we cannot determine what we choose to do, it is unclear why we should regard ourselves as responsible for our choices, or why we should regard the fact that they are indeterministic as affording us the kind of self-determination with which libertarians are typically concerned.35 34 Just as my earlier arguments were intended not to prove that compatibilist accounts of freedom cannot succeed but to explain why libertarians might think that they cannot, the arguments in this section are not intended to decisively refute libertarian accounts of freedom and responsibility. To do so would obviously require more detailed arguments than I provide here. My aim in this section is only to explain why one might doubt that libertarians can provide satisfactory accounts of freedom and responsibility. 35 Some writers, notably Robert Kane, have tried to explain how we can be responsible for what we do even if our choices are indeterministic. I do not have the space to address Kane’s complex arguments in detail. However, I will briefly indicate why I think they cannot succeed. Suppose that, like most people, I recognize that there is something to be said in favor of all sorts of actions that I would normally never dream of performing. I am, for instance, aware that stealing someone else’s car would solve the problem of how to get to work today, or that embezzlement would provide me with the money I need to spend a delightful week in Hawaii. Suppose, in addition, that every so often I feel some minor temptation to perform one of these acts. I have never acted on these temptations; in fact, I have done everything in my power to eliminate them, recognizing that larceny and embezzlement are wrong. In addition, whenever such a temptation arises in me, I make the strongest possible effort to resist it. However, it seems to be humanly impossible to eliminate any tendency to such temptations from one’s makeup. Even the most saintly person will occasionally experience unaccountable desires to do something she knows is wrong, and normally we suppose that virtue consists in resisting these rogue desires, not in never feeling them. If so, then the fact that my constant efforts have not succeeded in preventing me from ever feeling such temptations need not reflect badly on me. Now suppose that such a temptation pops up in me. I am sitting at work, balancing my employers’ books, and all of a sudden I feel a devilish urge to transfer some of their money into my bank account. As usual, I make the strongest possible effort to resist this temptation. On either a compatibilist or an agent-causal account of human action, such an effort might ensure that I will keep to the straight and narrow. However, on Kane’s account our freedom consists (in part) in the fact that such efforts of will are indeterministic. Suppose, then, that while I have always resisted temptation in the past, and while I have made my best effort to resist this temptation, on this occasion my indeterministic effort of will resolves in favor of embezzlement, and I transfer the funds.

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Theories of agent causation are designed to meet these objections. Such theories hold that our choices are not indeterministic natural events, but events that we bring about in an unusual way. Normally, when we say that some object caused some event, we believe that that claim can be translated into claims about events. When we say that a knife caused me pain, for instance, we mean that the knife’s piercing my flesh caused me to feel pain. However, theories of agent causation hold that when we say that an agent causes her choice, we do not mean that some event involving her caused that choice to occur but simply that she herself caused herself to choose as she did. As Chisholm writes, “In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing—or no one—causes us to cause those events to happen.”36 Theories of agent causation are vulnerable to a number of objections. First, agent causal theorists need to explain exactly what relation they take to obtain between an agent and the acts she causes. Generally, writers who defend agent causation claim that the answer to this question is simple: “agent causation, if there is such a thing, is (or involves) exactly the same relation as event causation. The only difference between the two kinds of causation concerns the types of entities related, not the relation.”37 But this is unhelpful in the absence of an explanation of what it means for causal relations to hold between agents and their actions, if (as libertarians insist) the claim that such a relation exists is not equivalent or reducible to the claim that some state of the agent, or some event in whose description she figures, causes her actions. We understand what it means to be someone’s sister. But it does not follow that we understand what it would mean to be the sister of an event. It would not help to be told that our relation to such an event would be exactly the same relation that we now stand in to our siblings. What we need, rather, is an explanation of how we could stand in that relation to an event: how, for instance, our mothers might in some nonmetaphorical sense have given birth to one. Likewise, we cannot assume that it makes sense to say that agents can stand in the same causal relation to On Kane’s view, I am responsible for my crime. I recognized reasons for stealing the money, I felt a desire to do so, I chose to act on it, and I did so noncompulsively. However, it is hard to see why I should regard this choice as one I am responsible for. I have, after all, done everything I could to ensure that I feel as few temptations as possible. I have tried as hard as possible to resist the few temptations that present themselves to me despite my efforts. In particular, I made the best effort I could to resist this temptation. The fact that that effort was unsuccessful is due solely to the fact that it, like any human effort, was indeterministic, and therefore that nothing I could have done would have ensured that I would succeed in resisting temptation. On Kane’s view, therefore, we can appropriately be held responsible for an occurrence we have done everything in our power to avoid. This conclusion seems to me unacceptable, as does the idea that if we recognize that there are some reasons to perform actions we take to be obviously wrong, and feel occasional temptations to do one or another of these actions, we lay ourselves open to wrongdoing for which we are responsible, and which we can do nothing to prevent. 36 Chisholm, “Human Freedom and the Self,” p. 32. 37 Randolph Clarke, “Toward A Credible Agent-Causal Account of Free Will,” p. 197.

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events that other events do, absent some explanation of how an agent can produce an event in some way that is not reducible to event causation.38 Second, as Clarke concedes, “There is no observational evidence that could tell us whether our world is an indeterministic world with agent-causation or an indeterministic world without it.”39 This poses several problems for defenders of agent causation. First, as Dennett has argued, “It is hard to take seriously the idea that something that could matter so much could be so magnificently beyond our ken.”40 More importantly, however, defenders of agent causation need to explain why, if we can have no evidence for the existence or nonexistence of agent causation, we should believe that it exists. They might argue that since observation underdetermines theory choice, we need to adduce nonobservational criteria in deciding between theories, and that these criteria give us reason to prefer theories involving agent causation to those that do not. However, the kinds of nonobservational grounds on which we usually choose among theories—simplicity, parsimony, and so forth—seem unlikely to support agent-causation theories over their rivals, since those theories sacrifice simplicity and, arguably, coherence and parsimony without gaining any explanatory power. Supporters of agent causation argue instead that because their view allows us to maintain our belief in reasons-based explanations41 or in our own moral 38 Clarke does address this question (ibid., pp. 197–8). However, I believe that his account is not adequate. Clarke cites Tooley’s claim that we can define the causal relation “by a set of postulates indicating the role of these relations within the domain of properties and states of affairs.” Clearly, we would need some specific postulates defining a specific relation in order to address the question whether persons could stand in that relation to an event. Clarke provides two criteria which causal relations must meet: they must relate particulars in virtue of their properties (p. 198), and they must relate those properties “under a law of nature” (p. 197). As an example of a law of nature that might relate an agent to the action she causes, Clarke suggests the following: “Suppose it is a law in our world that if an agent possessing [the capacity for reflective, rational self-governance] acts on reasons, then she acts with free will,” where the claim that an agent acts with free will entails that she “causes her acting on the reasons for which she acts” (p. 198). Suppose, that is, that if an agent who is capable of reflective, rational self-governance acts for reasons, she must have caused herself to do so. This law presupposes that we can intelligently describe an agent as standing in causal relations to her actions. For this reason it does not help to clarify that claim or to illuminate the relation an agent must bear to her actions if we are to say that she causes them. 39 Ibid., p. 199. 40 Dennett, Elbow Room, p. 136. One might question this claim on the grounds that some things that matter enormously might well be beyond our ken; thus, for instance, on some accounts the existence of God is unknowable, but it does not obviously follow from this that his existence should not matter to us. However, this response draws some of its strength from the fact that, on many accounts, even if we cannot prove the existence of God now, if he does exist we will eventually come to know him whether we wish to or not. Were we doomed to remain forever ignorant of God’s existence, it would be harder to explain why it should matter to us. Since it seems unlikely that agent causation will ever make itself known to us as God might, we do not have the same sorts of reasons for supposing that it should matter to us. 41 Timothy O’Connor, “Agent Causation,” p. 195.

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responsibility, we have reason to adopt it. This is not an appeal either to observational evidence or to the criteria that normally govern theory choice. It is an appeal to the tremendous importance to us of features of our selfconception that we cannot maintain unless we believe that we are free. Libertarians have criticized compatibilists like P. F. Strawson, who have relied on such appeals to justify the claim that we are free and responsible agents. I argued above that they are right to do so: that a satisfactory account of freedom and responsibility must allow us to rationally justify the claim that we are free and responsible agents, and that one cannot do this by pointing out that it is very important to us to think that we are. No libertarian who accepts these arguments should accept with equanimity the idea that she can provide no rational support for the claim that we are free. Even if libertarians can answer these two objections, however, it is unclear that appeals to agent causation would allow them to escape the problems posed by mechanism. On the intuitive view described at the beginning of this chapter, our selves deliberate, reflect, and make choices. They are selves of whose activities we are in general aware, and of which we might reasonably ask why they choose to perform one action rather than another. But I will argue that libertarians cannot identify the selves that they describe as freely choosing our actions with the selves of whose activities we are aware, and therefore that, by libertarians’ own standards, the idea that our choices are determined by such selves offers no advantages over mechanism. Consider the possibility that natural causes might fully determine all of our mental states and processes except for our choices. Those causes would allow us to explain, in detail, why a given agent notices certain reasons for action and overlooks others, the strength of her desires to perform or avoid certain courses of action, the trains of thought she entertains before choosing and those she leaves unexplored, the temptations to which she is subject, the strength with which she resists them, and, in general, everything involved in her evaluation of the alternatives among which she chooses. Only her choice itself would be uncaused. Suppose further that we always choose to act in accordance with these deliberations. In this case, those natural events that govern our deliberations would constitute sufficient conditions for our making a particular choice. Some libertarians might believe that sufficient conditions for the occurrence of some event constitute its causes. To such libertarians, the possibility I have just described would amount to mechanism. For if our choices reflect our motives, the reasons for action of which we are aware, our evaluation of our alternatives, and so forth, then in causing us to have certain motivations, to evaluate our alternatives in a particular way, and so forth, the natural world will also create sufficient conditions for our making some particular choice. If sufficient 42

Clarke, “Toward A Credible Agent-Causal Account of Free Will,” pp. 199–200.

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conditions constitute causes, then in such cases our choices are caused by natural events and are therefore not free. Such libertarians would therefore reject as incoherent the idea that while all of our other mental states and processes could be fully determined by natural causes, our choices might nonetheless be free. Other libertarians might think that the claim that our choices are not caused by natural events is compatible with the possibility that all of our other mental states are fully determined by natural causes. For if sufficient conditions do not constitute causes, then the fact that the natural world fully determines our evaluation of the various courses of action available to us would not show that it causes us to make any particular choice. However, such an account would offer libertarians no real advantages over mechanism. For, on this account, natural causes would fully determine the entire course of our evaluation of our alternatives, thereby determining what we would want to choose. The fact that our choices themselves would not be caused by any external factors—that although the world would fully determine our understanding and awareness of our grounds for choice, we would nonetheless be free to choose any action we wish, and that our choices would therefore “miraculously initiate a series of causes”43—simply introduces a metaphysically bizarre loop into the explanation of our actions without gaining any genuine freedom.44 Suppose instead that while the natural world determines the course of our deliberation, thereby determining what we want to choose, our choices themselves are not determined; and that we do not always choose to do what, in deliberating, we have concluded we want to choose to do. In some cases we might be torn between two alternatives, unable to discover any decisive reason to favor either, and unwilling simply to call a halt to our deliberation and pick one course of action at random, when all of a sudden a choice comes over us for no reason we can recognize. In other cases we might conclude that we would prefer to do one thing and suddenly find ourselves having decided to do another, not because we succumbed to weakness of will as traditionally understood, but for no reason. In this case, it is hard to see why we should call 43

I take this phrase from Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” p. 23. On this account, our situation would be like that of the animals discussed earlier in this chapter. Like those animals, we would have the nominal freedom afforded by the ability spontaneously to initiate courses of action. But like those animals, while we could choose as we please, what it was our pleasure to choose would be wholly determined by past events. In discussing libertarians’ account of our differences from animals, I claimed that, on that account, the fact that we can reflect on our alternatives and choose among them allows us to develop the nominal freedom of action that animals possess into genuine freedom of the will. But on the libertarian account, this capacity can perform this function only on the assumption that all our activities, including those mental activities involved in considering and evaluating our alternatives, are themselves spontaneous. Because, in the case under consideration, the activities of our selves (with the exception of our choices) are not spontaneous, our possession of such selves would allow us only (what libertarians should regard as) nominal freedom. 44

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these choices ours, or why we should hold ourselves responsible for making them. And since our freedom would consist in our ability to act against our own assessment of our various motives, reasons, and so forth, it is not clear why anyone would think it desirable. On any of the alternatives just described, we would not be free in any satisfactory sense if the world governed all of our mental lives except for our choices. If we always chose in accordance with our deliberation, our freedom could only involve the implementation of decisions whose content was determined by natural causes. If we did not, then our freedom would consist either in implementing such decisions or in performing actions we do not regard ourselves as having reason, all things considered, to perform. In the first case, freedom is not significant; in the second, it is not desirable. To be free in a sense that libertarians should find significant and desirable, we must be capable of acting freely without irrationality; and this requires that we be able not only to make choices which the world does not cause us to make but to look beyond the reasons the world will lead us to see and to evaluate them independently. Libertarians might try to show that we are capable of evaluating our courses of action independently by arguing that external events do not influence our mental states in any way that might threaten this ability. The world, they might argue, provides us with a stage on which to act, choices to be made or avoided, and a set of (physically available) alternatives from which to choose. But no external events cause us to notice some of its features and overlook others, to take only certain features of our alternatives as reasons to perform or avoid them, to follow out certain trains of thought while leaving others unexplored, or to evaluate the courses of action available to us as we do. For this reason we can be said to evaluate those courses of action independently and to decide, free from the world’s interference, which we will choose to perform. However, a libertarian who asserted this would face the unenviable task of explaining a whole host of phenomena that suggest that external events have constant and pervasive effects on our state of mind and our powers of judgment. If libertarians concede that external events do affect the activities of our selves, they must concede that, unless our freely choosing selves intervene, those events will determine our conception of our reasons for action. For the freely choosing self is the only thing besides the external world that could possibly affect our evaluation of our alternatives; and therefore, without its intervention, external causes would determine the course of that evaluation and its results. Any libertarian who does not deny that external events can influence mental states must therefore hold that the world will determine what we will want to do unless the freely choosing self intervenes. This implies that my freely choosing self cannot be identical with the self of whose activities I am aware. That self is the one that is caused by the external world to be aware of certain reasons for action and not others and to view

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some as compelling and others as negligible. The external world causes it to take a particular view of its grounds for choice and so (absent intervention) determines what it will choose to do. If external events lead me to overlook some reason for action, then I cannot intervene to make myself notice it, since ex hypothesi I have overlooked it. If external events lead me to regard some reason for action as compelling, then I will not intervene to question its strength, since ex hypothesi I regard it as compelling. If the libertarians’ freely choosing self were identical with the self that was influenced in these ways, then it would not be able to evaluate its reasons for action independently or to view those reasons in any way other than that in which the world had determined that it would view them, since (by definition) it would see no reason to. If the freely choosing self is to be capable of intervening to make me see reasons for action that the world would not lead me to see or to consider again a possible course of action that the world would lead me to dismiss, then it must instead be thought of as causing me to see my reasons for action differently. It must be thought of as rivaling, and as capable of outweighing or triumphing over, the external causes that lead me to view my reasons for action in a particular way; as standing behind my consciousness, directing its activities, leading it to consider possibilities it might otherwise have overlooked, and causing it to see its dilemmas in a light different from that provided by nature. This view of the self mirrors some of the more troubling features of the mechanist’s. On both accounts, my deliberations are controlled by something. I do what it wants me to do and think what it wants me to think. The difference, according to libertarians, is that on their account I am that something. But it is not clear in what sense my freely choosing self is me. The self I know is the self of whose activities I am conscious, the one who does the deliberating. I have argued that the libertarian self must be seen as guiding, not identical with, that self; as leading me to follow a certain line of reasoning, not as me following it. Without my freely choosing self, the external world would cause me to deliberate in a certain way and to choose to perform a certain action. My freely choosing self, if it intervenes, must lead me to consider reasons I would have overlooked, or to overlook reasons I would have considered, because it recognizes that the course of action that external causes would lead me to prefer is the wrong one. My freely choosing self, in short, controls my consciousness. While I may know what reasons the self of whose activities I am aware had for thinking and acting as it did, I cannot know why my freely choosing self led me to see those reasons as salient. (It may be deceiving me.) I cannot know in advance where it will lead me, nor can I try to control it, since it would control my attempts to do so. If I could identify myself with my freely choosing self, I would conclude that while I am morally responsible for my actions, since I freely choose them, I do not know why I act as I do, since the workings of my

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self are utterly mysterious to me. But I cannot identify myself with this freely choosing self, if only because this question arises in my consciousness; because it is the self of whose activities I am aware that is asking with whom it is to be identified. Because I must identify myself with the self of whose activities I am aware, I must see the freely choosing self that directs my deliberations as something other than myself, and I must conclude that I am in the same position with respect to it as, on the mechanist view, I am in with respect to the world. In both cases something (or someone) other than myself, and over which I have no control, directs my thoughts and my actions. In both cases libertarians’ own account of moral responsibility implies that I am not morally responsible for my choices and my actions, since I am caused to choose as I do by something other than myself. Being controlled by a freely choosing self, if that self is not my own, poses as great a threat to my moral responsibility and personhood as being controlled by the world. These problems cannot, I think, be avoided by any plausible libertarian view. Mechanism forces us to confront the possibility that our choices themselves might be caused by natural events. Once she recognizes that possibility, a libertarian who wishes to maintain that we are free has three choices. The first is simply to deny that natural events can have any influence on those choices, either by causing them directly or by causing us to want to choose some particular course of action. But this claim is implausible. The second is to admit that natural events can cause us to make particular choices but to claim that this does not imply that we are not morally responsible for making those choices. But this is the compatibilist position; to adopt it is to abandon libertarianism. Finally, one could try to argue that something else affects our choices and judgments and that that something is capable of overriding natural causes. But to view this as a solution to the problem posed by mechanism is to mistake the nature of mechanism’s threat to our moral responsibility. The problem is not that natural causes in particular might determine what we choose to do in a particular situation but that anything outside ourselves might do so. If, as I have argued, the libertarians’ freely choosing selves must be thought of not as identical with the selves of whose activities we are aware but as something more like guardian angels, then this third alternative cannot help us to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility. This conclusion will not, of course, allay libertarians’ concerns. For all I have said thus far, mechanism might still have the implications they fear; I have argued only that their own position is no less problematic. But these arguments do imply that behind their concerns about personhood and moral responsibility lies a deeper problem: that we no longer understand what it is about ourselves that makes the attribution of moral responsibility appropriate to us. We cannot maintain our view of ourselves as free and responsible moral agents without some confidence that this view can be justified. Compatibilists can point to any number of differences between persons and the rest of the

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natural world, but they have not shown how those differences could possibly have the kind of significance they would need to have were they to serve as the basis of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons. In the absence of such an explanation, their accounts seem arbitrary. Libertarians appear to answer these questions, and so to justify our views about personhood, only if one does not scrutinize their account of the self. This means that we may already be in the situation libertarians feared that mechanism would produce: one in which we cannot justify some of our most fundamental beliefs about ourselves. The arguments made above suggest that as long as the problem of freedom of the will is thought to turn on the question whether our choices are caused by something outside ourselves, these difficulties cannot be surmounted. And this in turn suggests that the best way to extricate ourselves from that situation is not by libertarian metaphysical fiat, but by providing an account of freedom and moral responsibility that explains how libertarians’ concerns can be met whether or not our choices are caused by natural events. In the chapters that follow I will attempt to provide such an account.

2 Theoretical and Practical Reason

IN CHAPTER 1 I discussed the reasons why a libertarian might think that mechanism implies that we are neither free nor morally responsible for our conduct. My solution to this problem relies on the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning and between the standpoints from which we engage in them. In this chapter I explain what theoretical and practical reasoning are, why we engage in practical reasoning, and what the relationship between these two forms of reasoning is. I conclude that theoretical and practical reasoning do not conflict but complement one another, and therefore that the legitimacy of claims made from the practical point of view is not called into question by theoretical reasoning; that the practical point of view is one we legitimately adopt for purposes we cannot abjure; and that no plausible theoretical conclusion could eliminate or threaten the need to engage in practical reasoning. In the chapters that follow I will attempt to derive a compatibilist account of freedom and moral responsibility from the requirements of practical reasoning.

Standpoint Arguments My argument in this book will run roughly as follows. There are (at least) two different standpoints from which we can consider human actions: the standpoints of theoretical and practical reasoning. The claims we make from these two standpoints may differ, but this fact does not impugn the legitimacy of those claims or of the standpoints from which they are made. Our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility are based on the requirements of the practical standpoint; when we occupy that standpoint, we find that we have every reason to regard ourselves as free and to hold ourselves morally responsible for what we do. When we occupy the theoretical standpoint, however, we seem to have no reason to employ concepts like freedom and moral responsibility at all, and in particular no reason to apply them to human actions, since we have left the standpoint from whose requirements our reasons for regarding ourselves as free and responsible agents are derived. The libertarian objections to compatibilist accounts of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility discussed in the last chapter seem as convincing as they do because they accurately describe human actions as seen from the standpoint of theoretical reasoning: from that standpoint, there is no difference in kind between the actions for

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which we normally hold ourselves responsible and those for which we do not. Libertarians’ mistake, I will argue, is to look to the theoretical point of view for a justification of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility, and to conclude that if that point of view affords no such justification, then our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility cannot be justified at all. This type of argument is obviously open to charges of vagueness and vacuity. It is, after all, easy to assert that arguments leading to apparently contradictory conclusions are each valid “from a different point of view,” but much more difficult to show that this is more than an attempt to evade the requirements of the law of noncontradiction. To show that one is not simply ducking the issues one must answer three questions. First of all, how are the two standpoints related to one another? Do differences in the claims made from the two standpoints constitute a genuine conflict? If not, why not? Second, what reason do we have to adopt the standpoint from which we ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons? Third, why, from that standpoint, do we have reason to regard persons as free and to hold them responsible for their actions? Without an answer to the first question, one cannot use a standpoint argument to establish the legitimacy of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility. We generally assume that when two arguments lead to incompatible conclusions, one of those arguments must be wrong. We might therefore wonder whether an argument that asserts that we have reason to ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons from one standpoint but not from another would not simply show that one of those standpoints was illegitimate. It is incumbent on those who wish to make such arguments to explain why this objection does not succeed, either by showing that the incompatibility between the claims made from the two standpoints is merely apparent or by explaining how we can accept incompatible conclusions without irrationality. Until such an explanation has been given, the fact that claims that appear to conflict with our ascriptions of freedom and responsibility can legitimately be made from other standpoints calls into question the legitimacy of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility, and of the standpoint from which they are made.1 1

It is especially important to provide such an explanation when one invokes a distinction between standpoints in order to justify our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility. The existence of a genuine incompatibility between claims that different standpoints entitle us to make shows only that one of those standpoints is illegitimate. Therefore, a failure to show that there is no genuine incompatibility between mechanism and our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility would not directly impugn the latter, since it would leave open the possibility of challenging the legitimacy of claims made from the standpoint from which we do not have reason to ascribe responsibility to persons. However, that standpoint is the one we adopt when we engage in scientific inquiry, and, for the purposes of this book, I will assume that the legitimacy of scientific inquiry is not seriously in question. Given this assumption, if I fail to show that mechanism does not conflict with our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility, I must conclude that the latter are illegitimate.

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To answer this question, it is not sufficient to claim that we cannot adjudicate conflicts between claims made from different standpoints without assuming the existence of some philosophically suspect “absolute standpoint” that allows us to describe the world “as it really is.”2 It may be that some conflicts between different standpoints are merely apparent and that the attempt to adjudicate these conflicts is misguided or empty. But not every purported distinction between different standpoints is of this kind, nor does simply calling something a standpoint place the claims made from it beyond question.3 For instance, I might distinguish the “reasonable” and “wish-fulfillment” standpoints. From the reasonable standpoint I have more or less realistic expectations about the time it will take me to write this book. From the wish-fulfillment standpoint, however, I believe that tonight as I sleep a band of tiny elves will file into my room, each bearing a sheet of neatly typed and cogently argued prose on my chosen topic. In this case I feel not the slightest hesitation about saying that claims made from these two standpoints are in genuine conflict or about deciding which is correct. And I do not think that in doing so I commit the sin of metaphysical presumption. The claims made from these two standpoints seem to conflict because they do conflict, and we need not yield to an illusion to imagine that we can decide between them. Unless one shows that claims made from the standpoints on which one’s argument relies are not in genuine conflict, one’s argument will take this form: Given claims which appear to conflict with other claims whose truth is not seriously in question, define a standpoint from which the first set of claims is made; assert that conflicts between claims made from different standpoints cannot be adjudicated; and conclude that the fact that claims that one wishes to defend seem to be contradicted by other claims that one does not believe to be false is no argument against them. Obviously, this sort of argument establishes nothing whatsoever. The second question that anyone who wishes to make a standpoint argument must answer is: What reason do we have to adopt the standpoint from which we ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons? Without an answer 2

P. F. Strawson makes such an argument in Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, p. 38: “The appearance of contradiction arises only if we assume the existence of some metaphysically absolute standpoint from which we can judge between the two standpoints I have been contrasting. But there is no such superior standpoint—or none that we know of; it is the idea of such a standpoint that is the illusion. Once that illusion is abandoned, the appearance of contradiction is dispelled.” 3 One might, of course, define a standpoint as a point of view from which we make legitimate claims. If the claims that some standpoint gives us reason to make were by definition legitimate, then the attempt to adjudicate conflicts between them might be misguided for the reasons Strawson describes. But if we define standpoints in this way, then anyone who wanted to appeal to a standpoint argument to justify our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons would have to show that the “standpoints” to which she appeals are in fact standpoints in this restricted sense. To do so, she would have to show that their claims do not conflict with one another; this would amount to answering my first question in a slightly different form.

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to this question, one cannot explain what reason we have to regard persons as free and responsible. It may be true (if my first question is answered) that claims made from other standpoints do not call our ascriptions of freedom and responsibility into question and (if my third question is answered) that the requirements of the standpoint under consideration imply that, from that standpoint, we have reason to regard persons as free and to hold them responsible for their conduct. At that point, one would have established the legitimacy of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility. But until one has explained whether that standpoint is one we must adopt, one it might occasionally be useful to enter, one we can adopt or not as we please, or one we should try to avoid entirely, one cannot show that we have reason to regard persons as free or to hold them responsible for their conduct. This question is not answered by the claim that, as a matter of psychological fact, we cannot help adopting the standpoint from which we regard persons as free and responsible.4 For even if we assume that we cannot give up that standpoint altogether, it is clearly possible not to adopt it in particular cases: to regard someone as, say, an object that emits its behavior in response to certain stimuli and not as a person who is answerable for her conduct.5 And if it is possible to decide not to adopt that standpoint in particular cases, there is no reason why we might not try not to adopt it in as many cases as possible. Even if in fact we could never succeed in giving it up altogether, we might view success in this enterprise as we view moral perfection: as an ideal that we ought to strive to approximate as completely as possible, even if we can never fully realize it. In neither case would the knowledge that we can never completely succeed make the attempt impossible or misguided. This being the case, it seems to me entirely legitimate to ask whether, and when, we have any reason to adopt the standpoint from which we ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons, even if we assume that we cannot entirely avoid doing so. The third question that anyone who wishes to use a standpoint argument to justify our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility must answer is: What reason does the standpoint in question give us to ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons? Without an answer to this question, obviously, an appeal to that standpoint, however legitimate its claims and however compelling our reasons for adopting it, cannot be used to justify our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility. The easiest way to answer this question is to define the standpoint under consideration as the standpoint from which we ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons (or, alternatively, as that from which “human behavior appears as the proper object of all those personal 4

This argument is made by P. F. Strawson in “Freedom and Resentment,” pp. 68–70; and in Skepticism and Naturalism, pp. 32–3. 5 As Strawson notes in “Freedom and Resentment,” pp. 66–7; and in Skepticism and Naturalism, pp. 34–5 and 39–40.

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and moral reactions, judgments and attitudes to which, as social beings, we are naturally prone”).6 Such an account would make it unnecessary to argue for the claim that the requirements of that standpoint give us reason to ascribe freedom and responsibility to persons, since that claim would be true by definition. Unfortunately, such an account would also prevent one from using an appeal to different standpoints to answer either my first or my second question. Because it would give the standpoint under consideration no content independent of the ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility made from it, the only way to show that we can legitimately adopt that standpoint, despite the fact that the claims made from it appear to conflict with claims made from other standpoints, would be to argue directly that those other claims do not in fact conflict with our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility. Likewise, the only way to show that we have reason to adopt that standpoint would be to argue directly that we have reason to ascribe freedom and responsibility to persons. If one defines the standpoint under consideration as the standpoint that we adopt when we ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons, an appeal to that standpoint cannot add anything whatsoever to a justification of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility; and an argument that relies on it will leave the problems raised in my first chapter untouched. If we want to use a standpoint argument not simply to recast the need to justify our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility in different terms but to show that freedom of the will and moral responsibility are compatible with mechanism, we must begin by defining the standpoint from which we ascribe freedom and responsibility to persons without reference to the claims that can be made from it. We can then try to show that its claims are not in genuine conflict with claims made from other standpoints and to determine what reason we have to adopt it. Because we have not defined this standpoint in terms of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility, we may be able to answer these questions without just arguing directly that our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility do not conflict with mechanism and that we have reason to make them. If this standpoint is not defined in terms of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility, we will have to argue for the claim that its requirements give us reason to ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons, instead of taking this to be true by definition. This leads to a further condition on a successful standpoint argument: our account of the standpoint from which we justify our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility must be precise enough to allow us to determine, to the extent needed to justify our ascriptions of freedom and responsibility, what its requirements are, and which claims we have reason to make from it. Only thus will we be in a position to argue that 6

P. F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 35.

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its requirements give us reason to ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons.7 I have argued that any successful standpoint argument must address three questions. In this and the chapters that follow I will address them. In this chapter I will explain how theoretical and practical reasoning are related to each other, show that they can license us to make different claims that are not in genuine conflict, and explain what reason we have to engage in practical reasoning. In the chapters that follow I will argue that the requirements of practical reasoning give us reason to claim that persons are free and that they are morally responsible for their conduct.

Theoretical and Practical Reasoning: What This Distinction Is Not My justification of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons is based on the distinction between the standpoints we adopt when we engage in theoretical and practical reasoning. I use the terms ‘theoretical and practical reasoning’ with some misgivings, since the distinction I will draw between these two forms of reasoning differs in several respects from those drawn by other writers on this topic. First of all, I do not assume that all reasoning must be either theoretical or practical. As I will explain, by theoretical reasoning I mean the various forms of description and explanation: physi7 This is, I think, one reason why the distinction between standpoints which Thomas Nagel describes in The View From Nowhere does not allow him to develop an account of freedom that he finds satisfactory. Nagel describes the standpoint from which we regard ourselves as free only as “the internal perspective of agency.” This description does not give Nagel the resources to say anything about the claims that perspective gives us reason to make or even to argue that there might in principle be such claims. For this reason he can only argue that we seem to ourselves to be free when we act, not that we have reason to regard ourselves as free. And therefore he cannot use his distinction between standpoints to show that the internal perspective of agency is more than “a form of clouded subjective appearance” (p. 114). Nagel’s task is made more difficult by the fact that he identifies the “objective view” with the view of ourselves as “part of the order of nature” (p. 110), which “admits only one kind of explanation of why something happened—causal explanation” (p. 115). In so doing he identifies objectivity with the form of objectivity appropriate to what I will call theoretical reasoning, and thereby implies that any point of view other than the essentially theoretical objective view must aspire to theoretical objectivity but fall short in some respect. This assumption prevents Nagel from considering the possibility that when, in deliberation, we adopt the internal perspective of agency, we engage in a distinct kind of reasoning that aims at its own standard of objectivity and whose claims might therefore be as fully justified as scientific claims, even though they are not made from the same standpoint. By implicitly assuming that we could maintain a conception of ourselves that differed from the naturalistic one (for instance, by allowing for genuine autonomy) only by refusing to pursue our reflections to the point of full objectivity, at which we would have to give that conception up, Nagel virtually ensures that “the inner view of the agent,” as he conceives it, will not be able to “stand up to the debilitating effects of a naturalistic view” (p. 110).

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cal, psychological, historical, and so forth; and by practical reasoning reasoning aimed at determining the will. Some forms of reasoning—for instance, mathematics—do not fit neatly into either category. However, I see no need to explain how such anomalous forms of reasoning relate to practical reasoning, since they do not threaten our freedom and moral responsibility. It is not coincidental that those forms of reasoning that are thought to threaten our freedom and moral responsibility—in particular, scientific and psychological explanations of human actions—are on my account clearly theoretical. The aim of theoretical reasoning is to describe and explain events, ideally showing them to be either the necessary result of antecedent conditions or (if they are indeterministic) not susceptible to further explanation. The particular threat posed to our freedom and moral responsibility by scientific and psychological reasoning stems from the possibility that, in principle, they might provide such explanations of our actions, thereby leaving it unclear in what sense we could legitimately claim to be free or to be morally responsible for the direction of our lives. It is because they are types of theoretical reasoning that are applicable to human behavior that scientific and psychological reasoning threaten our freedom and moral responsibility. Therefore, to counter this threat I need only consider the relation of practical reasoning, from whose requirements I will derive our concepts of freedom and moral responsibility, to theoretical reasoning, whose aim of completely explaining (among other things) human behavior seems to threaten them. Were someone to make the implausible claim that mathematical reasoning threatens our freedom and moral responsibility, that threat would have to be entirely different from that which I consider here; and therefore it would have to be answered by other arguments. Second, while the terms ‘theoretical and practical reasoning’ describe the kinds of reasoning I will refer to more accurately than any others I can think of, many writers who have used those terms have not drawn the distinction between theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning as I will draw it, and my decision to use these familiar terms may be misleading. I will therefore describe some respects in which I will not distinguish theoretical and practical reasoning before presenting my own account of that distinction.8 I do not wish to claim that theoretical and practical reasoning differ in the sense suggested by investigations into the ‘special logic of prescriptive utterances’. I am not trying to distinguish among different modes of inference, or between deontic logic and other logics. If this were the sole difference between two forms of reasoning, then these forms of reasoning would operate on the same claims but license different inferences among them. In this case the two forms of reasoning would be in genuine conflict: to accept both we would 8 I do not wish to argue that theoretical and practical reasoning do not differ in these respects; only that such differences, should they exist, are not the basis of the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning on which my arguments will rely.

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have to admit as valid the application of different logics yielding incompatible conclusions to the same objects. To show that two forms of reasoning involving different modes of inference are not in genuine conflict, we must appeal to some other difference between them. We might claim, for instance, that theoretical and practical reasoning involve the application of different concepts or the investigation of distinct fields of inquiry and try to explain why these differences make different forms of inference appropriate. In neither case could we show that theoretical and practical reasoning are not in genuine conflict simply by citing the different modes of inference appropriate to each. Whether or not theoretical and practical reasoning do differ in this way is irrelevant for my purposes, and I will not appeal to any such difference. I do not see the distinction between the theoretical and practical points of view as a distinction between two standpoints that allow us to describe the world in different idioms (for instance, in moral and scientific terms). Such a distinction would not allow us to resolve the problems set forth in chapter 1. We can accept claims made in different idioms as different ways of describing the same object or event only if we believe that they are in fact compatible; that one does not assert something that the other denies. Perhaps the claim that a given act was performed freely is simply a way of describing in moral terms an event that might be described, using a different idiom, as the inevitable result of its causal antecedents. But if one wanted to argue that this was so, one would first have to show that those two descriptions do not contradict one another; that freedom is in fact compatible with mechanism. Therefore, any attempt to defuse the conflict between mechanism and freedom of the will by arguing that terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘moral responsibility’ are part of a nonscientific descriptive idiom would be circular. I will not claim that theoretical and practical reasoning are distinguished primarily by their subject matters: for instance, that theoretical reason investigates facts, practical reasoning investigates values, and the fact/value distinction secures the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning.9 To 9 The distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning is not, and does not presuppose, the distinction between statements of fact and judgments of value. I will define practical reasoning as reasoning whose aim is to determine the will, and not all judgments of value are formed for this purpose. If I examine the engine of a car I am about to drive in the Daytona 500 because I want to discover any defects it might have and fix them, then my examination would be motivated by practical concerns. But I might examine its engine without having any intention of acting on my discoveries. Que sera sera, I might think: if the gods have given me a cracked engine block then I would not presume to interfere with their designs. But I might nonetheless like to know in advance whether my car will disintegrate at the first turn or glide to victory. In this case I could make an exhaustive catalog of its merits and defects in a purely theoretical spirit. It might nonetheless be true that evaluative judgments are primarily practical—that we can understand why we take some features of an object to be merits and others to be defects only with reference to the role of these judgments in our practical reasoning, and therefore that our ability to evaluate its merits and defects “in a purely theoretical spirit” essentially depends on our having determined, for practical purposes, which of its features we will take to be merits and which to be defects. But this claim, if true, gives us all the more reason not to define the distinction between

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conceive of theoretical and practical reasoning as carrying out similar investigations of different sets of objects or properties is to envisage the relation between the two as analogous to that between astronomical and zoological reasoning, and is therefore to regard the results of theoretical and practical reasoning as bodies of knowledge established by reasoning of essentially the same kind and distinguished only by their objects. Such a distinction would not allow us to show that the conflict between mechanism and freedom is merely apparent. For the claims that a study of one kind of object leads us to make can have implications about quite different kinds of objects. When this happens, two bodies of knowledge concerning different objects can conflict. When such a conflict occurs, we cannot dismiss it as merely apparent on the grounds that the two bodies of knowledge in question concern different objects. For at least one of those bodies of knowledge purports to establish claims that concern the objects described by the other, and that imply the falsity of beliefs which the other takes to be true. For this reason we cannot accept both bodies of knowledge as correct without accepting the truth of beliefs that are in genuine contradiction. We must adjudicate such conflicts either by modifying our beliefs about one of the types of objects in question or by showing on some other grounds that the contradiction between the two is merely apparent. Likewise, if theoretical and practical reasoning were distinguished primarily by the objects or properties that they investigate, then we could not appeal to this distinction to explain why mechanism is not in genuine conflict with freedom of the will and moral responsibility. The problem of freedom of the will consists in the fact that a theoretical position, mechanism, seems to imply the falsity of certain practical claims: that we are free, and that we are morally responsible for our conduct. If mechanism does in fact imply that we are neither free nor morally responsible, then we can no longer regard the bodies of knowledge established by theoretical and practical reasoning as separate. We might resolve the apparent conflict between them by showing on other grounds that mechanism does not imply that we are not free. But we cannot resolve it by claiming that theoretical and practical reasoning investigate different kinds of objects or properties and therefore establish separate bodies of knowledge, since we could regard those bodies of knowledge as separate only if the conflict between mechanism and freedom of the will had been resolved on other grounds. Finally, I will not argue that theoretical and practical reasoning are distinguished by the kinds of claims that they give us reason to make: for instance, theoretical and practical reasoning in terms of the fact/value distinction. For if we claim that evaluative judgments can be understood only with reference to their role in practical reasoning, and define practical reasoning as reasoning which investigates values, then we will be unable to say anything informative about either practical reasoning or evaluative judgments, since we will have defined them in terms of one another.

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that any reasoning which establishes factual claims is theoretical and any reasoning which establishes normative claims is practical. In later chapters I will argue that we must employ particular concepts of freedom and moral responsibility in order to determine what we have most reason to do; that these concepts are such that our ordinary ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility are more or less correct; and therefore that the requirements of practical reasoning justify our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons en route to other goals. Whether or not my arguments work, it is surely possible in principle that some such arguments might. But if theoretical and practical reasoning are distinguished by the kinds of claims they give us reason to make, then the fact that our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility are not themselves normative claims would imply that they must be established by theoretical reasoning. If they were established in the course of practical arguments then, on this account, we should conclude not that they are practical claims but that theoretical and practical reasoning are not distinct, since one train of reasoning establishes both the “theoretical” claim that we are free and the “practical” claim that we have reason to perform some action. For this reason, such an account of the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning would preclude a justification of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons that was based on an appeal to that distinction. Moreover, were I to define theoretical reasoning as reasoning that establishes factual claims and practical reasoning as reasoning that establishes normative claims, then to show that theoretical and practical reasoning are in fact distinct I would have to show that normative and factual claims are distinct. I would therefore have to respond to writers like John McDowell, who argue that normative claims describe “genuine aspects of reality.”10 Because I do not define the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning thus, I need not address this question. Where they have any normative force, statements about the virtue of an agent, the value of states of affairs, or the rightness of actions must be established by practical reasoning. Given an independent account of the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning, I would be in a position to explain how these claims differ from those established by theoretical reasoning. Whether, given such an explanation, we should say that objectively justifiable normative claims state facts (because they are objectively justifiable) or not (because their justification is in some respects unlike that of ordinary factual claims) would be a separate issue. Thus far I have claimed that the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning cannot help us to resolve the problem of freedom of the will if we construe it as a distinction between forms of reasoning that use different modes of inference or descriptive idioms, concern different subject matters, or estab10

John McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. 175.

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lish different types of claims. To describe theoretical and practical reasoning as involving different points of view supports these claims. To look at an object from two different points is not to look at different objects, nor to look at the same object subject to different laws of optics, nor to look at it from the same point but describe it in different terms (say, as a naturalist and as a poet). Still, one might wonder how this metaphor can be extended to reasoning. To talk about different standpoints or points of view is to suggest that from those points of view things look different. But one might wonder how things can look different from the standpoints I discuss since, from those standpoints, we might reason about the same things, using the same modes of inference, and in the same terms.

The Distinction Between Theoretical and Practical Reasoning I will define the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning as a distinction between types of reasoning undertaken for different purposes, and the distinction between the theoretical and practical standpoints as defined by this difference in purpose.12 The purpose of practical reasoning is to determine the will, to answer the question ‘What should I do?’13 Its aim is to ascertain what we have reason to do or not to do, to determine the relative importance of these various reasons for action, and thereby to arrive at a decision that we can regard as justifiable. Practical claims are those claims whose justification 11 These are some of the most natural ways to interpret the claim that we can consider human actions from two different points of view. If I am right to claim that distinctions of these kinds cannot help us to resolve the problem of freedom of the will, then anyone who wishes to use a standpoint argument to address that problem must explain clearly the kind of distinction on which her argument will rely and the kinds of conclusions which an argument relying on that distinction can establish, in order to show that her argument is not vulnerable to the objections just discussed. Most writers who have used standpoint arguments have not considered these questions explicitly but have written as though the idea of a distinction between standpoints did not require elucidation or explanation. This is, I believe, one reason why their arguments have not succeeded in convincing libertarians. 12 Here and elsewhere my account of the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning draws on Kant’s (cf. Critique of Practical Reason, Ak. 14–5, 89–91, and 120–1). I am indebted to John Rawls for discussion of these topics. 13 Practical reasoning is not, on my account, exclusively concerned with determining what we morally ought to do. I have said that practical reasoning aims to answer the question ‘What should I do?’; I understand that question in the widest possible sense, one which takes no position whatsoever on the kinds of considerations which might be relevant to answering it, and which allows it to be glossed, in some cases, as ‘What would be the virtuous thing to do?’, ‘What do I feel like doing at the moment?’, ‘What would be in my long-term interests?’, and so forth. A professional assassin trying to figure out from which vantage point to try to shoot her target, an executive trying to determine how best to advance her career, and a twelve-year-old trying to decide whether or not to see Surf Ninjas for the fourth time are all engaging in practical reasoning as I understand it.

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essentially involves practical reasoning. The purpose of theoretical reasoning is to describe the world insofar as this can be done without engaging in practical reasoning and to discover what causal connections exist between the objects and events that figure in that description. Theoretical claims are those claims that the best current theory takes to be descriptive or explanatory, excluding only those claims whose justification essentially depends on practical reasoning. On this account, any reasoning whose aim is to describe and explain the world is theoretical unless the claims that it aims to establish can be justified only by practical reasoning. Theoretical reasoning therefore includes not only physical explanations of events (including human actions) but explanations of actions that refer to the agent’s beliefs, goals, and desires, or that employ other psychological terms. Moreover, descriptions and explanations of those events that constitute an agent’s practical reasoning are themselves theoretical. By contrast, any reasoning whose aim is to determine what the reasoner should do is practical, regardless of the idiom in which she describes her alternatives. For instance, I might ask myself, “Should I get up and get a soda?” or “Should I [insert here the description that a particle physicist might give of my getting a soda]?”; either question would be answered through practical reasoning. I have defined theoretical reasoning as reasoning whose purpose is to describe and explain the world insofar as this can be done without engaging in practical reasoning. I include this qualification because, as noted above, I do not wish to take a position on the question whether or not practical claims state facts or are genuinely descriptive. This qualification might seem to undermine or trivialize the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning. Without it, we could say simply that theoretical reasoning aims to describe and explain the world, and practical reasoning to determine the will; and therefore that theoretical and practical reasoning are devoted to tasks that seem, intuitively, to be quite different from one another. But if practical claims constitute genuine descriptions, then the two forms of reasoning would seem to be distinguished only by the kinds of description at which they aim. The distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning might therefore seem to reduce to the third type of distinction I discussed above, which takes theoretical and practical reasoning to carry out essentially similar investigations of different objects. I do not think that this objection holds. If practical reasoning establishes objectively justifiable claims, then we may or may not wish to say that these claims state facts or describe “genuine aspects of reality.”14 But we engage in practical reasoning not in order to describe reality more fully or to represent it more accurately, but to determine what we have reason to do. This is not to say that we are indifferent to the accuracy of these descriptions, if descrip14

McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” p. 175.

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tions they be: reason as such seeks to arrive at justifiable claims, and therefore if we consider practical claims as descriptions, we will of course want them to be accurate. The point is, rather, that when we engage in practical reasoning, we are not interested in those claims qua descriptions at all. In this sense it is true without qualification that only theoretical reasoning aims to describe the world; for while practical reasoning may succeed in doing so, this is not its goal. In general, to say that some claim is justified from a practical point of view is just to say that it can be justified through some sound chain of practical reasoning. Those claims that can be so justified are valid practical claims. Practical claims include claims about which action one has reason to perform in a particular situation, which kinds of actions we have reason to perform in general, which sorts of facts provide us with reasons for action, and how different sorts of reasons might be weighed against one another. Call an account of practical reasoning that answers the more general questions listed above and that implies answers to (suitably many) questions about what we have reason to do in particular cases a substantive account of practical reasoning. Such an account would explain which sorts of arguments can legitimately be used to justify answers to the questions listed above and in virtue of what those answers can be said to be right or wrong. I will not attempt to provide a substantive account of practical reasoning in this book. My justification of our employment of the concepts of freedom and moral responsibility will not rely on any such account, or even on the claim that such an account can be provided (i.e., that answers to those questions can be objectively justified at all). I wrote above that to say that some claim is justified from a practical point of view is to say that it can be justified by some sound train of practical reasoning. But because I will not attempt to provide a substantive account of practical reasoning, my use of that phrase in this book will be narrower, since I will not be able to say of any claim whose justification depends on any particular substantive account of practical reasoning that it is justified from a practical point of view. I will be able to say that some claim is justified from a practical point of view only if the attempt to figure out what we have reason to do itself gives us reason to make that claim, regardless of how that attempt is to be carried out.15 I will argue that any attempt to determine what we should do gives us reason to employ the concepts of freedom of the will and moral responsibility. That I take those arguments to constitute a justification of our employment of those 15 This is one reason why I describe my arguments as based on the standpoints that we adopt when we engage in theoretical and practical reasoning, rather than on the distinction between those forms of reasoning themselves: the distinction between a particular point of view and what we see when we occupy it is analogous to the distinction between what is involved in any attempt to determine what we should do and what that attempt, if carried out correctly, would reveal.

