For the free will debate, here's what I consider to be the Central Intuition:
Central Intuition: It's not fair to blame someone for doing what they cannot not do, and it's not fair to blame someone for not doing what they cannot do. More precisely, it's incorrect to blame x as the cause of y when ~x was the cause of y.
Michael Huemer defends libertarian free will in his book Knowledge, Reality, and Value. (Though, Huemer admits that he doesn't know how free will is supposed to work (pg 193). He shares sympathy with both event causal and agent causal views.)
Let's see if the no free will view can withstand Huemer's attacks.
Huemer gives three nice reasons for why free will is important:
It's important for our self-conception. We see ourselves as free agents, at least free some of the time. (I don't feel this way, but more on that later.)
It's important because of how it relates to ought implies can and the truth of 'should' statements.
It's important because of how it relates to other moral ideas such as praise, blame, and just deserts.
Huemer identifies the "two conditions that are required for free will" (pg 180):
Alternative possibilities = the ability to do otherwise.
Self-control = the cause of your actions is you.
This is leeway freedom and sourcehood freedom, respectively.
It's strange to say both conditions are required for free will as if this is a common belief. It's very much contested whether one or the other or both are required for the kind of control we care about.
Why think we need alternative possibilities for freedom? Huemer gives the example of a robot. Because the robot is forced to do what it's programmed to do, it's not free.
That's intuitive enough. Though, also, the robot isn't free because the robot is not a who, a conscious person, and you need consciousness to have free will. So using a robot as an example might be a bit confusing. Do we see the robot isn't free primarily because of its lack of leeway freedom, or its lack of consciousness?
A better illustration is with 'should' statements. It feels wrong to say an animal should do something. Even smart animals like elephants, dolphins, certain cats and dogs, or magpies... we feel like they don't have free will, despite their cleverness and apparent consciousness. On one explanation, this is because animal actions are not up to the animal. Animals operate on instinct; they are, like the robot, programmed. Saying an animal should do anything is silly because the animal cannot do anything other than what its instincts cause it to do. The soul of the animal is just there along for the ride, witnessing, but not controlling, its own actions.
But again, even in this case, you might want to say animals lack the degree of consciousness that humans have, and it's really the lack of rationality that explains why animals are not blameworthy for their actions.
And animals might not be a good example because, one might think, morality is entirely a human affair, that morality is all about social stability among humans, and in that case of course we will feel like non-human animals are not moral agents.
So let's imagine a scenario where we have human consciousness and the inability to do otherwise. When Jessica Jones is mind-controlled by Kilgrave, it's silly to say that she should not have committed the crimes she did under Kilgrave's control. Because "her" actions were not really up to her. It's silly to say she should have broken free of the mind control. Because she had no choice in the matter.
Even still it seems to me that it's not necessarily the lack of leeway freedom here that explains why it's silly to say Jessica Jones should have done otherwise. We can explain the intuition instead through sourcehood freedom. It's not fair to blame Jessica Jones for crimes committed while mind-controlled because it wasn't her intentions or desires that caused those crimes, it was Kilgrave's intentions and desires. Kilgrave is at fault, not her.
If a person commits a crime while sleepwalking, it's obvious that the person per se is not the cause of the crime. Rather, the physiological conditions that caused the sleepwalking is what caused the crime. No one is responsible for those conditions, so no one is responsible for the crime. The reason why it's silly to blame the sleepwalker is not necessarily because they couldn't have done otherwise, but because it wasn't the sleepwalker who caused the crime (their body caused the crime, but not their conscious self, just like with Jessica Jones).
But if 'should' statements don't imply that someone could have done something, then why do we apply 'should' statements to unconstrained adult humans and not to robots, animals, children, or mind-controlled humans?
One answer is that 'should' statements do not imply leeway freedom at all. Here's an obviously true statement: I should have invested in Bitcoin in 2010. Here's an obviously false statement: I should have invested in Bitcoin in 1978. The latter sounds silly because I couldn't have invested then; I wasn't born yet and Bitcoin wasn't a thing. But the former doesn't sound silly at all. Why is that? Because when I try to imagine myself investing Bitcoin in 1978, I immediately see the impossibility. There was no chance of that happening. But when I imagine myself investing in 2010, I don't run into the same impossibility. But that doesn't mean another kind of impossibility isn't there. Being able to imagine something only means that it's logically possible, not physically possible. (And even then, per the discussion here: https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2024/10/physical-possibility-vs-metaphysical.html, this logical possibility is only immediate logical possibility, or a lack of explicit logical impossibility.)
We imagine impossible things all the time. We imagine ourselves having superpowers or living radically different lives. We imagine fictional stories taking place in physically impossible worlds. So imaginability does not imply possibility on the whole, only narrow or immediate possibility. Both the 1978 and 2010 scenarios are logically possible in the sense that they are not immediately incoherent. But the former is far more obviously physically impossible than the latter (I have to imagine Bitcoin having been invented much sooner, and I have to imagine myself being born much sooner). But that doesn't mean the latter scenario isn't also physically impossible, it just means it's easier to imagine.
When I imagine a clearly physically impossible scenario, like the 1978 scenario, I "don't bother" with that scenario. I can't take it seriously. But when I imagine a seemingly physically possible world, like the 2010 scenario, it's much easier to take that scenario seriously and pretend that's what happened. I'm able to hold the one in my mind better than the other. And when we compare these imaginable worlds and see which one is better, we prefer the one world over the other. So the 'should' statement is a statement of preference, as well as, potentially, a statement of understanding how one outcome is genuinely better than the other outcome.