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concepts shows that I am committed to a partial account of practical reasoning: to the claim that one way in which practical claims can be justified is by showing that any attempt to engage in practical reasoning gives us reason to accept them, whatever substantive account of practical reasoning we hold. But this does not commit me to any further claims about what other forms, if any, valid practical reasoning might take.

Do Theoretical and Practical Reasoning Establish Conflicting Claims? A demonstration that our employment of the concepts of freedom and moral responsibility is justified from a practical point of view would not show that our employment of those concepts is justified sans phrase. For it would leave open the possibility that the practical point of view itself might be illegitimate, in which case justifying our employment of those concepts by appealing to the requirements of practical reasoning would be on a par with justifying the claim that one embodies all known virtues by appealing to the requirements of the wish-fulfillment standpoint. If theoretical and practical arguments lead to genuinely incompatible conclusions, our first response should be to scrutinize those arguments, hoping to find some error which explains their incompatibility. But if no such errors can be found, we would have to conclude that either theoretical or practical reasoning is itself illegitimate. Since the legitimacy of theoretical reasoning is not in question in this book, I would have to respond to such a conflict by concluding that practical reasoning is illegitimate, thereby abandoning any hope of justifying our employment of the concepts of freedom and moral responsibility by appealing to its requirements. I will now try first to sketch, in general, the relation between theoretical and practical reasoning, and then to show that the claims they establish cannot conflict.16 It is generally assumed that moral properties in particular, and practical properties in general, supervene on other properties—that if, for instance, two situations differ in no respect discernible to theoretical reasoning, it would be irrational to claim that some action was right in one situation but wrong in the other.17 It is also generally assumed that no set of theoretical claims about some 16 In this section I will consider only the possibility that some sound practical argument might establish or presuppose the truth of some claim that theoretical reasoning shows to be false. One might suppose that theoretical reasoning would also conflict with practical reasoning if it showed to be true some factual claim that implies that practical reasoning is pointless, futile or misguided. If theoretical reasoning had such implications, it would more properly be described as showing that we have no reason to engage in practical reasoning than as directly conflicting with practical claims. I will therefore consider this possibility in the next section of this chapter, when I discuss whether or not we have reason to engage in practical reasoning, and will leave it aside for now. 17 Cf. R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals, pp. 80–1.

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situation is equivalent to a claim about what, in that situation, we should do. This does not, I assume, mean that we cannot appeal to theoretical claims when we try to establish claims about what we should do, or that no amount of reasoning could possibly license the conclusion that, given the truth of those theoretical claims, we ought to perform one action rather than another. But it does imply that even given a complete theoretical description of some situation, the question what, in that situation, we should do would remain to be answered in a sense in which, once we have ascertained that some figure is a triangle, the question whether it has three sides does not. These two assumptions, both of which I accept, suggest the following picture of the relationship between theoretical and practical reasoning: when we engage in practical reasoning, we attempt to determine what we have reason to do. But we cannot advance any claims about what we have reason to do in a particular situation in the absence of any information about that situation. If we were asked what an agent about whom we knew nothing should do in a situation whose nature was not specified, we could give no answer whatsoever. We might, however, be able to determine what principles that agent should use to answer that question. We might, that is, be able to justify norms that would yield particular conclusions about what she should do given further information about the agent herself, her situation, and the alternatives open to her. Such norms might hold that we have reason to perform certain kinds of actions, to try to cultivate a character of a certain kind, or to try to realize certain states of affairs; and they might also tell us how conflicts among the reasons provided by these norms should be resolved. The justification of these norms might depend on other theoretical claims; if so, these claims would figure as premises in that justification. These norms do not directly imply that we have reason to perform any particular action. Instead, they specify criteria that we can use to determine whether or not a given action is one we have reason to perform, and they imply claims about what particular action we have reason to perform in a given situation only given the additional premise that that action meets those criteria. The justification of any such norm must itself be practical: only on the basis of reasoning about what we have reason to do can we conclude that we have reason to perform actions of a given type, to try to realize certain kinds of states of affairs, and so forth; and only on the basis of practical reasoning can we conclude from the fact that an act or state of affairs is of that kind that we ought to perform or realize it. In some cases, the criteria that our norms imply that we should use to determine what we have reason to do may themselves be practical. For instance, we might conclude that we have reason to try to develop those character traits that would make us most likely consistently to perform those actions that we have most reason to perform; in this case the concept of a virtue would be defined in terms of that of right action. But if we are to be able to apply these

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norms at all, not all of our practical concepts can be defined in terms of one another. For instance, if we accepted the definition of a virtue stated above, then if we defined right action as action in accordance with virtue, we would be unable to conclude that any particular action was right or that any particular character trait was a virtue. At some point, then, our practical norms must have as their criteria of application properties of actions, agents, or states of affairs that are not themselves ascribed on the basis of practical reasoning. One might suppose that there could be practical claims that did not depend on such reasoning—for instance, claims that describe an independent moral order that we perceive through a special faculty of moral perception or rational intuition. But in order to show that some claim that accurately describes our experience provides us with a reason for action, we must not only have such perceptions but engage in practical reasoning; for only practical reasoning can allow us to conclude from the fact that some object has some property which we can perceive or intuit that we have reason to perform some action. This is true regardless of the faculty through which we perceive that property. For this reason we could not directly perceive or intuit the fact that we ought to perform some action, but at best could perceive or intuit the existence of some property that some sound practical argument shows to be the criterion by which we should determine whether or not any action should be performed or avoided, any state of affairs realized, or any character trait cultivated. Like theoretical claims, the claim that some act, state of affairs, or character trait possesses this property describes and explains our experience; like theoretical claims, it could constitute a reason for action only given some practical argument that shows that we should regard it as one. I therefore see no reason to regard that claim as a practical claim, or to think that the faculties through which we perceive such properties provide us with a kind of experience a description and explanation of which would not properly be provided by theoretical reasoning. Our practical norms tell us which facts, if true, would constitute reasons for action, which actions they would provide reasons for performing, and which of those reasons should prevail in case of conflict. Whether or not one wishes to claim that the answer to such a question states a fact, it cannot be included among the facts over which that question ranges. For this reason, the criteria of application of our practical norms must ultimately be theoretical, and our claims about what we should do in specific situations must depend on our theoretical knowledge. Because the application of our practical norms of conduct depends on the theoretical properties of actions, states of affairs, and so forth, practical properties must supervene on theoretical properties. For this reason, a recitation of the theoretical properties of the actions available to us would provide us with all the information we would need to determine which of those actions meets the criteria of any standard of conduct we might wish to live by. But because the question which standard of conduct we should employ, and thus which

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theoretical criteria we should use to determine which of the actions available to us we should perform, can be answered only by engaging in practical reasoning, such a recitation would leave open the question what, in the situation at hand, we have most reason to do. We might say that theoretical reasoning provides the data for practical reasoning and that practical reasoning manipulates these data, in accordance with procedures of its own devising, in order to arrive at conclusions about what we have reason to do. The fact that practical reasoning must use the data provided by theoretical reasoning, without providing any data of its own, explains why practical properties supervene on theoretical properties. And the fact that practical reasoning must perform some operation on these data, and that the nature of this operation is determined by practical reasoning, explains why the theoretical facts about situations, actions, agents, or states of affairs leave questions about their practical properties open. This sketch of the relation between theoretical and practical reasoning allows us to see, in general terms, why justified theoretical and practical claims cannot conflict. Theoretical reasoning attempts to describe and explain our experience; practical reasoning to determine what, given the facts that theoretical reasoning has established, we have reason to do. Because theoretical reasoning is indifferent to the question which of the claims it establishes provide us with reasons for action, it will neither establish nor contradict the norms that practical reasoning justifies as answers to that question. And because the facts that practical reasoning specifies as the criteria that we should use to determine the application of those norms are theoretical, the particular practical claims that those norms give us reason to make must supervene on, rather than conflict with, the claims established by theoretical reasoning. More specifically, practical claims can be divided into three groups. Particular practical claims concern what a given agent has reason to do in a particular situation. General practical claims concern the kinds of things we have reason to do in some type of situation, or in general. Claims that are justified by the practical point of view are those practical claims (if any) that any attempt to determine what we should do gives us reason to make. Each of these three types of practical claims might conflict directly or indirectly with theoretical claims. A practical claim is in direct conflict with a theoretical claim if it is a claim that some sound theoretical argument shows to be false. It is in indirect conflict if it presupposes the truth of such a theoretical claim.18 I have defined theoretical reasoning as reasoning whose aim is to describe and explain the world insofar as this can be done without engaging in practical reasoning, and practical reasoning as reasoning whose aim is to determine what we have reason to do. And I claimed above that no theoretical claim can 18

This division was suggested to me by T. M. Scanlon.

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be equivalent to a claim about what we have reason to do. If so, then no theoretical argument could possibly have as its conclusion any claim about what we have reason to do, and therefore no particular or general practical claim could be in direct conflict with any theoretical claim. General and particular practical claims often presuppose the truth of theoretical claims. But leaving aside for the moment the possibility that they might presuppose the truth of some claim that is justified by the practical point of view and that itself conflicts with some theoretical claim, they do so in a way that ensures that no general or particular practical claim that we have reason to accept can conflict with true theoretical claims. Practical reasoning, as I have described it, does not provide us with an independent method of establishing the truth or falsity of theoretical claims. Instead, it attempts to determine what we have reason to do given the facts established by theoretical reasoning. When theoretical claims figure in practical arguments, therefore, they do so as premises whose truth or falsity is established by theoretical reasoning. If theoretical reasoning shows that some claim whose truth is presupposed by a practical argument is false, it shows that one premise of that argument is false and therefore that that argument is not sound. Some other sound practical argument might establish the same practical conclusion; in that case that conclusion would not depend on the truth of the theoretical claim in question. But if all valid arguments that support that practical conclusion do presuppose the truth of that theoretical claim, then to discover that that claim is false is just to discover that the practical conclusion that presupposes it is unwarranted. If, for instance, I believe that I should leave my house now in order to be on time for a meeting at three o’clock, then the realization that that meeting was in fact scheduled for four o’clock should lead me to conclude that I do not need to leave now after all. If I believe that it is permissible to perform actions of some kind only because I think such actions harmless, then if I discover that they are not harmless I should conclude that I cannot permissibly perform them. If some sound practical argument showed that I could have reason to obey the moral law only if I had the capacity to initiate courses of action without being caused to do so by any antecedent event, then the discovery that I lack this capacity should lead me to conclude that I do not have reason to obey the moral law. In none of these cases should I conclude from the fact that some practical claim that I accept presupposes the truth of some theoretical claim that I discover to be false that theoretical and practical reasoning are in genuine conflict, since that discovery shows my practical argument to be unsound. If a general or particular practical claim presupposes the truth of some theoretical claim, then our reasons for accepting it are conditional on the truth of that theoretical claim. For this reason no general or particular practical claim that we have reason to accept could ever presuppose the truth of any theoretical claim that theoretical reasoning shows to be false; and therefore no such practi-

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cal claim could ever be in indirect conflict with any theoretical claim. Since I have already argued that such claims could not conflict directly with any theoretical claim, I conclude that no general or particular practical claim that we have reason to accept can conflict with any true theoretical claim. The only remaining sources of conflict between theoretical and practical reasoning are those practical claims, if any, that we have reason to make in virtue of adopting the practical point of view itself. If such claims were in genuine conflict with theoretical claims, we could not simply reject some particular practical argument as unsound. We would instead have to conclude that the practical point of view was itself a source of unavoidable error. In order to determine whether those claims might conflict with theoretical claims, we must determine what kinds of practical claims the practical point of view might give us reason to make. Such claims do not include those claims for which our practical reasoning is itself evidence, for instance, the claim that we can engage in practical reasoning. We might not know that that claim was true if we had never actually tried to determine what we had reason to do. But that is not because the requirements of practical reasoning themselves give us reason to make that claim but because the existence of practical reasoning, considered as an activity of whose existence we can be aware, is evidence for its truth. On my account, that claim is itself theoretical; and should we discover that it contradicts some other true theoretical claim, that conflict would have to be resolved within theoretical reasoning. For similar reasons, a conflict between some claim whose truth is presupposed by the possibility of engaging in practical reasoning and any other true theoretical claim would not constitute a conflict between valid theoretical and practical claims. It is the task of theoretical reasoning to describe and explain our experience, and any contradiction between theoretical claims and those claims whose truth is presupposed by the possibility of practical reasoning, considered as an activity which we can be aware of engaging in, would be a theoretical problem.19 Engaging in practical reasoning does not give us reason to accept those claims (if any) that practical reasoning causes us to believe. That we are caused to believe something does not imply that we have any reason to believe it; and any attempt to justify practical claims by arguing that deliberation causes us to believe them, or by construing the idea that the practical point of view has requirements as recording a form of psychological necessity, is doomed to failure. 19

If theoretical reasoning established the truth of some claim that implied that we could not engage in practical reasoning, that would not show that theoretical and practical claims were in genuine conflict, for if practical reasoning does not exist, it cannot establish any claims. However, it would show that our attempts to engage in practical reasoning are doomed to futility and therefore that we have no reason to try to engage in practical reasoning. I will therefore return to this question in the next section.

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Adopting the practical point of view does not give us reason to affirm those claims that must be true if we have reason to engage in practical reasoning, since from the fact that we have adopted the practical point of view it does not follow that we must regard ourselves as having reason to do so. I argued above that if a claim about what we have reason to do presupposes the truth of some theoretical claims, our reasons for accepting it are conditional on the truth of those claims; this is as true of the claim that we have reason to engage in practical reasoning as of any other claim about what we have reason to do. Therefore, if theoretical reasoning gave us reason to reject some claim whose truth was presupposed by our having reason to adopt the practical point of view, it would follow not that theoretical and practical reasoning were in conflict but that we had no reason to engage in practical reasoning. Nor does adopting the practical point of view give us reason to affirm those claims (if any) whose truth is presupposed by the claim that practical reasoning yields objectively justifiable conclusions. For the fact that an objective justification of practical claims depends on the truth of some theoretical claim is not a reason to think that that theoretical claim is true; nor does the attempt to determine what we have most reason to do require that we regard our answers to that question as objectively justifiable.20 I defined claims that are justified by the practical point of view as those practical claims that any attempt to engage in practical reasoning gives us reason to make. That engaging in practical reasoning either causes us to accept some claim or makes sense only if we accept it does not give us reason to think that claim true. By engaging in practical reasoning we might provide evidence for the truth of some claim, but since neither the claim that we engage in practical reasoning nor those claims for which it is evidence are practical claims, neither is required by the practical point of view in the sense under discussion. These are the only ways in which I can imagine that the practical point of view might directly show some claim to be true. If it cannot give us reason to accept any practical claims by any of these routes, then there are no practical claims that are in this way justified by the practical point of view itself. Instead, any practical claims that are justified by the practical point of view must involve what I will call practical concepts. 20

The attempt to determine what we have most reason to do does require that we be able to attach some meaning to the idea of justifying and supporting practical claims; since if any answer to the question what we have most reason to do were as good as any other, we could not try to establish such an answer through reasoning. However, it does not require that we regard such answers as objectively justifiable, i.e., as answers supported by arguments that no one could reasonably reject. The point of engaging in practical reasoning is secured by the assumption that such claims can be justified by arguments that the agent does accept: that some courses of action would reflect her deepest convictions and values better than others. If this assumption were false for some agent, it would follow not that theoretical and practical reasoning were in genuine conflict but that that agent had no reason to engage in practical reasoning.

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I argued earlier that practical reasoning carries out operations of its own devising on the data provided by theoretical reasoning. When we reason about some set of objects, we must construct concepts that mark some of those objects as playing particular roles in our reasoning. Thus, when we perform arithmetical operations on numbers, we construct concepts like those of a divisor, a product, or a sum, by which we mark certain numbers as playing particular roles in those operations. When we engage in theoretical reasoning, we construct similar concepts, for instance, the concepts of an explanatory hypothesis, of evidence, and of the best explanation of a given event. Likewise, when we engage in practical reasoning we must construct concepts that we require in order to perform the operations involved in practical reasoning, for instance, the concepts of a reason for action and of the action one has most reason to perform. In what follows I will refer to these as practical concepts. The practical point of view does not in the first instance give us reason to make practical claims, but to employ practical concepts. I have already described one such concept: the concept of the action one has most reason to perform. I argued that the criteria of application of that concept must ultimately be theoretical, but that our reasons for employing any particular set of theoretical criteria to determine what we have most reason to do are practical, and therefore that the claim that any action that meets those criteria is the one that we have most reason to perform depends on both theoretical and practical claims. Any concept that we have reason to employ in virtue of adopting the practical point of view would have to be structurally similar to this one. We define practical concepts to play particular roles in our attempts to determine what we should do. The criteria by which some practical concepts are applied might themselves be practical. But the practical claims on the basis of which those concepts are applied must ultimately supervene on theoretical claims, since the arguments provided thus far imply that practical reason does not provide us with any claims about particular objects that do not supervene on those objects’ theoretical properties. There are some practical concepts—for instance, the concepts of an agentcentered prerogative, of a deliverance of moral intuition, and of reflective equilibrium—that we have reason to construct only given some particular substantive view about the form practical reasoning should take. Since I defined claims that are justified by the practical point of view as practical claims that any attempt to determine what we should do gives us reason to make, regardless of our substantive views of practical reasoning, no claim involving such a practical concept is justified by the practical point of view. Any claim that is justified by the practical point of view would have to involve a concept that any attempt to engage in practical reasoning gives us reason to employ. But not all such concepts can allow us to justify such claims. For instance, because I have defined practical reasoning as reasoning that at-

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tempts to determine what we have most reason to do, the concept of ‘the act we have most reason to perform’ is one that any attempt to engage in practical reasoning gives us reason to employ. But the claim that some particular act is the one that we have most reason to perform is not itself justified simply in virtue of adopting the practical point of view, since any account of the particular criteria that we should use to determine which act we have most reason to perform must itself depend on substantive practical arguments. Only a concept that any attempt to determine what we should do gives us reason to employ, and the criteria of whose application are themselves fixed by the requirements of engaging in practical reasoning rather than by substantive practical arguments, could allow us to make the kinds of claims that I have described as justified by the practical point of view. They would, in particular, allow us to justify the general practical claim that the concept in question applies to all objects that meet those criteria. And this general claim, with the addition of the theoretical premiss that some particular object meets those criteria, would allow us to make particular practical claims that we could describe as justified by the adoption of the practical point of view itself. Like claims about the actions we have most reason to perform, however, these claims will supervene on theoretical claims rather than being in potential conflict with them. In discussing one standpoint argument, David Wiggins writes that it “seems . . . to rest on the idea that there can be two standpoints or perspectives, P(1) and P(2), upon some act of mine . . . such that P(1) is incompatible with P(2) and yet both are defensible. But what has this defensibility to do with truth? The law of non-contradiction assures us that one or other standpoint must be based on an illusion. If the supposition that real alternatives exist is an integral part of normal deliberation, and if determinism is true and shows that it was already fixed long beforehand which action the man would choose, then deliberation itself must involve some kind of illusion, however necessary an illusion.”21 This is an objection that anyone who wishes to make a standpoint argument must respond to. For standpoint arguments can seem to be nothing more than attempts to demonstrate the legitimacy of believing contradictory claims, and the burden is on those who make such arguments to show that these appearances are misleading. If the arguments made above are correct, I can respond to this objection. Wiggins seems to assume that the claim that we have real alternatives requires the falsity of determinism. If we grant this assumption for the sake of argument, then if one standpoint shows that we must regard ourselves as having real alternatives while the other shows that determinism is true, those standpoints establish claims that are in genuine conflict. Since, like Wiggins, I accept the law of non-contradiction, and since that law does imply that both of the claims 21

David Wiggins, “Towards a Reasonable Libertarianism,” p. 48. Galen Strawson makes the same point in Freedom and Belief, see especially pp. 74–5.

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in question could not be true, I agree that in the case Wiggins describes we would have to reject one of the standpoints in question as illegitimate. If the claims established by theoretical and practical reasoning were in genuine conflict, therefore, I would have to abandon my attempt to justify the claim that we are free and responsible moral agents on the basis of the requirements of practical reasoning. On my account, however, theoretical and practical reason do not establish genuinely conflicting claims. There are claims that only practical reason gives us reason to make, and that therefore do not appear from a theoretical point of view. However, this is not because theoretical reason gives us reason to deny these claims but because it is indifferent to the question what we have most reason to do, and therefore it will not establish either the truth or the falsity of claims concerning the proper application of practical concepts.22 Theoretical reason will simply be silent on practical questions, and thus its claims will not be in direct conflict with practical claims. Nor will theoretical claims be in indirect conflict with practical claims. As before, practical reasoning simply specifies the criteria by which certain concepts are to be applied, but the question whether or not any object meets those criteria is itself theoretical. Practical claims must therefore supervene on theoretical claims; and while the claim that some practical concept is appropriately applied to some object must always 22 This is not to say that theoretical reason will never establish claims that use practical concepts or claims about the ways in which some agent applies those concepts, only that it will not establish claims about their proper application. Theoretical reason obviously makes claims in which practical concepts appear. However, it employs those concepts only in ways that rely either on claims about some agent’s practical reasoning or on conclusions established by practical reasoning generally. As an example of the first sort of case, we might explain why an agent performed some action by citing her belief that that action was morally required. In this case, we would not need to concern ourselves with the correctness of that belief, since the fact that the agent held it is sufficient to explain her action (cf. Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality, ch. 1). As an example of the second, we might explain some event by citing the moral properties of some previous event or state of affairs; for instance, we might explain why slavery was abolished in part by citing its wrongness (cf. Sturgeon “Moral Explanations,” in Sayre-McCord, ed., Essays on Moral Realism). If my account of practical reasoning is correct, in such an explanation it must be possible in principle to replace the claim that slavery was wrong with the claim that slavery had those theoretical properties that lead us to conclude that it meets our criteria for wrongness. And if we were later to conclude that we had been mistaken about our criteria of wrongness and therefore that the fact that slavery had those theoretical properties did not show it to be wrong, we would retain the explanation which cites those theoretical properties but not that which cites its wrongness. That an explanation which employs practical terms can in principle be replaced by an explanation which cites only the theoretical criteria by which that term is applied is, I take it, no objection to counting the first explanation as genuine. But it does imply that the truth of that explanation depends on our assumption that the practical term in question is in fact correctly applied to all and only those objects that meet those criteria. For this reason, the appropriateness of using practical terms in theoretical explanations depends on our having already determined which theoretical properties we should use as the criteria by which those practical terms should be applied. And answering this question is a practical task.

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presuppose the truth of some theoretical claims, it will be conditional on the truth of those claims, rather than in potential conflict with them. Because there are claims that only practical reason gives us reason to make, theoretical and practical reasoning can give us reason to make different sets of claims. If they did not, we would have no reason to regard the theoretical and practical standpoints as distinct; and therefore we could not hope to justify the claim that we are free and responsible agents by appealing to this distinction. But because justified theoretical and practical claims cannot conflict with one another, these differences show only that theoretical and practical reasoning aim to answer different sets of questions, and that not all claims that figure in the answers to one set of questions must figure in the answers to another. They do not imply that we should regard either the theoretical or the practical point of view as a source of illusion or error.

What Reason Do We Have to Adopt the Practical Point of View? I have argued that justified theoretical and practical claims cannot conflict with one another and therefore that the fact that theoretical and practical reasoning establish different claims should not lead us to reject either as illegitimate. If these arguments are sound, then any claims that we can establish through practical reasoning are legitimate. But this does not show that we have reason to engage in practical reasoning or that theoretical reasoning could not establish some claim that implies that practical reasoning is impossible, pointless, or futile. In this section I will argue that no plausible theoretical claim could imply that we do not have reason to engage in practical reasoning. Presumably, some people are not capable of engaging in practical reasoning. The severely insane, for instance, might have such chaotic or discontinuous mental lives that they could not be described without qualification as engaging in reasoning of any kind. However, I will assume that any theoretical claim that implies that sane adults under normal circumstances are not capable of engaging in practical reasoning is for that reason untenable. This assumption is open to question only if one’s conception of “reasoning” is so exalted as to make it a serious question whether any reasoning has ever actually occurred or whether those who believe that they have engaged in reasoning hold that belief only because they do not recognize what that enterprise would involve. Since I will not appeal to any such conception of reasoning, I see no need to consider the question whether it does, or could, exist and no reason not to take the claim that we can and do engage in practical reasoning as stating a simple and obvious truth.

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Some theoretical claim might imply that our practical reasoning never actually affects our behavior. If this were true, practical reasoning would be pointless. The purpose of practical reasoning is to determine our will, and thereby our actions. Were theoretical reasoning to inform us that our practical reasoning never had any effect on our behavior, we would have no reason to engage in it. But absent appeals to huge coincidences, preestablished harmonies, or some other explanation of why we so often seem to decide what to do and then do it, this conclusion cannot be squared with the facts as we know them. Some theoretical claims—notably, determinism—might seem to imply the truth of fatalism: the view that it is irrational for us to try to decide what to do since our fate is already sealed. For, one might think, if it is already determined that we will take one course rather than another, then our attempts to choose our future course of action for ourselves are doomed to futility. We might continue to engage in deliberation, either because of a sentimental attachment to our idea of ourselves as agents or because we cannot help trying to alter the inevitable. But, one might think, if we were truly rational we would accept our fate and abandon our quixotic efforts to affect it. Determinism does imply that we “cannot escape our fate,” if this means that we could not, in an absolute sense, have done anything but what we did. But we might be tempted to infer from this not only that our fate was identifiable in advance but that we ought to be passive towards it, that our moral struggles and attempts to overcome our failings are necessarily futile, that our efforts are always in vain. This inference would be mistaken. It relies on the assumption that the activities of the self are something other than its fate; that if mechanism is true, then our fate or the world determines our actions while the self looks helplessly on; that the activities of the self define our attitudes towards our fate without being able to affect it. It relies, in short, on the libertarian assumption that the self and the world are distinct, and thus that if the world determines our actions, the self must be reduced to impotence. But mechanism’s central claim is that the self and the world are not separate in this sense, and thus that the self is “trapped within its fate,” not as a prisoner is trapped within her cell but as we are trapped within our bodies. We are trapped within our bodies only in the sense that, since we are our bodies (among other things, at least), we can go nowhere without them. And someone who took the fact that we cannot escape from our bodies to mean that they prevent us from moving freely, or that we should see our attempts to move as futile rattlings of our prison bars, would have misunderstood its point. Likewise, when mechanists claim that I could not, at a given time, have done anything but what I actually did, they do not mean that I cannot, for all my efforts, affect the course of my actions; on their view, I can.23 They mean that 23

It would be very odd if mechanism implied that, of all physical processes, only those that constitute decisions, efforts, and so forth could not cause anything to occur.

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because the activities of my self are themselves determined, whatever I choose to do is what natural causes determined that I would do. My struggles are not struggles against my fate nor my passivity acquiescence in it; they are my fate. And just as we cannot escape our bodies not because they thwart our efforts to move but because all our motions are necessarily motions of our bodies, so, if mechanism is true, we cannot escape our fate not because it dooms our efforts to failure but because we cannot do anything without it being our fate. Therefore the claim that we ought to “adjust” to our fate is wrong not only because we generally do not know what our fate is but because it does not make sense to try to adjust the activities of our selves to a fate with which they are necessarily identical. Finally, a libertarian might think that mechanism implies that our belief that we act on the basis of reasons is a mere illusion, albeit an unavoidable one. If mechanism is true, she might think, then although it might seem to me that I act as I do because I think my actions right or prudent, in reality my actions are caused by the blind interplay of chemicals in my brain. Again, this view rests on the assumption that my recognition of reasons and my decisions to act on them neither are, nor supervene on, natural processes—an assumption a mechanist would reject. A mechanist would insist that precisely because the self is a part of the natural world, and its activities natural phenomena, ‘my recognition of a given reason for action’ must be, or supervene on, a description of some natural phenomenon or state, and that that natural phenomenon or state might well cause the physical event that I call ‘my decision’. Therefore, on the mechanist view, the claim that my actions are caused by chemical interactions in my brain does not contradict the claim that I act on the basis of reasons; it simply redescribes it. Mechanism does not imply that we can never reason at all or that we are wrong to think that our practical reasoning can determine our actions. Nor does it imply that we ought to make those choices in any particular way or that it would ever be rational to “sit back and let nature take its course,” as though we were not part of nature. If we attempt to combine the mechanist claim that all of our actions can be explained as the result of natural causes alone with a libertarian conception of the self as a non-natural entity, then we may be tempted to think that when we deliberate and choose we are simply going through the motions, deluding ourselves into thinking that we cause our actions when all along they are caused by the world. But mechanism itself does not imply that this is the case. If we can engage in practical reasoning, and if we can act on our decisions, then our reasons for engaging in practical reasoning are relatively straightforward. Practical reasoning is the means by which we try to bring our life into accordance with our ideas about how it should be lived—with our principles, goals, desires, and conceptions of our own good. We do not need to engage in

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practical reasoning when the choice among the various alternatives available to us seems either insignificant or obvious, or when the costs of finding the best course of action available to us outweigh the benefits. However, there are times when it seems to matter which of several actions we choose to perform but unclear which we have most reason to choose. If, in such situations, we do not engage in practical reasoning, we leave decisions we take to be important to other factors, like luck or instinct. One might nonetheless decide to abjure practical reasoning for two reasons. First of all, one might not care at all what kind of life one leads. When faced with any choice among different courses of action, one might be utterly indifferent. Given the catholicity of my conception of practical reasoning, this indifference would have to run very deep—to abjure practical reasoning one would have to be indifferent not only to the moral quality of one’s life but (for instance) to one’s own degree of satisfaction with it; one would have to be unwilling to count anything at all as a better or worse way for one’s life to go. If one thinks that any kind of life is as good as any other, one recognizes no basis for any sort of decision and nothing to reason practically about. Second, one might decide never to engage in practical reasoning because, while one has some conception of what it would mean for one’s life to go well or badly, one is deeply pessimistic about one’s own ability to bring one’s life into accordance with that conception by means of practical reasoning. One might, and most people presumably do, feel that practical reasoning is not appropriate to every situation; that spontaneity will sometimes produce better results than deliberation. But this would not lead one to abjure practical reasoning altogether, since one would still think it appropriate in other circumstances. Only if one believed that one’s life would go better if one never deliberated, even when the stakes were high and arriving at the right decision seemed crucial, or that one would be more likely to live according to one’s ideals if one left the direction of one’s life entirely to chance, instinct, and habit, would one have reason to abjure practical reasoning altogether. It is conceivable that someone might be wholly indifferent among the various ways in which she might lead her life, or so deeply pessimistic about the likely results of any efforts to lead her life as she thinks she should that she would think it rational to leave the course of her life up to chance. To those who hold either view I will concede that, given their beliefs, they should see no reason to engage in practical reasoning, no reason to regard the requirements of the practical point of view as relevant to them, and therefore no reason to care about the rest of my argument in this book. But those who do have some ideas about what kinds of lives they would like to lead, and who think that their efforts to lead such lives will not be entirely counterproductive, have reason to engage in practical reasoning and to accept the requirements of the practical point of view.

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Is Practical Reasoning Dispensable? I have argued that no plausible theoretical claim could imply that practical reasoning is impossible or futile, and that those who are neither unconcerned with the course of their lives nor convinced that their lives would be better if they left their direction to chance have reason to engage in practical reasoning. There is, however, one other way in which theoretical reasoning might be thought to threaten practical reasoning. For if the activities of our selves are, or supervene on, natural events, then determinism might be thought to imply that it is possible in principle to predict our own actions with certainty.24 If all physical events were fully determined under exceptionless natural laws then, one might think, we could predict any event at any point in the future if we had a perfect physical theory, adequate information about the state of the world at any point in the past, and a very powerful computer. If so, then a fortiori we could predict the entire course of our future lives, including our future choices. And if we could predict what we would choose to do on any occasion, then while practical reasoning might be the easiest way of determining which of the actions available to us to perform, it would always be possible in principle to replace practical deliberation with theoretical prediction. On this view, practical reasoning is in principle a dispensable means of determining what to do, and one which we must rely on in practice only because of the (fortunately insuperable) technical obstacles to making such predictions.25 There are, of course, some ways in which we can already predict our behavior with virtual certainty, but these do not threaten our practical reasoning. For 24 Of course, determinism is almost certainly false. Quantum mechanics informs us that events are not subject to exceptionless causal laws; the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle implies that there is no such thing as a complete description of the state of the world at a given time; and so forth. But one of the conclusions for which I want to argue is that the truth or falsity of any reasonable account of the causal structure of the world is irrelevant to freedom of the will and moral responsibility. So here (and elsewhere) I discuss the implications of those physical and metaphysical views that seem to be, for my purposes, the least promising, whether or not I believe them to be true. 25 The possibility that our actions are in principle predictable is sometimes thought to conflict directly with freedom of the will. “If my physical brain-processes were wholly physically determined, and if my decisions could be inferred uniquely from my brain-processes, then a fully informed observer of my brain-processes could know the outcome of my choices with certainty before I made them, and my impression of freedom in making these choices would therefore be an illusion, due to mere ignorance of the true state of affairs” (D. M. MacKay, “On the Logical Indeterminacy of a Free Choice,” p. 31. This is not MacKay’s own view). In the section that follows I will not consider the question whether, if our actions are predictable, we might nonetheless be said to be free; nor will I try to argue for the (ludicrous) claim that our inability to predict our own choices and actions directly and unproblematically shows that we are free. I will simply try to show that even were determinism true, we could not predict our own actions in such a way as to render practical reasoning unnecessary. The implications of this claim for the problem of freedom of the will will, I hope, become clear in later chapters.

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instance, I am virtually certain that I will get out of bed tomorrow morning. In a sense, one might say that my knowledge of this fact renders deliberation unnecessary: unless I am suffering from serious clinical depression, getting out of bed is not something I have to decide to do. But I know that I will get out of bed tomorrow only because I am confident that I will in fact want to get out of bed tomorrow, and that this will be within my power. If, later this evening, I discover a revolutionary moral theory based on the idea that sloth is the ultimate human virtue, I will not think that my earlier prediction implies that I will be unable to live up to my new principles; if I am struck by a crippling attack of polio during the night, I will hardly be comforted by the thought that, according to that prediction, I will almost certainly get out of bed in the morning. I made that prediction because I assumed both that I would want to get out of bed tomorrow morning and that I would be able to; if, between the time when I made that prediction and the next morning, either of those assumptions turns out to be false, I no longer have reason to accept that prediction. Among the ways in which I can falsify the assumptions on which it is based is to change my mind as the result of practical reasoning. Such predictions can, therefore, never imply that practical reasoning is pointless or futile. The kinds of predictions that determinism seems to imply that we could make pose a threat of a different order. To falsify the basis of the ordinary prediction that I will get out of bed tomorrow morning, all I have to do is change my mind about the desirability of doing so. However unlikely it seems that I will change my mind on this point, I could do so; and this means that I can render this prediction powerless at any point between now and noon tomorrow. But I cannot thus falsify the bases of the kinds of predictions whose possibility determinism seems to imply. Those predictions are based on knowledge of the state of the world at a given time and of the physical laws which govern it. If that time is, say, the time at which I make the prediction, the description of the state of the world at that time will include a description of my present views on the desirability of getting out of bed tomorrow morning. But the force of that prediction will depend not on my continuing to hold those views but on my having held them at the time I made the prediction. No change of heart could falsify the claim that I did hold those views then, or any other claim about the state of the world at that time; and it is presumably not within my power to alter natural laws. There is therefore no way for me to deprive this prediction of its force by exercising my practical reason. If someone who knows enough about the state of the world at some point in time and about physical laws predicts, on the basis of this knowledge, that I will get out of bed tomorrow, then (one might think) I simply will get out of bed tomorrow, and there is nothing I can do about it. I will not dispute the claim that determinism implies that other people could in principle predict my actions with complete certainty on the basis of their

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knowledge of the state of the world at a given time and of physical laws. But I will argue that I cannot predict my own actions in this way and that others can do so only if their predictions do not themselves influence the process whereby I come to act as I do.27 Imagine that I have acquired the Pocket Oracle, a tiny yet unimaginably powerful computer that has been perfectly programmed to predict my behavior. If it does not show me its predictions, it will always know what I am about to do (or think, or choose). If it follows (so to speak) a step behind me, telling me at each instant what I have just thought or done, or if it keeps pace with me exactly, what it tells me will always be right—in either case, it might be considered a mechanical analog of my consciousness of myself. In none of these cases, obviously, will it threaten my practical reasoning. If, however, the Pocket Oracle tries to tell me in advance what I am going to do or think or choose, it will run into problems. For in order to figure out what I am going to do, it must factor into its calculations all of the stimuli I receive, since these may be among the causes that lead me to act or choose as I do. And if it plans to tell me what I am about to do or choose, the information it gives me will be among the things it has to take into account. The Pocket Oracle, that is, must factor the result of its calculations into its calculations in order to arrive at a result, and it would have to know what that result was before arriving at it in order to do so. Clearly, the best strategy for our Pocket Oracle would be to calculate the results of its telling me every prediction it could possibly make. For if there is 26 One might dispute this claim on various grounds. For instance, the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light implies that information about some portion of the universe at any given previous time (T) could not have reached us at the time we gather the information about the state of the universe on which our prediction is to be based, and therefore that we can never have a complete description of the state of the entire universe at any previous time. Since the time at which that information is gathered must antedate the time about which one wishes to make predictions, there will be some portion of the universe information about whose state at T is inaccessible to the predictor, but which might nonetheless affect the agent whose actions are to be predicted before she acts. Since the predictor cannot know what the state of that portion of the universe at T was, she cannot know whether it will significantly affect the process whereby the agent comes to act, and she can therefore never be certain that any prediction she makes will in fact be accurate. It is therefore impossible to predict the future with certainty. I will ignore such arguments. First of all, one can respond to them by noting that it is unlikely that such distant events will have significant effects on our decisions; and therefore that even if our predictions can never be completely certain, they might well be close enough to make it irrational for us not to accept them. More importantly, however, while such arguments do show that we cannot predict our own actions with certainty, they do so without implying anything interesting about the relation between theoretical and practical reasoning. My arguments will, I hope, establish the same conclusion, but they will also have interesting implications about practical reasoning. I am grateful to David Garfinkle for discussions on this and other topics in physics. 27 The argument that follows is similar to one made by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind, pp. 195–8; by Karl Popper in “Indeterminism in Quantum Physics and in Classical Physics”; and by D. M. MacKay in “On the Logical Indeterminacy of a Free Choice.”

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some action that I will perform regardless of what the Pocket Oracle tells me I will do, then it can avoid an infinite regress, since it does not need to factor the result of its calculations into those calculations in order to arrive at a result.28 Only if the Pocket Oracle concludes that all of its possible predictions converge on a single action will it be able to tell me what I am going to do, and only if it tells me what I am going to do can it make it unnecessary for me to engage in practical reasoning. I might respond to any prediction the Pocket Oracle made by deciding to do something entirely different—perhaps I hate the idea of being so predictable, or perhaps I am simply perverse. Alternately, I might just do whatever it told me to do, perhaps on the grounds that since an infallible oracle has told me that I will do this, I should resign myself to the inevitable. In either case, the Pocket Oracle would know what I would do if it predicted that I would choose heads and what I would do if it predicted that I would choose tails. But because, in both cases, what I do depends on what prediction it makes, these different predictions would not converge on a single action, and the Pocket Oracle would be unable to make any prediction at all. If what I do does not depend on what the Pocket Oracle predicts, however, its possible predictions will converge on a single action, and it will therefore be in a position to tell me what I am about to do. My future course of action might be independent of its predictions for several reasons. First, my future course of action might not be up to me at all. As Dennett observes, “There are genuine instances of what we might call local fatalism. . . . Consider the man who has thrown himself off the Golden Gate Bridge and who thinks to himself, as he plummets, ‘I wonder if this is really such a good idea.’ Deliberation has indeed become impotent for this man. We can plot his future destination without bothering to factor in his intervening efforts at problem-solving; whatever they are, they will not yield a causal chain that will deflect him from the trajectory we have already plotted for him.”29 In such cases the predictions of the Pocket Oracle do not threaten my practical reasoning: it can predict my future behavior only because my practical reasoning is already completely irrelevant to it. Second, I might simply not care what the Pocket Oracle tells me I am about to do. I am going to make up my own mind, thank you very much, and it can tell me whatever it pleases without affecting my decision in any way.30 It would, of 28 I leave aside the question how the Pocket Oracle could do this—while I can consider only a finite number of possible actions, the Pocket Oracle will have to consider everything that (in an everyday sense) I could possibly do, since the set of actions I will consider will presumably include the action that it predicts that I will perform. I will assume that only two actions—“heads” and “tails”—are available to me. 29 Dennett, Elbow Room, p. 104. 30 Obviously, it is not enough that I tell myself that the Pocket Oracle’s predictions will have no effect on my decision; they must actually have no effect in order for the Pocket Oracle to be able to inform me of its prediction.

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course, be very difficult for me to go on deliberating as usual if a Pocket Oracle that I knew to be infallible had just told me what I was about to decide to do.31 But only when I succeed in ignoring its predictions can the Pocket Oracle predict my actions. In such cases those predictions cannot displace my practical reasoning—the moment I begin to do what the Pocket Oracle tells me I will do instead of deciding for myself is the moment it falls silent. Third, I might be about to be subjected to some temptation that will cause me to perform one particular course of action regardless of what the Pocket Oracle tells me I will do. If, for instance, I were an alcoholic trying to give up drinking, the Pocket Oracle might be able to predict that, whatever it tells me, I will eventually find my way back to my neighborhood bar. This might happen for either of two reasons. It might be that the temptation to drink is simply too much for me: I do not now have the strength of will I would need to resist it, whatever virtuous resolutions I might make. It seems natural to describe such cases as cases of internal coercion: as in cases of local fatalism, my practical reasoning is not effective, and it is only because it is not effective that the Pocket Oracle can tell me what I am going to do. The Pocket Oracle’s predictions should, therefore, be seen not as displacing my practical reasoning but as informing me of the fact that my deliberation will, in this case, be useless.32 Alternately, it might be because the Pocket Oracle tells me something that I will end up starting to drink again. Were the Pocket Oracle to inform me that I would eventually start drinking again, I would decide to spare myself 31 One might think that it would be not just difficult but impossible for me to deliberate in these circumstances; that “[d]eliberating in the conviction that one will reach a certain decision is as impossible as trying to remember where one left his car keys in the conviction that one will conclude that they are in his overcoat” (David Perry, “Prediction, Explanation, and Freedom,” p. 239). It is certainly more plausible to think that, in the case at hand, I am simply refusing to listen to the Pocket Oracle than to imagine me attending to it, fully accepting the knowledge that the result of my deliberations will be x, and nonetheless deliberating as I would have done had the Pocket Oracle told me nothing. But I do not need to decide this issue for the purposes of my argument. If genuine deliberation is impossible when I know what I am about to do, then the Pocket Oracle cannot tell me what I am about to do in these cases; if it is possible, then it can tell me what I am about to do only when my knowledge of its predictions does not affect the course of my deliberations. In neither case can the prediction displace my practical reasoning. 32 One might reject the idea that such cases should be characterized as involving internal coercion. Being swept along by a flood of desire is different from being swept along by a flood of water: in the latter case the agent is literally helpless, while in the former (one might argue) the problem is not that she cannot choose to go against her desire but that she does not choose to do so. (See, for instance, Kadri Vihvelin, “Stop Me Before I Kill Again.”) But I do not need to resolve this issue for the purposes of this argument. If an agent’s actions are not up to her, then her situation is an instance of “local fatalism.” If they are up to her, then she can learn what she is going to do because her decision will not be affected by her knowledge of this prediction. On either account, her situation can be assimilated to one of the two types of cases in which I have argued that our knowledge of some prediction concerning our future behavior cannot displace our practical reasoning.

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the (as I now realize) futile effort to remain sober; were it to tell me that I would stay sober, I would become complacent, fail to guard myself against temptations which I “knew” would not sway me, and eventually succumb. In this case, the Pocket Oracle can predict the results of my deliberation—not, however, because it simply knows what I will do but because, given any intervention in my decision-making process, I will succumb to a temptation I might otherwise have resisted. The Pocket Oracle’s predictions have this effect because I make two assumptions. The first is that the Pocket Oracle’s predictions are accurate—that I will in fact do what it says I will do. The second is that once the Pocket Oracle has predicted that I will do something, I no longer need to try to do what it has told me I will do. By definition, anything the Pocket Oracle tells me about my future is accurate, and therefore my first assumption is legitimate. It might also be rational, on these grounds, for me to stop trying to do something once the Pocket Oracle has told me that I will do something else. But it is not rational for me to stop trying to do something on the grounds that the Pocket Oracle has told me that I will do it, since it might be precisely because of my efforts that I will make that prediction come true. To think that once the Pocket Oracle has told me that I will stay sober I need no longer try to do so is as irrational as deciding, when it tells me that my dinner will be cooked in an hour, that I can save money by not turning the stove on. It is this second assumption that allows the Pocket Oracle to predict my actions in this group of cases. For if I did not react to the prediction that I would stay sober by abandoning my efforts to do so, then my efforts might well have made that prediction come true. If my efforts would have been unsuccessful, then, as I argued above, we should view the case in question as one involving internal coercion. But if they would have succeeded, then the Pocket Oracle would not have been able to arrive at a prediction had it not known that I would respond to its prediction by abandoning them. In this last group of cases, my actions are predictable because I have mistakenly identified determinism, which implies that my behavior is in principle predictable, with fatalism, which holds that there is some fate that will befall me whether I try to bring it about or to avoid it. It should not surprise us that the actions of a fatalist can be publicly predicted in situations where the actions of others cannot. To the extent that we abdicate either our power to decide for ourselves what we will do or our efforts to translate these decisions into action, we allow our behavior to be determined by habit, by convenience, or by some external cause that determines our actions directly, rather than through our decisions. In so doing we allow the Pocket Oracle to avoid the problems posed by the effects of its predictions on our practical reasoning. But in such cases it is not the predictability of our behavior that threatens our need to determine our own actions through practical reasoning but the fact that we

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have already chosen not to exercise this power that allows us to learn in advance what we will do. The idea that I could predict my own behavior in all cases overlooks the distinction between the claim that someone could, in principle, predict my future behavior and the claim that I could do so. Determinism implies that the first claim is true. Those who view this as a threat to our practical reasoning seem to assume that this means that there just is a fact about what I will do, and that my learning this fact is no more problematic than, say, my learning how many planets there are in the solar system. Since they observe—correctly—that there would be no need to deliberate if we already knew what the outcome of our deliberation would be, they infer that we engage in practical reasoning only because of the technical obstacles that prevent us from arriving at such predictions. It is not true, however, that my learning what I am going to do is no more problematic than my learning any other fact. Since new planets do not pop in and out of the solar system when I acquire beliefs about their number, I can determine how many planets there are without affecting the truth or falsity of any proposition on this subject. Similarly, if determinism is true, then other people can in principle predict my actions as long as their predictions do not affect my future behavior. However, if I am to be informed of their prediction, then that prediction must perform two functions, which may not always be compatible with each other. On the one hand, it is supposed to be an accurate statement of what, when all the causes of my future behavior have been taken into account, I will in fact do. On the other, it must also serve as one of the causes that are taken into account in arriving at that prediction. The prediction to whose authority I must defer is the former. But the prediction to which I actually respond is the statement that figures among the causes of my actions. Human beings can respond to any piece of information they are given in all sorts of ways. They can decide that it is irrelevant to whatever decision they are in the process of making; if they think it relevant to that decision, it will be relevant not as a potential cause of their decision but as a ground for choice—as one of the facts that they regard as giving them reason to choose one or another of the alternatives available to them. Different people can, obviously, take the same fact as a reason for performing different actions. One person, for instance, might take a prediction of her future behavior as a reason for doing what that prediction said that she would do, while another might take it as a reason for doing anything but that. Because we have this capacity, there is no guarantee that one and the same statement will always be able to serve both as an accurate prediction of what we are about to do and as a cause of our doing that. If we are systematically perverse, there will never be any statement that could fulfill

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both functions. This shows not that we have the ability to defy scientific laws, or to make nature swerve from its course, but that when a systematically perverse agent has the power to determine her own actions, no statement made to her could be an accurate prediction of her future behavior. If we decide to defer to the predictions of the Pocket Oracle, then any statement that it made about a future action that depends on our decision would both cause and predict our actions. But for that very reason none of those statements would be predictions based solely on its knowledge of our past state, the conditions that affect us, and the laws of nature. The Pocket Oracle would know, for any action that I could, in an everyday sense, possibly perform, that if it predicted that I would perform that action, then I would in fact perform it.33 But because it cannot discover which action I will in fact perform unless it discovers which action it will tell me that I will perform, and since it cannot make such a statement on the basis of its calculations unless it knows which action I will in fact perform, it has no way of deciding, on the basis of its calculations, which of its possible predictions to make; and it must therefore fall silent. One might object that if I have adopted a policy of deference towards the Pocket Oracle, the Pocket Oracle might decide among the various predictions that it might accurately make on other grounds. The predictions of this paternalistic Pocket Oracle would still be accurate predictions of my future behavior, since I have decided to make any prediction it offers come true. Therefore, it might seem, it would be rational for me to defer to these predictions as well. If so, then I might find myself having to defer to the predictions of a Pocket Oracle in all cases in which my actions depend on my practical reasoning. It is true that, once the paternalistic Pocket Oracle makes a prediction, I will obey it as long as I maintain my policy of deferring to those predictions. But it is not rational for me to adopt a policy of deference to the predictions of a paternalistic Pocket Oracle. For in this case the difference between a policy of deference and one of simply making up my own mind regardless of what the Pocket Oracle tells me I will do is significant. Whichever policy I adopt, the paternalistic Pocket Oracle will be able to predict all of my actions, and its predictions will always be realized. And whichever policy I adopt, the paternalistic Pocket Oracle will make the same predictions as the neutral Pocket Oracle described above whenever the latter would have predicted my actions at all. Whenever my actions depend on my practical reasoning, however, the predictions of the paternalistic Pocket Oracle will depend on the policy I adopt towards them. If I decide to defer to its predictions, then it will choose among the predictions that would come true if it made them, and I will realize the 33

It will also know which action I will perform if it tells me nothing, but to inform me of this “prediction” would render it counterfactual and thereby deprive it of all authority.

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predictions it decides to make. But if I make up my own mind, then it will always predict that I will do what I would have done had it told me nothing. The choice between a policy of deference to the paternalistic Pocket Oracle’s predictions and a policy of ignoring them, then, amounts to a choice about which accurate predictions of my future behavior I want it to make. If I decide to defer to its predictions, then those predictions—and therefore my actions— will be determined by whatever decision procedure it uses to select among the predictions that would come true if it made them. If I decide to ignore its predictions, then they will be determined by whatever decision procedure I would have used had the Pocket Oracle told me nothing. Whether or not it is rational for me to adopt a policy of deference towards it depends on whether or not I agree with its ideas about which actions I ought to perform; that is, on whether or not I want to allow it to cause me to act as it thinks best. It might, in some cases, be rational for me to allow it to determine my actions. If, for instance, the paternalistic Pocket Oracle always chooses among the predictions which would come true if it made them by selecting the one that would maximize utility, then if I were a utilitarian I might think it rational to defer to its predictions. The Pocket Oracle, after all, is probably better than I am at calculating the results of various actions and will not, as I might, be tempted to convince itself that an easy, convenient, or selfish action would maximize utility. But if I were a Kantian, to adopt a policy of deference towards a utilitarian Pocket Oracle would be to choose to allow my actions to be determined in such a way that I would violate the moral law when I need not have done so, and would therefore be morally culpable. If we assume that the Pocket Oracle makes some of its predictions not on the basis of its knowledge of our past state, the conditions that affect us, and the laws of nature, but on other grounds, then it is no longer clearly rational to defer to its predictions. Whether or not we think it rational to defer to the predictions of a paternalistic Pocket Oracle depends on whether or not we agree with the decision procedure that it uses in selecting among the predictions that would come true if it made them. That question is obviously one that we can resolve only by engaging in practical reasoning: by trying to decide what we think we ought to do. The paternalistic Pocket Oracle, then, cannot threaten our need to engage in practical reasoning; it simply puts the questions we must ask ourselves when we do so in a slightly different form. This point becomes clearer if we imagine that we, not a paternalistic Pocket Oracle, are trying to calculate our future behavior.34 In this case the decision 34

Obviously, the Pocket Oracle has been a mechanical stand-in for our own attempts to calculate our own future behavior all along. I have used it mainly because it allows me to confine the problems posed by the interference of such calculations with our practical reasoning to one moment—the moment when the Pocket Oracle informs us of its prediction—rather than considering the constant interference with my deliberation that the attempt actually to carry out such complex calculations might involve. Besides, it allows me to postulate its infallibility and thus to rule out those uninteresting solutions to this problem that turn on the possibility of calculating wrongly. But the issues raised by the Pocket Oracle and by my attempting to predict my own future behavior

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between a policy of deference and one of deliberating as if no prediction had been made shrinks to insignificance: in the first case I deliberate about which prediction to make and then fulfill, in the second about which action to perform. In either case, what I do will be determined by my practical reasoning whenever there are several predictions that would come true if I made them; and therefore the attempt to predict my own future behavior cannot threaten my need to engage in practical reasoning. The possibility that theoretical reasoning could threaten our need to engage in practical reasoning by allowing us to predict our own actions exists because of the nature of practical reasoning itself. For it is only because we can take any information we are given as reasons to do one thing rather than another that we could take such predictions as reasons to abandon our efforts to decide what to do. But this same ability prevents us from learning of any predictions that it would be rational for us to regard as a reason to abandon those efforts. It is because what we are told can affect what we do that anyone who wants to predict our actions must know what effects her statements to us will have on our conduct. If in the case at hand statements about what we will do would not affect our conduct, then she can both predict our actions and inform us of her prediction. But if such statements would affect our conduct, she cannot both predict our actions and inform us of her prediction, since she would have to know what she was going to predict in order to arrive at her prediction. It is for this reason that no statement made to us could be a prediction to which it would be rational to defer unless its content would not affect our action, because we would choose to disregard it; because in the case at hand our practical reasoning is already, and independently, irrelevant to the determination of our future course of action; or because we have chosen not to exercise our power to determine our actions for ourselves. Our ability to engage in practical reasoning, that is, protects itself against any threats that theoretical reasoning might pose to it by preventing any statement made to us from being knowledge of our future behavior when our possession of such knowledge would threaten our need to engage in practical reasoning.

Conclusion I have argued that theoretical reasoning cannot show that we do not need to engage in practical reasoning. It is conceivable that theoretical reasoning might reveal that we do not in fact engage in practical reasoning or that practical reasoning is never effective, but I have argued that neither claim can plausibly be maintained, given the facts as we know them. Theoretical reason might also are the same. In order to come to a conclusion about what I will do, I must take into account the effects of my learning about this conclusion; for this reason I can reach a conclusion only when my subsequent behavior is not affected by what I learn.

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threaten practical reason by making it possible for us to predict our own actions with certainty. In this case, practical reason would be a sort of mental Finland, enjoying a provisional autonomy in the shadow of a large and threatening neighbor that might at any moment decide to roll in the tanks and annex it. But I have argued that it is impossible for us to predict our own behavior with certainty except when practical reasoning would be useless in any case or when our knowledge of this prediction would not affect our deliberation. If these arguments are correct, then the different purposes of theoretical and practical reasoning define different spheres in which each form of reason can operate; and within its sphere each form of reasoning can use the other’s conclusions for its own purposes, but cannot be replaced by it. One might put my conclusion this way: given that we engage in practical reasoning in order to determine what to do, if theoretical and practical reason were to compete with each other for primacy in some area, they would have to do so as ways of answering the question ‘What will I do?’. This question has two forms. One is theoretical, and it is answered when we form a prediction. The second is practical, and it is answered when we reach a decision. Theoretical reason would threaten practical reason if, in all cases in which it was possible to determine what we would do through practical reasoning, we could also predict what we would do with certainty using theoretical reasoning. For if this were possible, then while we might choose to refrain from making such predictions or from allowing them to affect our deliberation, we would in principle be able to use theoretical reasoning to determine our behavior in all cases; and we would therefore have no need to engage in practical reasoning at all. Practical reasoning would then be an alternative and dispensable way of arriving at a conclusion discoverable through theoretical reasoning alone. If my arguments are correct, however, only one form of the question ‘What will I do?’ is ever primarily appropriate to any given case. The practical form of that question is appropriate whenever our practical reasoning could determine our behavior, and the theoretical form when our behavior is independent of our practical reasoning.35 One can, of course, be wrong about which kind 35

‘Could’ is used here in an everyday sense: if, were I to decide to do X at T, I would do X at T because I had decided to do so, and if, were I to decide to do Y at T, I would do Y at T because I had decided to, and if X and Y are not identical, then my practical reasoning can determine my behavior. It is not relevant to this argument that determinism implies that whether I will do X or Y, and indeed whether I will deliberate at all, are already determined, and therefore that in one sense it is false that I can do either X or Y. The claim that the theoretical form of the question ‘What will I do?’ is not primarily appropriate when my practical reasoning could determine my behavior is based on the claim that in those cases I can predict my actions only if my predictions do not affect my practical reasoning. This is because in order to predict my own actions, I must find that I would perform the same action in each of the possible worlds resulting from my learning of each of the predictions I might possibly arrive at, and when my practical reasoning could affect my behavior I will not find this unless my predictions do not affect my practical reasoning. The fact that all but one of the possible worlds I must consider is counterfactual does not affect this argument.

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of reasoning is appropriate to a given case. I might lazily wonder whether or not to turn over in bed when, unbeknownst to me, someone has slipped me an immobilizing drug; later, I might think that I was unable to move long after the drug wore off. Theoretical reasoning, by correcting such false beliefs, might enlarge or diminish the class of situations in which I believe that one form of reasoning is primarily appropriate. But it cannot reduce or eliminate the class of situations in which one type actually is appropriate. In situations to which theoretical reason is primarily appropriate, we cannot try to decide what to do at all, since our behavior is not up to us. In situations to which practical reasoning is primarily appropriate, we can predict what we will do only when we have already decided what to do on other grounds or when our prediction will not affect our decision. In no case, however, are we faced with a choice about which form of reasoning to use to determine what we will do, since there are no situations in which both theoretical and practical reasoning can yield independent answers to this question. When practical reasoning is primarily appropriate, we must choose among our various alternatives. Practical reasoning is not the only way to do this: we can also act on instinct, flip coins, consult sacred texts, or just go on doing what we were already doing. But since theoretical reasoning is not a way of choosing among our alternatives, we cannot use it to replace deliberation. Moreover, it is practical reason that sets limits to theoretical reason, and not vice versa. The scope of practical reason is limited by its function: practical reasoning aims to reach a decision, and therefore I cannot reason practically about things other than choices and the grounds on which they should be made. I cannot, for instance, deliberate about what the atomic structure of uranium is or about how someone else will choose to live her life. These are inappropriate objects of practical reasoning not because theoretical reasoning is appropriate to them but because of the nature of practical reason itself. There is, by contrast, nothing about the question ‘What, in fact, am I about to do?’ that renders it an inherently unsuitable question for theoretical reason to raise. Rather, a theoretical investigation into that question is in principle impossible to complete whenever practical reason is primarily appropriate and a theoretical investigation would disturb our practical reasoning; and it is impossible to complete because practical reason is primarily appropriate in those cases. The applicability of practical reason itself blocks theoretical inquiry and sets limits to the knowledge with which theoretical reason can provide us. This in turn explains an asymmetry between the applicability of theoretical and practical reasoning in those cases to which they are not primarily appropriate. When I know that some aspect of my behavior is independent of my practical reasoning, I cannot ask myself the practical form of the question ‘What will I do?’ about that aspect of my behavior at all. I cannot, for instance, try to decide whether or not to move when I know that I am encased in lucite, or whether or not to continue to fall after I have jumped off a bridge. And this

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is what we would expect if the applicability of practical reasoning is limited by its own nature. By contrast, as noted earlier it is at least conceivable that I might predict what I am about to do with certainty, if I do not allow my knowledge of that prediction to affect my deliberation. When practical reasoning is primarily appropriate, it is not impossible or unthinkable that I might predict my own behavior; only that I should do so in such a way as to affect my own deliberation. Again, this is what we would expect if the applicability of theoretical reasoning is limited not by its own nature but by the fact that, in these cases, practical reasoning has primacy. I have argued that valid theoretical and practical claims cannot conflict, and therefore that the fact that those claims might differ does not imply that we should regard either theoretical or practical reason as illegitimate. And I have argued that some theoretical claim could imply that we do not have reason to engage in practical reasoning only if it implied either that we cannot engage in practical reasoning or that we cannot act on our decisions. Neither determinism, mechanism, nor any other plausible hypothesis about the causes of human action implies either conclusion; and therefore no such hypothesis can cast doubt either on the point of practical reasoning or on the legitimacy of valid practical claims. If, as I will argue in the chapters that follow, freedom and moral responsibility are practical concepts, and if the requirements of practical reasoning give us reason to claim that we can act freely and that we are morally responsible for our conduct, then we have reason to accept those conclusions whether or not determinism or mechanism is true, since neither these nor any other plausible hypotheses about the causes of human action can call them into question.

3 Freedom

IN CHAPTER 2 I claimed that any attempt to use a distinction between standpoints to justify our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons must answer three questions. First, can valid claims made from the two standpoints conflict? Second, what reason do we have to adopt the standpoint from which we ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons? Third, what reason does that standpoint give us to ascribe freedom and moral responsibility to persons? In chapter 2 I considered the first two questions. My purpose in that chapter was to show that the practical point of view is a legitimate foundation for a justification of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons: that an argument that appeals to the requirements of practical reasoning is not vulnerable to the objection that the practical point of view is itself a source of illusion or error, or that we have no reason to concern ourselves with it. I concluded that we have reason to adopt the practical point of view, and that no claim that it gives us reason to make could conflict with valid theoretical claims. If my arguments in chapter 2 are sound, then any argument that shows that we can justify some claim on the basis of the requirements of practical reasoning would show that that claim is legitimate. The arguments made in chapter 2 allow us to see, in general terms, how we might use the distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning to respond to the libertarian objections to compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will and moral responsibility that I discussed in chapter 1. Libertarians do not argue that mechanism implies that there is no difference at all between those acts we ordinarily call free and other acts, or between behavior for which we ordinarily hold agents responsible and behavior for which we do not. But they claim that if mechanism is true, those distinctions cannot possibly have the kind of significance that they would need to have were they to serve as the bases of a justification of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons. This claim itself should raise our suspicions. After all, distinctions are not important or unimportant per se but with respect to the purposes for which we invoke them. Because theoretical and practical reasoning serve different purposes, we might be able to argue that, for theoretical purposes, the distinctions invoked by a compatibilist justification of responsibility have no particu-

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lar importance; but that, for practical purposes, they are crucial, while the truth or falsity of the metaphysical hypotheses that libertarians take to be central to the problem of freedom of the will is irrelevant. If so, then we could explain both the strength of libertarians’ objections to compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will and moral responsibility, and why, despite their strength, those objections are wrong. In this chapter I will argue that, from a practical point of view, we must regard ourselves as acting freely in (more or less) the situations in which we ordinarily take ourselves to do so, and that the truth or falsity of mechanism or determinism does not bear on the question whether or not we can ever be said to act freely in this sense. While I will address some libertarian objections to this account of freedom, I will not try in this chapter to show that my account of freedom is one that libertarians should find satisfactory. I argued in chapter 1 that no account of freedom of the will should satisfy libertarians unless it allows us to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons. For this reason, I will be in a position to assess my account of freedom of the will only after I have addressed the question whether our ascriptions of moral responsibility can be justified on its basis. My purpose in this chapter is simply to discover whether the requirements of practical reasoning give us reason to regard ourselves as free in any sense at all; and, if so, to determine what that sense is.

Possibility We are free, we think, only when we can choose among courses of action that are truly open to us. And some course of action is truly open to us only if it is in fact possible for us to perform it. On this libertarians and compatibilists agree. They disagree, however, on the correct interpretation of these claims: on what it means to say that a course of action is ‘truly open to us’, and what kind of possibility its being truly open to us requires. We can use the word ‘possibility’ in various senses. It is possible, in a general sense, for water to freeze or to evaporate, but not to tap-dance or to recite Paradise Lost. The claim that it is, in general, possible for water to freeze does not mean that it is possible for any given amount of water to freeze at any time, regardless of its circumstances and, in particular, of its temperature; that is, that every bit of water always has freezing as an option. When we say that it is possible for some object to behave in a certain way, our claim is always made relative to some set of circumstances in which that object might find itself. Those circumstances can be specified more or less completely, and the possibilities we attribute to the object in question will vary accordingly. When, for instance, we claim that water can freeze, we consider water simply as such,

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in abstraction from the conditions in which any given amount of water finds itself. The claim that it is not possible for water to freeze at temperatures above thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit does not contradict that more general claim but specifies the conditions over which it ranges in a way that affects our conception of the possibilities in question. When we use the word ‘possibility’ in what I have called a general sense, we define the possibilities available to some object relative to an incomplete description of its circumstances: one that abstracts from certain types of information. Compatibilists use such a general conception of possibility in interpreting the claim that we act freely when we can choose among actions that it is possible for us to perform: we act freely, they claim, when we would perform any of several different actions if we chose to do so. This “conditional analysis” defines our possibilities relative to a description of our circumstances that treats the course of our deliberation and the outcome of our choice as variables, whether or not antecedent events cause us to follow a particular line of reasoning or to make a particular choice. If we define our possibilities thus, then we can say that all of those actions that we would have performed had we chosen to perform them are possibilities for us, just as we can say that it is possible for a given amount of water to vaporize if we disregard the fact that it is sitting in my freezer. Whereas compatibilists define our possibilities relative to a description of our circumstances that abstracts from certain kinds of information, libertarians allow no such omissions. They argue that our freedom requires that we be able to choose among alternatives that are possible given all relevant information about our state, our circumstances, and antecedent events, including those events (if any) that cause us to make a particular choice. I will refer to this ‘all-in’ sense of possibility as ‘possibility tout court’. In the arguments that follow, I will assume that determinism is true;1 and therefore that, while a given agent at a given time might have any number of possibilities in the broader compatibilist sense, no agent can ever have more than one possibility tout court. If a free agent must have alternatives that are possible only in the compatibilists’ general sense, then determinism is compatible with her freedom. But if she must have alternatives that are possible tout court, then determinism implies that she is not free. 1 I make this assumption for reasons of exposition, not because I believe it to be true. I must make some assumption about the causal structure of the universe: to modify each step of my arguments to accommodate each such theory would make those arguments impossibly long. Since I believe that the truth or falsity of any such view is irrelevant to the question whether or not we are free, my main concern in selecting an assumption is not to choose the correct one but to avoid the appearance of stacking the deck in my favor. I have therefore assumed the truth of determinism in particular because it is generally thought to be the hardest plausible view of the causal structure of the universe to reconcile with human freedom. (It also allows me to avoid endless qualifications about the effects of indeterministic events.)

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The most common way of trying to show that freedom requires one or the other conception of possibility is to argue either that there is some sense of ‘can’ or ‘possibility’ that we do in fact use when we talk about freedom, or that to construe freedom using the other sense entails conclusions that we must find unacceptable. Arguments of this kind generally appeal to ordinary language, to various examples, or to our intuitions in support of their claims about the kind of possibility relevant to freedom of the will. Those to whom they are addressed generally respond by constructing alternative accounts that appeal to their preferred conception of possibility and by arguing that these accounts capture our intuitions about those examples at least as well as those of their opponents. For this reason, this type of argument is generally inconclusive. To see why, consider two prominent libertarian arguments and the responses compatibilists might make to them. First, libertarians claim that the fact that it is possible, in the compatibilists’ general sense, for some agent at a given time to perform several actions does not show that that agent acts freely. In support of this claim, they argue that when we can perform some action only if we do something else, we do not claim that it is possible for us to perform that action unless we can do whatever performing it requires. So, for instance, while it might be true that I could pay off the Argentine national debt if I could transmute the dustballs under my bed into gold, this does not show that it is possible for me to pay off the Argentine national debt unless it is also true that I can transmute those dustballs into gold. Similarly, if determinism is true, then while it may be possible for me to perform various actions if I choose to do so, what I will in fact choose to do is itself fully determined by antecedent events. I might now have various “alternatives” in the compatibilists’ sense: if I chose, I could continue to work on my book, call out for pizza, or chuck it all and head for Tibet. However, were a Laplacean demon to survey the universe shortly after the Big Bang, it would be able to discern in that cosmic soup conditions that ensure that I will now type a paragraph, stare blankly into space for a few minutes, and then erase that paragraph in disgust; and that entirely preclude my picking up the telephone, buying a ticket to Lhasa, and arranging for sherpas. Given that those conditions existed, it is no more possible for me now to opt for the supposed alternative of going to Tibet than it is possible for me to usher in an era of peace and goodwill by snapping my fingers. But if it is impossible for me now to choose to go to Tibet, then why should I take the fact that I would go to Tibet if (per impossibile) I were to make such a choice to show that I am now free to go to Tibet; or that going to Tibet is now a possibility for me in any sense in which paying off the Argentine national debt is not?2 2

This is a restatement of an argument made by Roderick Chisholm in “Human Freedom and the Self,” pp. 26–7.

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Compatibilists might reply that this argument begs the question against them. For by allowing the conditions that determine what I will choose to do to constrain our conception of what I am free to do, libertarians must assume that the sense of ‘possibility’ relevant to freedom of the will is not the broader compatibilist conception of possibility (which, by definition, abstracts from information about what I will choose to do), but possibility tout court. Were we to assume instead that the conception of possibility relevant to freedom is the compatibilists’ broader conception, we could easily explain why going to Tibet is an option for me, while paying off the Argentine national debt is not. For according to the compatibilists’ general conception, it is possible for me to perform any action that I would perform if I chose. Since I would go to Tibet if I chose but could not transmute dustballs into gold under any circumstances, only the first course of action is in this sense a possibility for me. Second, Peter van Inwagen has argued that if determinism is true, then we can never do anything other than what we actually do.3 He also claims that his argument presupposes no particular analysis of ‘can’. Van Inwagen’s argument is this: If determinism is true, we can infer all true statements about the world now from a complete description of the world at any previous time, together with the laws of nature. If it is true that A now (at T) raises her arm, then we can infer the truth of the statement ‘A raises her arm at T’ from a complete description of the world at some time preceding her birth, together with the laws of nature. If A could have refrained from raising her arm, then A could have rendered the statement ‘A raises her arm at T’ false. But since that statement follows from a complete description of the state of the world at some time before her birth, together with the laws of nature, then A could render that statement false only if she could falsify either the complete description of the world at a time before her birth or the laws of nature. But since no one can either alter the past or change the laws of nature, A cannot do so; and therefore determinism implies that she cannot perform any action other than the one she actually performs. However, compatibilists need not accept van Inwagen’s argument. They believe that we should interpret the claim that an agent can perform some action to mean that it is possible for her to perform that action if we abstract from any information about what she will choose to do. In this sense it is not possible for that agent to alter either the past or the laws of nature, since whatever she chooses to do, these will remain the same. Moreover, if determinism is true, we can derive claims about the particular action she will perform at T from the conjunction of a complete description of the world at some previous time and the laws of nature. However, it does not follow from this that she cannot perform any other action at T in the compatibilists’ general sense unless we can 3 In Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will; and idem, “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism.” The summary of van Inwagen’s argument that follows is drawn from “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism.”

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infer the claim that she will not perform any other action from that conjunction without referring to any claims about what she will choose to do or about the events that constitute her choice. Since we will not be able to infer claims about what she will choose to do without referring to claims about her choice whenever her actions depend on what she chooses to do, it will be true in all such cases that she can perform any of the actions that she would perform if she chose, if we use ‘can’ in its broader compatibilist sense. For this reason compatibilists can deny van Inwagen’s argument on the grounds that it begs the question against them.4 4 More technically, I have described two conceptions of possibility: the broad compatibilist conception of possibility and possibility tout court. In van Inwagen’s idiom, we might define these two conceptions as follows: our possibilities at a given time are limited by the claims that can be inferred, subject to some (possibly empty) set of restrictions, from some proposition expressing the state of the world at a previous time together with the laws of physics. We define different senses of ‘possibility’ by imposing different sets of restrictions on the inferences that limit our possibilities. Possibility tout court allows any inferences at all: it is possible tout court for A to perform some action X at T if the proposition ‘A performs X at T’ is compatible with those claims about the state of the world at T that can be inferred from the proposition that completely expresses the state of the world at some previous time and those that state the laws of physics. Broader conceptions of possibility disallow inferences involving propositions concerning some type of event which that conception treats as a variable. In the broader compatibilist sense, it is possible for A to do X at T if the proposition ‘A does X at T’ is compatible with those propositions about the state of the world at T that can be inferred from some proposition expressing the state of the world at some instant at or prior to A’s choice, together with those that express laws of physics, if we prescind from any information about what A actually chooses to do or about the events that constitute her choice. If the proposition from which claims about the state of the world at T are to be inferred is a description of the state of the world at a time preceding A’s birth, then when, in the course of working out the implications of that proposition and the laws of physics, we arrive at some claim about A’s choice or about the events that constitute it, we must disregard that claim and any others that can only be inferred from it. Those claims about A’s conduct at T that are compatible with what we can infer, subject to this restriction, from that description of the state of the world at a time preceding A’s birth, together with the laws of physics, describe acts that are in the compatibilist sense possible for A at T. If this account is even roughly correct, then van Inwagen’s argument against compatibilists presupposes, rather than establishes, the claim that the sense of possibility relevant to freedom is the libertarian possibility tout court. Call the claim that A raises her arm at T ‘P’. Van Inwagen claims that if A could have rendered P false and if the description of the state of the world at a time preceding A’s birth, together with the laws of physics, implies P, then A could have rendered the conjunction of the description of the state of the world at a time preceding her birth and the laws of physics false. But in assuming that the fact that P is implied by the conjunction of the description of the world at some previous time and the laws of nature means that we can substitute that conjunction for P in the statement ‘A could have rendered P false’, van Inwagen begs the question against compatibilists. The claim that some proposition P follows from some premisses Q and R subject to certain restrictions on inference obviously entails that it follows from those premisses simpliciter. But, equally obviously, the converse is not true: from the fact that Q and R imply P it does not follow that Q and R imply P when some particular type of inference is disallowed, since Q and R may imply P precisely by means of the type of inference in question. But Q and R clearly imply themselves with or without any restrictions on inference. For this reason, the fact that Q and R imply P does not mean that we can substitute ‘Q and R’ for ‘P’ in statements

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At this point we seem to have reached what Fischer has called a “dialectical stalemate”:5 a situation in which proponents of opposing views can explain our intuitions about various examples using different principles, and in which any example that seems to support one principle over the other can legitimately be rejected on the grounds that it presupposes the view it is meant to support. In dealing with dialectical stalemates, it is in general unhelpful to try to establish one view over the other by arguing that either our ordinary use of the terms in question, our intuitions, or consideration of some set of examples forces us to accept it. For our opponents will reject any examples that their view cannot explain; they will not share the intuitions to which we appeal; and they will reject the claim that they cannot use the terms whose proper application is at issue in ways that accommodate their view. Some dialectical stalemates exist because one or both sides are arguing in bad faith: because they have already decided to reject their opponents’ position at any cost, and will therefore blithely dismiss any arguments that might be adduced in support of it. In other cases, one or both sides might reject the other’s arguments because they have not recognized the strength of their opponents’ position: the strains that using the contested terms as they do will impose on them, the lurking inconsistencies between the intuitions that they take to support their views and others to which they are equally committed, or the kinds of examples their opponents might adduce in support of their claims. In either case, the existence of a dialectical stalemate would be due not to the nature of the issues under discussion but to the limitations of some or all of the parties to the debate. But if neither side is arguing in bad faith, and if parties on both sides recognize the implications of holding their positions and the kinds of objections that might be made to them, then a dialectical stalemate must reflect the fact that neither our intuitions, our ordinary use of the terms like ‘P does not follow from Q and R when some set of restrictions on inference is observed’ and preserve the truth-value of the original statement, unless we know the set of restrictions in question to be either empty or not relevant to the case at hand. If we assume the compatibilist conception of possibility, then it is true that A cannot render either the description of the world at some previous time or the laws of nature false, since we can infer the truth of the description of the world at some previous time and the laws of nature from themselves without referring to any claims about A’s choice. Ex hypothesi, it is also true that the description of the world at some previous time and the laws of nature imply P simpliciter, and therefore that it is not possible tout court for A to render P false. But it does not follow that A cannot render P false in the broader compatibilist sense. For in that sense the claim that A can render P false means that some conjunct of P that concerns A’s behavior does not follow from the description of the world at some previous time and the laws of nature when we disallow any inference that refers to A’s choice, or to the events which constitute it. The claim that A can in this sense falsify P is compatible with the claims that A cannot falsify either propositions describing the past or those concerning the laws of nature, and that P follows from those propositions simpliciter, since all of these claims are true in any case in which we can derive P from those propositions only via claims about A’s choice or the events that constitute it. 5 John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will, pp. 83–5.

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in question, nor a straightforward appeal to examples can settle the issue. I will describe such cases as genuine dialectical stalemates. It is, I think, clear that the impasse described above is a genuine dialectical stalemate. For neither libertarians nor compatibilists are arguing in bad faith when they assert the legitimacy of using their senses of ‘possibility’; nor, given the extent to which these issues have been discussed, can we plausibly maintain that either libertarians or compatibilists have failed to recognize the implications of their positions or the kinds of arguments that might be made against them. Moreover, if the account of the problem of freedom given in chapter 1 is correct, we can see why this dialectical stalemate exists. I argued in that chapter that our ordinary use of the concept of freedom relies on the assumption that if I perform an action because I choose to do so, then I perform it freely, but if I perform it because something else causes me to do so, then I do not; that either we or the external world, but not both, cause us to act as we do. Mechanism implies that this assumption is false: that the actions we normally call ‘free’ are caused by choices that are themselves caused, ultimately, either by indeterministic events or by external causes. It therefore implies that our ordinary concept of freedom gives us reason both to affirm and to deny that we perform those actions freely. It is for this reason that appeals to intuition and ordinary language are not decisive: both libertarians and compatibilists draw on important features of our ordinary concept of freedom, both are trying to apply that concept to cases in which the conditions of its straightforward application are absent, both project that concept in ways that are not obviously unreasonable or illegitimate, and both can muster real intuitive support for their views. If this account is correct, then no appeal to our ordinary concept of freedom, or to the ways in which we ordinarily apply it, will settle the issue between libertarians and compatibilists, since that concept supports both views and does not give us decisive grounds to reject either. If this issue presents us with a genuine dialectical stalemate, then it might seem that we must despair of finding a solution that would satisfy libertarians and compatibilists alike. In fact, however, I believe that it shows us the kind of argument we would need to make in order to find such a solution. We reach a genuine dialectical stalemate when no arguments based on appeals to ordinary language, to the consideration of examples, or to our intuitions succeed in convincing our opponents, and when this is due not to our opponents’ limitations but to the fact that both sides can appeal to intuitions, accounts of apparent counterexamples, and claims about our ordinary use of the terms in question that are not unreasonable. In such situations we should abandon the attempt to convince our opponents that intuitions, examples, or ordinary language decisively favor our view, not only because such arguments are unlikely to convince them but because the fact that we have reached a genuine dialectical stalemate shows that such arguments are unsound. Instead, we should admit that there are several apparently legitimate ways of using the

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contested terms, that each way of using them will be supported by some apparently convincing intuitions, and that we will probably not find any example that will decisively show that one way of using these terms is right. Having made this concession, we should then proceed to ask what reasons we have to use the contested terms in either of these legitimate ways in the cases under discussion. If this argument is correct, and if the impasse reached above is a genuine dialectical stalemate, libertarians and compatibilists should agree that both the broader compatibilist conception of possibility and the libertarian possibility tout court have something to be said for them, that both can usefully be employed in various circumstances, and that the claim that one of them is the conception of possibility relevant to discussions of freedom and responsibility is unlikely to be established by arguments about what terms like possibility or ‘can’ mean, by appeal to our ordinary concept of freedom, or by our intuitions. Were they to agree on this point, both sides would have to recast some of the arguments by which they had hoped to establish the illegitimacy of their opponents’ position as demonstrations of the costs incurred by those who hold it.6 Having done so, they could proceed to address the question: Granted that we can legitimately use both the compatibilist conception of possibility and the libertarian possibility tout court, what reasons do we have to construe our freedom and responsibility in terms of one rather than the other? The claim that we should ask not which conceptions of freedom and responsibility are the real ones but which we have most reason to use might seem like a way of substituting questions about our motives for believing that we are free and responsible for questions about the justification of those beliefs, thereby deflecting libertarians’ attention from the question whether we are in fact free or responsible in some satisfactory sense to timeworn compatibilist arguments about the social benefits of thinking that we are. This objection rests on two mistakes. First, there is a difference between saying that we should be guided by what we care about in deciding which concepts to concern ourselves with and saying that such considerations should guide our decisions about what beliefs to hold. I make only the former claim. I assume that given a particular conception of freedom or moral responsibility, we should decide whether we are free or responsible in that sense, and what would follow if we were, without respect to the beliefs on these questions that we would like to be true. For this reason I will not try to argue, for instance, that we should regard ourselves as morally responsible because we would be less likely to behave badly if we did, since I am not aware of any reason for thinking that the truth of the latter claim is a reason for believing the former. I claim only that when we ask ourselves which conceptions of freedom and responsibility we should concern ourselves with, 6

See Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will, p. 199.

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there is no conception that we must use, and that we are therefore at liberty to consider our reasons for using one or the other. Second, one might object to this claim if one took an unduly narrow view of what we care about. Thus, for instance, Dennett claims that “unless we can tie [responsibility] to some recognizable social desideratum, it will have no rational claim on our esteem.”7 The idea that our concerns are so narrow seems wrong on two counts: first, not all desiderata are social, and second, not everything we might find desirable in a concept is an effect that concerning ourselves with that concept will produce. If we reject this restricted view of what we care about, we can regard as relevant to our assessment of concepts of freedom not only the consequences of accepting a particular conception of freedom but features of that conception itself: for instance, its rational defensibility, its role in a justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility, or its ability to help us to justify a satisfying account of our status as moral persons. Only if we construe what we care about broadly will we be able to accommodate libertarians’ legitimate concerns; and only if we provide an account of freedom and responsibility that fully satisfies our concerns, broadly construed, will we be able to say that those who reject our account are not worried about anything worth wanting. When we ask not which conception of freedom is the real one but which we have most reason to use, the force of libertarians’ objections to compatibilist accounts of freedom is clear. For while libertarians cannot plausibly claim that the meanings of words like ‘can’ or ‘possibility’ ensure that their account of freedom is correct or argue that our intuitions unequivocally favor their position, they can raise serious questions about what reason we have to construe our freedom in terms of the compatibilist conception of possibility. First, libertarians might ask why the conception of possibility relevant to freedom of the will should define our alternatives relative to a description of our situation that abstracts from any information at all. If determinism is true, then if we define our possibilities relative to all relevant information about our situation, we will conclude that no agent ever has more than one possibility available to her at a given time. We can decide to ignore some feature of her situation in formulating the description of that situation relative to which we will define her possibilities, and it will then seem to us that she has a variety of alternatives available to her. But from the fact that we have decided to ignore some feature of her situation, it does not follow that that feature has ceased to exist; nor does the fact that we have chosen to disregard the ways in which it limits her options imply that those limitations no longer constrain her. It might therefore seem that the compatibilists’ general sense of possibility describes the possibilities that we would have if the course of our deliberation and the outcome of our choices were in fact undetermined, and not the possibilities that are actually 7

Dennett, Elbow Room, p. 163.

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available to us, things being as they are. Unless compatibilists can explain why we should regard those actions that are possible in their sense as genuine alternatives, libertarians will take this argument to show that only those actions that are possible tout court are truly open to us. Even if compatibilists could explain why we should regard those actions that are possible in their general sense as genuine possibilities, libertarians might ask why similar arguments would not show that all objects have alternatives that are truly open to them. The claim that persons are free and nonpersons are not requires that persons have genuine alternatives in some sense in which nonpersons do not. Compatibilists claim that we can choose among genuine alternatives whenever our actions depend on our choices. But given any object at any time, we can define some general sense of possibility according to which that object at that time had several possibilities open to it. If we abstract from information about the topography of the mountain down which it slides, we can claim that an avalanche could have buried any of a number of different sets of houses; if we abstract from information about the angle at which it was hit, we can claim that a pool ball could have knocked any of a range of other pool balls into the corner pocket; if we abstract from information about the causes of our choices, we can claim that we could have chosen to perform any of a number of actions. In all three cases, were we to consider all information relevant to an explanation of the behavior of the object under consideration, we would find that its actual behavior was its only possibility tout court; the compatibilist conception of our possibilities differs from the other two only in the particular type of information from which it abstracts. When compatibilists claim that the fact that we would have performed any of several actions had we chosen to do so shows that we have genuine alternatives, while the fact that a pool ball would have taken any of several paths had it been hit in the right way does not, they must therefore assume that when we incorporate information about the angle at which the pool ball was hit into an account of the alternatives available to it, we thereby show that some of those alternatives were not genuine; but when we incorporate information about the causes of our choices into an account of our alternatives, we do not. And this assumption seems to reflect an arbitrary attitude towards a particular type of natural cause, an attitude which libertarians will rightly require compatibilists to explain. 8 Note that although I have discussed different conceptions of possibility, the sense of possibility involved in all of these conceptions is itself univocal. Each such conception uses the term ‘possibility’ to mean what I will call ‘physical possibility’ possibility given, first, some initial description of the object whose possibilities are in question and of its situation; and, second, natural laws. They differ in that each defines our possibilities relative to descriptions that abstract from different types of information. This makes it natural to think that our “real” possibilities are those that are defined relative to a description of our circumstances that does not abstract from any information at all. I have discussed possibility in this way in part because it makes explicit the strength of the libertarian position on this point.

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Finally, it is unclear why the compatibilist’s general conception of our possibilities should be relevant to our moral evaluation of persons. It might be relevant if, in our ascriptions of moral responsibility, we were concerned with people in general and their possibilities. Just as water can freeze or vaporize, people can choose to act rightly or wrongly. But our evaluation of persons is typically not concerned with people in general, but with individuals. It is a desideratum of moral evaluation that it be subtle and fine-grained; that it be as sensitive as possible to differences in the capacities of agents and in their situations. We say that water can vaporize, but not that water in a functioning freezer can vaporize, and still less that these ice cubes could have vaporized while they were locked in the deep freeze. Analogously, if determinism is true, we can say that people can refrain from acting selfishly but not that a person who actually acted selfishly could have refrained from doing so, given the circumstances as they were. But the claim that an agent is morally responsible for her conduct seems to turn on the latter sort of claim, and therefore to require that we define the possibilities available to an individual relative to her actual situation, and not in abstraction from factors, like the causes of her choice, that seem obviously relevant to an understanding of how she came to act as she did. Compatibilists must therefore explain why the conception of possibility that is relevant to freedom of the will should define our possibilities in abstraction from any information at all; why it should abstract, in particular, from information about the course of our deliberation and the outcome of our choices, but not from information about any other kind of event; and why we should regard a conception of possibility that does abstract from such information as relevant to our moral evaluation of persons. If compatibilists cannot answer these questions, libertarians will rightly reject their views. In what follows I will argue that the distinction between theoretical and practical reason allows us to answer these questions.

Theoretical Possibilities Possibility tout court is central to theoretical reasoning. The aim of theoretical reasoning is to describe the world and to explain the events that occur in it. Ideally, in explaining events it aims to provide a unified and systematic general explanation that would show all events to be either necessary or not susceptible to further explanation. To use that account to explain some particular event would be to show that event to be either the only event that could possibly have occurred, given all relevant natural laws and causes, or one of several such events that a complete specification of those laws and causes leaves open. To explain the behavior of any object, therefore, is to narrow our conception

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of the possibilities open to it as far as we can—that is, until we reach its possibilities tout court. By contrast, the claim that an agent would have performed some action had she chosen to do so has no particular importance from a theoretical point of view. What would have happened had some condition obtained does not figure in an explanation of what happened when that condition did not obtain— though it might be indirectly relevant if, for instance, the agent’s awareness of the fact that she would have performed certain actions had she chosen to do so was among the considerations that led her to act as she did. It is true that any number of actions might have been possible for her in the compatibilists’ general sense, but this fact has, from a theoretical point of view, no particular significance. Nor, from a theoretical point of view, can we explain the importance of the compatibilist conception of possibility by appealing to the idea that choices have some special significance. If mechanism is true, then our actions can be explained in the same terms as other natural events, and, qua cause, nothing sets our choices apart from the other natural events that might figure in such an explanation. For this reason, the claim that the distinction between those acts that depend on our choices and those that do not is more important or fundamental than the distinction between those events that depend on any other type of natural event and those that do not is, from a theoretical point of view, unfounded. From a theoretical point of view, human actions are events to be described and explained. The whole point of the attempt to describe and explain events is to move from a general conception of the possibilities available to some object to an understanding of the causes that led that object to behave as it did; to specify the causes of its behavior more and more fully until that behavior can be seen to be either necessary or not susceptible to further explanation. From this point of view, compatibilists’ insistence that we should define the possibilities available to us as those actions that we would perform if we chose will seem to reflect at best an unmotivated decision to disregard information that is clearly relevant to an explanation of her actions, and at worst a kind of willful blindness. For, from a theoretical point of view, there is no reason not to specify the causes of an agent’s behavior fully, or to conclude our inquiries before we understand what caused her to act as she did.

Practical Alternatives When we engage in practical reasoning, our purpose is not to explain what caused some event to occur but to determine which of the actions available to us we have most reason to perform. Like theoretical reasoning, practical reasoning seeks in a sense to demonstrate the necessity of certain actions. But whereas theoretical reasoning seeks to show that some action that actually

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occurred was physically necessary in view of antecedent events and natural laws, practical reasoning seeks to determine which of the actions available to us is rationally required in view of our grounds for choice and the principles by which we govern our conduct.9 Because the aims of theoretical and practical reasoning differ in this way, they require conceptions of possibility to serve different functions. Both the compatibilists’ general conception of possibility and the libertarian possibility tout court are conceptions of physical possibility. They specify which events are possible for some object given some (more or less completely described) set of antecedent events and natural laws. As I have argued, one aim of theoretical reasoning is to narrow our conception of the physical possibilities available to some object until we can see that its behavior was either required by physical laws or not susceptible of further explanation. For this reason, the aim of theoretical reasoning itself requires that we employ a conception of physical possibility; and that this conception be the narrowest available to us, namely possibility tout court.10 But because practical reasoning does not itself attempt to answer the question which of the alternatives available to us is physically possible or necessary, the aim of practical reasoning is not to determine whether or not any action is possible in either of the senses discussed above; and neither of those two conceptions of possibility can play in our practical reasoning a role analogous to that which possibility tout court plays in our theoretical reasoning. Instead, practical reasoning requires that we employ a conception of physical possibility in order to determine whether or not some action counts as one of our alternatives at all: to define the set of alternatives among which we can choose. In order to arrive at a decision about what to do, I must choose among some set of courses of action that I regard as my alternatives. This set will presumably not include all the courses of action that, in the least restrictive sense, I could conceivably perform. For instance, I might reject some courses of action 9 One might object to this statement on the grounds that practical reasoning is concerned only with the question whether or not some action is permissible; that when it shows some action to be required it does so only by showing either that its omission is impermissible or that no available alternative is permissible; and that it is therefore wrong to characterize practical reasoning as seeking to demonstrate the necessity of performing some action. This might well be true of moral reasoning. However, in this book, I use the term ‘practical reasoning’ not to mean moral reasoning or what Kant would call ‘pure practical reason’, but in its widest possible sense. If I conclude that it is morally permissible for me to perform any of several actions, I can then go on to ask which of those I have most reason to perform, given not only my moral principles but my other motivations. It is this question that practical reasoning (as I use that phrase) seeks to answer. 10 I do not mean to suggest that possibility tout court is the only conception of possibility that plays any role in theoretical reasoning, or that our attempts to describe and explain the world will never give us any reason to attend to the question what some object could, in any general sense, have done. My point is rather that the attempt to discover what it was possible tout court for some object to have done is itself one of the goals of theoretical reasoning, and that no conception of physical possibility plays an analogous role in practical reasoning.

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out of hand as obviously undesirable or beneath consideration. To reject a course of action as clearly undesirable is to reject it on practical grounds. Since I must determine which actions I can rule out on these grounds by engaging in practical reasoning, I do not require such an account in order to engage in practical reasoning at all. While practical reasoning does not itself require an account of which courses of action an agent regards as obviously undesirable, however, it does require some account of those other criteria, if any, that a proposed course of action must meet if an agent can legitimately consider it to be among her alternatives. We might conclude that there are no such criteria: that any action we can imagine can be counted among our alternatives. This would constitute an account of what must be true of some proposed course of action if it can be counted among our alternatives, namely, nothing. But we cannot dismiss the demand for such an account altogether. For without some conception of which proposed courses of action we can legitimately regard as alternatives and which we cannot, we would be unable to determine which courses of action we can legitimately regard as possible objects of choice.11 One criterion, clearly, is this: I can consider an action to be among my alternatives only if I do not know that it is impossible for me to perform that action. For if I know that I cannot possibly perform that action, then I need not ask myself whether or not I should perform it.12 However, it is not sufficient to rule out those actions that I know that I cannot perform. For I can be wrong about which alternatives I have. I believe that I could go to a movie right now; but perhaps if I did decide to do so I would discover that my house has been encased in lucite. In this case, I would be wrong to think that going out to see a movie is a genuine alternative for me; had I known that my house was encased in lucite, I would not have regarded it as one. If the criteria that an action must meet if it is to be counted among my alternatives are to accommodate the fact that I can be wrong about which alternatives I have, they cannot exclude only those actions that I know that I cannot perform. They must hold that it must really be possible, in some sense, for me to perform an action if I am to count it among my alternatives. But while we cannot define our alternatives in terms of what we actually know or believe to be possible, the criteria that we use to define our alternatives 11

To say that an action is an alternative in this sense does not imply that it is an alternative that one should seriously consider, or even that it is an alternative to which one should give a moment’s thought. While, as Susan Wolf suggests (“Asymmetrical Freedom,” pp. 152–3), an agent might have to be crazy or immoral to regard abhorrent actions as alternatives worth considering, she would not have to be crazy or immoral to regard such actions as alternatives in the sense I discuss here, any more than she would have to be mathematically inept to claim that “1000” is a possible answer to the question “What is 2 + 2?”, while “blue” is not. 12 I might consider trying to perform some action even though I know I will not succeed; but in this case the alternative that I consider is making a futile effort, not performing an impossible action.

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must allow us, in principle, to know what it is possible, in the relevant sense, for us to do, and to know this while we deliberate. For the account of our alternatives that is currently under consideration is supposed to allow us to determine, while we deliberate, whether or not we can consider some course of action as one of the alternatives among which we can choose. Therefore, while our account of the criteria by which we decide whether or not some act should count as an alternative must allow for the possibility that we might apply them wrongly, they should not be such that the question whether or not some action counts as an alternative is in principle unanswerable from a practical point of view. For this reason, the conception of possibility that we use to define our alternatives for the purposes of deliberation must define our possibilities relative to only those facts that we could conceivably know to be true while we deliberate. In the cases of error described above, I was wrong about which alternatives I had because I was ignorant of some fact that I might have known. In order for some course of action to count as one of my alternatives, it must be a course of action that I would regard as possible even if all such mistakes had been corrected and all the relevant lacunae in my knowledge filled. But if there is some type of information that is in principle inaccessible to an agent engaged in deliberation, then we cannot define the alternatives available to a given agent as those that are possible relative to a description of her situation that includes information of that kind. For to define our alternatives in terms of such a conception of possibility would make it impossible in principle for any agent engaged in deliberation to know which proposed courses of action she could legitimately count among her alternatives. If a proposed course of action is to count among our alternatives, therefore, it must be possible for all we could conceivably know while we deliberate. I argued in chapter 2 that an agent can predict her own future behavior, or learn of such predictions from others, only when her knowledge of the outcome of her choice would not affect the course of her deliberation, or when her behavior does not depend on her choice. In the first case, since the agent can know which action is her only possibility tout court only if she would deliberate and choose exactly as she would have done had she not known what she would choose to do, the possibilities among which she must choose will be those among which she would have chosen had she not known which course of action she would choose. Whichever conception of possibility is relevant to the practical reasoning of an agent who does not know which course of action she will in fact choose to perform is the conception relevant to the practical reasoning of an agent who does know which action she will choose to perform, but on whose deliberation this knowledge has no effect. An agent whose behavior is entirely determined by factors other than her choice will have no reason to engage in practical reasoning at all; in any case, once she has correctly identified the set of actions that she would perform if she chose

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to, and has determined that that set has only one member, her conception of the possibilities available to her can hardly be criticized on the grounds that it is insufficiently narrow, nor will the statement that she has only one possibility tout court tell her anything she does not already know. In all other cases, an agent cannot predict what she will choose to do or learn of such predictions from others. But if it is in principle impossible for an agent to know, before making a choice, what she will choose to do, then no conceivable correction of her beliefs could allow her to narrow the set of actions that she regards as alternatives beyond those that she would perform if she chose to perform them. Because, while she deliberates, it is impossible in principle for her to predict the outcome of her choice, those actions are possible for all she could conceivably know. For this reason, the conception of our possibilities that we use to define the alternatives among which we can choose must be the compatibilists’ general conception of possibility, rather than the narrower possibility tout court. Libertarians argue that because, while I deliberate, conditions exist that will cause me to make some particular choice, the compatibilists’ general conception of my possibilities is insufficiently narrow. They claim that, if determinism is true, only that action that I will in fact perform is a possibility tout court for me; and that that action is therefore my only genuine alternative. But to use the word ‘alternative’ in this sense renders it useless for the purposes of deliberation. While I deliberate I can, of course, believe that determinism is true and therefore that I have only one possibility tout court. If I believe that the truth or falsity of determinism itself gives me reason to choose one or another of the alternatives available to me, then the claim that determinism is true or false will figure among my grounds for choice and will be in that sense relevant to my practical reasoning. But my beliefs about the truth or falsity of determinism will not affect my conception of which alternatives I have. For in order to narrow my conception of the alternatives available to me to that one action that it is possible tout court for me to perform, I would have to know, while deliberating, which action that was; and to know this, I would have to be able to predict which action I would choose to perform. Because I cannot predict the outcome of my choices, I cannot know, while I deliberate, which of the actions that I would perform if I chose is possible tout court. Therefore, the belief that there is at any given time only one course of action that it is possible tout court for me to perform cannot lead me to conclude that any particular course of action is or is not among my alternatives. Whether or not I believe that determinism is true, I must choose among those actions that are possible for all I could conceivably know while I deliberate. Unless the belief that determinism is true figures among my grounds for choice, it is, for practical purposes, empty. Consider as an illustration Sartre’s example of a young man torn between joining the Free French and caring for his aging mother.13 Imagine that an 13

Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” pp. 42–3.

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incompatibilist, to whom he had described his dilemma, were to say to him: Although you may not realize it, you have only one genuine alternative. The young man begs for clarification: Have the Allies invaded Berlin, ensuring the Nazis’ defeat? Has his mother found someone else to care for her? Is this perhaps a particularly insensitive way of telling him that his mother has died? No, the incompatibilist replies, I mean that because determinism is true, conditions now exist which ensure that you will choose one of those alternatives and which entirely preclude your choosing the other. Well, the young man might ask, which alternative is it inevitable that I choose? At this point, the incompatibilist would have to confess that, alas, she did not know which choice the young man would make; which of his alternatives was the genuine one, and which the spurious. If she were willing to try the young man’s patience further, she might go on to explain why she would not be able to tell him which choice he would make even if she had an infallible Pocket Oracle. At the end of this recitation Sartre’s young man might shrug his shoulders and say: If I were trying to decide what line to take in my work on causality, or to make some other decision in which the truth or falsity of determinism might figure among my grounds for choice, then this discussion would have helped me to see what decision I have most reason to make. And if the truth of determinism allowed me to eliminate all but one of my apparent alternatives from consideration, then it would have relieved me of the need to deliberate at all. But the truth of determinism gives me no reason to abandon either my mother or my country; and as for my “alternatives,” it implies only that whichever choice I make will have been the only choice that I could possibly have made. I don’t know which choice that is, and your arguments imply that I cannot possibly know which of my alternatives you would call my only real possibility until I have already chosen one of them. So I am left with exactly the same decision, to be made among exactly the same alternatives, whether or not determinism is true. And now, if you will excuse me, I’ll try to make it.

Are Our Alternatives Genuine? I have argued that we cannot narrow our conception of our alternatives beyond the set of actions that we would perform if we chose since, when we deliberate, we either cannot know which action we will in fact choose to perform or cannot use that knowledge in making our choice. However, one might think that this claim does not imply that we have reason to regard all the actions that we could perform if we chose to do so as genuine alternatives. For it might be that to deliberate among various courses of action also requires that we believe those actions to be possible tout court. In this case, our conception of an alternative would have to meet two conditions. First, it would have to allow us to

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identify our alternatives while we deliberate, and thus, for the reasons given above, it could not restrict our alternatives beyond those actions that we would perform if we chose. Second, no action could count as one of our alternatives unless it were possible tout court for us to perform it. These conditions could not be jointly satisfied unless it were possible tout court for us to perform all those actions that we would perform if we chose; and thus they could not be jointly satisfied unless determinism were false. If deliberation requires that we regard our actions as possible tout court, then my arguments in the last section imply not that we have reason to regard those actions that we would perform if we chose as genuine alternatives, but that we cannot formulate a coherent conception of an alternative that meets the requirements of practical reasoning unless determinism is false. Peter van Inwagen has argued on these grounds that a belief in determinism, if taken seriously, would make it impossible for us to deliberate.14 Van Inwagen argues that deliberation “manifests” a belief that it is possible tout court for the agent to perform her various alternatives, since one cannot deliberate about whether or not to perform some course of action unless one believes it to be possible tout court. Determinism implies that only one such action is possible tout court, and therefore a determinist cannot believe that all of her supposed alternatives are in fact possible tout court. Since deliberation manifests the belief that one’s alternatives are possible tout court, a determinist who deliberates thereby shows that she has inconsistent beliefs. On van Inwagen’s view, determinists who recognize these facts must therefore either give up their belief in determinism, learn to live with the fact that they have beliefs that they know to be inconsistent, or give up on deliberation altogether (in which case van Inwagen claims that they will either “move about in random jerks and scuttles, or . . . withdraw into catatonia”).15 The crucial step in van Inwagen’s argument is the move from the uncontroversial claim that we cannot deliberate about whether or not to perform some action that we know that we cannot possibly perform, to the claim that we cannot deliberate about whether or not to perform some action unless we believe it to be possible tout court. Van Inwagen supports this move as follows: “Anyone who doubts that this is indeed the case may find it instructive to imagine that he is in a room with two doors and that he believes one of the doors to be unlocked and the other to be locked and impassable, though he has no idea which is which; let him then attempt to imagine himself deliberating about which door to leave by.”16 Deliberation is the attempt to determine what one should do. If, in the situation van Inwagen describes, I were in any doubt about what to do, I might reasonably deliberate about whether or not I should try to leave the room at 14

Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will, pp. 153–61. Ibid., p. 157. 16 Ibid., p. 154. 15

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all, whether (if so) I should opt for a graceful exit through the unlocked door or try to scratch through the walls with my fingernails, and (if the former) how I should ascertain which door is unlocked. Deliberation is a perfectly good way of answering any of these questions. But assuming that I do want to leave through a door, deliberation is not a good way to figure out which door to leave by. If I knew only that one of the two doors was locked, there might still be room for deliberation about which door to leave by: I might conceivably decide to try to smash through the locked door with my head or to pick its lock with a hairpin. But if I know that one door is not only locked but impassable, I know that I cannot leave through it by any means; and therefore I cannot regard leaving through the locked door even as an undesirable alternative. If I do want to leave the room through a door, then I must leave it through the door that is unlocked. And while there are some things about which I might reasonably deliberate in this situation, which door is unlocked is not one of them. When we deliberate, we try to answer the question ‘What should I do?’ Under normal circumstances, the answer to this question is not, and does not imply, an answer to the question ‘Which door is unlocked?’ or to questions about any other matter of fact that is independent of my will. For this reason, deliberation is not a means of answering that question, any more than it is a means of discovering the precise value of the gravitational constant or the date of Dante’s exile from Florence. Moreover, in the situation van Inwagen describes, I have a perfectly good way of figuring out which door is unlocked: namely, to try the doorknobs and see. Because this is such an obvious way of discovering which door is unlocked, and because deliberation is not a way of doing so at all, deliberating about which door to leave by in the situation van Inwagen describes would, as he suggests, be absurd. However, our ordinary choices are disanalogous to the situation van Inwagen describes in both respects. First of all, as I have argued, while we deliberate we cannot discover which of our alternatives is possible tout court; we cannot simply try the doorknobs and see. Second, in the situation van Inwagen describes, the question which door is unlocked is independent of my decision which door to leave through; and it is for this reason that deliberation cannot help us to answer it. One door is locked; the other is not; and which door I choose to exit by has nothing to do with which is which. But when I face a choice among several courses of action that I would perform if I chose to, then which course of action is possible tout court depends on which I choose to perform; and any of those actions would be possible tout court if I chose to perform it. Instead of imagining that I am in the situation van Inwagen describes, we should instead imagine that I am in a room with two doors, one of which is locked and one of which is unlocked; that I do not know which is which; but that I do know that the locks are set up in such a way that as soon as I choose to try to open one door, that door will unlock, and the door that I have not

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chosen will lock. We should also imagine that these doors do not open onto the same hallway. Perhaps one opens onto a Tahitian beach and the other into downtown Manhattan; in any case, imagine that I know which door opens onto which prospect. Would it be irrational to deliberate in this situation? I cannot just try the doors and see which is unlocked, since I would have to try one before the other, thereby causing one to open and the other to lock. While it is true that one door is (now) locked and one unlocked, it is impossible for me to discover which is which without altering the conditions about which I seek to learn. Moreover, I have no reason to try to answer the question which door is now locked and which is unlocked. Since I can cause whichever door I wish to open, the question which is now unlocked has nothing to do with which door I actually leave by; and it can only be of academic interest to me. In this situation, if I do not wish to remain in the room needlessly, I must somehow select one door to try to leave through. If I decide not to resolve this question through deliberation, I will have to select one door at random, or flip a coin, or find some other way of determining which door I will cause to become unlocked. Since I can leave through whichever door I want, and since the question which door I choose to try first will determine whether I find myself in Manhattan or Tahiti, it is unclear why I should not simply decide which door to leave by and act on my choice; why I should allow my future to be decided by the toss of a coin and not by my preferences or my practical principles. And if I could reasonably deliberate in this situation, despite my knowledge that at any given time only one door is unlocked, it is unclear why we should think that my deliberation must manifest the belief that both doors are unlocked. Van Inwagen might object that the situation I have just described is not strictly analogous to our ordinary situations as determinists understand them. The most natural way to understand that situation is to suppose that the doorknobs are sensitive to my touch and thus that my touching either doorknob causes that doorknob to unlock and the other to lock. But in this case the fact that only one door is unlocked does not imply that it could not be possible tout court for me to leave through either door. For if my decision about which door to try to leave by were itself undetermined, and if that decision caused the door I chose to leave by to become unlocked, then it would be possible tout court for me to leave through either door. For this reason the fact that I can coherently deliberate in the situation I described above might not constitute a counterexample to his claim that we can coherently deliberate only when we believe our alternatives to be possible tout court. Whether or not this objection succeeds depends on whether or not my reasons for supposing that it makes sense for me to deliberate in the situation I have described have anything to do with the question whether or not my choice is determined. They do not. It makes sense for me to deliberate in the situation just described for the following reasons: first, there are several actions that I

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would perform if I chose; second, which of those actions I end up performing is not a matter of complete indifference to me; third, if I ask myself which action to perform, I can try to figure out which action I think I have most reason to perform, choose to perform it, and act on my decision; fourth, no other means of selecting among those alternatives will reliably lead me to perform that action which I think I have most reason to perform. Whether or not these conditions obtain in any given case has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of determinism.17 For this reason I conclude that deliberation does not, as van Inwagen suggests, manifest a belief that it is possible tout court for us to perform our various alternatives. Rather, it manifests a belief that we would perform any of those alternatives if we chose to do so. If this conclusion is correct, then determinism does not imply the impossibility of constructing a coherent conception of an alternative that meets the requirements of practical reasoning. Rather, practical reasoning requires that we regard all those actions that we would perform if we chose to perform them as our alternatives, and does not 17 One might object that to take the question whether or not we can coherently deliberate if determinism is true to turn on the question whether or not we have reason to do so begs the question, since in so doing we must assume that it makes sense to ask whether we have reason to deliberate. If we cannot coherently engage in practical reasoning if determinism is true, then determinism implies that we cannot coherently ask ourselves whether or not we have reason to do anything, and thus a fortiori we cannot coherently ask ourselves what reason we have to deliberate. I have construed the claim that deliberation “manifests” the belief that determinism is false to mean that it makes sense to deliberate only given this belief because I cannot see how else to construe it. Van Inwagen seems to think that it is unintelligible to deliberate if one believes in the truth of determinism. I have assumed that the clearest way of showing someone’s conduct to be intelligible is to show it to be reasonable, given her beliefs, and have tried to argue that it is in this sense intelligible for a determinist to deliberate. It is unclear to me whether, in his discussion of this point, van Inwagen means to admit that we can ask whether a determinist’s conduct is reasonable and to deny that it is; or to deny that it makes sense to apply terms like ‘reasonable’ to a determinist’s conduct at all. But on either construction, van Inwagen has not established his point. If van Inwagen means to admit the possibility that we can describe the determinist’s deliberation as reasonable or unreasonable, and to argue that it is unreasonable, then the arguments given above show that he is wrong. On the other hand, if van Inwagen were to object that I have begged the question in supposing that a determinist’s conduct could ever be reasonable, given her beliefs, he must assume that a determinist’s conduct must always be unintelligible, since her beliefs prevent us from assessing her conduct in the terms we use to determine the intelligibility of human action and, in particular, prevent us from regarding her conduct either as reasonable or as unreasonable given her beliefs. This is a more substantial claim than van Inwagen seems to be making, and establishing its truth would require far more in the way of argument than his appeal to the example discussed above provides. In particular, it would require some explanation of why a determinist who had some conception of the kinds of actions she preferred to perform and the kind of life she wished to lead could not coherently ask which of the actions that she would perform if she chose to perform them her standards gave her most reason to perform; and some justification for the claim that if she did try to decide among those actions, she could not coherently be described as deliberating, and as doing so for good reasons.

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require that we believe those alternatives to be possible tout court. We can therefore regard ourselves as choosing among alternatives whether or not determinism is true.

Does Our Belief That We Choose among Alternatives Reflect Only Our Epistemic Limitations? I have argued that because, while we deliberate, we either cannot know what we will choose to do or cannot use that knowledge, we cannot narrow our conception of our alternatives beyond those actions that we would perform if we chose; and therefore that no narrower conception of our alternatives can be relevant to practical reasoning. Because this argument shows only that no narrower conception of our alternatives is available to us while we deliberate, it might seem to show only that we must use this conception faute de mieux: that while ideally we might hope to narrow our conception of our alternatives to our possibilities tout court, our epistemic limitations prevent us from doing so, and thereby force us to settle for the broader compatibilist conception. In fact, I believe that when we engage in practical reasoning it is not only unavoidable but rational to regard our alternatives as those actions that we would perform if we chose to do so since, for the purposes of deliberation, we have no reason to regard the various actions that we would perform if we chose as differing with respect to their possibility. When I deliberate, I evaluate the various alternatives available to me. I ask myself what would happen if I made one choice rather than another and what reason I have to bring about the various states of affairs that would result from my choosing one alternative rather than another. In weighing my alternatives I take into account the effects of those choices; and while I must believe that each of the states of affairs I envision is consistent with my general beliefs about the way the world works, and that each would in fact occur were I to make the choice whose effect I take it to be, I need not believe that all of these states of the world could be simultaneously realized. If I choose to perform any action that I would perform if I chose it, then I will perform that action, and it will therefore be possible tout court. When I consider the respective merits of the states of affairs that would result from the various choices I might make, then if the actions among which I choose are actions that I would perform if I chose, I consider states of the world in which those actions are possible tout court. For the purposes of deliberation, therefore, I can regard all those alternatives as possible tout court, since each would be possible tout court were I to choose it; without thereby contradicting my belief that only one of them is in fact possible tout court. When we deliberate, we take the question what we will in fact choose to do to be open—not because we believe the outcome of our choice to be physically

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undetermined, but because we regard the question what we will in fact choose to do as one whose answer depends on us, and which we have yet to answer. And we are right to regard it thus: since, when we engage in practical reasoning, we try to decide what to do, when we engage in practical reasoning we must regard the question what we will choose to do as one we have yet to resolve. Because we take the question what we will choose to do to be open, for the purposes of deliberation we regard all those actions that we would perform if we chose as genuine alternatives for us. And we are right to regard them thus: to say that we would perform some action if we chose is (trivially) to say that if we chose, then we would perform it; and therefore if we regard the question what we will choose as open, we should regard all these actions as possible. In the case discussed above, for instance, the fact that at any given time only one door is unlocked is irrelevant for the purposes of my deliberation. Because either door will become unlocked as soon as I choose it, I can regard my alternatives as “leaving through the door on the left” and “leaving through the door on the right,” despite the fact that there is, at any given time, only one unlocked door through which I can leave. I can, that is, regard myself as having to choose between leaving through either of the two doors, without thereby contradicting my belief that only one door is in fact unlocked at any given time. Similarly, when I try to decide what to do, I may believe that only one of my alternatives is possible tout court. But because which of the courses of action that I would perform if I chose is possible tout court depends on which course of action I choose to perform, any of those courses of action will be possible tout court if I choose to perform it. Since, while I deliberate, I must regard the question which of my alternatives I will choose to perform as open, for the purposes of deliberation I should not regard those alternatives as differing with respect to their possibility. Any of them will be possible tout court if I choose to perform it, and impossible tout court if I do not. Nothing prevents me from performing any of those actions that I would perform if I chose except my choosing to do something else.18 Still, a libertarian might say, in most cases that obstacle is insuperable, since there is in fact only one choice that we could possibly make. Again, I do not wish to deny that this is true19 but to insist on its irrelevance to practical reasoning. As I have said, when we deliberate we take the question what we will choose to do to be open, a question to be answered. In answering it, we ask not which action we will in fact perform but which action we have reason to perform. We search not for the causes of an event whose nature is already 18

For a very different formulation of this point, see J. David Velleman, Practical Reflection, especially chapter 5. 19 One might deny this by denying determinism, but, as before, I assume the truth of determinism for the purposes of this argument.

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specified but for the grounds that determine which of our alternatives we have reason to choose. While we may conclude that some course of action is not among our alternatives on the grounds that we know that we could not possibly perform it, we reject courses of action that are among our alternatives not on the grounds that they are physically impossible but because we do not have reason to perform them. And when at last we choose to perform one action, we do so not because we have discovered that it is our only possibility tout court but because we have determined that it is the choice we have most reason to make. If the fact that there is, in any situation, some particular action that is our only possibility tout court implied that practical reasoning was pointless or futile, then it would imply that we have no reason to ask ourselves which of the alternatives available to us we have most reason to perform; no reason to search for grounds rather than causes. But I argued in chapter 2 that no plausible theoretical claim could imply this; a fortiori, the claim under consideration does not. If that claim allowed us to narrow the set of actions that we could legitimately regard as alternatives beyond those that we would perform if we chose, then it would constrain our practical reasoning by limiting the set of possible objects of choice over which it ranges. But I have argued that it cannot allow us to do this. Finally, if the fact that some particular action was our only possibility tout court could serve as a reason to perform some action, then it would affect our practical reasoning by providing us with grounds for choice. But it cannot—not only because we can never know which action is possible tout court until we have already chosen, but because, when our actions depend on our choices, which action is our only possibility tout court depends on which action we choose to perform, and therefore the fact that some action is our only possibility tout court could not possibly serve as a reason to choose to perform one action rather than another. While the truth of determinism might figure among our grounds for choice, the fact that some particular action is our only possibility tout court cannot possibly play any role in the deliberation that leads us to perform it. That fact is, for practical purposes, empty. Thus far I have argued that, from a practical point of view, we cannot narrow the set of actions that we regard as alternatives beyond those that we would perform if we chose; and that for the purposes of deliberation we can regard all of these actions as genuine alternatives. These arguments allow us to answer two of the libertarian objections discussed at the beginning of this chapter.20 To the question why we should define our alternatives relative to a description of our situation that does not incorporate information about the outcome of our choices, we can reply that our use of the compatibilists’ general conception of possibility reflects not an arbitrary decision to ignore information relevant to our understanding of the possibilities available to us but the fact that that 20

The third (“Why is the compatibilists’ general conception of possibility relevant to our evaluation of individuals?”) will be addressed in subsequent chapters.

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information is in principle inaccessible to us while we deliberate, and therefore that conceptions of possibility that incorporate that information can play no role in practical reasoning. To the question why we should regard ourselves as having alternatives on the grounds that we can choose among actions that we would perform if we chose to, while we do not regard pool balls as having alternatives on the grounds that they would take various trajectories if they were hit at various angles, we can reply that the concept of an alternative is defined for use in practical reasoning and therefore that only beings who are capable of engaging in practical reasoning have reason to regard themselves as having alternatives. If a pool ball were capable of engaging in practical reasoning, then it might have reason to wonder what its alternatives were. Things being as they are, however, it does not. Moreover, if a pool ball were capable of engaging in practical reasoning, it would not have reason to regard itself as having various alternative trajectories except in those situations in which its trajectory depended on its choice. If hitting such a pool ball at a particular angle caused it to roll along a particular path by causing it to make a particular choice, then it would have reason to regard the various trajectories that it would take if it chose to take them as its alternatives.21 But if hitting it caused it to take a particular trajectory by any other means, then it could in principle predict its actual trajectory. It would therefore have no more reason to define its possible trajectories in abstraction from the angle at which it would be hit than someone about to be thrown off the Empire State Building would have to define her possible trajectories in abstraction from information about the way in which she would be thrown. It is only because we can think at all that we can so much as frame the question which alternatives we have. It is only because we can engage in practical reasoning that we have reason to raise that question, since the concept of an alternative is a practical one. And it is only because we can act on our decisions that we have reason to conclude that we do have alternatives. Only a being that met all three conditions would have reason to regard itself as choosing among genuine alternatives. Any being that met all three conditions would be a person; and that person would have reason to regard her alternatives as those actions that she would perform if she chose. From a theoretical point of view, as I have said, human actions are events to be described and explained. Theoretical reasoning therefore gives us no reason to disregard the causes that lead us to choose as we do or to ascribe any particular importance to the conception of possibility on which the conditional analysis of freedom of the will relies. From the practical point of view, however, our use of this general conception of possibility, as opposed to the narrower possibility tout court, is both unavoidable and rational. It is unavoidable 21

I leave aside the question whether or not we could regard a being whose choices were determined in this way as having anything like a continuing self.

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because while we deliberate we cannot possibly employ a conception of the alternatives that are available to us that is narrower than the set of actions that we would perform were we to choose to do so. It is rational because, for the purposes of deliberation, we must regard the question what we will choose to do as open, and because, if we regard that question as open, we should not regard the various actions that we would perform if we chose as differing with respect to their possibility, since any of them would be possible tout court if we chose to perform it. Moreover, to determine whether or not a particular action is one which we would perform if we chose is to determine whether or not we can regard it as a possible object of choice: an action about which the question whether or not we have reason to perform it can legitimately be raised. The question whether or not I would perform some action if I chose is as fundamental to practical reasoning as the question whether or not some object is a possible object of knowledge is to theoretical reasoning: in each case, the answer to the question determines whether the type of reasoning under consideration is appropriate to a given object at all. By contrast, the question whether or not some action is possible tout court is, for practical purposes, irrelevant. For all three reasons, practical reasoning requires that we regard those actions which we would perform if we chose as genuine alternatives.

Freedom Freedom of the will has traditionally been held to involve two distinct conditions.22 The first condition holds that our wills are free only if we can choose among genuine alternatives. I have argued that when we engage in practical reasoning, we should regard all those actions that we would perform if we chose as genuine alternatives. An agent can, as noted above, be wrong about which alternatives she actually has; because I have defined the concept of an alternative in terms of the actions that the agent would have performed had she chosen to perform them, and not in terms of those she believed that she could have performed when she made her choice, my account allows for the possibility that she might wrongly identify some course of action as one of her alternatives because she believes, falsely, that she would perform it if she chose to. But because it incorporates those constraints on knowledge that are unavoidable when one occupies the practical point of view, and in particular the fact that while deliberating an agent either cannot know what the results of her deliberation will be or cannot use that knowledge, my account does not imply that she is wrong to think that those actions that she would perform if she chose to are, in the relevant sense, possibilities for her, or that when she decides to perform one of them and acts on her decision, she does not act freely. 22

See Watson, “Free Action and Free Will,” p. 145.

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The second condition that an agent must meet if his will is to be free has been described in different ways: as requiring that he be able to secure “the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions”23 or that he have “the capacity to translate his values into action.”24 But it always involves the ability to step back and ask ourselves whether or not we should act on our various motivations and desires; the ability to attain some critical distance from them and choose which to endorse, rather than acting on them unreflectively or accepting them uncritically. When we are capable of determining our conduct through practical reasoning, we must have this capacity, since evaluating our motivations and deciding which we have most reason to act on is one of the things that practical reasoning consists in.25 When we engage in practical reasoning, we ask ourselves what we have most reason to do: which facts about our situation and motivations we should regard as constituting reasons for action, which of those reasons are most compelling, and what, as a result, we should do. There are no theoretical claims about which we might not in principle raise the question whether they constitute reasons for action; no theoretical claims which, so to speak, carry their credentials as reasons for action in themselves, or whose natures guarantee them a place among our reasons for action whether or not we choose to regard them as such. In particular, the fact that I have some desire, or feel impelled by some motivation, cannot lead me to conclude that I should satisfy that desire or act on that motivation unless I take the fact that I have that desire or motivation to constitute a reason for acting on it;26 nor is there any desire or motivation about which I could not in principle raise the question whether or not the fact that I have that desire or motivation constitutes a reason for acting on it. I might conclude that that desire or motivation does constitute such a reason and act accordingly. But in this case the fact that I had that desire or motivation would not suffice to explain my action, since had I concluded that I did not have reason to act on it, either I would have performed some other action or I would have performed that action for some other reason. If my desire or motivation does suffice to explain why I performed some action, without requiring the additional assumption that I regarded it as a reason for acting as I did, then it must be true that even had I concluded that it was not such a reason, I would nonetheless have performed that action. But if this is true, then I was not then 23

Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” p. 20. Watson, “Free Agency,” p. 106. 25 This means that my account, like Frankfurt’s and Watson’s, is a hierarchical one. I differ from them in taking freedom to consist in our ability to determine our conduct through practical reasoning, not in our ability to act on our values or our second-order volitions. 26 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 19–20; Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, chapter 2, especially pp. 39–41; Barbara Herman, “On the Value of Acting from the Motive of Duty,” pp. 11–12; and Christine Korsgaard, “Morality as Freedom,” pp. 162–5. 24

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capable of deciding which of the actions available to me I had most reason to perform and of acting on my decision. I could not, that is, have been capable of determining my conduct through practical reasoning. If we are capable of determining our conduct through practical reasoning, then we need not accept our various desires and motivations uncritically or act on them blindly. We can ask ourselves which of our desires and motivations constitute reasons for action and which do not, and we can conclude that we have no reason whatsoever to satisfy some of our desires or to act on some of our motivations. If we can act on our decisions, then we need not satisfy those desires or act on those motivations. We might allow our various desires and motivations to dictate our actions, either by failing to exercise our capacity to evaluate them or by deciding that we have reason to allow our conduct to be governed by “the economy of [our] first-order desires.”27 But if we are capable of determining our conduct through practical reasoning, then we cannot explain such failures as the result of our inability to decide for ourselves which of our various desires and motivations provide us with reasons for action.28 When we are capable of determining our conduct through practical reasoning, we meet both of the conditions that freedom of the will requires. I will therefore define freedom as follows: a person is free if she is capable of determining her actions through practical reasoning; such an agent is free to choose among all those acts that she would perform if she chose to perform them, and she is free to perform a given action if she would perform it if she chose to do so. When we see these actions as possible or our wills as free in this sense, we need not believe that determinism is false, since we need not believe that all of these actions and choices are possible tout court or that we are free in a libertarian sense. We simply recognize that, given the unavoidable constraints on our knowledge, we must choose among the actions that are possible for all we could possibly know. Because these constraints are unavoid27

Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” p. 18. This is true regardless of the source of the desires in question. Even in the absence of mad scientists, drug addictions, and other sources of alien desires, we are subject to odd bouts of desire that spring up in us from unknown sources. When someone cuts us off on the freeway, a desire to run her off the road might sweep over us; when a particularly irritating person buttonholes us at a party, we might feel tempted to substitute withering disdain for our customary tact. We normally regard ourselves as capable of resisting these temptations and hold ourselves responsible if we do not. If a resistible alien desire were to spring up in us, we could respond to it in the same way: by stepping back from it, asking ourselves whether or not we think we should act on it, and acting accordingly; in short, by engaging in practical reasoning and acting on our decision. If we endorse that desire and act on it, then in so doing we exercise our autonomy, rather than revealing its absence. For this reason, so long as our ability to determine our conduct through practical reasoning were left intact, neither the strength of a resistible alien desire nor its external cause could properly be said to undermine our autonomy. See David Blumenfeld, “Freedom and Mind Control,” and Daniel Dennett, “Mechanism and Responsibility” (in Brainstorms), for development of this point, and for persuasive arguments against objections to compatibilism that turn on the possibility of implanting beliefs and desires in people’s minds. 28

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able, such a belief in our freedom is neither an unjustifiable concession to our desire to think ourselves metaphysically unique, nor a belief that we might be persuaded to give up by some scientific theory, but a necessary feature of deliberation and choice. For this reason, my arguments should not be confused with those that purport to show that we must believe that we are free, in a libertarian sense, when we decide what to do. I can see no reason to suppose that deliberation forces us to think of ourselves as free in a libertarian sense; and while I have argued that determinism and mechanism are, for practical purposes, empty, I have not tried to argue that deliberation requires us to believe that they are false. I have argued that the requirements of practical reasoning give us reason to regard ourselves as free in the sense defined above; but the claim that we are free in this sense does not require the falsity of determinism or mechanism and therefore cannot be identified with a libertarian conception of freedom. Nor should my arguments be confused with those that base the claim that we are free, in a libertarian sense, on an experience of freedom that is supposed to attend our choices. Such arguments have been widely and justifiably criticized by others;29 I will not rehearse those criticisms here. My arguments differ from them in three important respects. First of all, as I have said, I have not tried to argue that we are free in a libertarian sense; that is, that our choices are not determined by natural causes. Second, my arguments are not based on any claims about what we experience when we make choices. Indeed, this strategy would be directly opposed to my own; for to base the claim that we are free on some experience that we can supposedly explain only by assuming it to be veridical is to construe freedom as a theoretical, not a practical, concept. Finally, the claim that an experience of freedom inevitably attends our choices leaves open the possibility that the inevitability in question is merely psychological; that our choices might just as well produce in us the impression that our skin is purple. It does not, and arguably could not, warrant the claim that the belief that we are free is rationally required. By contrast, I have tried to argue not that people engaged in deliberation just do, for some unspecified reason, see their alternatives as the actions that they could perform if they chose but that practical reasoning necessarily involves such a conception of our alternatives, and that this necessity derives not from our nature but from the nature of practical reasoning itself. Finally, I have not tried to argue that our freedom depends on our belief that we are free.30 My arguments depend essentially on the following claims: that when we adopt the practical point of view, we have reason to employ certain concepts, like the concepts of an alternative and of a free agent; that the requirements of practical reasoning give us reason to define these concepts in 29 See, for instance, John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings, chapter 26. 30 See Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief, especially chapters 3 and 10.

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certain ways; and that when we do so, we have reason to regard ourselves as free when we can determine our conduct through practical reasoning, whether or not determinism or mechanism is true. These are all claims about the concepts we have reason to use and the beliefs we have reason to accept, not about the concepts we actually use or the beliefs we actually hold. For this reason my arguments do not make the truth of the claim that we are free agents dependent in objectionable ways on our belief that that claim is true. One might think that I would see myself as free in the sense defined above only until I made my choice, since as soon as I choose and act I learn which act was possible tout court, and therefore the constraints on the knowledge available to practical reasoning, which led me to employ the more general conception of my possibilities, will no longer restrict me. This would imply that though I must believe that I am free when I choose, that belief is mistaken, since the passage of time will inevitably dispel it. This conclusion might follow had I argued that when I choose I must see myself as free in the libertarian’s sense, that I must act under the illusion of contracausal freedom. But I argued above that when I see myself as free I do not believe, mistakenly, that it is possible tout court for me to choose to perform any action that I could perform if I chose to. I simply recognize that my actions depend on my choices, that when I make those choices I do not know, or cannot use my knowledge of, which action I will choose to perform, that I can legitimately regard any action that I could perform if I chose as a genuine alternative, and therefore that I must, from a practical point of view, regard myself as free to perform any of the actions that I could perform if I chose to. If I subsequently discover that my actions were not up to me, because for example, unbeknownst to me I was drugged, hypnotized, or coerced, then I will conclude that I was wrong to think that I was free in this sense. But I will not conclude that I was not really free in this sense simply because I discover which action it was inevitable that I choose.

4 Holding Ourselves Responsible

IN CHAPTER 1 I argued that libertarians reject compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will because they believe that no such account can allow us to justify the claim that we are morally responsible for our actions.1 My arguments in chapter 3 do not address these concerns, since in that chapter I did not discuss the relation of the conception of freedom I set out to moral responsibility. In chapter 3 I argued that when we are trying to decide what to do, our conception of the alternatives that are open to us must include all the actions that we would perform if we chose to, whether or not we believe that which of those actions we will choose to perform is itself determined; I also argued that this does not constitute an arbitrary refusal to consider information relevant to the question which alternatives we actually have. Libertarians believe that, if all events are determined by natural causes, compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will must arbitrarily attribute to one kind of natural event a prominence it does not possess. I tried to show that, seen from a practical point of view, the distinctions a compatibilist account of freedom of the will focuses on must leap to the foreground, and argued that this does not conflict with the truths libertarians have accurately perceived. Any attempt to use this conception of freedom as the basis for a justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons faces three problems. First, it is not clear that this conception of freedom can be used as the basis for a justification of the claim that we are in any sense responsible for our conduct. We hold ourselves responsible primarily for our past actions. Even when we 1 I use the term ‘moral responsibility’ with some misgivings. Traditionally, ‘moral responsibility’ is the name given to the kind of responsibility that we attribute only to persons, that is contrasted to mere ‘causal responsibility’, and that renders praise and blame appropriate. It is this kind of responsibility that I will discuss in this chapter and those that follow; and for this reason I have chosen to retain the term traditionally used to refer to it. However, this term might suggest a closer connection to specifically moral evaluation than I intend. I will argue that anyone who engages in practical reasoning has reason to hold herself responsible for what she freely does, and to praise or blame herself insofar as her conduct reveals something about her that whatever standards of conduct she accepts imply is a virtue or a fault. My arguments will not rely on any assumptions about the content of an agent’s standards of conduct; and therefore any conclusions that they establish will hold whether or not those standards are recognizably moral. For this reason I considered using the term ‘practical responsibility’, but concluded that to introduce this term might give the impression that I wished to weaken or dilute the sense of responsibility under consideration. I do not: all that is needed to render the term ‘moral responsibility’ appropriate without qualification to the conception of responsibility I discuss is the assumption that the content of the standards by which we evaluate our conduct is recognizably moral.

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say, for instance, “I will be responsible if things turn out badly,” we mean that if things turn out badly, it will then be appropriate for me to be held responsible. Because my account of freedom of the will is explicitly based on the requirements of practical reasoning, it is directly relevant only to our consideration of choices we have not yet made and courses of action on which we have not yet embarked. It might therefore turn out that while we have reason to attend to the distinction between those acts that we would perform if we chose to and other acts when we consider our future, that distinction drops back into insignificance once we have decided what to do. If so, it is not clear that my account of freedom of the will could be used as the basis for a justification of the claim that we are responsible for our conduct. Nor is it clear that my account of freedom allows us to justify our ascriptions of responsibility to others. We cannot deliberate, though we might speculate, about what someone else will do; and therefore an account of freedom of the will that is based on the requirements of practical reasoning would seem to be particularly ill suited to the task of explaining how we can legitimately ascribe responsibility to others. Libertarians believe that compatibilist accounts of freedom of the will do not allow us to explain why we should view the claim that we are free as particularly important or to use that claim to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons. I have shown that, from a practical point of view, we must regard the distinction between those acts that we would perform if we chose to and other acts, and the distinction between that part of our behavior that depends on our will and that which does not, as central. But in basing this explanation on the requirements of practical reasoning, I seem to have ensured that it will be directly relevant only to our view of our own future: only, that is, to those cases in which ascriptions of responsibility are never made. I must therefore explain why, despite this fact, my conception of freedom of the will can be used as the basis for a justification of the claim that we are responsible for our conduct. Second, supposing that I can show that my account of freedom can be used to justify the claim that we are in some sense responsible for our conduct, I must also show that this sense is one that libertarians should find satisfactory. Libertarians do not argue that mechanism is incompatible with the existence of those distinctions that any account of freedom of the will and moral responsibility must take to be central: for instance, the distinction between those of our acts that depend on our will and those that do not. Nor do they claim that mechanism implies that we cannot legitimately be held responsible for our conduct in any sense. After all, there is a sense in which we can say that a defective bit of electrical wiring is responsible for the destruction of a building or that a drought is responsible for the failure of a crop, and libertarians do not deny that we can say that persons are in this sense responsible for what they do.

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Instead, libertarians claim that, if mechanism is true, we cannot explain why we should think that the fact that some of our behavior is caused by our will, our choices, or our deliberation implies that we can legitimately hold ourselves responsible for that behavior in any sense that transcends this sort of causal responsibility. For, they argue, any attempt to explain why we take the existence of these distinctions to justify the ascription to persons of a kind of responsibility that we do not ascribe to objects must rely on the claim that there is a difference in kind between the causes of our voluntary actions and those of other events. Since mechanism is the view that our choices and our actions are determined to the same extent and in the same sorts of ways as other events, libertarians do not believe that compatibilists can consistently claim that there is such a difference in kind. For this reason they suspect that compatibilists must, at bottom, construe moral responsibility only as a particular form of causal responsibility, and the moral evaluation appropriate to responsible agents only as a form of “mere grading.”2 I must therefore show that the sense in which the requirements of practical reasoning give us reason to hold ourselves responsible is the full-bodied sense of moral responsibility libertarians have in mind. If I fail to do this, I cannot respond to libertarians’ deepest concerns. Third, since I am attempting to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility on the basis of the requirements of practical reasoning, I must distinguish the question whether a person has reason to hold herself responsible for her conduct from the question whether she has reason to ascribe moral responsibility to others. We engage in practical reasoning in order to figure out what to do. In so doing we employ those concepts that practical reasoning requires—for instance, the concept of an alternative. Our reasons for employing these concepts in our own case depend on our interest in determining what to do in order to act on our decisions. We can also ask ourselves what we would choose to do were we in someone else’s position, and in so doing assume in imagination the point of view from which they might regard their alternatives while deliberating. But this involves a merely hypothetical extension of practical reasoning beyond its primary sphere of application; and while we might have good reasons for extending it thus, those reasons cannot depend on the same interest that leads us to deliberate about our own conduct. Similarly, if I am right to assume that moral responsibility is a practical concept, we should expect it to find its primary application in our reflections on our own conduct, and we should expect that our reasons for ascribing responsibility to others will differ from our reasons for ascribing responsibility to ourselves. That our reasons for holding ourselves morally responsible for our conduct differ from our reasons for ascribing moral responsibility to others is a methodological assumption that will be justified, if at all, by its role in a successful 2

Smart, “Free-Will, Praise and Blame,” pp. 303–4.

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justification of our ascriptions of responsibility. For this reason I will not attempt to argue for it here. It is worth noting, however, that if moral responsibility is indeed a practical concept, then we should expect attempts to justify our ascriptions of responsibility that do not reflect this assumption to fail. For if moral responsibility is a concept whose primary employment is practical, and which therefore finds its most direct application in our reflections on our own conduct, then presumably our reasons for holding others morally responsible for their conduct will involve showing that we have some reason to extend to others a concept that we have already shown that we have reason to apply to ourselves. If so, a justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others would presuppose an independent justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to ourselves. But if we attempt to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons generally, regarding ourselves simply as one among the many persons whose responsibility is in question, then we will be able to regard our reasons for ascribing responsibility to ourselves only as the application to our own case of our reasons for ascribing moral responsibility to persons generally. We will, that is, have to derive our ascriptions of moral responsibility to ourselves from our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons by instantiation, rather than justifying our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others on the basis of the claim that each of us has reason to hold ourselves morally responsible for our conduct. Therefore, if my assumption that a justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others must proceed by the latter route is correct, attempts to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility that do not distinguish the question why we should regard ourselves as morally responsible from the question why we should ascribe moral responsibility to others must fail, since by assimilating the former question to the latter they make it impossible to give a satisfactory response to either. I will therefore divide my discussion of moral responsibility into three parts. In this chapter I will argue that the requirements of the practical point of view give each of us reason to hold herself responsible for what she does. In the next I will argue that this conception of responsibility is one that libertarians should find satisfactory. Finally, in chapter 6 I will argue that we have reason to hold others morally responsible for their conduct.

Standards and Evaluation To engage in practical reasoning is not simply to recognize the existence of various alternative courses of action and then opt for one of them. It is to try to decide, on the basis of reasons, which of those alternatives one should perform. To accept some characterization of an action or its consequences as a reason for or against performing it involves having some conception of the kinds of actions we wish to perform or to avoid, the kinds of persons we wish

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to be, the kinds of characteristics we wish to have or to avoid having, and so forth. If, for instance, I perform some action because I believe that it will advance my career, then I must think that it is a reason for doing something that it will advance my career; that, while this consideration might be overridden if it conflicts with some other value, goal, or standard of mine, when it does not, I should perform whatever action it suggests. And while I might not value all the character traits that would enable me to advance my career more quickly and surely (some might be objectionable on other counts), I must value, as such, a character trait that will help me to advance my career and which I see no reason to object to. To the extent that I am indifferent to otherwise unobjectionable actions or traits of character that would help me to advance my career, it is unclear in what sense I can say that advancing my career is a goal of mine or that I performed the original action in pursuit of that goal. I will refer to the collection of considerations that an agent regards as giving rise to reasons for action as her standards. I do not intend my use of this term to suggest that that agent must have some definite, articulate, internally consistent, and detailed conception of the way she thinks she should lead her life; that her standards cannot themselves be called into question; or that they constitute some sort of practical rule book, which she has only to consult in order to discover how she thinks that she should resolve any practical dilemma with which she might be confronted. By an agent’s standards I mean her ideas about the kind of person she thinks she should be and the kind of life she thinks she should lead, however vague, incompletely articulated, or mutually inconsistent they may be, so long as she regards them as giving rise to reasons for action. While these standards might be the kind we usually think of as moral, they need not be. An agent whose goal is to become a cool and efficient assassin has the kind of standards I am discussing, and she can evaluate the alternatives available to her accordingly. Say that I have a practical interest in something if the attempt to live by my standards implies that I have reason to regard facts about it, or its condition, as relevant to my deliberation. The claim that I have a practical interest in something does not imply that that interest is always overriding or that I always have reason to pursue it. It means only that I have some reason to take it into account in determining what to do: that I regard facts about it as having practical implications and that while I might for some reason decide to set aside or ignore those implications, I would be wrong to think that they do not exist. Different standards will give those who hold them different practical interests. Thus, utilitarians have a practical interest in the effects of their actions on the general happiness, those whose goal is to become world-class terrorists have a practical interest in the coolness of their nerves and the steadiness of their aim, and so forth. If, however, there is something that the attempt to live by any set of standards gives us reason to take an interest in, then anyone who holds any set of standards has a practical interest in that thing. Since anyone who engages in practical reasoning must hold some set of standards, I will say

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that we have an interest in that thing not in virtue of holding any particular set of standards, but simply in virtue of engaging in practical reasoning. In what follows I will argue that we have such an interest in assessing the quality of our wills, and that this interest gives us reason to hold ourselves morally responsible for our conduct. If I engage in practical reasoning, I must recognize some considerations as constituting reasons for or against performing certain actions; and in virtue of this fact I must have some standards by which I can evaluate the alternatives available to me. Any set of standards that I can use to evaluate the alternatives available to me can also be used to evaluate the alternatives that were available to me on some occasion in the past. By asking myself which of the alternatives available to me I had most reason to choose to perform, given what I knew at the time, I can determine whether or not the course of action I actually performed on that occasion was the one I had most reason to perform. I can, that is, ask myself to what extent my conduct conforms to my principles, and judge it accordingly. What will my attitude towards the results of this evaluation be? If I have done something that, by my standards, I ought not to have done,3 I might just say: Well, it was determined that I would act thus, and while I regret the fact that the universe took this particular tack, there was nothing that I could (tout court) have done to prevent its doing so. I might wonder what in particular caused me to perform some action, as I might wonder what caused the French Revolution or why the dinosaurs became extinct. But for the purposes of this inquiry I will have no reason to view those links in the causal chain that are 3 For reasons of simplicity, in what follows I will discuss only my responsibility for acts that I think I should not have performed. However, my account of responsibility implies that we should also regard ourselves as responsible for praiseworthy acts. I will argue that we have reason to hold ourselves morally responsible for what we do in virtue of our practical interest in the quality of our will. This account allows us both to claim that we are responsible, in the same sense and under the same conditions, for our good and bad acts, and to explain why we tend to focus more attention on our responsibility for acts we think wrong. For while both right and wrong actions can reflect our will, we have particular reason to attend to actions we think we should not have performed, since only they indicate the existence of some problem that requires immediate attention. The fact that our practical interest in our past actions is derived from our interest in improving our wills might seem to imply that we have reason to take such an interest only in those of our past actions that reveal the existence of a flaw in our will. Therefore it might seem to call into question our reasons for holding ourselves responsible for acting rightly. But it would be a mistake to construe our interest in evaluating our past actions in this way. We are interested in our past actions insofar as, by evaluating those actions and the features of our will they reveal, we might discover the existence of some way in which our will might be improved. Any action that reflects our will might reveal that our will is in some respect flawed, and we therefore have an interest in what an evaluation of any such action would reveal. Similarly, someone who wants her car to run properly does not have an interest in seeing whether it is running properly only when it is in fact about to break down. Her interest is in answering the question “Is my car running properly or not?” and she will respond to the discovery that it is in perfect working order not with disinterest but with relief.

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my choices as particularly salient. If mechanism is true then, qua cause, my choices are not essentially different from other causes. Their particular features may allow me to explain why they produced the effects they did, as the angle at which a pool ball was hit might allow me to explain why it knocked the eight ball into the corner pocket; but since, if mechanism is true, the same type of explanation is appropriate in both cases, the fact that some particular cause of my action has those features that lead me to regard it as one of my choices will have no further significance. I would have no reason to do anything but regret the fact that, as it happened, it was determined that I would perform this of all unfortunate actions, if I did not believe that my actions could reveal anything about me. In this case, I might regard my actions as a series of isolated occurrences, none of which tells me anything about my underlying character and dispositions, and none of which implies anything about my future behavior. And therefore the fact that I did something that violates my standards, while no doubt regrettable, would not be cause for concern about the future. However, I cannot both maintain this attitude towards my conduct and claim to determine that conduct through practical reasoning. If, when I try to determine my conduct through practical reasoning, I find that I cannot do so—that my choices seem to have no discernible connection to what I actually do— then I can claim, justifiably, that my behavior does not reflect anything about me. My acts would then simply befall me, for reasons entirely unconnected to my standards or my character. In this case, practical reasoning would be pointless, and I would have no reason to continue to engage in a process of deliberation that experience had shown to be futile. If, however, I do succeed in general in determining my conduct through practical reasoning, then for that reason I can no longer claim that my conduct does not reflect anything about me. My conduct may reveal my will in the narrowest sense of that word: my judgments about what I should do or about what sort of person I should try to become, and the general principles by which I think I should live. But if it revealed only this—if my principles always and unproblematically translated themselves into action, so that one could infer them directly from my behavior4—then I would have no compelling reason to reflect on and evaluate my past acts. For one thing, I am aware of my principles and judgments; and 4 Some writers claim that my behavior always does reveal my principles; that if I believe myself to be committed to some principle that I nonetheless consistently violate, the fact that I violate it shows that I deceive myself when I claim to hold it and that I am really committed to some other principle. I will not use the term ‘principle’ in this sense. The principles I discuss are those that we use in practical reasoning; for this reason, they must be our avowed principles and not those that someone might claim that we really, though unconsciously, hold. Even if I am really, though unconsciously, committed to a different set of principles, these cannot be the principles by which I decide what to do or evaluate my conduct if I am not aware that I hold them. I do not mean to deny that people can deceive themselves about the principles they are committed to; that their real and avowed standards might diverge. I mean only to clarify which set of standards I am now concerned with, namely, the avowed ones.

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therefore reflection on my past actions could tell me nothing about what led me to perform them that I could not learn from introspection alone. Moreover, if my principles always translated themselves into action, my evaluation of my conduct would always be favorable. Normally, I believe that my actions can reflect badly on me even when I performed them because, at the time, I thought them right—if, for instance, I believed this only because I had not thought through my moral principles sufficiently, or because I had allowed my judgment of their application to a particular situation to be biased by self-interest, or because I failed to exercise reasonable care in arriving at, say, the conclusion that a particular action was harmless. But each of these cases involves a failure to do something that I believe that I ought to have done not simply in retrospect but according to the principles I then had. If my principles translated themselves directly into action, such failures would never occur: not only would my outward behavior automatically reflect my principles, but the process whereby I came to hold those principles, and the process whereby I applied them, would automatically reflect my standards of, for instance, reasonable care in the formulation of principles and in their application. While in retrospect I might nonetheless view my actions or my principles as mistaken, I would never believe that these mistakes revealed some fault in me. Unfortunately, my principles do not translate themselves directly and unproblematically into actions. I must apply my principles to the situations I confront, and I do not always apply them well. I misdescribe the situations in which I find myself; I fail to recognize the principles that apply to them; I overemphasize the importance of considerations that favor convenient or gratifying courses of action and downplay those that might lead me to conclude that the course of action which I have most reason to perform is one that I find unpleasant or threatening; I allow my deliberation to be distorted by fear, prejudice, and laziness; and I fail to act on the decisions I have made. And to the extent that I do any of these things, I will fail to perform that action which my standards imply that I should perform. Call those aspects of me that determine the use I make of my freedom my will. Because my conduct reflects my will, I can ask of any past action what it reveals about me, and I can evaluate those features of my will that it reflects. Because those features include not only my standards and practical principles but my habits, character traits, and dispositions, I need not always act as my standards of conduct imply that I should. Because I do not always translate my standards directly into action, when I evaluate those features of my will that my conduct reveals, I may conclude that my will is flawed:5 that I do not 5

Here, and in the arguments that follow, I use the words ‘flaw’, ‘fault’, and ‘defect’ to refer to any feature of an agent’s will that hinders her attempts to live by whatever standards she accepts, either by making it less likely that she will perform those actions she thinks right or develop those character traits that she thinks she should cultivate, or by itself being prohibited by her standards. What any given person regards as a flaw will, of course, depend on which standards she accepts; and therefore those character traits that she regards as flaws may not be those that are traditionally regarded as undesirable. If, for instance, my only goal in life were to become a world-class terrorist, then I might regard compassion for others as a flaw.

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exercise my freedom as my own standards imply that I should, and that this failure reflects not a simple mistake but some disposition or character trait that impedes my efforts to live by my standards. And because the will that determined my past actions will determine my future actions as well, the discovery that it is flawed is relevant to my present deliberation. When I reflect on my past conduct, I know that because it is in the past, it is not an appropriate object of deliberation; that while it might once have been up to me, it is no longer. I also know that, if determinism is true, I could not (tout court) have done anything other than what I actually did. But I do not and cannot know whether or not I will repeat any mistakes I may have made should I find myself in a similar situation in the future. Whether or not I violate my standards in the future may depend on decisions I have yet to make; and therefore, while I cannot change the fact that I did violate my standards in the past, I might be able to ensure that I do not violate them again. And I will have reason to try to ensure that I do not do so, since to say that some action violates my standards is just to say that it is an action that I think that I should not perform. In order to ensure that I do not violate my standards again, I must first determine whether or not some past act6 does reveal a fault in my will; second, determine what that fault is; and third, try to correct it.

My Interest in Evaluating the Process Whereby I Came to Act As I Did My attitude towards some regrettable act that I have performed will depend on whether or not that act reveals some fault in my will. If it does not, then I will regard it primarily as an occasion for regret. I might in addition regard the fact that I performed this act as giving me reason to do something—for instance, to make restitution for some harm that I inadvertently caused. But whether or not I regard it thus depends on the particular standards that I accept; and therefore the fact that I engage in practical reasoning does not itself imply that I should regard this act as having any practical significance. If this act does reflect some fault in my will, however, I must regard it as relevant to my present reasons for action. I have defined a fault as any feature of my will that leads me to violate my standards, and an action that violates my standards as one that those considerations that I regard as giving rise to reasons for action imply that I should not perform. If I conclude that I performed some act that I regret because of some fault in my will, then my interest in acting in accordance with whatever standards of conduct I accept gives me reason to try to correct that fault. For if I do not correct it, then I will continue to do things that my own standards imply that I should not do. 6

In what follows, I use ‘act’ to refer to any bit of my behavior, whether intentional or not, and reserve ‘action’ for intentional acts.

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In order to discover whether some regrettable act of mine does reflect a fault in my will, I must first ask whether any choice or voluntary action of mine contributed in any way to its occurrence. If not, then the fact that this act occurred cannot conceivably reflect anything about my will, and I can confidently conclude that no amount of investigation into its causes could possibly reveal that my will has some defect. However, it will almost never be true that no choice or voluntary action of mine contributed in any way to the occurrence of the act under consideration. If someone trips me, causing me to push someone under an oncoming subway train, I could have prevented that accident by staying home from work that day, traveling by taxi, or taking a slow boat to China. If burglars break into my apartment, tie me up, and hurl me from my eighth-story window onto an innocent passerby, I could have prevented this from happening by living in a different building or by making my apartment physically impregnable. Once I have identified those points at which my choices or voluntary actions contributed to the occurrence of this act, I must then decide whether or not I should have taken those steps that would have prevented its occurrence. There is a sense in which any regrettable occurrence that is the result of my choices or voluntary actions must reveal that I did something that I should not have done. Looking back, I now know which lottery ticket I should have bought yesterday, what I should have done to avert some unfortunate coincidence, and so forth. But when I try to determine whether some regrettable act reveals a flaw in my will, I am not concerned with the question what, in this sense, I should have done. For I am trying to determine what I should have done in the past in order to ascertain what, if anything, I should do differently in the future. I will presumably have to make my future choices under conditions of uncertainty and without the benefit of hindsight. Therefore, when for these purposes I try to determine what I should have done differently on some occasion, I will ask myself not what I should have done differently given what I know now, but what I should have done differently given what I knew at the time.7 I will, that is, assume hypothetically the point of view from which I might have regarded my alternatives at the time and ask myself whether the process whereby I came to act as I did is one I still endorse. Whether or not I conclude that I should have done something differently will depend on the standards I accept. In the examples mentioned above, if I had no reason to believe that the events in question were likely to occur, then I could regard my role in producing them as culpable only if my standards require that I never place myself in a position in which it is even remotely 7 This account allows me to deal with cases in which I acted wrongly because of (what I regard as) culpable ignorance. For those points at which I might have prevented the occurrence of some act include not only the moment at which I chose to perform it—when, given what I knew, my standards might not imply that I should have chosen differently—but those earlier points at which I could have, and (by my standards) should have, taken the trouble to inform myself.

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possible that I be involved in any way in causing harm to another—in which case I should long since have locked myself in a padded cell and arranged to be fed through a mail slot. If my standards do not require this, however, my failure to prevent these unfortunate events does not show that I did something that I should regard as wrong. I could have chosen to live in a different apartment, but for all I knew at the time, no apartment had a greater chance than any other of being the target of burglars in search of human projectiles. I could have taken a taxi to work, but since, given what I knew at the time, this might actually have increased the chances that I would inadvertently bring harm to someone (taxi drivers being as reckless as they are), my taking the subway to work might reveal a laudable concern for human life. Since I had every reason to think that the possibility that my choices would lead to these outcomes was negligible, the fact that they did shows only my bad luck; and I will regret them only in the way in which I might regret not having chosen to buy the winning lottery ticket. If I serve a friend orange juice that someone has, unbeknownst to me, laced with cyanide, I could have prevented my friend’s untimely demise not only by inviting her over on another day or by serving her club soda instead, but by performing chemical tests on the orange juice before serving it. While the first two means of preventing her death do so by substituting choices that turn out to be noncatastrophic, but that had, for all I knew at the time, no more chance of being so than the choice I actually made, performing chemical analyses of everything I serve is in fact a reliable way of preventing inadvertent poisonings. If my standards require that I take any steps that would reliably prevent acts of mine from leading to disastrous consequences, then I will regard my failure to perform tests on my orange juice as wrong. But if they hold only that I should try to prevent those catastrophes that I have some reason to believe might result from my actions, then unless poisoning is common in my circles, or Lucrezia Borgia has access to my refrigerator, I will not see my failure to perform chemical tests on my orange juice as a failure to do something I should have done. I could analyze everything I serve for cyanide, just as I could disassemble my car every morning to ensure that I am not blown up by a car bomb, or perform structural analyses of all the buildings people will walk under if they follow the directions I give them in order to ensure that I am not the unwitting cause of their death; and in certain environments (Beirut for car bombs, Renaissance Florence for poison) I might think these precautions worthwhile. But in general, the chance that my failure to take them will lead to disaster is so remote that I will not think them worth taking, even though the price of being wrong is very great. If, however, I discover something that I could have done to avoid violating my standards—some consideration I might have attended to, some principle I could have brought to bear, or some decision I could have made differently— and if my standards imply that I should have done this, given what I knew at

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the time, then I will conclude that my failure to perform this act reflects a fault in my will. I will think that I failed to make my choice in the way that I should have, and I will reproach myself for this failure. And in determining what I should have done differently in the situation under consideration, I will have learned something of direct practical relevance, namely, what I should do if I encounter a similar situation in the future.8

My Interest in Evaluating My Character Thus far I have described my interest in evaluating the process whereby I came to perform some act that I regret as based on my interest in learning how to avoid repeating it. One might therefore wonder whether it allows us to explain why we should care how we came to perform a given action when that action is a response to a situation so unusual as to warrant the assumption that we will never encounter its like again. For if we will never find ourselves in a similar situation, we will have no occasion to apply any lessons we might learn about what we should have done in this case. Thus, for instance, I do not expect that I will ever win millions in a state lottery. Were I to do so, I might legitimately assume not only that my behavior on learning that I have become a millionaire is a response to a once-in-a-lifetime event but that I will never again have the opportunity to display the deliberative failings that lead me to behave badly on learning that I have received a stroke of good luck so massive as to alter my entire life. I might conclude that whatever fault led me not to act as I think I should have acted in this particular situation is unlikely to lead me to act wrongly in the future, and therefore that correcting this defect in my will is not a matter of any great urgency. The arguments made above give us no reason to reject this conclusion. Nor can those arguments show that I have any reason to concern myself with my evaluations of actions that I voluntarily performed under the description under which they violated my standards. For in such cases there might be nothing wrong with the process whereby I identified the alternative that my standards implied that I should choose. The problem is, rather, that I knowingly and willingly did something else. I might quite properly regard the fact that I knowingly violated my standards as revealing a defect in my will and resolve to act differently in the future. But such resolutions are unlikely to work: if 8

The arguments just presented are similar to those made by P. F. Strawson (“Freedom and Resentment,” pp. 64–9) and T. M. Scanlon (“The Significance of Choice,” pp. 166–172) in that they explain why we do not hold ourselves responsible for certain actions on the grounds that those actions do not reflect our will. For a similar account of our reasons for excusing actions performed as the result of mind control, see David Blumenfeld, “Freedom and Mind Control”; and Daniel Dennett, “Mechanism and Responsibility” (in Brainstorms). My arguments differ from those presented by Strawson and Scanlon in that I base our interest in assessing the quality of our wills on our practical interest in improving them.

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my knowledge that this action violates my standards did not prevent me from intentionally performing it then, I have no reason to believe that it will prevent me from repeating my mistake should I encounter a similar situation. If my only practical interest in evaluating my contribution to my past acts were my interest in learning how not to repeat the particular failures of deliberation that those acts reflect, then these objections would be unanswerable. But the very examples used to support these objections show that my practical interest in evaluating my contribution to my past acts goes beyond this. For, first, it is not true that I can learn nothing relevant to my future conduct from reflection on my behavior in unusual situations. If, for instance, I responded to winning the lottery by flaunting my newfound wealth in front of my impoverished friends, and if I think this response odious, then I have reason not only to resolve not to repeat it in any similar situations I encounter but to ask myself whether it reveals some more general fault in me: cruelty, insensitivity, or an ugly desire to prop up my ego by making other people feel envious or inadequate. If it does, then I have reason to try to correct this more general fault as well. My interest in doing so will depend not on my interest in acting rightly in the unlikely event that another massive stroke of good fortune befalls me but on my interest in acting rightly on any of the far more numerous occasions in which my cruelty or insensitivity might otherwise prevent me from doing so. Second, the fact that a simple resolution not to repeat some knowing violation of my standards may not prevent me from doing so should not lead me to conclude that I can do nothing to avoid knowingly violating my standards in future, or that the only response left to me is resignation in the face of the inevitable. In this case as well I must ask myself what more general fault led me intentionally and knowingly to violate my standards. Once I have identified this fault, I will still have reason to resolve to act as my standards imply that I should in any similar situations I encounter. But I will also have reason to try to correct the more general fault that my failure to do so reveals, and, in so doing, to make it more likely that I will act on my resolution. Whenever I discover some fault in the process whereby I came to perform some act—something I could have and should have done differently—I can ask what it is about me that explains my failure to do what I should have done. I will refer to the collection of dispositions and traits that might figure in the answer to such a question as my ‘character.’ And I will argue that the same considerations that give us reason to correct any faults in the process whereby we come to act as we do also give us reason to correct any flaws in our character. Our standards are those conceptions of the kind of lives we think we should lead, and the kinds of actions that we think we should perform, that we regard as providing us with reasons for action. To accept some set of standards is therefore to believe that we should act in accordance with them. If we accept

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the principle that to will some end is to will those means to that end that are in our power, then in virtue of the fact that an agent accepts some set of standards she has reason to do whatever is necessary to ensure that she lives by those standards, unless to do so would itself violate them. Our character affects the extent to which we live up to our standards of conduct, and the extent to which we perform those acts that, if asked, we would claim that we have most reason to perform. If, for instance, I consistently fail to recognize situations to which my principles apply, I will often fail to apply them when I should. If my response to conflicts among my principles or my desires is to pretend to myself that those conflicts do not exist, or to avoid or postpone indefinitely a decision among them, then I will not decide what I ought to do in situations in which my principles and preferences would lead me to think that something important is at stake. If I lack the confidence to act on my own judgments when others disagree with me, or the strength to resist what I take to be temptations, then I will often fail to act as I think I should. Habitual errors in judgment may prevent me from carrying out the clearest and most unequivocal of intentions. If, for instance, I become convinced that being late for appointments shows real disrespect for other people and for the value of their time, I will not succeed in being punctual if I consistently underestimate the time it takes for me to do things; nor will I be able to carry out my intention not to wound others needlessly if I am consistently wrong about what would wound them, and why. Because our characters affect our ability to live by whatever standards we accept, we have an interest in having a character that tends to advance, or at least not to impede, our attempts to live by those standards. And because the character is malleable, this interest gives us reason not simply to hope that such a character will descend on us like grace but to try to create it: to change those aspects of ourselves that lead us to violate our standards, and to strengthen and cultivate those that enable us to discern what we should do and to do it. Any person who engages in practical reasoning has, in virtue of that fact, an interest in improving her character.9 This interest is practical, since it is based on her interest in the conformity of her future conduct to whatever practical standards she accepts. It is, moreover, an interest that she cannot renounce so long as she accepts any standards whatsoever. While a race-car driver might have an interest in the proper functioning of her car, she can always switch cars if hers becomes too unreliable; and if she wishes to rid herself of any interest in automotive maintenance, she can always change careers. But we cannot similarly trade in our characters when they become too decrepit, nor can we rid ourselves of our practical interest in them by giving up any particular end or activity. For any end that we have is necessarily one that we must 9

As before, improvement is defined relative to whatever standards the agent accepts.

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pursue; and, given any end, some character traits will help us to achieve it, while others will prevent us from doing so. In order to divest oneself of our interest in our character, we would have to give up on having ends altogether, and to do this would be to abandon practical reasoning itself. In order to learn about our character, we must examine our past actions. Our principles and preferences are often available to introspection, and therefore we generally do not need to infer them from our behavior. But the character is not similarly transparent. Some character traits—for instance, a tendency consistently to make some particular error in judgment—can only be discovered by examining our conduct. Others can be discovered through introspection: one can realize that one is deeply self-centered simply by noticing that most of one’s thoughts concern oneself. Nonetheless, it is easier and more reliable to try to determine the degree to which one is self-centered by watching oneself in action, and by noting how consistently one simply fails to consider the ways in which one’s actions affect the interests of others. Still other character traits are intermediate cases: one might in principle conclude on the basis of introspection alone that one would be incapable of resolving a conflict between one’s moral principles and one’s own convenience without resorting to self-deception or denial, without ever encountering such a conflict; but to know this about oneself would take a degree of self-knowledge that few possess, and that it is hard to imagine anyone acquiring without considerable reflection on her conduct. In all cases, however, reflection on our past behavior provides us with information about our character that is not reliably accessible to introspection alone. For this reason, and because observing what we actually do provides us with a way of checking the accuracy of our judgments about our character and correcting for biases in our estimation of ourselves, we use our observation of our behavior as a way of keeping our judgments about our character honest; and we refrain, for instance, from attributing actual generosity to ourselves until we have seen not only how often generous thoughts well up in our hearts but what we do when an occasion for generosity actually arises. When we reflect on our past conduct in order to determine what it reveals about the ways in which our character might be improved, our reflection must refer to the kind of evaluation discussed in the previous section: our evaluation of the process whereby we came to perform our past acts and of our own contribution to their occurrence. On the one hand, any character trait that leads us to violate our standards must do so by leading us to fail to attend to some consideration that we should have attended to, to neglect the application of some standard that we should have brought to bear, to allow our deliberation or our conduct to be determined by some motivation that we do not regard as giving rise to reasons for action, or in general by leading us either to fail to apply our standards correctly or to disregard them. For this reason some past act might reveal a flaw in our character only if the process whereby we came

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to perform that act was itself flawed. On the other hand, the fact that I failed to do something that I could have and should have done, given what I knew at the time, must reflect something about me; and therefore any point at which I failed to apply my standards correctly must reveal some flaw in my character that I have reason to try to correct.10 Our interest in improving our character gives us an interest in the knowledge of our character that reflection on our conduct affords us. Because the character is coherent over time, rather than being subject to drastic and unpredictable fluctuations, the fact that I had some character trait in the (relatively) recent past is prima facie evidence that I have it, or some modified descendant of it, now. If that character trait is one that helps me to follow my principles more consistently, my interest in following them in the future gives me reason to try to cultivate and strengthen it. If it is one that prevents me from acting as I think I should, then my interest in acting as I should in the future gives me reason to try to change it. In either case, my interest in the conformity of those actions that I have yet to perform to the standards I accept gives me a standing 10 This allows me to clarify an ambiguity in the discussion of freedom in chapter 3. In that chapter I discussed the conception of ‘possibility’ that is relevant to practical reasoning, and the kind of freedom that is important from a practical point of view. For this reason I needed to consider actions from the point of view of an agent engaged in practical reasoning, an agent who was explicitly trying to decide what to do. I therefore did not address the question whether we should say that we act freely when, while we could have done otherwise had we chosen to do so, we did not in fact engage in any explicit process of deliberation at all. I have argued that as agents we must have some set of standards of conduct and that these standards give us a practical interest in assessing our character and our will. This interest gives us reason to concern ourselves with all of our voluntary actions, whether or not we performed them as a result of practical reasoning, for two reasons. First, our character is revealed in all of our voluntary actions, whether or not they were preceded by practical reasoning; and therefore if we wish to evaluate our character we will have reason to ask ourselves what aspects of it are revealed by actions we did not perform as a result of practical reasoning. Second, we can violate our standards by performing actions that are not preceded by practical reasoning, and when we do so we have reason to ask ourselves what features of our character led us to perform that action, to correct any flaws that this examination reveals, and thereby to try to ensure that we do not act similarly in the future. When I evaluate the process whereby I came to act as I did, I try to determine what I ought to have done in that situation. I consider that situation, and my alternatives in it, from the practical point of view, and try to determine how, were I able to do things over, I would now think that I should act. Because I have reason to evaluate not only the practical reasoning that leads me to choose one alternative over another but the habits, character traits, and dispositions that lead me to perform those voluntary actions that are not preceded by practical reasoning, I have reason to consider the situations in which I performed both kinds of actions from the practical point of view. In both cases I will think of my alternatives as those courses of action that I would have performed had I chosen to do so, and I will ignore the question whether or not my choice was itself determined and even whether or not it was determined that I would engage in practical reasoning at all. Because I adopt the practical point of view towards these past actions in order to figure out what I should do in the future, I have reason to apply the practical sense of ‘freedom’ to actions that I did not in fact perform as the result of practical reasoning.

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practical interest in my evaluation of my conduct insofar as it reveals my character or the quality of my will. For only by reflecting on my past can I learn how to improve on it.11 At the beginning of this chapter I noted that since practical reasoning is most directly concerned with the determination of our future conduct, it might turn out that we have no particular practical interest in our past actions. I have argued that we do have such an interest. When we engage in practical reasoning, we must accept some standards by which we think we should live. Because our ability to live by these standards depends on our will and our character, we have a standing practical interest in developing the kind of will and character that will allow us to live by our standards. To do so, we must determine which features of our will and our character help us to live by our standards and which prevent us from doing so. Because our past actions reveal features of our will and our character that we could not reliably learn by other means, we have reason to reflect on our past actions and to figure out what they reveal about our character and our will. When we reflect on our conduct for these purposes, we must distinguish those acts that reveal the quality of our will from those that do not. This means that we have a practical interest not only in the course of our future conduct but in our past actions insofar as they reveal the quality of our character and our will. This interest gives us reason to define and to use a conception of responsibility according to which we are responsible for those actions that reveal the quality of our character and our will. It also gives us reason to regard those past acts for which we are in this sense responsible differently from those for which we are not. For while we might simply regret the occurrence of some untoward act that does not reveal the quality of our character and our will, we can never regard an act that does reflect on us as merely unfortunate. Our standing practical interest in the quality of our will gives us reason not only to note its occurrence with regret but to ask ourselves what flaw in us it reveals and try to correct that flaw. 11 Note that my interest in improving my character also gives me reason to ask myself what the fact that I have some character flaw reveals about me. For by reflecting on this question I may come to realize that I have some further character flaw that I also have reason to try to correct. For this reason, my practical interest in the fact that I performed some action that I think wrong is not exhausted when I discover and correct the particular character flaw that led me to perform it. If, for instance, I performed an action that I think wrong because of a streak of cruelty that I have since eradicated, I might still ask myself what the fact that I allowed that streak of cruelty to develop, and that I was capable of acting on it, reveals about me. For while my streak of cruelty might be a thing of the past, I might still have (for instance) those features of my character that made it possible for me to take pleasure in the suffering of others, or the blithe disregard for the state of my character that led me not to nip my nascent tendencies to cruelty in the bud. This process can in principle be reiterated until no new character flaws come to light. Again, I am not trying to show that we should devote our entire lives to the kind of painstaking examination of conscience just described. I am trying to show what our interest in improving our wills, considered in isolation, gives us reason to do, and not to argue that that interest is always overriding.

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I conclude, therefore, that if we engage in practical reasoning, we have reason to attend to our past conduct, and to regard ourselves as responsible for it if it reflects on our will. Libertarians might feel that this conception of responsibility is not the sort of moral responsibility they have been concerned to secure for us. I will address this objection in the next chapter. Here I have been concerned only to show that there is a conception of responsibility that practical reasoning gives us reason to use, and to explain what that conception is.

5 The Adequacy of My Account

I HAVE ARGUED that the requirements of practical reasoning give each of us reason to distinguish those actions and events that reflect her will from those that do not, and to take attitudes towards the former that she would not take towards other events. Thus, I will merely regret or rejoice over events that do not reflect my will. But I will hold myself responsible for those actions that I freely performed. Because those actions reflect my will, if they violate my standards I cannot simply regret having performed them as I might regret the outcome of the 1994 Congressional elections; nor, if I think them right, can I simply rejoice over having performed them as I might rejoice over the fact that various geological processes combined to form the Grand Canyon. For these actions did not simply happen; I performed them. If I voluntarily performed some action that violates my standards, that action might indicate the presence of some flaw in my will that, if left unchanged, might continue to hinder my attempts to live as I think I should. If I have such a flaw, then my interest in living by the standards I accept gives me reason to try to identify and change it. For this reason, I have an interest in assessing the extent to which I have lived up to my principles that I do not have in evaluating other events. And this reflects not a merely proprietary interest in those acts that, as it happened, I performed, but my interest in the conformity of those acts I have yet to perform with the principles by which I try to govern my life. In itself this argument should not satisfy libertarians. Libertarians might have two sorts of concerns about compatibilist accounts in general, and mine in particular. First, they might suspect that compatibilists cannot provide the right sort of justification for the claim that we are responsible for our conduct. Thus, one can easily show that mechanism is compatible with its being useful to think that we are morally responsible for our conduct, and thus with our having, in a sense, a reason to think so. Nonetheless, libertarians would not regard this as the sort of justification with which they are concerned: a demonstration that that belief is not just useful but true. Since on my account our ascriptions of responsibility are justified by appeal to their role in our practical reasoning, libertarians might suspect that I have not provided a full justification of the claim that we are responsible for what we do. Second, libertarians might wonder whether I have justified the claim that we are responsible for our conduct in the right sense. It is clear that there is a sense in which we can be responsible for our conduct if mechanism is true.

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After all, if we can say that a cracked engine block is responsible for an engine’s malfunction, there is no obvious reason why we should deny that persons can be in the same sense responsible for what they do. But this is not the sense of responsibility with which libertarians are concerned. Libertarians might suspect compatibilists of practicing a sort of philosophical shell game on themselves and their less discerning readers: misled by the superficial similarity between various concepts of responsibility and by the speed with which these concepts replace one another in their arguments, compatibilists might imagine that they have secured the sort of genuine moral responsibility that is truly of value, when closer inspection would reveal only a worthless facsimile. Unless I can show that the sense of responsibility described in chapter 4 is one libertarians should find satisfactory, they will suspect that my arguments are the philosophical equivalent of the waving hands and meaningless patter that serve to distract the unwary while the crucial substitution is performed. Libertarians might think that compatibilists can escape one of these objections only by falling prey to the other; that while they can provide something other than a real justification for the claim that we are truly responsible, and can justify the claim that we are responsible in some less than satisfactory sense, they cannot fully justify the claim that we are genuinely responsible moral agents. If I cannot meet these objections, I will not have addressed libertarians’ deepest concerns. In this chapter, therefore, I will try to meet them. Specifically, I will first answer two objections to my view: that my account of responsibility is objectionable because it is too forward-looking, and that on my account our practical interest in our conduct is not importantly different from our practical interests in other objects. In so doing I will clarify the kind of justification I take myself to have provided for our ascriptions of responsibility and will thereby address the first part of the libertarian challenge. I will then consider whether libertarians should find my account satisfactory.

Is My Account Too Forward-Looking? Any account of moral responsibility that explains our reasons for holding ourselves responsible for our conduct by appealing to the requirements of practical reasoning must in some sense look towards the future. We engage in practical reasoning in order to determine what we have most reason to do. And therefore the claim that our reasons for holding ourselves morally responsible for our conduct are derived from the requirements of practical reasoning must involve the claim that our ascriptions of responsibility, and the evaluative judgments on which they rely, are relevant to the question what we now have most reason to do. Nonetheless, I will argue that my account is not forward-looking in any objectionable sense.

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One might object to forward-looking justifications of our ascriptions of responsibility on the grounds that they replace a concern for the truth of our beliefs with a concern for the usefulness of believing them. I do not believe that my account is open to this objection. I have argued that our interest in acting in accordance with our standards gives us reason to care about the quality of our will as it is revealed in our conduct; and that we therefore have reason to distinguish those acts that reveal the quality of our will from those that do not, and to concern ourselves (for these purposes) with the former alone. To say this is not to say that we have a direct interest in accepting any particular claim about what we are responsible for, but that we have an interest in the information that would result from the correct application of a particular concept of responsibility. It is not, therefore, our acceptance of particular beliefs whose justification is forward-looking, but our use of a particular concept. I assume that when we ask whether a given concept is correctly applied to some object, we should try to answer that question in accordance with whatever standards of truth and evidence we take to be relevant to that question; and that we should regard our own interest in accepting a given answer as relevant only if, for some reason, those standards hold that it is. Given a particular concept of responsibility, then, there is a fact of the matter about whether or not we are responsible, and we should concern ourselves with that fact, not with what it would be useful or pleasant for us to believe. I also assume that we should decide what follows from the claim that we are responsible in a given sense in accordance with the relevant standards of valid inference. If we wish to use ‘responsibility’ in such a way that the claim that we are responsible agents has certain specific implications, it is not up to us to decide which sense meets that criterion or which agents are responsible in that sense. However, there are, I assume, no such constraints on the concepts we can decide to use, and in particular, no reason not to take the usefulness of marking a particular type of information as relevant to our deliberations as a reason to define a concept that does so. Supposing that we then determine which objects that concept is correctly applied to in accordance with the relevant standards of truth and evidence, I can see no reason not to take the claim that some object falls under that concept as true. If there is no reason not to do so, then one cannot object to my account of responsibility on the grounds that it replaces concern for the truth of our ascriptions of responsibility with concern for the usefulness of thinking that we are responsible.1 One might object to forward-looking accounts of responsibility on the grounds that when we try to determine whether or not we are responsible for some action, we focus primarily on our evaluations of our past actions themselves, not on their implications for our future conduct. This would be a 1 Of course, libertarians might still object that the sense of responsibility in question is not the sort of genuine moral responsibility with which they are concerned. As I noted earlier, I will discuss this objection in a later section.

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compelling objection to my account had I argued that we should justify particular ascriptions of responsibility by appeal to their usefulness. For when we try to determine our responsibility for some action, we ask not whether it would be useful for us to think so but what role we played in what we did. However, I have argued only that we use a particular concept, with particular criteria of application, because it plays a particular role in our deliberation. We can use a given concept because it is useful to do so even if its criteria of application refer only to facts about the past. Thus, for instance, one might argue that we distinguish those actions we are contractually obligated to perform from other actions because that distinction is relevant to the question what we should do, even though we can determine whether we are contractually obligated to perform a given action only by considering such facts about the past as whether or not we entered into such a contract. Similarly, when we ask whether we are responsible for some act in the sense defined in chapter 4, we ask whether that act reveals the quality of our will; when we ask whether we should be praised or blamed for that act, we ask whether or not what it reveals is to our credit. In determining the answers to these questions, as Rawls has written, “The law looks back, the judge looks back, the jury looks back,”2 and so do we. But this is consistent with the claim that our reasons for concerning ourselves with the answers to these questions look towards the future. One might find the forward-looking character of my account of responsibility objectionable if it implied that evaluating our conduct and those features of our will that it reveals was simply one of a variety of means that we might use to ensure that we act rightly in the future. For in this case we might in principle have reason to dispense with our ascriptions of responsibility were we to discover some more effective means of regulating our conduct. While such a discovery would not show that we are not really responsible for our conduct, it might leave us with no more reason to care about the distinction between those acts we are responsible for and those we are not than we now have to care about the medieval distinction between the heavens and the sublunary sphere. One might legitimately object to a conception of responsibility that leaves open this possibility. This objection would have considerable force had I argued that our interest in ascribing moral responsibility to persons generally is based on our interest in improving their conduct.3 For we can seek to regulate the behavior of others in any number of ways, some of which—brainwashing, deception, and manipulation, for instance—bypass or undermine the capacities for rational selfgovernance on which our reasons for holding ourselves responsible rely. It seems wrong to suggest that our reasons for ascribing moral responsibility to persons are such that we might legitimately substitute brainwashing for our 2 3

John Rawls, “Two Concepts of Rules,” p. 146. See chapter 6 for further discussion of this view.

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ascriptions of responsibility to persons if it proved to be a more effective means of regulating their behavior. However, because my arguments concern only our ascriptions of moral responsibility to ourselves, our evaluations of the quality of will that our conduct reveals could never be supplanted by some more effective means of ensuring that we act rightly. We cannot try to ensure that we act rightly if we do not try to correct those flaws in our character and our will that lead us to violate our standards.4 We cannot try to correct some flaw in our character or our will unless we have concluded, first, that our character or will has some particular feature; second, that this feature is a flaw; and third, that we have reason to try to correct it. For this reason our attempts to learn about and evaluate our character and our will are not simply dispensable means of ensuring that we act rightly in the future but essentially involved in any attempt to achieve this end. I have argued that we must reflect on our conduct if we wish to learn about our character and our will. If these arguments are sound, then any attempt to ensure that we act rightly in the future necessarily gives us reason to reflect on and evaluate our conduct, to ask ourselves what it reveals about our will, and to try to correct any flaws in our will that we discover. Nor does my account imply that the content of our evaluations of those features of our will that our conduct reveals is inessential to our ascriptions of responsibility. I have already argued that any person who engages in practical reasoning has reason to take an interest in acting rightly in the future, and that this interest necessarily gives her reason to reflect on her conduct and to evaluate those aspects of her will that it reveals. From these claims it follows that any agent who engages in practical reasoning, and who forms a particular evaluative judgment about those aspects of her will that her conduct reveals, has reason to take that judgment to be relevant to her present deliberation and to do so in virtue of its content. For if she concludes that her will has some feature that, if uncorrected, will lead her to violate those practical standards that she regards as giving rise to reasons for action, then in virtue of the fact that she accepts those standards she must conclude that she has reason to correct that flaw. Recast in this way, my arguments establish the appropriateness of particular responses to judgments in virtue of their content. T. M. Scanlon has objected to some “forward-looking” accounts of moral responsibility on the grounds that they “locate the ‘special force’ of moral judgment in what the . . . judge is doing [rather than] in what is claimed about the person judged.”5 The question where, according to some account, the “spe4

Of course, it might turn out that some agent always acted rightly even though she left her various character flaws uncorrected, if she were lucky enough never to encounter the sorts of situations in which they would lead her to act wrongly. But to try to ensure that one acts rightly, one must not simply hope for a life in which one never encounters an occasion to display one’s faults but prepare oneself for the possibility that this hope will not be realized. 5 Scanlon, “The Significance of Choice,” p. 169; cf. also p. 166.

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cial force” of our ascriptions of moral responsibility is to be located is crucial if on that account the connection between the point of our ascriptions of moral responsibility and the content of the evaluative judgments on which they rely is such that we might in principle achieve the same purpose without concerning ourselves with those judgments. But on my account the connection between the two is so close that this question lacks a clear sense. For we might regard my arguments either as showing that our interest in acting rightly gives us reason to attend to those evaluative judgments on which our ascriptions of moral responsibility rely, or as demonstrating that these judgments are, in virtue of their content, necessarily relevant to our present deliberation, and that in virtue of this fact we have reason to respond to them in certain ways. Where one locates the special force of our ascriptions of responsibility depends on which construction one puts on my arguments; the arguments themselves accommodate either view. In any case, the crucial facts are these. First, each of us has a standing practical interest in the quality of her will. Second, this interest gives us reason to distinguish between those acts that reflect our wills and those that do not, and to concern ourselves particularly with the former. Third, since we cannot try to improve our wills unless we determine whether and how they need improvement, learning what our conduct reveals about our will is not a dispensable or replaceable means of ensuring that we act rightly. So long as we retain the capacity to determine our conduct through practical reasoning, we must have this standing practical interest in our assessment of our conduct. Fourth, this interest gives us reason to define a particular concept of responsibility. If, in deciding what this concept is correctly applied to, we respect the appropriate standards of truth and evidence, we should not regard the fact that our reasons for using this concept are derived from its role in our deliberation as impugning the truth of our ascriptions of responsibility, or as implying that we believe that we are responsible simply because it is useful for us to do so.

Why My Practical Interest in My Will Is Unique I have argued that we have a standing practical interest in the quality of our will and in the state of our character, and that this interest gives us reason to ascribe a kind of importance to our evaluations of those actions that reflect our will that we need not ascribe to our assessment of our other behavior. That we have such an interest implies that we never have reason to regard our evaluations of those actions, and of what they reveal about us, as mere descriptions: lists of the merits and defects of some object in which we have no practical interest whatsoever, and which we might legitimately regard as an object of curiosity alone. But it does not imply that our practical interest in our will and

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in our character differs in any significant sense from our practical interests in other objects. At the moment, for instance, I want to finish writing this book; and my ability to do so expeditiously depends on the continued functioning of my personal computer. I therefore have a practical interest in its continued functioning. This practical interest in the state of my personal computer will lead me to regard ominous flickerings of its screen, inexplicable disappearances of blocks of text, or sparks flying out its back not simply as regrettable events to be noted in my theoretical account of this particular region of space-time but as giving me reason to save my files, back up my disks, and call the repair store. It also gives me reason to distinguish sharply between those apparent failures of my personal computer that reflect an actual malfunction and those that do not: for instance, to regard the fact that my computer will not start up as catastrophic if it is due to some mechanical problem, but as (at most) a reason to laugh at my own ineptitude if it is due to my failure to turn on the power supply. My arguments in the previous section show that I must take a practical interest in the quality of my will, but they do not show that that interest is in any significant respect different from my interest in the state of my personal computer. In this section I will argue that it is. I noted above that my interest in the state of my will is both permanent and ineliminable. If my personal computer breaks down I can always try to get a new one, but I cannot trade in my will if I allow it to degenerate beyond repair. And while I might decide to restructure my life so as to eliminate the need to take an interest in any personal computer, I could divest myself of my interest in my will only by giving up any interest in the future course of my life. For my ability to achieve any end I might set myself depends not only on the availability of means to that end and opportunities to achieve it but on my using those means and seizing those opportunities; and whether or not I do so depends on my will. However, the fact that my interest in the state of my will is permanent and ineliminable does not show that it differs in kind from my interest in the state of my personal computer but only that, unlike my interest in my personal computer, my interest in my will is one I must always have. Consider, for instance, my practical interest in the quality of my lungs. Like my interest in the quality of my will, this interest is permanent and ineliminable: I cannot achieve any end or live by any principles without breathing, and the possibility of trading in my lungs is, for all practical purposes, unavailable to me. But my interest in the quality of my lungs does not differ in kind from my interest in my personal computer. Both are instrumental interests: my interest in the state of my personal computer depends on my desire to finish my book on time, and my interest in the quality of my lungs depends on my interest in continuing to live, an interest that is itself presupposed by any end (other than suicide) that I might conceivably adopt. If the fact that I will find my lungs useful given

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any nonsuicidal alteration in my ends or principles does not show that my practical interest in them differs in any significant respect from my practical interest in other objects, then the fact that my interest in the quality of my will, like my interest in the quality of my lungs, is permanent and ineliminable cannot show that it differs in kind from my practical interests in other objects either. There are two crucial differences between my practical interest in the quality of my will and my practical interests in other objects. First, I take practical interests in other objects because their failure to function in certain ways would exclude some course of action that I think that I have reason to perform from the set of courses of action that I regard as my alternatives, not because their failure would in some way affect my choice among the alternatives I have. If my personal computer explodes, then I will be unable to finish my book as quickly as I would like, but I will not thereby lose my ability to decide rationally how I ought to respond to its demise. If my lungs become crippled, then the set of alternatives available to me will be drastically limited: I will have to give up the idea of leaving my oxygen tent, not to mention my long-awaited trek in the Himalayas. But—as long as I remain alive at all—I will not thereby come to question my ability to choose the best alternative from among the few that remain to me. If my will is flawed, however, then I might fail to achieve any ends I set myself not because some course of action is excluded from among my alternatives but because I do not choose to perform that alternative which my standards imply that I should perform, or because I do not act on my decision. This means, first, that my will is the only object of my practical interest whose failure can lead me not simply to fail to achieve my ends but to violate my principles. The action that I ought to perform is the alternative that I have most reason to perform; and therefore it can be the case that I ought to perform some action only if that action is in fact among my alternatives. If some catastrophe destroys all existing drafts of this book, then a course of action that I now think that I have reason to perform—finishing this book in the near future— will cease to be among my alternatives. But for that reason it would no longer be true that I ought to finish this book in the near future or that in failing to do so I violate my practical standards. If some catastrophe befell my diligence or my strength of will, then I might also fail to finish my book in the near future. But in this case that course of action would still be among my alternatives, since I would perform it if I chose to do so. Barring some change in my ideas about what I ought to do, I would still believe that I ought to finish my book in the near future; and I would regard my failure to do so as a failure to perform that alternative which I have most reason to perform. Moreover, because that course of action remains among my alternatives, my failure to perform it is, from a practical point of view, entirely avoidable. It is always possible that the external world will fail to cooperate with my attempts

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to accomplish my goals: that my efforts will meet with failure, my enterprises be dogged by unremitting bad luck, and my few successes attended by ghastly unforeseen consequences. But if my will itself is flawed, then even if the world bends itself to my every whim, I will squander the opportunities with which it presents me, and neglect or misuse the means to my ends that it provides. I will fail to achieve those ends that I set myself and to live by my principles; and I will do so not because the external world has failed to do its part but because I have failed to do mine. And while the possibility that the external world might frustrate my efforts cannot be entirely avoided, the fact that I frustrate them is, from my point of view, utterly needless. If my will is flawed, then I will consistently fail to perform the course of action that my standards imply that I should perform; and I will do so not because that course of action is not among my alternatives but because I have not chosen to perform it. Moreover, among the things I might fail to do are those that my other practical interests give me reason to do: sheer laziness, for instance, might prevent me from taking my personal computer to the repair store even when its hard drive bursts into flames. For this reason, any practical interest that I take in another object will itself give me reason to take an interest in the quality of my will. However, one might think that my interest in the state of my will must nonetheless be an instrumental one. For the fact that defects in my will will frustrate my attempts to do what I think I should, not by limiting the alternatives available to me but by leading me to choose the wrong alternative, does not show that my will is more than a mere means of living by those standards that I currently accept. My will may be an especially important means, one without which I would be unable to use any other means of realizing my various ends; but, one might think, it is for all that valuable only as a means of acting in accordance with my standards, and my interest in the quality of my will derives all its force from my interest in acting in accordance with those standards. This line of thought overlooks a second and more fundamental difference between my practical interest in the quality of my will and my practical interests in other objects. Any other practical interest that I might take itself depends on my will. To take a practical interest in some object is to regard facts about its condition as giving rise to reasons for action, whether because it is a means to some other end that I have adopted or because helping that object to remain in that condition is itself one of my ends. In either case, I take a practical interest in that object only because I have adopted some end that gives me reason to regard facts about its condition as constituting reasons for action; only, that is, in virtue of some determination of my will that leads me to regard it thus. My character and my will determine not only whether or not I choose to perform that act which my standards imply that I have most reason to perform, but the care I give to the selection of those ends and the formulation of those

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practical principles, which I regard as giving rise to reasons for action: whether I tend to adhere rigidly to my first articulation of what I think it important to do, cutting off or silencing those responses that might lead me to revise it; to adopt principles too quickly and glibly, without taking the trouble to think them through; to leave conflicts among my principles unresolved; or to grope towards a formulation of what I think important in a human life that does justice to my deepest responses and expresses what I truly value. Because my formulation and articulation of my principles depend on my will, I can criticize myself for holding certain principles or for applying them in particular ways. In particular, I might conclude that the fact that I held some principle indicates the presence of some flaw in my character or my will: glibness, obstinacy, uncritical acceptance of the principles of others, a failure to think seriously about the principles I adopt, a shallow acceptance of a theoretically elegant but morally abhorrent standard of conduct, and so forth. If my will is flawed, then I may not only frustrate my own efforts to achieve any ends I set myself or to live by any principles I adopt; I may adopt ends or principles that, were I to reflect further, I would conclude that I have no reason to adopt.6 If I have too limited an imagination, if I fail to resolve conflicts among my principles, if I settle on ends or principles without (what I regard as) due reflection, or allow myself in considering them to be swayed by some motive that I do not regard as relevant to the choice among them, then if I reflected further I might come to regard some of my ends or principles themselves as unjustified. In this case the fact that defects in my will might frustrate my efforts to achieve those ends or to live by those principles would be beside the point, since further reflection would convince me that I have no reason to make those efforts at all. 6 One might think that because I have defined a fault as any characteristic that leads an agent to violate her standards, I cannot now claim that the discovery that her will or character is flawed might lead her to question her justification for holding the standards she holds, since in so doing she would also have to question whether or not the characteristic in question is a fault at all. This might follow if all agents held sets of standards that were fully articulated and mutually consistent, and if we could revise our standards only by exchanging one fully articulated and consistent set of standards for another. In fact, our standards are often neither fully articulated nor mutually consistent. For this reason we might begin with certain rough ideas about how to lead our lives, try to develop the kinds of characters that would enable us to do so, discover that the attempt to develop these character traits itself leads us to regard our old formulation of (some of) our standards as in some respect inadequate or mistaken, revise our standards accordingly, revise our conception of the kind of character we should try to develop on the basis of these reformulated standards, and so on. This process of redefinition is one form of what Charles Taylor calls “radical reevaluation.” In Taylor’s words: “Anyone who has struggled with a philosophical problem knows what this kind of enquiry is like. In philosophy typically we start off with a question, which we know to be badly formed at the outset. We hope that in struggling with it, we shall find that its terms are transformed, so that in the end we will answer a question which we couldn’t properly conceive at the beginning. We are striving for conceptual innovation which will allow us to illuminate some matter, say an area of human experience, which would otherwise remain dark and confused” (Charles Taylor, “Responsibility for Self,” p. 125).

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Thus far I have described my interest in the state of my will and of my character as based on my interest in the conformity of my future actions to those standards of conduct that I now accept. This is one source of my practical interest in my character and my will; for if my character or my will is flawed I will not consistently follow whatever standards of conduct I accept. But because my formulation of my standards itself depends on my will, I cannot regard my interest in the quality of my will as based solely on my interest in acting in accordance with the standards I now accept, nor can I regard my will simply as a means to acting thus. I could regard my interest in the quality of my will as derived solely from my interest in acting in accordance with the standards I now accept only if I had some way of knowing those standards to be correct that would not itself be called into question were I to conclude that my will was flawed. But because the adequacy of my standards itself depends on the quality of my will, I cannot regard my will simply as a means of acting in accordance with them nor my interest in the quality of my will as derived entirely from my interest in so acting. If my interest in the quality of my will can be said to depend entirely on any prior interest, that interest would have to be not my interest in acting in accordance with those standards that I now accept but my interest in acting in accordance with those standards that I would accept were I to reflect on them fully. But this interest is not distinct from my interest in the quality of my will. For my interest in the quality of my will is my interest in holding justifiable standards and acting in accordance with them. It therefore does not depend on, but includes, my interest in adopting standards that I would still accept were I to reflect on them fully. Moreover, this interest is implicit in practical reasoning itself. For reasoning as such aims to arrive not simply at any conclusions but at conclusions that we have reason to accept; and practical reasoning as such aims to arrive not simply at judgments about what we have reason to do but at judgments that we would still accept after full reflection. While our evaluation of our past actions and of those aspects of our will that they reveal proceeds initially from our interest in the conformity of our future conduct to those standards we now accept, we cannot regard our practical interest in those evaluations as based solely on our commitment to our present standards of conduct, or our wills simply as instruments that we use to realize those standards. For to regard our wills thus would be to overlook not only the fact that, since we can use any other means to our ends only by exercising our wills, we can never regard our wills simply as one instrument among many, but the fact that because we can regard the ends we set ourselves and the principles we adopt as providing us with reasons for action only in virtue of the fact that we have accepted them, the reasonableness of our ends and principles itself depends on the state of our character and on the quality of our will. And for this reason our practical interest in our will can never be a purely instrumental one.7 7

See Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Ak. 426–9.

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Moral Responsibility I have argued that for the purposes of practical reasoning we must take an interest in what our conduct reveals about our character and our will, and that this interest justifies us in using a concept of responsibility such that we are in fact responsible for our conduct insofar as it reflects our will. To say that we are responsible for our conduct in this sense is to say that we can appropriately hold ourselves accountable for it: that it can legitimately be laid at our door or reckoned to our charge. When I take some action to reflect my will, I attribute it to myself, and ask what it reveals about my will and my character, and about the ways in which they might be improved. To do this is to hold myself accountable for that action. If the arguments I have made thus far are sound, then each of us has an interest in assessing her actions and her will in these ways and thus in holding herself to account for her conduct. And we do so legitimately, since we have good reason to conduct such an evaluation and since doing so does not commit us to any sort of illusion or error. However, I have not yet shown that we are responsible for our conduct in a sense that should satisfy libertarians. As I noted earlier, libertarians often suspect compatibilists of substituting arguments for the claim that we can be responsible for our conduct in some less than satisfactory sense even if mechanism is true for demonstrations that mechanism is compatible with genuine moral responsibility. If I cannot show that the sort of responsibility described in chapter 4 should satisfy libertarians, my account will not meet their concerns and they will reject it. What exactly a satisfactory sense of responsibility involves is more often gestured at than explained, and some of the most common attempts to explain it are unilluminating.8 For this reason, in what follows I cannot refer to an 8 For instance, some writers have claimed that a person is in the relevant sense a morally responsible agent if she “is a fit subject upon whom to pass moral judgment” (C. A. Campbell, “Is ‘Freewill’ a Pseudo-problem?” p. 118) or if she “can legitimately be praised or blamed” (Jonathan Glover, Responsibility, p. 19). As it stands, this is unilluminating. It is clearly consistent with mechanism to assess actions by moral standards: to judge, say, that a particular act of cruelty is wrong. And it is possible to assess agents by the same standards: to claim that someone is the sort of person who is frequently dishonest or callous or cruel and that such traits are defects of character (see J.J.C. Smart, “Free-Will, Praise and Blame,” pp. 303–5). Unless we are to assume that libertarians have failed to grasp this fairly obvious point, we must assume that the sort of moral evaluation that moral responsibility makes appropriate goes beyond this kind of assessment in some respect. The most obvious way to explain how it does so would be to say that when we engage in this kind of moral evaluation we do not simply judge that a person has certain defects of character or that she can be counted on to act wrongly in certain sorts of situations, but that she is responsible for being a person of that kind. And the sort of responsibility in question cannot be causal responsibility since, again, the claim that we can be causally responsible for having some defect of character is too obviously compatible with mechanism for this to be the point under discussion. Moral evaluation must, therefore, go beyond the assessment of persons by moral standards in that it involves ascriptions of moral responsibility. If so, then the demand that moral responsibility make ascriptions of praise and blame appropriate, while clearly legitimate, will

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accepted libertarian account of the sense of responsibility in question, and then try to show that on my account we are responsible in that sense. I will, however, make two assumptions about what a satisfactory answer to this question will involve. First, I will assume that on any adequate account of moral responsibility, we can be morally responsible for something only if we helped to bring it about; that causal responsibility is a necessary condition of moral responsibility. Libertarians should accept this assumption, since they do not hold that we do not cause ourselves to act as we do. Second, I will assume that libertarians cannot reasonably hold that what makes an account of moral responsibility satisfactory is simply the fact that it requires the falsity of determinism or mechanism. Libertarians might support in either of two ways the claim that an agent cannot be morally responsible in any satisfactory sense unless at least some of her more important choices are not caused by anything outside her. On the one hand, they might argue that only such an agent can be responsible in some sense that is desirable for reasons other than its incompatibilism. This is not an unreasonable view; but to justify it libertarians would need to provide an independent account of what that sense of responsibility is, why it is desirable, and why it requires that nothing outside us have caused our choices. On the other hand, libertarians could hold that what makes their accounts of moral responsibility satisfactory is simply the fact that, on those accounts, some of our choices are not caused by anything outside ourselves. I will assume that this is not reasonable. If there is some particularly rich or deep sense of responsibility that requires a libertarian account of agency, then it might be reasonable to reject compatibilist accounts of responsibility as inadequate by comparison. But if we can construct a compatibilist conception of responsibility that differs from incompatibilist accounts not in its strength or richness or depth but only in being compatible with determinism or mechanism, then it would not be reasonable for libertarians to reject that conception. This assumption should be acceptable to most libertarians, since they have in general argued not that the falsity of determinism is desirable for its own sake, but that unless determinism is false, we cannot be responsible for our conduct in some sense that is desirable on other grounds. I will, therefore, assume that moral responsibility requires causal responsibility, and that while an adequate account of moral responsibility might require the falsity of determinism or mechanism, the fact that some account does not require this is not itself a reason to reject that account as unsatisfactory. In what follows I will try to figure out what might motivate libertarians to reject compatibilist accounts as unsatisfactory, and consider whether my account might meet their objections. presuppose an account of the sort of moral responsibility with which we are concerned, rather than providing that account.

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Arbitrariness: As noted in chapter 1, libertarians might suspect that compatibilist accounts of moral responsibility must be fundamentally arbitrary. Mechanism is the view that our choices are determined as fully, and in the same sorts of ways, as other natural events. It therefore implies that while choices, like eclipses or explosions, have certain features that allow us to distinguish them from other kinds of events, as far as the structure of causal relations is concerned they are natural events like any others. Libertarians might therefore suspect that compatibilist attempts to invest the distinction between our responsibility for the foreseeable results of our choices and inanimate objects’ responsibility for the effects they produce with some special significance are doomed to failure. They might wonder whether compatibilists’ answers to such questions as “why do we hold only persons responsible for what they do?” must not at bottom rely on their having simply defined moral responsibility as one among the many forms that causal responsibility can take. Libertarians might then ask why, if moral responsibility is simply the form of responsibility that persons bear for the foreseeable results of their choices, we should not regard it as on a par with, say, “tectonic responsibility” (the responsibility borne by tectonic plates for the results of their activity) or “lunar responsibility” (the moon’s responsibility for such phenomena as the tides). If compatibilists cannot answer this question, their accounts of responsibility will not satisfy libertarians. I have argued that we must hold ourselves responsible for our conduct insofar as it reflects the quality of our will. In so doing, I have not simply defined moral responsibility as the particular sort of responsibility that persons have for the foreseeable results of their choices. I have argued that our interest in the quality of our will gives us reason to employ a particular conception of responsibility and to regard those actions we are responsible for in this sense as having a kind of significance that other events lack. I have, that is, given reasons for answering such questions as compatibilists do, and therefore my account is not arbitrary in the sense described above. My account might nonetheless be arbitrary in two further senses. First, our interest in the quality of our wills might be simply one among the many practical interests we might have, on a par with our interest in the continued functioning of our cars or computers. In this case we might have no reason to regard our ascriptions of moral responsibility as more significant than our assessments of the quality of other objects that matter to us. But I have argued that our interest in the quality of our wills is not just one among the many practical concerns we might have. Unlike our interest in the functioning of other objects, our interest in the quality of our wills is presupposed by any other end or interest we might have, and it is therefore an interest we necessarily have as practical agents. And it is not an instrumental concern but one that is implicit in practical reasoning itself. For these reasons it differs in kind from other

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practical concerns, and these differences allow us to explain why we are right to regard it as more fundamental. Second, if our concern with the quality of our wills were merely a concern with evaluating whatever happens to be like ourselves, libertarians might wonder whether, had we been some other sort of being, we might have had the kind of reasons I have described to hold beings of that kind responsible for what they do and no reason to ascribe responsibility to persons. They might therefore find my account arbitrary in a different sense. But our interest in holding persons responsible does not rely solely on the fact that we are persons, and that therefore we have an interest in learning how we might become good persons that we do not have in learning how to become a good landslide or meteorite. It is only because we are persons that we can engage in practical reasoning at all. To engage in practical reasoning is to act on the basis of some practical principles: some conception of the kinds of actions we think we should perform, the kinds of persons we think we should be, and so forth. It is only because we can act on the basis of such conceptions that we have reason to ask ourselves to what extent our conduct conforms to the standards of conduct we accept and to assume responsibility for our conduct. If we could not engage in practical reasoning, we would have no particular reason to care whether or not our conduct reveals some defect in our will, nor would we regard ourselves as answerable for its defects. But by the same token we would have no will at all, nor would we be able to ask whether or not we have any reason to concern ourselves with our evaluations of it, or whether or not we should assume responsibility for its condition. Some writers claim that an adequate account of the content of our ascriptions of moral responsibility must show only that they have an “intensity”9 or a “special force”10 that ascriptions of other forms of responsibility lack. My account meets this condition. Moreover, it allows me to show that the “special force” of our ascriptions of moral responsibility is not derived from interests that we simply happen to have, that it differs in kind from the significance of our evaluations of other objects, and that it is based on an interest that only persons have reason to take in their conduct. If this is the condition a satisfactory account of moral responsibility must meet, then I have already shown that my account is satisfactory. Ultimacy: Incompatibilists might wonder whether compatibilists can satisfactorily explain why, if our choices are ultimately the result of events outside our control, we can be responsible for them in any satisfactory sense. Why, in tracing back the causes of an action, should we draw the line at a choice and ascribe responsibility to the agent who made it, if her choice was itself the result of antecedent causes? How can compatibilists explain why “the buck 9

Richard Double, The Non-Reality of Free Will, p. 77. Scanlon, “The Significance of Choice,” pp. 167–72.

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stops here” without resorting to arbitrary stipulation? And why would the fact that an agent’s choice was caused, ultimately, by events outside her control not imply that we cannot legitimately hold her responsible for what she chose to do? The account of responsibility developed in the previous chapter allows me to answer these questions. When we ask whether or not we are responsible for some action in the sense I have described, we do not need to trace the causes of our actions back beyond our choices to events beyond our control; nor, for these purposes, does it matter whether or not it was inevitable that we chose as we did. When we ask what we could have done to avoid acting in ways that violate our standards, we will interpret this question using the sense of possibility defined in chapter 3, rather than possibility tout court, for three related reasons. First, our main interest is in evaluating our contributions to the process whereby we came to act as we did. We want to discover whether we did anything that we think wrong: whether we were attentive to all those considerations we think we should have taken into account, whether we thought hard enough and seriously enough about what we were about to do, whether we made the right choices, and, if we did not, what explains our failure. It may be that it was determined that not only our act but the process whereby we came to perform it would fail to conform to our standards; but that fact is not relevant to the question whether or not it did fail to conform to them. And it is that question that we must answer if we wish to decide whether or not the fact that we did something that we regret indicates the existence of some fault in our wills that we can and should try to correct. Second, we are trying to figure out whether we should have done anything differently in part in order to figure out what our principles imply that we should do should we find ourselves in a similar situation in the future. And while, if we are determinists, we will believe that our choosing as we did was inevitable, we will have no reason to think it inevitable that we will make similar choices if, in the future, we find ourselves in similar situations. Because we are trying to figure out how we ought to have chosen in the past in order to figure out how to choose in the future, we will ask not whether it was possible (tout court) for us to do anything other than what we did but whether, 11

Harry Truman, as quoted in Kane, “Two Kinds of Incompatibilism,” p. 119; see also Dennett, Elbow Room, p. 76. Kane writes that to be “ultimately responsible” in the sense with which libertarians are concerned, an agent must “be an ultimate cause, or causal influence—one whose operation or influence is not caused or explained by anything else” (p. 119). This cannot, I think, be the point at issue. The claim that compatibilists cannot explain why we are ultimately responsible for what we do is supposed to show us in what respect their accounts of responsibility are inadequate. If libertarians want to claim not that incompatibilism is desirable for its own sake but that it is required by some conception of responsibility that is desirable on other grounds, then their account of the inadequacies of compatibilist accounts must involve something more than pointing out that they are compatibilist.

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had we chosen differently or been more attentive to considerations we overlooked, things would have turned out differently. For these purposes, the fact that it was inevitable that we chose as we did is irrelevant. Finally, we are also interested in assessing our reasons for action. When we act for a particular reason, we do so because we think that reason a good one, or good enough to warrant that action. And we can later ask ourselves whether we were right to think so. If our interest in that action were merely historical, we might answer that, good or bad, it was one that it was inevitable that we accept at the time. But to give this answer is to ignore the fact that we are still at loose in the world, still acting on the basis of (equally inevitable) reasons, and that we therefore have reason to ask whether our reasons for acting were good ones, why we thought they were good at the time, and whether we ought now to revise them. If we conclude that we were wrong to think that we ought to have acted as we did, we will not simply regret our errors as we might regret a natural disaster. We will revise our ideas about how we ought to act and try to act differently. Again, for this purpose whether or not our holding those reasons at the time was inevitable will be irrelevant, since we are trying to determine whether or not we were right to hold them.12 Libertarians claim that because, if mechanism is true, our choices might ultimately be caused by events beyond our control, compatibilist accounts of moral responsibility will necessarily be arbitrary. Why, they ask, do compatibilists trace the causes of our actions back to our choices and no further? Why, if an unbroken causal chain leads from events beyond my control through my choices to my actions, should I place the responsibility for my actions on myself? If my interest in that action were merely descriptive, it might be arbitrary for me to draw the line at my choices and say, “The buck stops here.” But because I am interested in evaluating my actions in order to learn from them how I ought to act in the future, it makes sense for me to trace the causes of my actions back to myself and no further; to ask not what differences in the universe might have prevented its occurrence but what I could have done to prevent it. A Difference in Kind: Even if libertarians accept the arguments I have just made, they might nonetheless feel that those arguments do not meet their concerns. Libertarians do not want to argue only that our ascriptions of responsibility are particularly important and that we have reasons to be concerned with them that differ in kind from our reasons for caring about ascriptions of causal responsibility. For this could be true even if the sense in which we are responsible for our conduct were no different from that in which we are responsible for our other behavior and in which nonpersons are responsible for their effects on the world. Libertarians want to claim that these senses of responsibility are not the same: that the difference between nonpersons’ causal responsibility for 12

Cf. Scanlon, “The Significance of Choice,” p. 172.

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their effects and our moral responsibility for our voluntary conduct “is not simply a difference between a general relation and a . . . particularly interesting and complex species of that relation,” but a “difference in kind.”13 In showing that my account is not vulnerable to the charge of arbitrariness, I have shown that we should not regard our responsibility for our conduct as just another form of causal responsibility, on a par with a faulty brake line’s responsibility for a car crash. However, libertarians might want, in addition, a demonstration that while moral responsibility presupposes causal responsibility, it is not itself a form of causal responsibility at all. If I cannot show that our responsibility for our voluntary conduct is more than a particularly important form of causal responsibility, then while libertarians might be relieved to learn that I can answer the charge of arbitrariness and explain why we are ultimately responsible for what we do, my account will not satisfy them. In what follows, I will attempt to meet this concern. Kant wrote that practical reason “does not . . . follow the order of things as they present themselves in appearance, but frames for itself with perfect spontaneity an order of its own according to ideas, to which it adapts the empirical conditions, and according to which it declares actions to be necessary, even although they have never taken place, and perhaps never will take place.”14 The point of referring to two orders is, I take it, that in each we regard objects as related to one another in particular ways and thereby place them within a structure. The same objects can appear in both orders, and both structure things in terms of relations of necessity. The two orders differ from one another in at least two ways. First, the two appeal to different kinds of necessity. Within one, we order events in terms of their causal relations to one another and regard an event as necessary if, given that some other event has occurred, it must occur. By contrast, the order of things that practical reason frames for itself appeals to a conception of rational necessity: an action is necessary if, given some set of facts, it is rationally required. The first order tells us which events cause which others to occur; the latter, which facts constitute reasons for action. Second, since these two orders relate things to one another by appeal to different types of necessity, one thing can necessitate another within one order but not within the other; and thus the structural relations between things can vary from one order to another. To say that theoretical and practical reason are compatible with one another is to say that there is no contradiction involved in believing ourselves to be 13

Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason, p. 42. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 473 (Ak. A548/B576). In citing this quote I mean to agree with it, but not to commit myself to the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds to which it appeals. The account that follows can be read as a gloss on the two-standpoint view of the relation between Kant’s phenomenal and intelligible worlds, with one caveat: it does not present either standpoint as in some way more fundamental than the other. 14

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parts of both orders, in supposing both theoretical and practical questions to be legitimate, or in taking answers to both to be defensible. Nor is there any contradiction involved in regarding our practical reasoning as causally efficacious. We can regard any given exercise of practical reason from a theoretical point of view: as a set of events to be described and explained. From this point of view, our practical reasoning is a mental process like any other; and the claim that it can affect our conduct poses no special problems. While there is no inconsistency involved in believing that we stand both in the order of reasons and in the order of causes, however, the way in which we regard our choices when we consider them as events to be described and explained is fundamentally different from the way in which we regard them when we engage in practical reasoning. And while these differences do not imply that we cannot believe that we stand within both orders, they do imply that we cannot simultaneously regard our choices as events to be described and explained and as decisions to be made. When we try to describe some event, we regard that event as having a determinate nature that it is our task to describe accurately. When we try to explain what caused some event, we take the fact that that event occurred as it did as given: we begin with a description of that event and, using it as the starting point of our inquiry, try to explain what caused it to occur as it did. When the event in question is a choice, we either assume that it exists in order to try to describe it or assume a description of it and try to explain why it occurred as it did. In either case we regard it as fixed or given. Moreover, when we try to describe or explain some event, we regard ourselves as, in a certain sense, passive with respect to it. We are, of course, active as thinkers. We select objects of investigation, frame descriptions, formulate and test hypotheses, and so forth. Moreover, we might have to structure our conceptions of objects in certain ways in order to arrive at knowledge of them at all. Thus, on Kant’s account, (human) knowledge per se requires that we perceive objects in space and time and that we think of them as subject to the categories. Since such activity is necessary if we are to describe and explain objects at all, it is neither avoidable or objectionable. However, when we engage in theoretical reasoning, we try to avoid having any further effects on the objects we try to describe and explain. The aim of theoretical reason is to describe its objects, not to alter them. It therefore requires that insofar as possible we try to register their nature faithfully, not to change it.15 15

See Korsgaard, “Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Reciprocity and Responsibility in Personal Relations,” pp. 317–8. My account differs slightly from Korsgaard’s on this point: on my account the reason we cannot have theoretical knowledge of activity per se is that to take something as an object of theoretical knowledge is to regard it as fixed and given. The fact that when we engage in theoretical reasoning we aim to be “passively receptive” (ibid., p. 317) to it rather than trying to affect it, and that we cannot take this attitude towards our own activity, is a further reason why we cannot have theoretical knowledge of our own activity, not a problem with having knowledge of activity per se. I am, however, indebted to her work on this topic.

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When we try to decide what to do, by contrast, we regard our choice and our conduct as open, to be determined by us. We do this not because we believe that they are not caused but for two reasons. First, we do not know what we will choose to do, and therefore we have no description of our future choice that we might hold fixed or from which any causal explanation might proceed. Second, and more important, just as the nature of theoretical reasoning requires that we assume that any event we try to explain occurred as it did, rather than regarding its character as up to us, the nature of practical reasoning requires that we regard our choices as open rather than fixed. For when we are deciding what to do, we must regard the question what we will do as one whose answer depends on us and that we have not yet answered. Likewise, when we engage in practical reasoning we do not regard ourselves as “passively receptive”16 to the object we reason about. That object is our will, and the point of practical reasoning is not to register its nature accurately but to determine it ourselves. Just as the nature of theoretical reasoning requires that we regard ourselves not as altering the objects about which we reason but as allowing them to manifest themselves to us, so the nature of practical reason requires that we regard ourselves as actively determining what they will be.17 If, when we engage in practical reasoning, we must regard ourselves as standing in the order of reasons rather than the order of causes, and if those orders are distinguished from one another by the relations of necessity to which they appeal, when we engage in practical reasoning we will not regard ourselves as subject to the same sort of necessity appealed to by theoretical reason. Theoretical necessity is causal: one object acts on another, thereby rendering some change in the latter necessary. To see oneself as necessitated in this way is to see oneself as passive: acted on rather than acting. When we regard ourselves thus, “[t]he area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink . . . to an extensionless point.”18 When we engage in practical reasoning, by contrast, we ask ourselves what we should do, and we try to answer this question on the basis of reasons. In so doing we regard ourselves as subject not to causal but to rational necessity. This means, first, that when we engage in practical reasoning we do not regard our choices as determined by anything outside ourselves. For while causal necessity operates whether or not the beings who are subject to it accept or endorse its laws, rational requirements can move us to act only if we regard them as such. As I argued in chapter 3, no theoretical claims automatically count as reasons for action. We must decide to regard such claims as reasons; and while there may be arguments that convince us that we should regard some theoretical claim as giving us reason to act, when we can determine our conduct through practical reasoning no such claim can move us to act without our 16

Ibid., p. 317. See Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Ak. 89. 18 Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” p. 183. 17

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consent. Insofar as regarding our choices as caused involves regarding them as determined by antecedent events, we cannot regard ourselves as caused to choose as we do when we engage in practical reasoning.19 This is not because we believe we are not caused to choose as we do, but because when we engage in practical reasoning, we are concerned with another form of determination entirely. When we engage in practical reasoning, we ask ourselves what we have most reason to do; and, when we conclude that we should perform one particular action of the alternatives available to us, we do so for reasons that we endorse. That some fact can move us to action only if we regard it as giving us reason to act, and that no rational requirement can force itself on us without our consent, is an additional reason why we must regard ourselves as active rather than passive when we engage in practical reasoning. For both our choices and our endorsement of reasons are activities of our selves, and not events that we might simply undergo passively or that might simply befall us. Moreover, both represent judgments that we make and with which we must identify.20 Because we regard ourselves as subject not to causal but to rational necessity, when we engage in practical reasoning we regard ourselves not as the passive object of external forces but as determining our own conduct; not as acted on by things outside us but as choosing for reasons that we are free to accept or reject. And we regard these choices not as events that might simply befall us and with which we might or might not identify but as necessarily our own. For these reasons, as Christine Korsgaard writes, “[a]t the moment of decision, you must regard yourself as the author of your action.”21 When we ask ourselves what some past action reveals about us and whether, in particular, it reveals some flaw that we ought to correct, we evaluate the situation in which we performed that action from the practical point of view, and we try to decide how, were we able to do things over, we think that we should act. Because, for these purposes, we regard our past actions from the 19 See Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 50 (Ak. 448); and Korsgaard, “Morality as Freedom,” pp. 162–3. 20 Even if we later come to believe that we were wrong to take some consideration to be a reason for acting or that we should not have chosen as we did, we will not cease to regard these judgments as our own absent evidence that we were not just wrong but unable to think for ourselves. To the extent that we do not identify our practical reasoning and our choices as our own (for instance, in those dissociative states in which one seems to observe one’s own mind making itself up without one’s own participation and even, in some sense, against one’s will), we call into question the accuracy of describing them as our practical reasoning and choices. In this respect practical reasoning differs from desires, which we can easily imagine welling up in us without our consent and against our will. The fact that practical reasoning differs from desire in this respect means, I think, that my account of freedom and responsibility is not subject to the problems of identification that beset accounts that appeal instead to our higher-order desires (see Frankfurt, “Identification and Externality”; and idem, “Identification and Wholeheartedness”). 21 Korsgaard, “Creating the Kingdom of Ends,” p. 319.

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practical point of view, we will regard them not simply as actions that we caused but as expressions of our will. And we will regard the will they express not as determined by antecedent events but as self-determining. To regard our conduct as the expression of our own activity and self-determination is to regard ourselves as responsible for it in a sense that goes well beyond mere causal responsibility. Moreover, there is another sense in which we must regard ourselves as responsible for our conduct when we engage in practical reasoning. When we engage in practical reasoning, we ask ourselves what we should do, and we regard our conduct and the determination of our will as up to us. In so doing we regard ourselves as responsible for the determination of our will: our will is our province, and it is our job to govern it. To regard ourselves as responsible in this sense is to regard ourselves as having what H. L. A. Hart calls “roleresponsibility”22 for our wills. But while other roles can be accepted or declined, the role of governor of our wills is ineliminable as long as we engage in practical reasoning. For in undertaking to determine what to do we accept that role and the responsibility that it entails. And since practical reasoning aims to arrive not simply at some conclusion but at the right one, when we engage in practical reasoning we must try not only to determine our will but to do so in (what we take to be) the right way, and to hold standards of conduct that we would still accept on full reflection. We must, that is, regard ourselves as responsible not only for the governance of our wills but for governing them well. And we are answerable for how we discharge this responsibility, not only in that we are capable of explaining why we discharged it as we did, or in that we are in fact motivated to provide such explanations,23 but because, for the reasons given in the previous chapter, we require such explanations of ourselves. If to say that I am responsible for something is to say that I am answerable for it, then when I engage in practical reasoning I must regard myself as responsible for my exercise of my freedom, and for my conduct insofar as it reflects my will. I have argued that when we engage in practical reasoning we must regard ourselves not as caused to choose by antecedent events but as determining our conduct for ourselves; that we must regard our choices not as determinate events to be explained but as open; and that we must see ourselves as active choosers and not as the playthings of external forces or antecedent events. And I have argued that this gives us reason to regard ourselves as responsible for our conduct in a sense that transcends causal responsibility. To hold ourselves responsible in this sense is not simply to act as if we are morally responsible or to indulge in a socially useful fiction, but to define ‘moral responsibility’ in such a way that we really are morally responsible for our actions. To be morally 22 23

H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility, pp. 212–4. See Scanlon, “The Significance of Choice.”

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responsible in this sense a person need not be free in the libertarians’ sense of that word but in the sense I defined in chapter 3. She must be able to engage in practical reasoning, to decide which action she has most reason to perform, and to act on the basis of her decisions. Libertarians might object that even if this is true, on my account we are still, at bottom, only causally responsible for our conduct since, while I have argued that when we engage in practical reasoning we must regard ourselves in various ways, I have not shown that there is in fact a difference in kind between the ways in which we cause our voluntary conduct and the ways in which other objects produce effects on the world. This objection would misconstrue the aim of my arguments. I have tried to show that practical reasoning gives us reason to use a conception of responsibility that differs in kind from causal responsibility. Establishing this claim does not involve showing that we produce our conduct in some noncausal way; that, considered as causes, we are in some way unique; or in general that there is any striking difference in kind between the ways in which we cause our voluntary conduct and the ways in which other objects affect the world. To think that we must establish such claims if we are to show that we are morally responsible agents would be to regard moral responsibility as a theoretical property. If moral responsibility is not a theoretical but a practical concept, then to show that we are morally responsible I must show not that, considered as causes, we differ in kind from other beings, but that practical reasoning gives us reason to employ a particular conception of responsibility, that we have reason to regard ourselves as responsible in this sense for our voluntary conduct, and that this conception differs in kind from causal responsibility. I argued in chapter 2 that if the requirements of practical reasoning give us reason to make some claim, and if that claim does not conflict with any theoretical claim, then that claim is justified. If this argument is sound, then if the requirements of practical reasoning give us reason to regard ourselves as responsible in some sense, and if so regarding ourselves does not conflict with any theoretical claim, then we are justified in regarding ourselves as responsible in that sense. If that sense of responsibility differs in kind from causal responsibility, and if it does so in ways that make it plausible to identify this conception with moral responsibility, then we are justified in regarding ourselves as morally responsible agents. Whether or not the practical difference in kind between morally responsible agents and other beings corresponds to a difference in kind between ourselves and other objects considered as causes is irrelevant for these purposes.24 24 At this point, some libertarians might argue that theoretical reasoning is in some way more fundamental than practical reasoning, or that it shows us what we really are, and not just how we must regard ourselves. But it is not clear how one might support this claim. For if we take ‘what we really are’ to mean ‘what claims are really true of us’ or ‘what properties can justifiably be ascribed to us’, then justified practical claims would seem to reveal ‘what we really are’ as fully as justified theoretical claims; and the claim that only theoretical reason shows us what we really are could be true only if there were no justified practical claims. Since I claim to justify some

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Moreover, this account of responsibility allows us to see how compatibilists can make various other claims that it seems, intuitively, that an account of responsibility should allow us to make, but that seem to be incompatible with mechanism. For instance, consider the claim that the self is crucially distinct from the rest of the natural world. Interpreted theoretically, this claim means that when we consider the self as an object whose behavior we wish to describe and explain, it turns out to be different in kind from the rest of the natural world. Mechanism implies that this claim is false, since mechanism just is the view that the activities of our selves are caused in the same kinds of ways as the behavior of other objects. Interpreted practically, however, this claim means that when an agent engages in practical reasoning, she cannot regard her self or her will simply as a part of the natural world, as one object among many. And this is true: the aim of practical reasoning is to determine the will, and therefore when we engage in practical reasoning we regard the content of our wills as up to us and the determination of our wills as our object. By contrast, we regard the rest of the world as external: it impinges upon us, it can provide us with reasons for action, and we can affect it through our conduct, but we have neither the direct ability to determine it that we have to determine our will nor the same immediate concern with its state.25 For this reason possible changes in the external world are relevant to our practical reasoning only if we can bring them about by our will and only if we regard them as providing us with reasons to determine our will in one way rather than another. Likewise, the claims that our actions are not simply the result of external causes and that we are not simply the vehicles through which those causes work out their effects can be given both a theoretical and a practical interpretation. Interpreted theoretically, these claims mean either that external causes do not determine our actions at all or that they do so in some way that is radically different from the ways in which they determine the behavior of other objects. Mechanism implies that these claims are false. Interpreted practically, however, they mean that when we engage in practical reasoning we do not regard practical claims in this work, someone who objected to my account of responsibility on these grounds would have to argue that my attempts to justify these claims are unsuccessful, rather than trying to show, as the objection under consideration does, that even had my arguments been successful they would not have shown that we are morally responsible agents. If, on the other hand, the point of the objection is that practical claims, even if fully justified, are in some way less true or less fundamental than theoretical claims, then it is not clear why we should accept it, or even what it would mean. 25 I do not mean to imply that we might not be as concerned with the state of the world as with the state of our will, but only that we are concerned with them in different ways and for different reasons. We must be concerned with the determination of our wills if we engage in practical reasoning at all, since the determination of our wills is the object of practical reasoning. Our practical concern with the rest of the world derives from our specific views about what we should be concerned about and about how we should live.

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external causes as simply dictating what we will choose to do. This claim is true: as I argued in chapter 3, there are no theoretical claims that automatically constitute reasons for action. A fortiori, the claim that some previous event occurred or that some cause impinges on us does not do so. Rather, when we engage in practical reasoning, we ask ourselves which theoretical claims constitute reasons for action, and we act on those claims only insofar as we conclude that we should regard them as reasons for action. For this reason, while we might regard our practical reasoning as caused by antecedent events when we consider it as a series of events to be described and explained, when we engage in practical reasoning we cannot regard ourselves as simply following the dictates of the external world.26 Finally, consider the claim that if we were simply the vehicles through which antecedent causes worked out their effects, we would be neither free nor responsible. If we adopt the theoretical interpretation of the antecedent clause just described, this claim implies that freedom is incompatible with mechanism. If we give that clause its practical construction, however, it means that if antecedent events forced our hand without requiring our consent, we could not be said to act freely or to be responsible for our conduct. And this is true, since in that case we would not be capable of determining our conduct through practical reasoning, and thus, on my account, we would not be free and responsible moral agents. In all these cases, my account allows us to argue that these claims have both a theoretical and a practical interpretation, and that mechanism implies that the theoretical forms of these claims are false. In so doing it allows us to understand why libertarians have thought that mechanism is inconsistent with these claims, and thus to understand why they take our intuitive conviction that an account of freedom and responsibility should be able to accommodate them to constitute a serious objection to compatibilism. But it also allows us to argue that the practical versions of these claims are crucial to an account of freedom and responsibility, and that mechanism is consistent with these practical forms. I have tried to explain why it is rational for us to hold ourselves responsible for our actions whether or not mechanism is true; why it is rational for us not merely to regret the occurrence of our unethical actions, but to think that they indicate some fault for which we ought to blame ourselves and that we ought to try to correct; and how such responsibility can be justified by, and lend importance to, a kind of freedom that is compatible with mechanism. I hope, in so doing, to have dispelled at least some of the libertarians’ fears about the implications of mechanism. 26 See Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 19–20; Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, chapter 2, especially pp. 39–41; and Korsgaard, “Morality as Freedom,” pp. 162–5.

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My basic premise has been that a libertarian account of freedom of the will seems desirable only if one thinks that no other account would allow us to justify our beliefs about moral responsibility. Until we examine libertarian and compatibilist accounts of freedom, this view seems plausible. Our intuitive beliefs about freedom and moral responsibility seem to require as a foundation a vast metaphysical difference between persons and nonpersons, and between freedom and its absence. Only a libertarian can assert that such fundamental differences exist. A mechanist, by contrast, will have to justify those beliefs by appealing only to “accidental” differences between persons and nonpersons. While a libertarian can point to metaphysical chasms that separate us from the rest of the natural world, a mechanist must rely on other arguments; and it is not clear at the outset that she can succeed. The compatibilist’s task will seem hopeless if we assume that our ascriptions of moral responsibility must be justified from the God’s-eye point of view from which we describe the world. From the theoretical point of view, it might seem arbitrary to hold ourselves responsible for our actions if the choices that led us to perform those actions were caused by events beyond our control, or to distinguish between those of our acts that were caused by our choices and those that were not. But to a person who is trying to figure out how she should live, the distinction between those actions for which she is responsible in the sense I have described and those for which she is not is crucial. For while the latter can be occasions for joy and regret, only those actions that reflect her will can reveal to her the distance between the self she has and the self to which she aspires, and the tasks that she must undertake if she wishes to transform the one into the other.

Excursus on Guilt

THE ACCOUNT of moral responsibility described in the last two chapters implies that we should hold ourselves morally responsible for those of our actions that reflect our wills and that we should blame ourselves when what those actions reflect is a defect. Moreover, it implies that we have reason not simply to blame ourselves when we happen to stumble across such defects but actively to seek out occasions for guilt through self-examination. But one might think that guilt is not something that should be encouraged. Freud maintains that guilt is a form of internalized aggression. When we allow ourselves to feel it, he claims, we let this aggression loose on ourselves, and its predations leave our egos weaker and more anxiously self-protective, while placing new reservoirs of unacknowledged aggression at our superego’s disposal.1 He would add that we need guilt if we are to restrain our antisocial impulses, but on his account it is at best a necessary evil. Nietzsche believes that to the extent that we encourage the kind of self-examination I recommended in chapter 4, we stand apart from ourselves, scrutinizing our wills and criticizing them, and that this makes us too ashamed to act forthrightly.2 William James might see limits on one’s susceptibility to guilt as an essential part of “healthy-mindedness,” and any attempt to heighten this susceptibility in normal (nonsociopathic) people as an invitation to anxious morbidity.3 And many of us might wonder whether guilt is not in itself debilitating: a kind of self-flagellation that harms us without in any obvious way benefiting those we have wronged. On any of these views, guilt should not be encouraged; and to the extent that my account does encourage it, it plays with fire. Such objections are reinforced by the metaphor most often used to describe guilt: a trial before the bar of conscience. This is a natural metaphor to use in this context, not only because the word ‘guilt’ is drawn from the law but because one’s conscience is in fact called on to consider what one did, to listen to whatever considerations one might offer in one’s own defense, and to render a verdict of “guilty” or “not guilty.” But it is also misleading, since it suggests that guilt is a form of punishment for our crimes, punishment that we inflict on ourselves. If we consider guilt in this way, we will misconstrue the relation 1

See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, chapter 7. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, pp. 9–10: “Take as an extreme example a man who possesses no trace of the power to forget, who is condemned everywhere to see becoming: such a one no longer believes in his own existence, no longer believes in himself; he sees everything flow apart in mobile points and loses himself in the stream of becoming: he will, like the true pupil of Heraclitus, hardly dare in the end to lift a finger.” 3 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, lectures 6 and 7. 2

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between the verdict of our conscience and the guilt we suffer as a consequence; we will misdescribe our reasons for feeling guilty and for supposing that this feeling is appropriate; and we will be tempted to regard a concern with our own guilt as a form of self-absorption that distracts us from the actual harm we have done. I have argued that we should regard ourselves as morally responsible for our conduct insofar as it reflects the quality of our will, for the following reasons. First, each of us has some set of standards of conduct, which reflects the kind of life she thinks she should lead, the things she thinks worth caring about, the kind of character she wishes to have, and so forth. Second, our standards give us reason to care about the quality of our wills, since both the adequacy of our standards themselves and our ability to live by them depend on our wills. Third, we should not only regret our past actions as we would any untoward event but regard them as reflecting on us as moral agents; and since we must care about the kinds of persons we are, we must care about what they reveal. Finally, when our conduct reveals some flaw in our will, we must, in particular, try to figure out what that flaw is and to correct it, lest it lead us to act wrongly the next time we encounter a similar situation. The discovery that we have intentionally violated our standards will be painful in proportion to the wrongness of the action, judged by our own standards, to the degree to which it reflects our will and to the degree to which the state of our will matters to us. However, the relation between the recognition that we have done something wrong and the guilt we suffer as a consequence is not analogous to that between a guilty verdict and the punishment inflicted on the criminal. The relation between a legal verdict of guilty and the penalty prescribed by law is external. Neither the verdict nor the defendant’s knowledge that it has been pronounced itself produces the punishment; rather, we must enact laws according to which those who are convicted of a particular crime suffer a particular punishment. We might hope that there will be some kind of correspondence between crime and punishment: that the punishments we inflict will cause criminals to suffer in the ways, and to the degrees, that their crimes warrant.4 But this correspondence must be deliberately constructed; and our reasons for constructing it depend both on our belief that there is some reason to do so and on our having some antecedent conception of which acts are wrong and of what sorts of punishments would in fact be appropriate to them. The relation between the recognition that one has done something wrong and the guilt one suffers as a result is not external in this way. Rather, it is like 4 In saying this I do not mean to presuppose a retributivist view of punishment. Those consequentialists who believe that our reasons for punishing criminals should be “forward-looking” will not differ from retributivists in supposing that particular crimes might warrant certain kinds of punishments but in the kinds of reasons they will offer in support of claims about the appropriateness of particular punishments to particular crimes.

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the relation between the recognition that one’s relationship with someone one truly loves has collapsed and the pain of heartbreak. Heartbreak is not a pain one inflicts on oneself as a punishment for the loss of love; it is not something we undergo because we deserve it; nor need we develop our susceptibility to it to meet some antecedent conception of the kinds of responses that situations of this kind warrant. Rather, supposing that what one has lost was in fact love, and that one has indeed lost it, one can fail to suffer only if one walls oneself off from these facts, either by blinding oneself to their existence or by denying their importance. Pain is not only an appropriate response to the collapse of love but the only response that accurately registers what has happened. Similarly, on my account the recognition that one has done something wrong causes pain. But this pain is not a form of suffering that we inflict upon ourselves as a punishment but an entirely appropriate response to the recognition of what we have done, for two reasons. First, our standards define the kind of life we think we should lead and what we regard as valuable in the world, in our lives, and in the lives of others. They articulate what matters to us, and living by them is therefore by definition of concern to us. If we have violated them, we have slighted what we take to be of value, disregarded principles we sincerely think we should live by, and failed to be the sorts of persons we think we should be. The knowledge that we have done these things must be painful to us.5 Second, we mind violating our standards because of the importance we attach to ourselves. By this I do not mean the degree to which we think that we are important in the grand scheme of things, the degree to which anyone else should think that we are important, or the degree to which we think that we are virtuous or unique or special. Rather, a person is important to herself in the sense I have in mind simply in virtue of the fact that she is herself, both because her grasp of what really is important or of value depends on her— because her mind is the only means she has of seeing what really matters, and if it is dull or distorting she will see things wrong—and because she is the only means she has of translating her conception of what is of value into action. To the extent that her character is flawed, she will neither see what matters clearly nor act consistently on what she sees.6 5

At least, this is true on the assumption that a person’s standards articulate her conception of how she should live and of what is of value, and not just (for instance) the views of other people, views that she feels badly about violating but that she herself does not fully accept. As I use the term ‘standards of conduct’, this is true by definition. 6 Samuel Johnson wrote: “I have now begun the sixtieth year of my life. How the last year has passed I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking” (Selected Writings, p. 508). Only when one regards the state of one’s character as important could one find the thought of how one spent one’s last year not just disheartening or disappointing, but terrifying. And to think of oneself thus need involve neither self-aggrandizement nor the thought that one is important to the universe. One need only think that one’s conduct is, and should be, important to oneself.

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These two sources of concern with the quality of our wills rely on and reinforce one another. If I believed that nothing was of value or that nothing really mattered, then I would not need to concern myself with the condition of my will or my character, since there would be nothing to get right. And if I thought that I was not important in the sense just described—if it did not matter to me what I thought or did, or what state my will or character were in—then a fortiori what I thought was important would not matter to me, and I would be unable to take my own values seriously. If, on the other hand, I do think that anything matters (as I must if I am to engage in practical reasoning), then I must care about my own condition in the sense just described. If we care about living by our standards and about the state of our wills, then we will find the thought that we have failed to act as we think we should painful. In so doing we are not giving free rein to self-hatred or turning internalized aggression on ourselves, but responding in the only appropriate way to a fact about our conduct. For just as our claim to love another person is called into question if the demise of our relationship to that person leaves us unmoved, not minding the fact that we have willingly violated our standards calls into question our claim that they are, in fact, standards we think we should live by. To construe the feeling of guilt as a kind of self-inflicted punishment also leads us to misconstrue its point. Because we must construct any system of laws that prescribes certain punishments for certain crimes, we can ask ourselves why we think that our system of laws should involve punishment at all and whether, and on what grounds, the institution of punishment can be justified. To answer these questions, we will have to provide some account of the legitimacy of inflicting harm or suffering on others in response to their crimes; and this account will appeal either to the consequences of adopting this practice or to the claim that persons who commit those crimes deserve to suffer. Either account would provide us with reasons for thinking that inflicting harm or suffering on criminals was itself worthwhile, and those reasons would explain and justify our construction of the institutions that inflict those punishments. Similarly, if guilt were essentially a form of self-inflicted punishment that we had to decide to impose on ourselves in response to wrongdoing, we might ask why we think it appropriate to punish ourselves at all and what makes it legitimate to punish ourselves in this way. We would have to answer this question by showing that we have some reason for inflicting suffering on ourselves when we have acted wrongly. If guilt were a kind of punishment, the pain we feel would either have to be the point of our feelings of guilt or else a necessary means for achieving some desirable end. In either case, producing this pain would be the point of feeling guilty, and we could regard guilt as appropriate only if we had some reason for thinking that causing ourselves to suffer when we have acted wrongly was itself a good thing.

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But if, as I have argued, guilt is not essentially a form of self-inflicted punishment, then we need not regard our reasons for feeling guilty in this way. If guilt is the only coherent response to the recognition that we have acted wrongly, then in reflecting on our conduct we will suffer to the extent that we regard our conduct as reflecting badly on us. On this account, reflecting on our own wrongdoing and causing ourselves to suffer the pain of guilt are not two separate activities; instead, recognizing that we have acted wrongly necessarily and appropriately brings suffering in its wake. For this reason we should not regard the fact that we cause ourselves to suffer as something that requires its own separate justification, nor need we believe that our own suffering has any independent value. Moreover, in pursuing those reflections on our conduct that lead us to recognize the painful fact that we have acted wrongly, we need not be motivated by a desire to provide ourselves with an opportunity for self-flagellation.7 Again, we might be tempted to think this if we take the metaphor of a trial before the bar of conscience too literally. The point of a legal trial is to establish whether or not the defendant should be punished, and it is to this end that the parties involved seek to demonstrate the defendant’s guilt or innocence. If our reflections on our conduct were analogous to trials in this respect, their point would be to determine whether or not we merit punishment. But on my account, our reasons for trying ourselves before the bar of conscience are not derived from our need to determine whether or not we should be punished for violating our standards. We must reflect on our conduct in order to determine whether or not we have violated our standards, and we must make that determination not in order to decide whether or not we deserve punishment but in order to determine how we might ensure that we will not violate them again. The feeling of guilt is not the point of this exercise but the necessary consequence of recognizing that we have done something we believe to be wrong. On my account, the pain of guilt is simply a by-product of the recognition that one has done something wrong. One might think that this is an unfortunate conclusion: that the idea that guilt might even in principle be eliminated from our lives without affecting the point of our reflections, so long as those reflections did allow us to correct flaws in our wills, would be morally abhorrent. We would not like to become the sorts of persons who respond to their own wrongdoing by briskly embarking on a comprehensive program of self-improvement without feeling the least twinge of pain or remorse. And we might therefore resist the conclusion that punishing ourselves is not the point of reflecting on our own conduct, lest we infer from it that we might become such persons without loss. Again, it is instructive to consider the analogy with heartbreak. While we try to avoid having our hearts broken, there would be something wrong with 7

I do not wish to deny that some people do seek out occasions to punish themselves, only that in reflecting on our own conduct we must be so motivated.

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trying to avoid not the occasion for heartbreak but the pain of it, with trying to become the sort of person who could watch love splinter and collapse while feeling as little as possible. But we do not need to account for this fact by trying to show that the pain of heartbreak serves some purpose, or by claiming that it allows us to achieve some end more effectively; nor need we fear that we will be unable to explain what is wrong with not feeling pain when our hearts are broken in the absence of such arguments. We find heartbreak painful not because our pain has instrumental value but because losing what we love is necessarily painful to us. And we resist the suggestion that we might try to turn ourselves into persons who did not feel pain when their relationships to their lovers fall apart, not because this transformation would make us less effective agents but because we could achieve it only at the price of ceasing to feel love altogether, and because this price is much too high. If the risk of heartbreak is the price we pay for loving people who have wills of their own and who change over time, and who can therefore cease either to love us or to be the person we once loved, the risk of feeling guilt is the price we pay for thinking anything of value and for caring about the kinds of lives we lead. We can avoid the pain of guilt in only two ways: first, by living blameless lives,8 and second, by ceasing to care about the world we live in and the lives we lead.9 To explain what is wrong with choosing the second alternative, we need not argue that that pain has instrumental value. For we can explain on other grounds what would be wrong with deciding not to care about the kind of person one is, the kind of life one leads, the persons one loves, and what one brings about in the world, simply to protect oneself from pain.10 To say that the point of reflecting on our conduct is to bring about practical change is not to say that all it involves is thinking about how to do things differently in the future. We will, as I have said, have to try to understand exactly what we have done, why we did it, and what it reveals about our character, since only by understanding these things clearly can we see how we 8 This is Miss Manners’s approach: “Guilt is an emotion Miss Manners does without, having taken the simple precaution of always doing everything right the first time” (Judith Martin, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, p. 10). 9 A third alternative—systematically deceiving ourselves about any unethical actions we perform—seems to me to amount in practice to ceasing to care about the world and about our lives. 10 One might wonder whether this account does not underestimate the role of the pain of guilt in preventing us from repeating our wrongdoing. To this I would say, first, that I have not tried to argue that the pain of guilt plays no such role, but only that feeling guilty is not the point of reflecting on our conduct; second, that if we believe that we should live by our standards, we must already think it good or valuable to live by them, and the idea that we require aversive conditioning to live by principles we sincerely accept is either false and demeaning, or true and an indication of a problem we should seek to correct; and third, that if in fact we can live by our standards only if we experience the pain of guilt, then my account implies that we should feel that pain when we act wrongly. Even in this case, however, the point of reflecting on our conduct would be to try to ensure that we act as we think we should; the pain would only be a means to that end, without intrinsic value.

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might act differently in the future. If we have done something we think is wrong, and if we have not shut ourselves off from concern with the course of our lives and the state of our characters, then thinking clearly about our conduct, and about what it reveals about us, is mortifying. The fact that the kind of concern for the state of our wills for which I have argued is supposed ultimately to result in practical change does not imply that we can dispense with that mortification, or that in our rush towards the future we need not stop to reflect on the extent of our iniquity. The point is, rather, that throughout these reflections we should not lose sight of the connection between recognizing that we have done something wrong and resolving in all seriousness never to do it again. Guilt involves seeing clearly what one should have done and that one did not do it. For this reason it characteristically involves the wish that one could alter the past, either by reaching back through time to one’s former self and helping it to recognize all that one now sees so clearly, or by being granted the chance to relive that part of one’s life in which one acted wrongly so that one might undo the action one now regrets. The pain that guilt involves derives entirely from the thought that what one did was wrong and that it cannot be undone: from one’s awareness of the harm one did or the wrong that one committed, from the knowledge that one was not the person one now sees that one should have been, and from the recognition that one has written this failure indelibly into one’s life. While we cannot alter the past, however, we can try to ensure that we will not repeat it. And if we think it appropriate to feel guilt over some past act, then by the same token we should think that we have reason to try to avoid performing similar actions in the future. If we think that what we did was wrong, we must think that doing the same thing in the future would also be wrong. While we cannot affect the past, we can affect the future; and therefore the most direct way of acting on our belief that what we did was wrong is to try to ensure that we do not do so again. Likewise, if we find reflection on the moral faults that our conduct reveals mortifying, we must think that we should try to remove those faults; and if we are pained by the thought that we cannot erase our misdeeds from our lives, then we must think that allowing ourselves to disfigure them further would be at least as bad. The source of our pain and the source of our efforts to change are one and the same; and while guilt does not consist solely of attempts to change those faults in our wills that led us to act wrongly, to the extent that it is disconnected from any such attempt it is motivationally incoherent. Finally, if we misconstrue the point of reflecting on our conduct and of the guilt such reflection can bring in its train, we might be tempted to regard guilt as a form of self-indulgence. Guilt strikes people as self-centered and selfindulgent for two reasons. First, feeling guilty involves thinking about what one has done; and it seems self-centered to think about oneself and one’s failings and not about the people one has harmed, the values one has failed to

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realize, or the good one has failed to achieve. Thus, for instance, Gabriele Taylor writes that “even where the person feeling guilt believes that she has harmed another and believes that she should now repair this damage, her thoughts are not primarily on this aspect of the situation, they are primarily on herself”;11 for this reason Taylor denies that guilt is “moral in the sense of being other-regarding.”12 Second, it seems even more self-indulgent to think about our own failures when we might be doing something concrete to make up for them. If we have harmed another person or damaged a relationship, we can try to make restitution; if we have let an opportunity to do some great good slip through our fingers, we can seek out another occasion to do what we think we should have done; if we can think of no way to make good the damage we have caused, we can at least try to atone for it. Compared to any alternative that involves taking action, tormenting oneself with guilt seems like a morally lazy and culpable form of self-absorption. I do not wish to defend the claim that we should sit around feeling guilty when we might be making restitution for what we have done. When we ignore the need to undo any damage we have done and the need to try to make things up to any persons we have harmed, we act wrongly. However, I will argue that if we have done all we can in this regard, we have no further reason to think that guilt is essentially self-centered. First, guilt does not focus solely on the fact that we have acted wrongly as opposed to the harm we have done or the good we have failed to realize. It is, of course, possible to be so preoccupied with one’s own iniquity that one loses sight of what exactly it was that made one’s action wrong. But it is not clear why we should think that guilt always involves this unfortunate condition; nor is it clear that that condition is motivationally coherent: that we can make sense of the guilt we feel at the thought that we did something that violates our standards without at the same time thinking about why, exactly, what we did was wrong. Thus, for instance, if I lie to a friend of mine, I feel guilty because of what I did: because I treated her and our relationship with disrespect and violated our friendship. While I might allow myself to get so caught up in self-flagellation that I lose sight of these things and of why they matter, doing so does not make sense. My feelings of guilt make sense only on the assumption that I see my friend, her autonomy, and our friendship as important enough that my violation of them pains me. If I allow the pain I feel at having slighted these things to blind me to them at a time when I should be particularly concerned with them, I do not act coherently. If my guilt is not incoherent in this way, I should not be described as being concerned with my own wrongdoing as opposed to being concerned with my 11 12

Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt, p. 104. Ibid., p. 101.

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disregard for my friend, her autonomy, and our friendship. I will feel badly about what I did; but since the reason I feel badly is that I do care about these things, and since what I think about when I reflect on my guilt is my failure to respect them, it is not accurate to describe me as thinking about my own iniquity and not about what I did to my friend, or as replacing my concern for her with concern for myself and my moral failings. One might also regard guilt as self-centered if one thought of it as “an emotion experienced in the face of an abstraction, the moral law,”13 and of one’s failure to live by it, and if one regarded this focus as opposed to concern for those one has harmed and what one has done to them. But to regard the relation between caring about the moral law and caring about the particular features of one’s actions in this way is wrong.14 When I explain why a rock falls when I drop it by citing the law of gravity, I am not substituting “an abstraction” for an appreciation of the stone itself and of its particular weight and density, but explaining how those things are connected to its falling. When I explain why I hold some belief by saying that I cannot see how I could deny it with without losing my intellectual integrity, I am not substituting concern for an abstract ideal for concern for the evidence that supports my belief, and the considerations that seem to me to tell decisively in its favor. Rather, the claim that my intellectual integrity matters to me is a way of explaining that, and how, those considerations matter to me; if I were not concerned with the considerations that tell for and against my beliefs, I would have no intellectual integrity and could not without deceiving myself claim to be concerned with it. Similarly, when I feel guilt or remorse at the thought that I have done something wrong, I am not replacing concern for those I have harmed with concern for an abstraction. I think that certain actions are wrong because of particular facts about them or their consequences. When I feel guilt or remorse because I have acted wrongly, I focus both on those features of what I did—the harm I did to another person, the trust I violated, the damage I thoughtlessly permitted—and on the fact that I did these things. The moral law is not a separate object of concern; rather, the claim that I violated it explains why, and how, I regard these particular actions as making remorse appropriate. If these arguments are correct, then it would be wrong to regard guilt as focusing on oneself or on the moral law as opposed to the harm one did. But it would also be wrong to regard the reflection on our own conduct that leads us to feel guilt when we have acted wrongly as something other than an active response to what we have done. When we take ourselves to have acted wrongly, we typically wish that we could undo the past. Since we cannot do this, we have two ways of acting on this desire. The first is to try to undo the damage our action has caused. Thus we can try to make restitution to those we have harmed in order to undo the consequences of our action, and try to 13 14

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, pp. 219–20. See Herman, “Integrity and Impartiality,” especially pp. 25–9.

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atone for what we did in an effort to undo the moral damage to ourselves. Second, we can try to ensure that we never perform this sort of action again. It may not be possible for us to do both of these things at once, and in some such conflicts we should place restitution above self-improvement. However, when we have done what we can to make good the damage we have caused, we can and should try to make sure that we never repeat it. I have argued that if we care about anything—if we think that anything is valuable, that one sort of life is nobler or better than another, that how we treat others matters, or that we should care about the effects our actions have on them—we must also care about the state of our will, since we will not be able to realize those values consistently if our will is flawed. This sort of concern with our own failings and limitations is not an alternative to concern for the results of our actions but an expression of it. I have also argued that if we think that we have acted wrongly, we must think that we should act differently in any similar situations we encounter in the future; and that we must reflect on what we did, and on what it reveals about our will, if we are to avoid repeating our misdeed. If this argument is sound, then it would be wrong to regard this sort of reflection as something other than an active response to our own wrongdoing, or as demonstrating a concern with ourselves as opposed to those we have harmed. For if the point of such reflection is to avoid inflicting similar harm on others in the future, then we should regard it not as a form of selfindulgence, or as evidence that we are more concerned with the state of our conscience than with the damage we have caused, but as an expression of our concern both for our own character and for those we might harm were we to leave it unchanged. That it is motivationally incoherent to feel guilty in the absence of any commitment to practical change does not, unfortunately, mean that it is impossible to do so. There are several conditions that go by the name of guilt that do not seem to involve any commitment to practical change of the kind just described. For instance, there are people who have stored up reservoirs of self-hatred that await only some plausible excuse to pour down on them. When such people believe that they have done something wrong, they can take their misdeeds as occasions not for genuine remorse but for self-flagellation. Since the pretext for their expressions of self-hatred is the fact that they have acted wrongly, those expressions naturally pass themselves off as guilt. But this kind of guilt rarely translates into practical change, since those who suffer it are motivated not by a desire to avoid repeating their misdeeds but by an independent desire to punish themselves. In addition, there is a kind of guilt whose point is precisely to avoid the need for practical change. As Iris Murdoch writes, “The ideas of guilt and punishment can be the most subtle tool of the ingenious self. The idea of suffering confuses the mind and in certain contexts (the context of ‘sincere

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self-examination’ for instance) can masquerade as a purification.” This is a masquerade since we use suffering to obscure to ourselves our response to what we have done. “The truly good is not a friendly tyrant to the bad, it is its deadly foe”;16 and if we were in fact concerned to become good, we would try not to make ourselves suffer but simply to root out what Murdoch calls “the bad self.” But our bad self proposes an alternative: it “is prepared to suffer but not to obey until the two selves are friends and obedience has become reasonably easy or at least amusing.”17 In such cases suffering is neither a means nor an effect of purification, but an alternative to it. Changing our character for the better is rarely amusing. It is long, slow, and often tedious work, which requires, moreover, that we actually give up our vices, whether or not we find it easy or pleasant to do so. If we want to avoid giving them up while reassuring ourselves that our failure to do so does not reflect moral insensitivity or a lack of concern with the wrongness of our actions, self-flagellation is an obvious solution. Tormenting ourselves can be, in a peculiar way, more gratifying than the hard work and unpleasant sacrifices that any sort of serious attempt to change our character involves.18 It is certainly easier. And precisely because it involves punishing ourselves for our wrongdoing and torturing ourselves with the idea of our own iniquity and unworthiness, it allows us to reassure ourselves that we are genuinely concerned with morality while relieving us of the need actually to become good. My account of moral responsibility implies that we should feel the kind of guilt that aims at practical change when we reflect on our own wrongdoing. But it provides no reason for indulging in either of the two forms of guilt just described. Rather, it implies that these conditions are not guilt proper, but the result of our having placed the mechanism of guilt at the service of extraneous motivations; and it implies that both are wrong.19 In the second of the two cases just described this is obvious. On my account, the point of our ascriptions of moral responsibility is to bring about practical change; for this reason, it implies that to torment oneself with thoughts of one’s own iniquity in order to avoid such change is wrong. In addition, however, precisely because my account of moral responsibility holds that guilt has a legitimate and important role in our moral lives, it implies that we should not allow our reflections on our own conduct to be taken over and distorted by other motivations. My account relies on the claim that a clear15

Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, p. 68. Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 82: “To buy back evil by suffering in the embrace of the good: what could be more satisfying, or as a romantic might say, more thrilling?” 19 One might think that guilt could not be distorted so easily unless it were in some way morally dubious. But one should not make this claim unless one is prepared to regard as morally dubious any other emotion that can be, and often is, distorted in similar ways. The most obvious example of such an emotion is love. 16

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eyed appreciation of the nature of our conduct, our character, and our will is crucial to our ability to live by whatever standards of conduct we endorse. For this reason, it implies that we should not allow our image of ourselves to be distorted, as both of the mistaken forms of guilt discussed above do. This is so whether this distortion takes the form of pride or of self-abasement. For in either case, in allowing our understanding of ourselves to be distorted, we prevent ourselves from recognizing exactly how our own characters compare to our conception of the lives we should lead, and what that conception truly requires of us. Many of the objections to guilt described at the beginning of this chapter are, I believe, objections only to one or another distorted form of guilt. Certainly only those distortions could be described as the vengeance of a tyrannical superego, a crippling manifestation of self-hatred, or a neurotic preoccupation with one’s own iniquity at the expense of any concrete attempt at change. Because my account does not imply that we have any reason to indulge in these distorted forms of guilt, these objections do not hold against the kind of guilt that my account serves to justify: the kind that aims at practical change. If we consider only the kind of guilt that my account implies that we should feel, it is hard to see why anyone would object to the idea that we should feel guilty when we have in fact done something we think wrong. Presumably, those who find guilt objectionable do not think that we should have no conception of the kinds of actions we think we should perform or the kinds of lives we think we should lead, or that it is wrong to believe that we are failing to lead such lives when we are.20 This would be true only if protecting ourselves from such painful discoveries were more important than actually living by our standards, and this is neither true of most of us nor motivationally coherent.21 Presumably, they would not think that we should not mind the discovery that we have done something we think wrong unless they also believed that our selves, our characters, and our lives should not matter to us; and it is unclear why anyone would recommend such global indifference. Finally, those who find guilt objectionable might believe that the pain of recognizing our own shortcomings is so debilitating that it makes change impossible. My account allows us to see what is wrong with allowing guilt to focus our attention on our own shortcomings at the expense of what we regard as truly valuable and why we should not allow guilt to paralyze us. I have argued that we should find our own wrongdoing painful precisely because 20 One might, of course, be too quick to conclude that one had done something awful, but that does not affect the desirability of thinking that one has failed to live up to one’s standards when this thought is accurate. 21 Since there is no coherent reason to find the thought of one’s own wrongdoing painful that does not give us reason to think, first, that we should also refrain from acting wrongly, and second, that given the choice between acting wrongly without believing that one had and believing that one had acted wrongly when one had not, one should choose the latter.

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we must concern ourselves with living by our own standards of conduct, and therefore with the state of our wills and of our characters. We care about living by our standards because they articulate what we care about and what we think truly matters. By the same token, we mind violating those standards because in so doing we fail to do justice to what we regard as genuinely worth caring about. Since our concern with our actions reflects our concern for what we value, we have no reason to allow ourselves to be so consumed by self-doubt as to be incapable of looking beyond ourselves to those other objects of our concern; to be so afraid of acting wrongly that we are no longer able to act at all; or, in the words of John Dewey, to allow “concern for the truth [to be] reduced to a paralyzing solicitude to be preserved from falling into error.”22 To do so would be to allow our concern with our conduct to be turned against one of its deepest sources. If we find that guilt actually impedes our attempts to live as we think we should, our first response should surely be not to renounce it but to try to change those features of ourselves that make it debilitating. For the reasons just described, these changes would be worthwhile and, once made, would render this objection groundless. If a person were unalterably paralyzed by guilt—if she knew in advance that no efforts to render its effects benign could possibly succeed, and thus that it was impossible that guilt should ever lead her to change for the better—then, for her, feeling guilt would indeed be pointlessly destructive, and she would have reason to try to root out her capacity to feel it. If my account is correct, however, this would be not a welcome escape but a deep misfortune. 22

John Dewey and James Tufts, Ethics, p. 284.

6 Holding Others Responsible

IN CHAPTERS 4 AND 5 I argued that the requirements of practical reasoning give me reason to take an interest in my conduct insofar as it reflects my will, and in evaluating those features of my will that it reveals. This evaluation may lead me to conclude that my will is flawed: that I do not act as my own standards imply that I should. Because my will determines not only my past actions but my future actions as well, this flaw in my will, if left uncorrected, might lead me to act wrongly in the future. For this reason, the discovery that my will is flawed can never be a matter of indifference to me. I then argued that the fact that I take this interest in those of my actions that reflect my will gives me reason not simply to regret or rejoice over their occurrence but to hold myself morally responsible for performing them; and that this is so whether or not determinism, mechanism, or any similar hypothesis is true. While these arguments imply that I have reason to hold myself morally responsible for what I do, however, they do not imply that I have reason to ascribe moral responsibility to others. However thoroughly enmeshed my life may be with that of another person, and however deeply her conduct might concern me, flaws in her will cannot directly interfere with my ability to live by my standards; and therefore I cannot take the particular type of interest in the quality of her will that I take in my own. For this reason I cannot justify my ascriptions of moral responsibility to others on the same grounds on which I justify my ascriptions of responsibility to myself. My ascriptions of responsibility to others require a separate justification. In this chapter I will attempt to provide it.

Two Ways of Extending My Account of Responsibility to Other Persons Any attempt to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others by generalizing the arguments made in chapter 4 will presumably have to involve the claim that I have reason to hold other people morally responsible for what they do because I have reason to hold myself morally responsible for what I do, and because other people differ from me in no respect relevant to my reasons for so doing. However, the arguments I made in chapter 4 do not make it clear exactly how to interpret the claim that other people differ from me in no respect

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relevant to my reasons for regarding myself as morally responsible. For I appear in those arguments in two guises: as an agent who is capable of governing her life through practical reasoning, and as the self who is thus governed; as a person who decides what kinds of standards to try to live by, and as a person whose character can be changed in order to allow her to live by those standards more consistently. When I try to change my character in order to ensure that I live by my own standards, I must appear in both guises. Therefore, for the purposes of my earlier arguments I did not need to decide which of the two is essential: whether in ascribing moral responsibility to myself I should be primarily concerned with my attempts at self-governance or with attempts to mold my character that, as it happened, I directed and carried out. When I try to determine what reason I have to regard others as morally responsible for their conduct, however, I must decide which of those two roles is central, since it will no longer be true that any attempt at governance is necessarily self-governance, or that any such attempt must have the consent of the self who is governed. This means that there are two ways in which I might try to explain what reason I have to hold others morally responsible for what they do, two different routes that a justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others might take. On the one hand, I might base my justification of ascriptions of moral responsibility to others on the claim that others, like me, are capable of governing their own lives in accordance with standards of conduct that they have freely adopted. On the other, I might try to justify my ascriptions of responsibility to others by arguing that their characters and conduct, like mine, can be changed for the better. These two ways of justifying our ascriptions of responsibility differ in several ways. First, they involve different conceptions of those we hold responsible. While persons are both susceptible to causal influence and capable of governing their lives, only their capacity for self-governance is a feature that they have in virtue of being persons. For only a person can reflect on different standards of conduct and reasons for action, decide which of them she thinks she should act on, and act on her decision. Any justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility that is based on a conception of others as capable of governing themselves will therefore be based on a conception of them as persons. The fact that a person’s conduct can be influenced and modified, by contrast, is a feature that she shares not only with other persons but with objects. For this reason, any justification of our ascriptions of responsibility to others that is based on the fact that their conduct can be changed for the better will be based on a conception of others according to which they are not significantly different from things. These different conceptions of the persons we hold responsible imply correspondingly different conceptions of our ascriptions of responsibility themselves. To treat someone as a person who is capable of self-governance involves, among other things, trying to change her behavior by offering her

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reasons to change it, rather than just adopting whichever techniques for improving it seem to be most effective. For in offering a person reasons for action, we acknowledge her ability to assess those reasons, to decide whether to accept or reject them, and to act on her decision. Because an account of our reasons for regarding other people as morally responsible that is based on their capacity for self-governance requires that we try to change their behavior by offering them reasons to change, it implies that if we regard our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others as means of influencing their behavior, we do so because we believe that, in holding them responsible for their conduct, we make claims that they have reason to accept and that they should regard as giving them reason to act differently. If we adopt such an account, we will therefore treat our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others not merely as stimuli but as claims that we think relevant to their deliberation. By contrast, if we regard others simply as beings whose behavior can be modified, we need not try to influence their behavior by making claims that we think they have reason to accept. If persuasion turns out to be the most effective way of improving their behavior, then we can try to convince them to act differently; otherwise, however, we can use whatever means of altering their conduct turns out to be the most effective. Since we place no constraints on the means we use to modify others’ behavior, we need not consider their capacity to govern their own lives, unless to do so would help us to alter their conduct. If we leave other people’s capacity for self-governance out of consideration, we treat them as things; by the same token, we regard our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others simply as stimuli designed to alter their conduct, and assess those ascriptions of moral responsibility on the basis not of their truth but of their efficacy. Finally, while we can extend the arguments made in chapter 4 to others either by claiming that others share with us a capacity for self-governance or by claiming that their behavior, like ours, can be improved, the kinds of responsibility that the resulting arguments imply that we can ascribe to others also differ. If we base a justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others on the claim that they share with us the capacity to govern their lives through practical reasoning, we regard them as persons. The sense in which that justification shows that it is appropriate to ascribe responsibility to them will, for that reason, be a sense of responsibility appropriate to persons alone. If, on the other hand, we base a justification of our ascriptions of responsibility on the claim that persons’ behavior can be influenced by praise and blame, we will be able to show that others are responsible for their behavior and its consequences only in the sense that they caused those acts and their consequences to occur; and we will be able to distinguish other people’s responsibility for their behavior from the kinds of causal responsibility that other objects enjoy only by noting that human actions have certain characteristic types of causes, and that they can be affected by kinds of causal interventions that are

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not normally effective when used on other objects. For this reason the claim that other people’s behavior can be influenced by praise and blame will allow us to show only that they are causally responsible for what they do. Each of these ways of justifying our ascriptions of responsibility to others is a generalization of the arguments made in chapter 4, since each appeals to the fact that I share with other persons some feature that really did play a role in that argument. It might seem that in order to determine which route a justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others should take, we must determine which of the conceptions of persons on which they rely is in fact correct. But this would be mistaken. For both accounts base their claims on some feature that I and other persons really have. On the one hand, people behave in various ways, and we can affect their behavior. We can therefore try to bring it about that other people act in accordance with whatever standards of conduct we think appropriate, and one way to do so is to induce them to feel pride when they act according to these standards and guilt or shame when they do not.1 On the other hand, most people are capable of governing their lives through practical reasoning. They can ask themselves how they should live, answer this question on the basis of reasons, and try to act accordingly. We can therefore ask ourselves how, in their place, we would regard our past actions; and if we do so, we will conclude that they have reason to regard themselves as morally responsible for their conduct. Because the arguments in chapter 4 appeal both to the fact that we are capable of self-government and to the fact that we can alter our conduct, we can generalize the arguments made in chapter 4 by appeal to either feature. And because persons are capable both of being influenced and of governing their lives through practical reason, our reasons for preferring one way of generalizing those arguments over the other will not concern the truth of the claim that persons have the feature to which it appeals, nor, if both allow us to justify the claim that persons are in some sense responsible, will we be able to decide between those conceptions of responsibility by arguing that only one of them accords with the facts. Instead, we must ask which, if any, of these two ways of generalizing the arguments made in chapter 4 allows us to justify a conception of moral responsibility that we should find satisfactory. Libertarians will object to accounts that justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility as means of modifying other people’s behavior on several counts.2 First, such accounts treat ascriptions of responsibility as, essentially, 1 The problem with accounts that justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others on the basis of their efficacy in changing others’ behavior is not that those accounts assume that other people are capable of being influenced by our ascriptions of responsibility (which they surely are) but their suggestion that we can justify a satisfactory conception of moral responsibility to others by appealing only to this fact about them. 2 Such theories have been advanced by Moritz Schlick (Problems of Ethics) and J. J. C. Smart (“Free-Will, Praise and Blame”), among others.

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a form of operant conditioning: if we can convince other people that they are morally responsible for what they do, then they will feel guilt (negative reinforcement) when they do something wrong and a warm glow of selfapproval (positive reinforcement) when they withstand temptation or hardship without acting wrongly. The justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility consists simply in the fact that holding other people responsible for their conduct can cause them to obey some standard of conduct. Because this “justification” does not establish the truth of the claim that others are morally responsible for what they do, it can at best justify the act of holding people responsible, not the claim that they are morally responsible for their conduct. Second, what T. M. Scanlon calls the “cognitive content”3 of our ascriptions of responsibility is, on this account, irrelevant to their justification. As noted above, on this account, what justifies us in holding other people morally responsible for their behavior is the fact that our ascriptions of responsibility bring it about that they behave better than they would have otherwise. Nothing in this account implies that we might not in principle be equally justified in telling people things that were false if to do so would alter their behavior in ways we think desirable. For our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others are, on this view, considered simply as stimuli that produce beneficial results rather than as statements whose truth or falsity is a relevant concern. Third, any account that holds that our interest in ascribing moral responsibility to persons generally is based on our interest in improving their conduct must regard our ascriptions of moral responsibility as replaceable means to that end. For ascribing moral responsibility to persons is not the only way in which we can seek to regulate the behavior of others. If we regard our ascriptions of responsibility simply as ways of improving others’ conduct, we will assess them on the basis of their efficacy in achieving this end, and we will have reason to prefer them to such alternatives as brainwashing or deception only so long as they are more effective means of affecting other people’s behavior. No account of moral responsibility that implies that we might legitimately substitute brainwashing or deception for our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons if they proved to be more effective means of behavioral control will be acceptable to libertarians. Fourth, such accounts are manipulative. Because they justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others by claiming that they make it more likely that those we praise or blame will act as we think best, and because there is no guarantee that those we praise or blame will agree with us about the standards we think they should obey, such “influenceability theories”4 leave open the possibility that our ascriptions of moral responsibility will be used to enforce on others standards of conduct that they do not accept and have no reason to accept. 3 4

Scanlon, “The Significance of Choice,” p. 160. I take this term from Scanlon, “The Significance of Choice,” pp. 159–60.

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Finally, we normally take the fact that persons are morally responsible for their conduct to mark a distinction between persons and things. We might therefore hope that an account of moral responsibility would illuminate this distinction. Influenceability theories do not do so. Because influenceability theories base the claim that we can be held responsible for our conduct solely on the fact that we can be influenced for various purposes, they treat persons primarily as beings whose behavior can be modified, and who should therefore be caused to act in the “right” ways, whatever those are. They hold that we should treat people primarily as things to be pushed and pulled about by conditioning: pain and pleasure, pride and shame, guilt and self-satisfaction. This is just the way we treat things: managing their behavior for optimal results. Because influenceability theories regard persons primarily as objects to be managed, they cannot help us to understand how persons differ from things. And because they justify our ascriptions of responsibility to others by appealing to the fact that the behavior of persons, like that of other physical objects, can be modified, they allow us to justify only the claim that others are causally responsible for their behavior and its effects, and allow us to distinguish the actions others are morally responsible for from the rest of their behavior only in that the former can be modified in certain ways, while the latter cannot. Since influenceability theories allow us to regard the moral responsibility of others only as a particular form of causal responsibility, they cannot help us to explain why those persons are responsible for what they do in any sense in which things are not. For these reasons influenceability theories will not satisfy libertarians. Libertarians will not accept the claim that our ascriptions of moral responsibility are simply bits of operant conditioning designed to produce beneficial effects. They are unlikely to regard the claim that holding people responsible produces desirable results, or indeed any account that takes the truth or falsity of our ascriptions of responsibility to be beside the point, as a justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to persons. They will not accept any account that implies that our ascriptions of moral responsibility might be replaced by other means of improving people’s conduct or that our ascriptions of moral responsibility might be designed to manipulate others into conformity with standards that they have no reason to accept. And they will insist that any acceptable account of moral responsibility illuminate, not obliterate, the distinction between persons and things. Libertarians are, I believe, right to reject influenceability theories on all these counts. The account of our reasons for regarding ourselves as morally responsible for our conduct that I developed in chapters 4 and 5 is not vulnerable to these objections, and it succeeds in avoiding them precisely because it is addressed to us in our capacity as governors of our own lives. As I argued in chapter 5, because those arguments concern only our ascriptions of moral responsibility to ourselves, they imply neither that our evaluations of the quality of will

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revealed by our conduct might be replaced by some more effective means of ensuring that we adhere to our standards, nor that the content of those evaluations is inessential to our ascriptions of responsibility. If we wish to provide an account of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others that libertarians might find satisfactory, we should try to generalize the account of moral responsibility given in chapters 4 and 5 in a way that allows us to preserve this feature. Influenceability theories do not do so. Because they seek to show that we have reason to hold others morally responsible for their conduct, influenceability theories address us, insofar as we contemplate ascribing responsibility to others, as persons with a capacity for self-governance. But when they try to explain what it is about others that makes ascriptions of moral responsibility appropriate to them, they leave those persons’ capacity for self-governance out of account. In so doing they distort the argument they seek to generalize, discard those features that might have made it acceptable to libertarians, and lay themselves open to the objections listed above. In chapter 5 I argued that our reasons for regarding ourselves as morally responsible are not simply instrumental because they are derived not only from our interest in ensuring that we live by the standards of conduct we now accept but from our interest in arriving at standards of conduct that we would still endorse after full reflection, because they depend not on some antecedently given end but on our capacity to set ends for ourselves, or, in Kantian terms, because they reflect the fact that we are, and must regard ourselves as, ends in ourselves. Any account of moral responsibility that is based solely on our (supposed) interest in inducing others to act in accordance with some antecedently given standard of conduct will sacrifice these benefits. Because such accounts leave out of consideration our capacity to decide for ourselves how we wish to live, they can justify only conceptions of responsibility that might as appropriately be applied to beings who lack that capacity, that is, to objects. It is not surprising that so many writers on this topic have found such accounts of responsibility deeply unsatisfactory. For at their core lies a denial of one of the things that an account of freedom and moral responsibility should be most concerned to secure: the claim that we are not just objects of causal manipulation but autonomous persons, capable of governing our own lives in accordance with standards we have freely adopted. For this reason any justification of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others that might satisfy libertarians must be based not on the conception of persons as capable of being governed but on the conception of persons as capable of governing themselves. As I have already noted, when we regard another person as having the capacity to govern her life through practical reasoning, we regard her as someone to whom reasons can be offered and who has the ability to assess those reasons, decide whether to accept or reject them, and act accordingly. When we make some claim to her, therefore, we must ask ourselves not simply whether the results of our making that claim will be to

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our liking or what effects it will have on her conduct, but whether it is a claim she has reason to accept. We must, that is, consider that claim from her point of view, ask ourselves whether or not she has reason to accept it, and offer it to her as a reason only if we conclude that she does. I argued in chapters 4 and 5 that any person who can govern her life through practical reasoning has reason to regard herself as morally responsible for her conduct insofar as it reflects her will. If those arguments are correct, then if we regard someone as a person who is capable of self-governance, we should regard her as morally responsible for two (related) reasons. First, if regarding a person as capable of self-governance requires that we consider her point of view towards the topics we discuss, that we ask ourselves how she should regard them, and that we advance claims that we think she has reason to accept, then regarding someone in this way directly implies that we should regard her as morally responsible for her conduct. For when she considers her past conduct, she has reason to regard herself as morally responsible for it; and therefore if we consider her past conduct from her point of view, we should conclude that she has reason to regard herself as morally responsible as well. For this reason, when we regard her as an agent who is capable of self-governance, we should regard her as a morally responsible agent. Second, when we regard an agent as a person who can govern her life through practical reasoning, we regard her as a person who acts on the basis of reasons that she chooses to endorse, and whose choices can therefore be evaluated. If we try to evaluate her as such a person, we will be concerned only with those of her actions that reflect her will, since only those actions are relevant to an assessment of her as an agent who acts for reasons. We will therefore regard her as responsible for those actions, not for the rest of her conduct. Moreover, we will regard her as having the same reasons for concerning herself with the quality of her will that we have for concerning ourselves with our own; and therefore if we regard her as a person, we will regard her not just as causally responsible for her conduct but as morally responsible for it. These two reasons for holding others responsible are, as I said, related. When we regard another person as a person who can govern her life through practical reasoning, we regard her as a person who can take her own view of her life and who has an interest in determining what view she should take and what, as a result, she should do. This is also the way in which we regard ourselves; and therefore it is not surprising that when we regard another person in this way, we find that we have reason to attribute to her those properties that we must attribute to ourselves. And since, insofar as we regard another person as capable of governing her life through practical reasoning, we consider things from her point of view and allow ourselves to try to influence her view of herself only by making claims that we think she has reason to accept, it is not surprising that when we regard her thus, we find that we have reason

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to attribute to her those properties that she must attribute to herself. When we regard others as persons, we must both extend to them a view we would otherwise only take of ourselves and allow ourselves to enter into their view of themselves. These two aspects of conceiving of others as persons with a capacity for self-governance are inextricable, and both give us reason to regard others as morally responsible. On this account, our reasons for regarding other persons as morally responsible are derived not from an interest in securing the conformity of their behavior to some standard of conduct, however defined, but from our interest in acknowledging their ability to govern themselves and in the conclusions about themselves that they have reason to arrive at in the course of exercising this ability. This account generalizes my arguments about our reasons for ascribing moral responsibility to ourselves not by claiming that we should collectively develop some set of standards and then try to enforce them on everyone but by arguing that each of us has the capacity to direct her own life by standards of her own choosing, a capacity in which others should take some interest. And it justifies our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others not as a means of directly influencing their behavior but by arguing that we should take an interest in the claims that they would have reason to make were they to reflect on their own actions, and therefore in the claim that they are morally responsible for those actions that they performed voluntarily and knowingly. Such an argument would take as its foundation a conception of others not as objects that can be influenced but as persons who are capable of governing themselves by standards of their own choosing. This conception of moral responsibility would not be vulnerable to the objections to influenceability theories discussed above. It would not regard our practice of ascribing moral responsibility to persons as an attempt at behavior modification or operant conditioning, since the aim of that practice would be not to get results by any means but to reflect our interest in others as persons who are capable of governing their lives through practical reasoning. For this reason, such an account would also take the content of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to be central since, on this view, our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others are not simply attempts to cause them to behave as we think they should, but claims about the actions for which they rightly regard themselves as morally responsible, and which they should take to be indications of the quality of their wills. It would therefore justify not only the act of asserting that others are morally responsible for their conduct but the claim that they are morally responsible agents. Such an account of our reasons for regarding other persons as morally responsible would not be manipulative, since it would be based on our recognition of their ability to choose the standards by which they wish to govern their lives, and to evaluate their wills in light of those standards. For this reason, while it would be compatible with attempts to convince others that they are wrong to accept the standards they currently endorse, it would give us no

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reason to try to enforce on them standards of conduct that they do not themselves accept. Finally, because such an account would regard other persons’ capacity for self-governance as central, it would preserve the distinction between persons and things, and take as the foundation of our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others one of the features that constitutes their autonomy and their personhood.

Why We Should Hold Others Responsible Libertarians argue that if determinism or mechanism were true, we should not regard persons as morally responsible for their conduct. If the arguments made above are sound, then this claim is mistaken. For I have argued, first, that most people do have the capacity to govern their lives through practical reasoning; second, that any person who has that capacity must regard herself as morally responsible for what she freely and knowingly does; third, that if we regard others as persons who have the ability to govern themselves, then we must take an interest in the conclusions about themselves that they have reason to adopt in the course of exercising this ability; and finally, that this implies that when we regard others as persons, we should regard them as morally responsible for their conduct. These arguments imply that we can legitimately hold other persons responsible for what they do. Moreover, these arguments imply that only persons are morally responsible in this sense, since only of persons does it make sense to ask how they should regard themselves, or to talk about respecting their capacity for self-governance. And they imply that we can legitimately regard other people as morally responsible regardless of the truth or falsity of mechanism, determinism, or any similar hypothesis about the causal structure of the world. My arguments also imply that we must regard persons as morally responsible for what they do in the sense that if we raise the question whether or not another person is morally responsible for her conduct, the answer must be “yes,” unless that person is not capable of governing her life through practical reasoning. For, on this account, we should say that someone is morally responsible for what she does if she has reason to regard herself thus, or (what comes to the same thing) if her actions meet the conditions that mine must meet if I am to hold myself morally responsible for them. Therefore if we ask whether someone is morally responsible for her conduct, if she is capable of governing her life through practical reasoning, and if she acted knowingly and freely, then we should conclude that she is. However, while I have argued that it is legitimate to regard others as morally responsible for their conduct, and that if we ask ourselves whether another person is morally responsible, we will in general have reason to answer “yes,” I have not shown that we must regard others as morally responsible agents but only that we must regard them thus insofar as we regard them as persons who

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are capable of governing their lives through practical reasoning. Since I have not argued that we must regard others as such persons, my arguments thus far leave open the possibility that our conception of others as morally responsible agents might be merely optional. In one sense, the question what reason we have to take an interest in the ways in which other people have reason to regard their past actions, and in the claims they have reason to make about them, is a curious one. For whenever we are addressing other people as persons and not simply regarding them as objects to be manipulated, we must take an interest in the claims they have reason to make. Whenever, in the course of our dealings with persons whom we regard in this light, the question of their attitudes towards their conduct arises, they will have reason to regard themselves as morally responsible for it insofar as it reflects the quality of their will; and if we take an interest in the claims they have reason to make about their conduct, we will regard them as morally responsible for it as well. Assuming, then, that in the course of our dealings with others the question of their attitudes towards their conduct will occasionally arise, we will have reason to regard others as morally responsible for their conduct so long as we regard them as persons to be reasoned with, and not simply as objects to be manipulated. The question whether we have reason to regard others as morally responsible for their conduct would then reduce to the question what reason we have to regard others as persons and not as mere things. But this might not seem like a question to which a general answer is needed, since, essentially, it is the question why we should not be sociopaths, and that is not a question we need to appeal to philosophy to answer. Explaining what reason we have to regard others as persons is, in addition, beyond the scope of this project; and I will therefore not attempt to provide such an explanation. Whatever account we give of our reasons for regarding others as persons with a capacity for self-governance, the arguments I have already made imply that our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others are compatible with mechanism. The problem that remains is posed not by the possibility that mechanism might be true but by the possibility that we might have no reason to regard others as persons, and therefore no reason to take an interest in their ascriptions of moral responsibility to themselves. It is the problem not of the compatibility of freedom and moral responsibility with determinism or mechanism but of moral solipsism. And its solution involves not showing that freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism or mechanism but explaining what reason we have to care about the quality of others’ wills and about their conception of themselves as autonomous and responsible agents. Nonetheless, I will try to indicate some of the kinds of reasons we might have to regard others as persons who are capable of governing their lives through practical reasoning. For the most obvious way of explaining what reason we have to regard others as persons would be to note how much of

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what we value depends on our regarding others in this way, and how impoverished our lives would be if we regarded them simply as objects to be manipulated.5 But this would, I believe, be an inadequate foundation for our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others. I argued in chapter 1 that our attitudes towards others are affected by our reasons for holding them and that it is not clear that we can decide to regard others as persons because of the instrumental value of doing so. If we believe that we should regard others as persons because our lives would be impoverished if we did not, we take an instrumental attitude towards our attitudes to other people. If so, and if we could find no other reason to regard others as persons, then it is not clear that we could really regard them as persons at all. Moreover, if we could adduce only instrumental reasons for regarding others as persons, then even if those reasons were compelling, there would be a contradiction at the heart of our attitudes towards others. To regard someone as a person with the capacity to govern her own life is to acknowledge her ability to live by standards of her own choosing, to assess her various reasons for action in light of those standards, to decide what she thinks she should do, and to act accordingly. It is, in addition, to allow ourselves to be constrained in our dealings with her by the requirement that we address her as a reasonable being, whom we should seek not simply to affect but to convince. For this reason, regarding someone as a person requires that we grant her conception of herself legitimacy, that we consider things from her point of view, and that in dealing with her we adduce only claims that we think she has reason to accept. If our only reasons for regarding others as persons were instrumental, then in deciding to regard them as persons we would not be treating them in this way. Since our most fundamental decision about how to treat other people would depend on reasons that concern only our own interests, not theirs, in making this decision we would consider only our point of view, not theirs. In so doing we would deny other persons’ conceptions of themselves the legitimacy we seek to give them. This would, I think, be a serious objection to the claim that we can coherently regard others as persons, and thus to my account of moral responsibility. For this reason I will argue that our reasons for regarding others as persons need not be merely instrumental, and indicate some types of arguments that we might use to show that we must regard them thus. Suppose that our reasons for regarding someone who is capable of selfgovernance as a person must be justified by practical arguments.6 These might 5

See P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment”; and Wolf, “The Importance of Free Will.” Making this assumption is, I think, unproblematic for my present purposes. I am trying to show that our reasons for regarding others as persons need not be instrumental. Since instrumental reasons are a species of practical reasons, any nonpractical reasons for regarding others as persons would necessarily be noninstrumental. In assuming that all our reasons for regarding others as persons are practical, then, I am ruling out only possibilities that, if true, would establish my point; in so doing I make my task more difficult, not less. 6

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be either arguments based on the requirements of the practical point of view or substantive practical arguments. If they are substantive practical arguments, they could be either arguments that justify their conclusion without appeal to any of our particular aims or interests, or arguments that rely on such an appeal. Arguments of the last type justify practical claims on instrumental grounds; arguments of the first two do not. The claim that all our reasons for regarding others as persons are instrumental must therefore turn on the claim that we cannot show that we should regard them thus using arguments of the first two kinds. Most writers on freedom of the will and moral responsibility do not examine the requirements of practical reasoning; for this reason it is not surprising that they do not conclude that those requirements give us reason to regard others as persons. Moreover, many do not consider the possibility of justifying our conception of others as morally responsible persons on the basis of noninstrumental substantive arguments. For the most obvious way of constructing such an argument would be to appeal to explicitly moral considerations; and since the claim that we are morally responsible for what we do is generally taken to be required by, and not a consequence of, the claim that we are appropriate objects of moral judgment, it might seem that a moral argument could not be used to establish a conception of moral responsibility without presupposing its conclusion.7 For these reasons their practical arguments for our ascriptions of responsibility to persons have tended to be instrumental ones. However, on my account we can use arguments of both types to explain why we should regard others as persons and thereby to justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to them. First, because I have separated the question what reason we have to hold ourselves morally responsible for our conduct from the question what reason we have to ascribe moral responsibility to others, we can justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others on the basis of explicitly moral arguments without assuming our conclusion. For if, as I have argued, each of us has reason to hold herself morally responsible for those actions that reflect her will, then each of us can govern our lives by any practical principles that command her assent. In particular, each of us can regard herself as subject to moral requirements and as morally culpable when she fails to live up to them. If so, and if morality requires that we regard others as persons who are responsible for their conduct, then we can justify our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others on the basis of moral considerations without begging the question. The claim that we should regard others as persons is one of the few points on which virtually all moral theories agree. Different theories support that 7

For this reason libertarians are unlikely to be convinced by those accounts of responsibility that do rely on explicitly moral arguments (for instance, R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments) but that do not distinguish the question what reason we have to hold ourselves responsible from the question what reason we have to ascribe responsibility to others.

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claim using different arguments; I will not assess those arguments here. However, if any of those arguments succeed in showing that we should regard others not simply as things but as persons, and if those arguments that succeed are not based on instrumental considerations, then they will provide a noninstrumental justification for regarding others as persons and therefore for regarding them as morally responsible agents. We can also argue that we have reason to regard others as persons on the basis of the requirements of practical reasoning. Reasoning as such aims to arrive at claims that are justifiable. To say that a claim is justifiable is to say that all persons in similar circumstances would regard it as justifiable were they to reason correctly. When we engage in reasoning of any kind, we try to construct justifications that are in principle accessible to other reasoners. For this reason we should in principle be ready to put our claims to justification to the test: to open our beliefs to the criticism of others, to allow others to inspect our reasons for holding them, and to accept their criticism on its merits, rather than claiming personal authority or privilege. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant writes that “[r]eason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism; should it limit freedom of criticism by any prohibitions, it must harm itself, drawing upon itself a damaging suspicion. Nothing is so important through its usefulness, nothing so sacred, that it may be exempted from this searching examination, which knows no respect for persons. Reason depends on this freedom for its very existence. For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, of whom each one must be permitted to express, without let or hindrance, his objections or even his veto.”8 We exercise the kind of dictatorial authority to which Kant objects whenever we arbitrarily restrict the criticism we are prepared to accept from others, whether by preventing them from voicing it at all or by discounting what they say when we have no reason to think that they are in error. If so, then while we might on occasion regard someone as, say, an object of theoretical inquiry or behavioral control, we exercise dictatorial authority if we decide that we will in general not regard others who are able to reason as reasoning beings. For in so doing we remove our reasoning from any criticism that might be offered by others, and decide, in effect, that ours is the only voice we will attend to. If the verdict of reason is “simply the agreement of free citizens,” then if we do not regard those others who are able to reason as reasoning beings, we will be unable to determine what reason’s verdict is. For if we will ignore the conclusions that others arrive at, we will be unable to tell which claims command their agreement. If this is correct, then if we engage in reasoning, we must regard those persons who can also do so as reasoning beings to whom our justifications should be accessible, and as beings who are entitled to examine our claims 8

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A738-9/B766-7.

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and to criticize them. And if we engage in practical reasoning, we must regard other persons who can also do so as, so to speak, our partners in deliberation: as persons who share with us the right to construct justifications of practical claims, persons to whom we are prepared to submit the practical justifications we offer and from whom we are prepared to accept criticism if it is warranted. If we do not regard them thus, we are engaged not in reasoning but in selfassertion.9 The arguments I have sketched above are examples of the kinds of arguments we might use to show that we have reason to regard others as persons. Whether or not these particular arguments work, some such arguments might. For if I am right to claim that we must show that we have reason to hold ourselves morally responsible for our conduct before arguing that we have reason to ascribe moral responsibility to others, then we can use explicitly moral arguments to show that we should regard others as morally responsible agents. And if we can show that the attempt to engage in practical reasoning itself requires that we accept certain claims, then we might be able to argue on these grounds that it requires that we regard others as persons. In either case our reasons for regarding others as persons would not be purely instrumental, and therefore our account of moral responsibility would not be vulnerable to the objections I described above.

Blaming Others Writers on moral responsibility sometimes describe the practice of holding others morally responsible for their conduct as if it were in some way morally dubious, and seem to think that those who wish to defend our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others need to show that we have reasons for holding others morally responsible that can outweigh the essentially questionable nature of this activity. Thus, for instance, some writers seem to regard blame as essentially punitive. This is most obviously true of those consequentialist thinkers who believe that ascriptions of moral responsibility are, at bottom, 9

In saying this, I do not mean to argue either that the fact that we engage in practical reasoning directly implies that we have reason to regard other persons as morally responsible for their conduct, or that the fact that we engage in practical reasoning commits us to the belief that there are other beings who can engage in practical reasoning. (One might think this on neo-Wittgensteinian grounds: for instance, on the grounds that practical reasoning would be inconceivable in the absence of a community of practical reasoners; but that would be a different argument.) Rather, my point is that, given that there are other persons who are capable of engaging in practical reasoning and of acting on their conclusions, practical reasoning requires that we regard them as persons to be reasoned with and not simply as things to be manipulated; that when we regard them in this way we will have reason to attend to the claims they have reason to make; and that since these claims involve, among other things, the claim that they are morally responsible for their conduct, we will have reason to regard them as morally responsible as well.

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simply ways of rewarding those who do good and punishing those who do not. But even writers who do not accept this account of moral responsibility sometimes write as if it were true. Thus, for instance, R. Jay Wallace writes that “the responses of blame and sanction are negative and punitive in character.”10 Even if we do not regard ascriptions of moral responsibility as essentially punitive or cruel, we might still regard them as morally dubious in some other way. For instance, the practice of ascribing moral responsibility to others is often described as though it involved thinking of oneself as other people’s moral bookkeeper: noting their moral debits and credits and figuring out exactly where, on balance, they stand. Since this is a morally problematic attitude to take towards someone else, those who see our ascriptions of moral responsibility in this light will conclude that holding people morally responsible for their conduct is morally dubious. We might be tempted to view blaming others in this way if we fail to distinguish the question whether it would be true to say of someone that she is morally responsible for some action from the quite different question whether it would be right to say so to her. As I noted above, blaming ourselves is painful, and convincing others that they should blame themselves will predictably cause pain to them. For this reason, presumably, we should recognize that the fact that someone is blameworthy does not always imply that we should tell her so. For there are many occasions on which providing someone with an honest and searching assessment of her character should not be uppermost in our minds. If, for instance, someone steps out into the street without looking and is run over by a tractor-trailer, it will be true that she was stupid and thoughtless, but heartless of me to say so as she lies bleeding in the street. Once we distinguish the question whether someone is morally responsible for some action from the question whether we should tell her so, it seems clear that the fact that it is sometimes cruel to try to convince someone to accept moral responsibility for her conduct does not imply that she might not be morally responsible for it; nor does the fact that guilt is painful imply that telling someone that she should feel guilty about something she did is necessarily cruel. Dental work is often painful, but that fact alone does not imply that dentists are sadists. Finally, the fact that ascriptions of moral responsibility can be used to make others feel badly shows that they are intrinsically cruel. Just as the fact that we can torture people with dental instruments shows only that dentistry can be turned to evil ends, not that it is essentially a form of torture, the fact that ascriptions of moral responsibility can be abused does not show that they are essentially punitive. What makes the view that holding others morally responsible is essentially cruel more plausible than the analogous view about dentistry is the fact that, while we are clear about the legitimate uses to which dentistry can be put, we 10

Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, p. 61.

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are less clear about the legitimate role of holding others morally responsible. A band of aliens who did not know about teeth, the need to maintain them, and the painful results of leaving cavities untended might see dentists only as persons who for no apparent reason felt impelled to drill holes in other people’s teeth and pull them out by their roots. In this case they might well regard dentists as sadists. Similarly, in the absence of some clear account of the point of our ascriptions of moral responsibility, we will see guilt only as a sort of debilitating psychological pain, unconnected to any valuable insight, and blaming others only as a sort of punishment: a deliberate infliction of pain in response to wrongdoing. Likewise, the idea that holding others morally responsible makes sense only if one regards oneself as other people’s moral bookkeeper is tenable only in the absence of some compelling account of what, other than keeping score of others’ moral triumphs and failures, we might be doing when we hold them morally responsible for their conduct. In either case, the sense that there is something morally problematic about our ascriptions of responsibility to others will persist in the absence of a clear account of their point. I have argued that if we regard anything as valuable or care at all about the kinds of persons we are or the kinds of lives we lead, then we have reason to try to assess our own conduct, to see what it reveals about our will, and to try to correct any flaws that this assessment reveals. I have tried to show that the fact that this kind of reflection on our conduct can lead us to feel guilt does not imply that it is a form of punishment or internalized aggression, and that the kind of guilt that aims at practical change is not a needless pain. And I have argued that when we engage in practical reasoning we should regard other persons who can do so as persons to be reasoned with, not simply as things to be manipulated; that when we regard them in this way we will have reason to attend to the claims they have reason to make; and that since these claims involve, among other things, the claim that they are morally responsible for their conduct, we will have reason to regard them as morally responsible as well. If we regard others as persons who have the ability to govern themselves, then we must take an interest in the conclusions about themselves that they have reason to adopt in the course of exercising this ability; this implies that we should regard them as morally responsible for their conduct. If these claims are correct, then in regarding others as morally responsible for their conduct we treat them as moral persons. Were we to deny that they could in principle be held responsible for what they do, we would be denying their humanity.11 11

On this point I disagree with Christine Korsgaard’s account in “Creating the Kingdom of Ends.” My disagreement has several sources. First, I do not believe that to “think that it is a fact about a person that she is responsible for a particular action, or that there is some fact about her condition either at the time of action or during the events which led up to it which fully determines whether it is correct to hold her responsible” (ibid., p. 312) is to construe responsibility theoretically. On my account, practical concepts like responsibility have criteria of application that might fully determine whether they are correctly applied to a given person. I therefore do not believe that “[w]hile . . . facts about the agent and about her condition at the time of the action guide

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Those who think it cruel or punitive to regard others as morally responsible for their conduct often seem to assume that our judgments of others will in general be harsh and that we should therefore refrain from making them. But to think that the proper remedy for undue harshness is a complete suspension of judgment is wrong on several counts. First, since this view assumes that if we were actually to think about what others have done we would be driven to judge them harshly, it must itself assume the very attitude towards others that it condemns. Second, it is unclear why, if others were in fact so generally contemptible, it would be wrong to recognize that fact. Third, the idea that sparing others our harsh judgments by denying their humanity would be an act of kindness is false and condescending. Finally, if our judgments of others are in fact unduly harsh, we should respond to this fact not by suspending judgment altogether but by trying to judge them with the generosity and compassion that we should expect of ourselves, and which they deserve. To choose instead to deny their status as moral persons is simply a way of avoiding this moral requirement at others’ expense. Just as we try to live by our standards, other people try to live by theirs. And just as our reflections on our conduct and our ascriptions of responsibility to ourselves help us to achieve this goal, so reflecting on their conduct can help others to live the kinds of lives they most want to lead. Sometimes others will not have any interest in our views on their conduct or in our assessments of their moral responsibility. And sometimes we may offer those views not out of concern but out of cruelty, officiousness, or moral stupidity. In such cases we should, of course, hold our tongues. At times, however, others might be interested in our views, and we might have views worth sharing. In such cases expressing our ascriptions of moral responsibility to others serves a real purpose. Our moral judgments about one another are parts of the conversations we have when we deliberate together. We are all trying to figure out how to lead our lives. Any assistance we can give one another is all to the good. And sometimes this assistance takes the [one’s] decision whether to hold her responsible, they do not fully determine it” (ibid., p. 313). When an agent who is capable of determining her conduct through practical reasoning voluntarily and knowingly performs some action, on my account she is responsible for it. Second, while it is clear that we can act uncharitably in expressing our view of another person to her or in forming an unduly harsh view of what her conduct reveals about her, it is not clear that holding someone responsible for her conduct might in itself show a lack of charity or understanding. But Korsgaard at times seems to imply that it can. Thus, she writes that “[r]espect for someone’s humanity is not always best expressed by holding him responsible for each and every action. It may be better to admit that even the best of us can just slip” (ibid., p. 324). It is not clear to me why this admission requires that we not regard the agent as responsible: if even the best of us can just slip, then surely we can admit that this agent acted wrongly, and that he is responsible for so doing, without having to conclude that he is not one of the best of us. Indeed, if we respond to his slip by declining to regard it as his, we duck the challenge of trying to understand how even the best of us are capable of voluntarily acting in this way, and thus of deepening our understanding of human virtue and its complexity.

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form of reflecting together on what our conduct reveals about us, and how it might be improved. At such times we hold ourselves and one another morally responsible for what we do. In so doing we seek not to punish one another, or to record one another’s actions in our moral ledgers, but to help one another to live the lives we think are best. Stanley Cavell writes that “our first task in subjecting ourselves to judgment is to tell the moralist from the moralizer. When Auden heard ‘the preacher’s loose, immodest tone’, he heard the tone of one speaking in the name of a position one does not occupy, confronting others in positions of which one will not imagine the acknowledgment.”12 One might think that because my account stresses the importance of regarding both ourselves and others as morally responsible, it lends support to moralizers: to those who wander about condemning others without taking the trouble to understand them. But it does not. What is wrong with moralizing is not that it involves holding others morally responsible for what they do or expressing these opinions. It is that the moralizer has the wrong motives for doing so, and that as a result she has not bothered to try to understand the people she judges or to see why they did what they did. Here, as elsewhere, we should always be concerned with our reasons for doing what we do and with what our conduct reveals about our character. If it reveals officiousness, cruelty, insensitivity, or a desire to prop up our opinion of our own moral character by pointing out the failings of others, we should correct those flaws in ourselves. To respond to the possibility of judging people for the wrong motives and in the wrong ways by suspending judgment altogether is simply a way of avoiding both our responsibility for ourselves and our duties to others. For in so doing we avoid both the need to recognize and correct our own moral failings, and the moral requirements to see ourselves and others as they are, to acknowledge our humanity and theirs, and to respond to what we see with honesty and compassion. Precisely because my account stresses the importance of regarding ourselves and others as morally responsible and of seeing them clearly and honestly, it allows us to see why it is important that our judgments of others be accurate and that we not allow ourselves to judge them for the wrong reasons. The more important it is to understand ourselves and others clearly, the less reason we will have for looking with equanimity on the idea of allowing our conceptions of ourselves and others to be distorted by extraneous motives or for allowing ourselves to judge others without bothering to understand them, and the more reason we will have for trying to see all persons, ourselves included, “in a light of justice and mercy.”13 12 13

Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 326. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, p. 66.

Conclusion

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER of this book I claimed that libertarianism depends on a particular formulation of the problem of freedom of the will, a formulation that is a natural development of our prereflective view of that problem, but that ensures that it cannot be solved. And I argued that a solution to the problem of freedom of the will would therefore require a new formulation of that problem, one that allows us to show that we are in some satisfactory sense free and morally responsible, that is rooted in our ordinary understanding, and that allows us to explain both the strength of the libertarian position and the source of its error. The most rudimentary formulation of what freedom of the will requires is this: to be free, our wills must be determined by ourselves and not by the external world. The word ‘determined’ is here deliberately ambiguous: it means only that the nature of that which is determined in some way depends on, or is specified by, that which does the determining. The crucial, and disastrous, libertarian move is to interpret the claim that we are free as a claim about our deliberation and our choices considered theoretically: as events to be described and explained. Theoretical reason is concerned to provide causal explanations of events. If we interpret claims about the ways in which something is determined as theoretical claims, we must interpret ‘determined’ as ‘caused’, since causation is the type of determination to which theoretical explanations appeal. If it is a claim about our choices considered as events to be explained, the claim that we are free must mean that we cause our choices to take the form they do, and that we are not caused to do so by the external world. Likewise, the claim that persons are free while objects are not must mean that there is some difference in kind between the causes of our choices and actions and those of the behavior of other objects, a difference that allows us to claim that only the former are self-determined. If the problem of freedom of the will is formulated as a problem about the causes of our choices and our actions, it cannot be solved. On the one hand, compatibilist accounts cannot show that there is any difference in kind between the ways in which our actions and choices are caused, and the ways in which other events are; or between the degree to which our actions and choices are determined and the degree to which the behavior of other objects is. For mechanism just is the view that our choices are determined as fully, and in the same ways, as other events. Libertarians will therefore reject the views of compatibilists who claim to discern the existence of such a difference in kind on the grounds that those compatibilists have failed to grasp the implications of mechanism.

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On the other hand, libertarian accounts of freedom of the will are vulnerable to two related objections. First, as I argued in chapter 1, libertarians who do not wish to deny that natural causes can affect our deliberation and choice can secure our freedom only by supposing that we can exercise a rival causal influence on ourselves, which can override or outweigh the effects of those natural causes that affect us. They will therefore be led to postulate a kind of “self behind the self,” which directs our deliberations and which is not itself subject to the influence of natural causes. Similarly, because libertarian accounts of moral responsibility require not only that our actions reflect our choices or our character but that we be responsible for the choices or character that they reflect, the claim that we are morally responsible for our conduct can be defended only by introducing a self that is not identical with, but responsible for, the self that we now have; a self to whose choices we can attribute the shape of our character and of our life. In neither case can this self be identical to the self we know and of whose deliberation we are aware.1 For this reason it is not clear why the fact that it led us to choose to perform some action should imply that we performed that action freely, or why the fact that it is responsible for our conduct should show that we are. Second, libertarian accounts of freedom of the will inevitably involve an infinite regress of choices.2 Suppose that I chose to perform some action. Either my choice was caused by something or it was not. If it was not, then I cannot be morally responsible for my choice, since moral responsibility requires causal responsibility; nor is it clear why we should say that I chose, and not that my choice simply befell me. If my choice was caused by something, then either that something was external to me or it was not. If the former, libertarians hold that I cannot be morally responsible for choosing as I did. If the latter, we can ask whether or not I am morally responsible for the existence or occurrence of the choice, act of will, psychological state, desire, preference, or disposition that caused me to choose as I did; and we will be confronted with the same list of possible answers to that question. There is in principle no point in this inquiry at which I might simply conclude that I am morally responsible for choosing as I did or for performing any action. This objection holds regardless of the truth or falsity of determinism or mechanism. In Galen Strawson’s words: If we are to be truly deserving of praise and blame for our actions, then since our intentional actions are necessarily a function of how we are, mentally, then we must be truly responsible for how we are mentally, at least in certain vital respects. We must be genuine ‘originators’ of ourselves, and our natures, at least in certain respects. But the attempt to describe how we could possibly be true originators of 1

See chapter 1 above. This is a restatement of an argument made by Galen Strawson in Freedom and Belief, chapter 2. 2

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ourselves in this way leads self-defeatingly to infinite regress (quite apart from being quite fantastically unrealistic): for even if one could somehow choose how to be, and then bring it about that one was that way, one would in order to do this already have to have existed prior to that choice, with a certain set of preferences about how to be, in the light of which one chose how to be. But then the question would arise: where did these preferences come from? Or were they just there, unchosen preferences for which one was not responsible? And so on. This argument proceeds completely independently of any appeal to determinism or indeterminism, and if valid shows that true-desert-entailing freedom of will is provably impossible—impossible whether determinism is true or false.3

The basic problem with libertarian accounts of freedom of the will is that they cannot allow for the possibility that any discovery about the causes of our actions could conceivably allow us to settle the question whether or not we acted freely in the affirmative. The supposition that our choices are caused by nothing whatsoever would not show those choices to be free, since it implies that we did not cause ourselves to choose as we did. The supposition that we were caused to choose as we did by something other than ourselves implies that we are not free. The supposition that we caused them to occur simply pushes the problem back, since we must then ask what, if anything, caused us to cause ourselves to choose as we did. In order to conclude that we are in fact morally responsible for our actions, we would have to be able to appeal to a fourth possibility: the possibility that our choices were the result of some act of genuine self-determination. To make sense of the possibility of genuine selfdetermination we would have to be able to describe some way in which we could determine our wills about which we could not raise the question whether we or the world caused us to determine our wills as we did; some way that simply settles the question whether the agent or the world is responsible for some action. We cannot make sense of this possibility so long as we assume that the kind of determination in question is causal. To the extent that we understand causality, we understand it to be a relation between events or states.4 We cannot claim that any event causes itself to occur or that any state brings itself into existence, since any causal explanation must appeal to causes antecedent to 3

Galen Strawson, “Consciousness, Free Will, and the Unimportance of Determinism,” pp. 10– 11. See also his Freedom and Belief, chapter 2. Strawson takes his argument to show that genuine self-determination is in principle impossible, since, like the libertarians he discusses, he interprets ‘determine’ to mean ‘cause’. (See, for instance, Freedom and Belief, p. 27: “It is clear, I think, that the truth of determinism excludes [true self-determination]. One cannot have determined how one is, in such a way that one is truly and ultimately responsible for how one is, and hence for how one acts, if how one is is ultimately wholly determined by ‘causes anterior to one’s personal existence’.”) 4 I say this because, as noted in chapter 1, I do not think we understand what it would be for an agent to cause her choice or her action in any sense that is not reducible to event causation.

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that which is being explained and since nothing can exert any causal influence before it exists. We can therefore explain what caused us to choose to perform one action rather than another only by citing some previous event or state that explains that choice. There are no events or states that might figure in such an explanation for which a causal explanation might not in turn be demanded; and therefore no events or states the discovery of which among the causes of our actions would show conclusively that we and not the world caused ourselves to choose as we did, rather than pushing the question what caused us to choose as we did one step further back. For this reason any causal explanation of our deliberation, choices, and actions must terminate, if at all, not in a genuinely self-caused event or state but only in a random occurrence. There is no way in which our choices might be caused that a libertarian should accept as genuine self-determination. There is therefore no possible discovery about the causes of our choices that would entitle libertarians to conclude that those choices are the result neither of random events nor of causes outside ourselves, but of our own free choice. The fact that our choices must, ultimately, be caused either by events not of our own making or by random events, and that neither alternative seems a likely basis for the claim that those choices are made freely, should lead us to wonder whether we are not asking the wrong question or mistaking what the claim that we determine our conduct freely would involve. But as long as we implicitly regard ourselves and our choices from a theoretical point of view, we will be unable to transform this from a vague suspicion into a positive account of our error, since we will be unable to provide any other interpretation of the crucial term ‘determine’. To regard ourselves from a theoretical point of view is to consider our choices and our practical reasoning as events whose occurrence we wish to explain. If we try to imagine some form of noncausal determination while still regarding our deliberation and choices as events whose occurrence we wish to explain, we will not succeed. For when we regard our deliberation and our choices thus, claims about what determines our choices can be construed only as claims about what brings it about that they occur; and the claim that they are determined by our deliberation and practical reasoning can be construed only as a claim about the particular type of natural event(s) that brought it about that those choices occurred. If, at this point, we try to imagine some way in which one event might bring about the occurrence of another without causing it to occur, we cannot succeed.5 As long as we 5 We might succeed in imagining the abstract possibility of a relation between two events, one of which brings it about that the other occurs, that differs in some unspecified respect from causality. But such a relation would share with causality all the features that doom those accounts of freedom of the will that interpret ‘determined’ as ‘caused’. In particular, any relation whereby one event brings about the occurrence of another will confront us with the same possibility of regress; any such relation will require that the event that does the determining exist before the event that is determined; no event would be able to bring itself about in this way; and therefore we could not explain the possibility of self-determination by appealing to any such relation. For this reason the objections that I raised to accounts of freedom of the will that interpret ‘determined’ to mean

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regard ourselves as objects of theoretical reasoning, we must interpret claims about how our choices and actions are determined as claims about how they are caused. And as long as we interpret these claims in this way, we will be unable to resolve the problem of freedom of the will. Whereas theoretical reasoning is concerned with the causes of events, practical reasoning is concerned with the grounds on the basis of which we choose to act as we do. Practical reasoning aims to construct not a comprehensive causal explanation of events but a system of reasons that would allow us to determine which actions we should perform and which we should not. On my account, the claim that we are free is a claim not about the relation of our choices and actions to the theoretical system of causes but about their relation to the agent’s practical system of reasons. Those actions that reflect our will, and with respect to which the question what reason we had for performing them can arise, are actions that we performed freely; and we are morally responsible for performing them. Those that do not reflect our will, and to which our system of reasons is therefore irrelevant, are not free; and we cannot be held morally responsible for them except in virtue of some previous free action. The claim that freedom is a practical concept allows us to explain why the problem of freedom of the will takes the form that it does. In chapter 1 I argued that libertarians do not deny the existence of the distinctions on which compatibilist accounts of freedom and responsibility depend: for instance, the distinction between those actions we choose to perform and the rest of our behavior, or between beings who can act for reasons and beings who cannot. But they claim that if mechanism is true, these distinctions do not have the kind of significance they would need to have to serve as the basis of a satisfactory account of freedom and responsibility. They therefore find compatibilists’ attempts to use these distinctions to justify our ascriptions of freedom and responsibility to persons arbitrary. However, when libertarians try to explain what would constitute a satisfactory conception of freedom and responsibility, it becomes unclear that anyone could ever be either free or responsible in their sense. Therefore some philosophers have concluded that, in wanting to be free and responsible agents, “we are apparently condemned to want something impossible.”6 This is exactly what we would expect to find if freedom and responsibility were practical concepts, if both libertarians and compatibilists had failed to distinguish clearly between theoretical and practical reason, and if they had therefore implicitly construed the problem of freedom of the will in theoretical terms. I have argued that practical reasoning involves the use of practical con‘caused’ will also defeat any account that interprets that term using some purportedly noncausal relation whereby one event brings about the occurrence of another. 6 Nagel, The View From Nowhere, p. 113. See also Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief, especially chapter 2.

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cepts, that these concepts are defined to play particular roles in our practical reasoning, that they are applied using criteria that are ultimately theoretical, and that the claim that some particular set of criteria can be used to determine when some practical concept should be applied can be justified only by practical reasoning. If this account is correct, then we cannot justify our use of some practical concept using only the resources of theoretical reasoning. We will be able to describe those properties that are in fact the criteria by which we apply that concept and to distinguish those objects that have those properties from those which do not, since those properties are themselves theoretical. We will also be able to say something about that concept itself: to describe its significance to us, and to explain what we normally take the application of that concept to some object to imply. If, for instance, we were trying to justify our use of the concept of ‘a wrong action’, we might note that to call an action ‘wrong’ is to say (among other things) that we have reasons of a particular kind for not performing it, and that these reasons are normally overriding. But we will not be able to explain why any particular properties should serve as the criteria by which that concept should be applied, why the distinction between objects that meet the criteria we normally use and objects that do not is more important than any of the other distinctions we might draw between different sorts of objects, or why the fact that some object has those properties should have the significance we normally take the claim that that practical concept is appropriately applied to that object to have. For if the concept in question is a practical one, then we can answer these questions only by engaging in practical reasoning. If the concept of freedom is a practical one, and if libertarians and compatibilists have tried to account for it using the resources of theoretical reason alone, then we can understand why the problem of freedom of the will takes the form it does: why we seem to be torn between arbitrariness on the one hand and incomprehensibility on the other. Our accounts of freedom will seem arbitrary if we try to explain our use of concepts like freedom and responsibility without reference to their practical justification: by noting that we can in fact draw the distinctions on which any account of freedom and responsibility must rely, without explaining why we should think those distinctions have the significance we take the distinction between free agents and other beings to have. We will render freedom and responsibility incomprehensible if we “try to force autonomy into the objective causal order,”7 since we will be trying to provide a theoretical account of a property that is essentially practical. By contrast, if we recognize that freedom and moral responsibility are practical concepts, we can use the resources of practical reasoning to construct an alternative account of them. Such an account would allow us to admit that when we consider our choices as events to be described and explained, the 7

Nagel, The View From Nowhere, p. 115.

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distinction between them and other events is no more significant than any other distinction we might wish to draw between different kinds of events. It would therefore allow us both to acknowledge libertarians’ main objection to compatibilist accounts and to explain its force. But it would also allow us to show that when we engage in practical reasoning we have every reason to regard ourselves as free and responsible agents, that that claim does not require the falsity of mechanism, and that the distinction between those acts we freely perform and other events is crucial for the purposes of practical reasoning. In so doing, it would enable us to construct an account of freedom and moral responsibility that avoids both the apparent arbitrariness of standard compatibilist accounts and the mysteries of libertarian conceptions of agency. In this book I have tried to construct such an account. I have argued that when we engage in practical reasoning we must use a particular concept of freedom, and that we act freely in this sense in more or less the cases in which we ordinarily take ourselves to do so. I have argued that when we act freely in this sense we choose among genuine alternatives, that we should hold ourselves responsible for those acts we freely perform, that we should likewise hold others responsible for their conduct, and that this sort of responsibility differs in kind from mere causal responsibility. And I have argued that the truth of these claims is independent of the truth or falsity of determinism, mechanism, or any plausible hypothesis about the causes of human actions. If these arguments succeed, then I have provided a compatibilist account of freedom of the will and moral responsibility that meets the libertarian objection set forth in chapter 1. My account also allows me to respond to the objection to libertarian accounts that I discussed above: that those accounts do not allow us to make sense of the possibility of genuine self-determination. As I argued above, the problem with libertarian accounts of self-determination derives from their attempt to construe self-determination as a causal property. When we ask what caused us to choose as we did, we can give only three possible answers. Either nothing, something external to our wills, or we ourselves caused us to choose as we did. In the first two cases libertarians claim that we are not free. But the third answer only pushes the question back a step, since we must then ask what caused that feature of our wills that caused us to choose as we did, and we must give one of the same three answers. At no point can we simply conclude that we acted freely and that we are morally responsible for what we did. We cannot construct an account of genuine self-determination if we construe freedom as a causal property for three reasons. First, insofar as we understand causality, it is a relation between events one of which must occur before the other. The fact that a cause must be temporally prior to the effect whose existence it explains ensures that unless our choices turn out to be caused by indeterministic events, we will be able to trace their causes back to a time when we did not exist. It therefore implies, on libertarian accounts, that we are not

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responsible for them. Second, when we provide a causal explanation for the occurrence of our actions or our choices, nothing about such an explanation requires that the events that figure in that explanation be events we initiated. For this reason, causal explanation always threatens to wind up citing events that occur outside us and thus, on libertarian accounts, to show that we are neither free nor morally responsible for our conduct. Finally, the fact that causality is a temporal relation between events also implies that we cannot arrive at a completely satisfying explanation of any event. For when we ask what caused some event to occur, we must discover either that it was caused by some previous event or that it was not caused by anything. If it was not caused by anything, we cannot give a satisfying explanation of its occurrence, since there is none to give. If it was caused by some previous event, then we must ask what caused that event to occur. Until we have answered that question, our explanation will not be complete. But in answering these questions we confront the same two alternatives. At no point, then, can we discover a complete and satisfying explanation of any event. Libertarians’ inability to answer the question whether we made some choice freely in the affirmative is simply an instance of this general problem. Construing freedom in terms of the relation of our choices not to the theoretical system of causes but to our practical system of reasons allows us to avoid these difficulties. First, the relations between the reasons by which I determine my conduct are not temporal. This means that in explaining the grounds on which I chose, I do not need to cite earlier and earlier events, and thus there is no reason to think that a sufficiently comprehensive account of those grounds would have to terminate either in randomness or at a time before my birth. Second, when I act for reasons, the events that cause me to act as I do might be external to me, but the reasons that I regard as determining what I do cannot be. For while, qua event, my acceptance of some reason for action might or might not ultimately be caused by something outside myself, in regarding it as a reason for action I must regard it as having a justification that is independent of those causes. This justification might at various points appeal to theoretical claims. But I cannot regard it, qua justification, as having been produced or foisted on me by any natural event. When I consider it as a justification, I consider not its causal origins but its rational grounds; and I accept or reject it on that basis. When I explain what leads me to accept it, I will adduce not the causes that led me to do so, but the reasons that convinced me that it was sound. Because any reasons I adduce must themselves be reasons I accept, this type of explanation will not ultimately lead me to adduce determining factors that I do not regard as my own.8 It might seem, however, that practical justifications are vulnerable to a version of the regress problem that brings libertarian accounts of self-determina8

Cf. Christine Korsgaard, “Morality as Freedom,” pp. 162–5.

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tion to grief. From a practical point of view, we must regard the reasons for which we act as reasons we have accepted. But when we ask ourselves what makes us regard these facts as reasons, it might seem that we must either appeal to some prior reasons about which the same questions can be raised or give up. Ultimately, it might seem that our reasons for adopting or rejecting any practical standard must depend on something outside our system of reasons—for instance, on the fact that we have a certain kind of character, or certain dispositions or interests, which ultimately congealed into the set of principles by which we now govern our lives. The question why we have that character, or those dispositions and interests, could itself be answered only theoretically: only, that is, by citing their causes. For when we reach this point, our reasons come to an end: there can at this level be no grounds for adopting or not adopting the particular reasons for action that we accept, and therefore the only explanation we could give of our acceptance of them would be a causal one. The possibility that we might have to appeal to the causes that lead us to regard certain facts as constituting reasons for action is not the same as the possibility that my practical reasoning, considered as a set of natural events, might be caused by something outside myself. A calculator’s parts, we hope, operate in at least a broadly deterministic fashion, and the causes of each operation that it performs in the course of its calculations might in principle be fully explained. But this would not show that its conclusions are arbitrary, or that because it obeys the laws of physics its allegiance to the laws of arithmetic must be called into question. Similarly, the idea that the course of our practical reasoning might be determined by natural causes should not in and of itself lead us to conclude that our explanation of our grounds for accepting our practical principles must be incomplete or inadequate. Nor should we conclude that we must ultimately explain our acceptance of our standards of conduct by citing their causes if we believe, on Wittgensteinian grounds, that the form of life that leads us to regard certain types of considerations as constituting a rational justification of some practical principle is at bottom contingent. For in this case, we would have no reason to regard our practical principles as less than fully justified simply on the grounds that, had “certain very general facts of nature”10 been different, we might have had a correspondingly different conception of what would constitute a rational justification of some practical principle—if, indeed, we would have held anything recognizable as a principle at all, or regarded anything as a justification. For if we can provide what we regard as a fully adequate justification of our principles, then in the absence of any alternative account of what such a justification might possibly involve, or of any reason to reject the account of justi9

I owe the line of thought that follows to John Rawls’s lectures on Kant. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 230.

10

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fication that we currently accept, we should regard our practical principles as fully justified. The claim that we must ultimately explain our standards of conduct by citing the causes that led us to accept them does not depend either on the claim that the events that constitute our practical reasoning have causes or on the claim that the form of life that underwrites our conception of justification is in some way contingent. Rather, it depends on the claim that practical justification must at some point come to an end: that we cannot carry the project of justifying our practical principles to a satisfactory conclusion. This is true only if our practical principles cannot be fully justified in whatever sense of that term we do accept. For suppose that there are no rationally justifiable moral principles; that when we look to practical reasoning for guidance, we might discover (for instance) instructions on how to make our principles consistent with one another, but that practical reasoning in and of itself could not license the conclusion that any particular practical principle should be adopted or rejected. In this case, we could not explain our choice among consistent sets of principles by citing the grounds that make our choice reasonable; for, ex hypothesi, there are no such grounds. To explain why we hold one consistent set of practical principles rather than another we would have to appeal instead to those innate qualities of temperament, or those features of our education and experience, that lead us to prefer it. We would, that is, have to appeal to the causes that lead us to accept the particular set of principles we hold if we wished to explain why we hold them. The claim that we can explain why we hold the practical principles we do only by citing their causes would not imply the falsity of my account of freedom and responsibility. If this claim were true, we would still have reason to regard ourselves as free to choose among alternatives that are truly open to us, and as morally responsible for those actions that reflect our exercise of this freedom. Moreover, we would still be able to evaluate our various desires and motivations, to choose to regard even our strongest desires as irrelevant to the question what we have most reason to do, to disregard those desires when we decide which action to perform, and to act on our decisions. However, the conclusion that our standards of conduct could ultimately be explained only in causal terms would make my account less satisfactory on several counts. First, if in order to explain why I accept certain standards of conduct I must eventually cite the causes that led me to accept them, then when I act on those standards I must nonetheless regard myself as a being whose actions can be completely explained only by citing their causes. This would call into question the claim that practical reason provides us with a serious alternative to regarding ourselves as beings whose conduct can only be explained in causal terms. Second, while it would still be true that when we engage in practical reasoning we must regard ourselves as the sources of our reasons for action, not as

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simply obeying the dictates of the natural world, it would also be true that to explain why we regard certain facts as constituting reasons for action we would have at some point to invoke the causes that led us to do so. In this case our claim to be capable of truly autonomous action would be called into question; and the fact that we cannot regard our reasons for action as foisted on us by some external event might seem like a sort of perspectival illusion produced by the practical point of view. For this reason the possibility that we might be able to explain why we hold the practical principles we do only by citing their causes implies that there is a stronger sense of freedom and self-determination than that which I described in chapter 3, one that would be unavailable to us if our practical principles were in this sense contingent. However, whether or not we are autonomous in this stronger sense has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of determinism, mechanism, or any similar hypothesis about the causes of human actions. What is required to show that we are autonomous in the stronger sense is not a demonstration that we were not caused to adopt them but a demonstration that our standards can be rationally justified a priori: that our search for their grounds does not simply come to an end at some point, but results in a demonstration of their general rational validity. If we could produce such a demonstration, then we would have the right to regard those standards not as “nature again”11 but as fully determined by reason, whether or not any (or every) given instance of our practical reasoning could itself be described, theoretically, as the effect of natural causes. We would have no reason to regard them as fundamentally arbitrary or to regard ourselves as, even in this indirect and somewhat attenuated way, obeying the dictates of some original natural event as the result of which we were simply stuck with certain views about how we ought to lead our lives. Thus far I have argued that, while from a theoretical point of view we have no reason to regard the distinction between those acts that we freely perform and our other behavior as particularly significant, and no reason to regard ourselves as making an active contribution to the direction of our lives in any sense in which other beings do not contribute actively to theirs, the requirements of practical reasoning give us reason to regard the distinction between free acts and other behavior as central, and to view ourselves as the authors of what we do. But libertarians might still ask why we should look in particular to the requirements of practical reasoning for a justification of our ascriptions of freedom and moral responsibility to persons. If the situation were reversed— if, that is, we had a theoretical but not a practical interest in attending to these distinctions—should we regard that fact as providing the basis for a justification of our ascriptions of freedom and responsibility? Would the demonstration 11 The phrase “nature again” is Kant’s (Critique of Pure Reason, A803/B831). I do not know whether by the possibility that our reason might be “nature again” Kant means to indicate the possibility that I discuss in this paragraph.

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of any interest at all suffice for such a justification? If not, why should the fact that we have reason to take, in particular, a practical interest in these questions be significant? Why should we think that freedom of the will and moral responsibility are practical concepts at all, or that we should look in particular to the practical point of view for their justification? In fact, I do not believe that we need to decide whether freedom is a practical concept in order to decide whether or not to accept a practical account of freedom. If the theoretical and practical points of view are compatible, then conclusions established by either theoretical or practical reasoning are legitimate. If we can justify an account of freedom and moral responsibility on the basis of practical reasoning, and if on that account we are free, then the claim that we are free in the sense that account describes is true. And if that account is satisfying—if it allows us to show that we are free agents in some sense that implies more or less the conclusions that it seems, intuitively, that the claim that we are free should imply, if it allows us to explain and justify a rich conception of moral responsibility, and if it is not vulnerable to objections— then the claim that we are free in that sense tells us what we wish to know. We should therefore accept any fully satisfying account of freedom of the will, whatever the basis of its justification, so long as that justification is sound. And we should regard a demonstration that construing freedom as a practical concept allows us to construct such an account, while construing it as a theoretical concept makes this task impossible, not as incomplete without the further claim that the concept of freedom with which we are concerned is a practical concept, but as the best way of showing that that claim is true. However, there are, in general, reasons why we can justify certain claims on some bases but not on others, and it is worth trying to figure out what these reasons are. One might think that freedom and moral responsibility must be practical concepts since our most important interests in applying those concepts to persons are moral, and morality itself falls within the practical sphere. But my account of the relation between theoretical and practical reason implies that this argument is invalid. I argued in chapter 2 that practical claims are applied on the basis of theoretical criteria. If this is correct, then the fact that our interests in knowing whether or not persons are free and responsible moral agents derive from our interest in determining how we should treat them does not itself show that the concepts of freedom and responsibility are practical. Rather, we should look to practical reasoning for a solution to the problem of freedom of the will because it is a problem about the relation between human agency and the natural world. When we consider our choices and our actions theoretically, as events to be described and explained, we seem unable to explain in what sense we are agents. As Thomas Nagel has written, “The area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point. Everything seems to result from

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the combined influence of factors . . . that are not within the agent’s control. Since he cannot be responsible for them, he cannot be responsible for their results. . . . The effect of concentrating on the influence of what is not under his control is to make this responsible self seem to disappear, swallowed up by the order of mere events.”12 There seems to be no place within this conception of the world for free and responsible agency, no way even of explaining what free and responsible agency might be. It is right that a solution to this problem should involve not the drawing of finer and finer distinctions between different types of natural phenomena or an insistence that we are nonnatural beings, but an account of the distinction between theoretical and practical reason that allows us to understand the strength and depth of the practical point of view and its relation to theoretical reasoning, and that enables us to argue that the fact that our free agency does not appear when we consider our choices and our actions theoretically does not imply that there is no point of view from which it does appear. For the practical point of view is, as I have said, the point of view we occupy as agents, and its conclusions express our rational agency. To understand how the theoretical and practical views of the world can coexist is to understand how we can be both fully natural beings and genuinely free and responsible agents. The distinction between theoretical and practical reason allows us to address Nagel’s concern in three related ways. First, we can point out that it turns on the claim that our deliberation is simply a series of natural events, not different in kind from any other such series, and that this claim can be given both a theoretical and a practical interpretation. Our choices can seem to be “swallowed up by the order of mere events” only if we regard them from a theoretical point of view: as events to be described and explained. When we engage in practical reasoning, however, we are trying not to describe our choices or to explain why they occurred but to decide what to do. We regard facts about the world not as potential parts of a description of the world or of an explanation of what happens in it but as facts that might either limit the set of courses of action that we can regard as alternatives or provide us with reasons for action; and we regard ourselves as needing to determine which of those facts do constitute reasons for action, and what, as a result, we should do. We could regard our agency as “shrinking to an extensionless point” only if there were no scope for such decisions, and mechanism does not imply that this is true. Second, our selves would be in another sense absorbed into the natural world if we could regard them only from a theoretical point of view. The theoretical point of view is essentially a God’s-eye point of view on the world. When we adopt it, we regard our own choices (so to speak) from above: not as choices that we are currently engaged in making but as events that can be explained like any others. Because theoretical reasoning is essentially concerned with 12

Nagel, “Moral Luck,” pp. 183–4.

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finding the causes of events that are known to us and whose nature we regard for these purposes as fixed, our choices, seen from a theoretical point of view, will not appear to have that quality of openness that we associate with freedom of the will. And because, when we try to explain why we chose as we did, we try to show what antecedent states or events caused us to make one choice rather than another, from a theoretical point of view our choices will seem like events that simply occurred in us, but in whose production we were not active in any sense in which other objects are not. If we could regard our choices, our practical reasoning, and our actions only from that standpoint, our selves and our agency would indeed seem to vanish. The practical point of view, by contrast, is essentially the point of view of an agent who is actively engaged in trying to figure out what to do. Because practical reasoning is concerned with finding grounds on the basis of which to make choices that we have not yet made, from a practical point of view we must regard our choices as open—as choices that we will make on the basis of our practical conclusions. And we will regard ourselves as playing an active role in them since, whether or not our choices are themselves caused by anything, they are choices that we are in the process of making and that, given the distinction between what we do and what is done to us that is used in practical reasoning, we cannot regard as simply happening to us or occurring in us. Finally, we could not defend the claim that we are free and responsible agents who make an active contribution to what we do if we could regard our choices and our actions only from the theoretical point of view because the practical point of view itself is the point of view that we occupy insofar as we are agents. If we could not engage in practical reasoning, we would be unable to consider alternatives, to ask ourselves which features of our situation constitute reasons for action, to weigh those reasons, to frame for ourselves a conception of what we wish to do and who we wish to be, or to act on the basis of such a conception. We would not, in short, be agents at all. The problem of freedom of the will seems as intractable as it does partly because we have an inadequate understanding of the nature of practical reasoning, of its relation to theoretical reasoning, and of the kind of objectivity to which practical claims might aspire. To the extent that we misunderstand practical reasoning, we misunderstand ourselves as agents. Such misunderstanding not only prevents us from seeing the possibility of justifying the claim that we are free and responsible agents; it blinds us to precisely those aspects of our agency that constitute our freedom. Kant once criticized philosophers who claimed to have received an incommunicable intimation of supersensible mysteries on the grounds that they had mistaken the nature and authority of the mysteries they described.13 He claims 13 Kant, “On A Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,” I am grateful to Paul Franks for bringing this essay to my attention and for allowing me to consult his unpublished translation of it.

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that the real mystery, the “veiled goddess before whom we . . . bend our knees,” is “the moral law in us, in its inviolable majesty.”14 The philosophers Kant criticizes correctly regard this mystery as an object of reverence and awe. But they have the wrong idea of what is worthy of reverence and of the nature of its sublimity. Where they might have found the source of that mystery in their own reason, they pay it the supposed compliment of calling it a revelation of a transcendent reality outside themselves. Where they might have sought to understand the moral law’s authority in accordance with “the law of reason whereby one must work to acquire a possession,”15 they rely instead on “an apotheosis that comes from above and that costs [them] nothing.”16 And because such a philosopher mistakes both the source of the moral law’s authority and the means by which alone it can be understood, he takes philosophy to consist in “brood[ing] over an Idea in himself, which he can neither make comprehensible nor even communicate to others.”17 Behind these errors lies a curious mixture of false pride and misplaced humility. On the one hand, these philosophers pride themselves on having secured access to secrets known only to the wise,18 when in fact this secret is open to all. On the other, because they do not regard themselves as worthy of being the source of this mystery or of serving as its shrine and its guarantor, they construe the fact that the moral law is sublime and worthy of reverence to mean that its dictates are “supernatural communication[s]”19 whose transcendent source confers on them a majesty and grandeur that their reason alone could never impart.20 But by shrouding the moral law in obscurity they do not compliment it but blind themselves to its real nature. For the moral law lies in each of us; we ourselves give it its authority, and our reason is the source of its grandeur. The fact that these philosophers believe that they must invoke the supersensible to secure its sublimity shows that they understand neither the moral law nor their own true worth. Similarly, libertarians believe that our freedom is not sufficiently secured by a demonstration that we must regard ourselves as free for the purposes of practical reasoning, that our conception of ourselves as free agents is a necessary presupposition of rational action as such, and that the claim that we are free does not conflict with any truths that theoretical reasoning might reveal. Libertarians believe that for our freedom to be secure, it must not depend on our capacity for rational and purposive action; it must be simply there, waiting to be recorded. Only if our freedom were entirely independent of our purposes, our interests, our reason, and our selves would it really exist. 14

Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 56. 16 Ibid., p. 53. 17 Ibid., p. 56. 18 Cf. ibid., p. 63. 19 Ibid., p. 62. 20 Cf. ibid., p. 66 n. 5. 15

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This view, like that of the philosophers Kant criticizes, involves both false pride and misplaced humility. On the one hand, we want to see our freedom and our dignity as moral agents written into the fabric of the universe for all to see. But on the other, we are unwilling to regard ourselves and our practical reasoning as worthy of being its sources or its guarantors. We may feel that as purposive agents we are tainted or fickle or untrustworthy; that our freedom is at risk to the extent that it depends on us. We may believe that any conception of ourselves that depends on our practical reasoning could only be a selfaggrandizing distortion or a way of projecting our own desires onto the universe. In either case we would think it an unworthy foundation for our freedom. If we adopt this view, and look to theoretical reasoning for our dignity as free agents, we will find no dignity worth having. But that is only because, in devaluing its source in our practical reasoning, we have already denied it.

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Index

Allison, Henry, 119n, 165n Ayer, A. J., 21–23

Miss Manners (Judith Martin), 172n Murdoch, Iris, 176–177, 198

Blumenfeld, David, 120n, 134n Campbell, C. A., 25n, 152n Cavell, Stanley, 22–24, 42n, 198 Chisholm, Roderick, 4, 25n, 44, 95 Clarke, Randolph, 44–46

Nagel, Thomas, 57n, 160, 203, 204, 210–212 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 167

Dennett, Daniel, 3, 4n, 41n, 45, 82, 101, 120n, 134n, 156n Dewey, John, 179 Double, Richard, 23n, 155 Fischer, John Martin, 98, 100n Frankfurt, Harry, 18–20, 47n, 119–120, 161n Franks, Paul, 212n Freud, Sigmund, 167 Garfinkle, David, 81n Glover, Jonathan, 152n Hare, R. M., 65n Harman, Gilbert, 74n Hart, H. L. A., 162 Herman, Barbara, 119n, 175n James, William, 167 Johnson, Samuel, 169n Kane, Robert, 25n, 43–44n, 156n Kant, Immanuel, 7, 62n, 119n, 151n, 158–162, 165n, 193–194, 209, 212–213 Korsgaard, Christine, 119n, 159–162, 165n, 196–197n, 206n MacKay, D. M., 79n, 81n McDowell, John, 61, 63n Mill, John Stuart, 121n

O’Connor, Timothy, 45–46 Perry, David, 83n Popper, Karl, 81n Rawls, John, 62n, 144, 207n Ryle, Gilbert, 81n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 108–109 Scanlon, T. M., 36n, 68n, 134n, 145–146, 155, 157n, 162n, 184 Schlick, Moritz, 183–185 Smart, J. J. C., 35, 125n, 152n, 183–185 Strawson, Galen, 73n, 121n, 200–201, 203n Strawson, P. F., 4n, 26–29, 36n, 42n, 46, 54– 56, 134n, 191n Sturgeon, Nicholas, 74n Taylor, Charles, 150n Taylor, Gabriele, 174–175 Truman, Harry, 156n Tufts, James, 179 van Inwagen, Peter, 96–98, 110–114 Velleman, J. David, 115n Vihvelin, Kadri, 83n Wallace, R. Jay, 192n, 195 Watson, Gary, 4, 27, 118n, 119 Wiggins, David, 25n, 73–74 Williams, Bernard, 175 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 207 Wolf, Susan, 28n, 106n, 158, 191n