We get a glimpse of this when watching fictional movies or shows, or playing video games. Often our imagination will try to take the fictional world to its logical conclusion. When we do this, we eventually run into plot holes that cause the world to unravel in our minds. We see how the world doesn't make sense; we see how it's impossible. But for some fictional worlds, our imagination is able to "go" for a lot longer before running into problems compared to other worlds. More consistent worlds are more immersive. (I would say religions are very highly consistent fictions, which helps explain how they survive. We really can imagine them being true; they carry our imagination as far as it will go. But for some of us, we eventually run into problems, such as contradictory scripture verses or incoherent doctrines.)
So that's what's going on with 'should' statements: we are comparing two sets of actions and seeing how one is better over the other. I compare two scenarios, one where I invest in Bitcoin in 2010 and the actual scenario where I do not. I see how the former scenario is the better one. 'Should' statements are action-guiding. I can imagine having taken better actions, leading to a better outcome. But the 'possible' world in which I invested in 2010 is not really possible, it's just relatively easy to hold in the imagination.
Some folks want to say that I could have invested in Bitcoin in 2010, and what that means is that if I had tried to do so, I would have succeeded (Huemer mentions this interpretation of 'could'). But of course, I couldn't have tried to do so given my ignorance, etc. So there is no real sense in which I could have done otherwise; the past and the laws of nature would have to have been different. But it's fairly easy to imagine these things being different. It's easy to imagine me eavesdropping on some older teenagers talking about Bitcoin, me having the insight to look into the matter, and so on. But again, imaginability does not entail possibility.
All of that to say it doesn't seem to me ought implies can. Rather, ought implies there is a highly imaginable and better counterfactual scenario. When we speak of what an unconstrained human should have done in a way that we don't speak of robots, animals, children, or constrained humans, we do so because it's very easy to imagine the unconstrained human having done differently in a way that's very hard to imagine of the robot, animal, child, or constrained human, and we see how the counterfactual scenario is better. (Sometimes we say someone did what they ought to have done, in which case it's the counterfactual scenario that is worse.) While these scenarios are highly imaginable, they are still impossible, as they require us to imagine a person being different at the time of the action, which would require that person having different inputs that shaped them up to that moment, which would require a different past and/or different laws of nature.
But if we don't have the ability to do otherwise, and if we don't need the ability to do otherwise to make sense of oughts and shoulds, then it all comes down to sourcehood freedom.
Why think we need sourcehood freedom for free will? Huemer gives the example of radioactive decay. If quantum indeterminacy is true, then it's truly unpredictable when exactly the atom will decay. So the atom doesn't have freedom because it doesn't control when it decays.
I would say sourcehood freedom matters because of the Central Intuition. The question of blame is a question of causes. If I am the cause of my actions, then I am to blame. If my circumstances are the cause of my actions, then my circumstances are to blame.
Huemer defines determinism in the following way:
Determinism(1) = every event has a sufficient cause; given the cause, the event must happen.
Determinism(2) = the future is closed; the past plus the laws of nature set the future in stone; all future events are perfectly predictable given perfect knowledge of the past and the laws of nature.
The 2020 PhilPapers survey shows that 59.16% of philosophers believe in compatibilism, 18.83% believe in libertarianism, and 11.21% believe in free will skepticism, and the remaining 10.8% fall into various miscellaneous categories such as 'undecided.'
On page 182, Huemer says we have a natural bias toward belief in determinism. Maybe that's true given that 70% of philosophers believe in determinism (assuming that all compatibilists and free will skeptics actually believe in determinism and aren't just agnostic). But by that logic we should be worried about the bias toward believing in free will, given the combined 78% who accept it.
Huemer claims libertarian free will is "the most commonsensical view" (pg 187). I don't understand. So if a view you don't like is popular, it's because of bias, but if a view you do like is popular, it's because it's commonsensical? And yet, it's clearly compatibilism that's the common sense view. I haven't seen any survey data on what lay people believe about free will to think otherwise.
I'm not bothered by the low percentage of free will skeptics. Maybe I would be if I didn't have an explanation for it. But there's a pretty easy explanation available: 'ought implies can' is a strong intuition for many, driving support for libertarianism, and it's clearly true that unconstrained actions, even when determined, say something about our character that constrained actions don't, driving support for compatibilism. And free will skeptics make the obvious point that yes, our actions are caused by who we are, but we are not the cause of who we are, and so we are not the ultimate cause of our actions.
Huemer notes that it's surprising how common belief in determinism is given that determinism and indeterminism are on the table as viable views. Quantum indeterminacy could win out in the end, showing that indeterminism is true.
To push back on that, I would give a few philosophical ideas in favor of determinism. First, determinism is highly intuitive. It seems like the next state of reality really does flow from the previous state. It doesn't feel like reality, at the macro scale, is all that random. There certainly is epistemic randomness in the sense that I can't tell where the die will land. But I easily can imagine Laplace's Demon who knows every detail about gravity, the weight of the die, the surface the die lands on, the math involved in the physics of the die roll, and so on, and from there is able to predict how the die will land before it does.
Beyond intuition, we also have philosophical arguments from contingency, fine-tuning, the laws of nature, the applicability of mathematics, the existence of necessary objects and necessary truths, arguments for necessitarianism, and so forth, all implying, or potentially implying, determinism.
Plus, even if indeterminism is true, it may only apply on the microscopic scale and be irrelevant to our actions on the macroscopic scale. Determinism in the relevant sense would still be true.
And even if indeterminism is true and impacted the macroscopic scale, it threatens to rob us of our freedom by leaving our choices up to chance and not up to us. So again, determinism in the relevant sense would still be true (our actions are not determined by us).
Despite defending libertarian free will, Huemer concedes quite a bit to compatibilism. He says that "Everytime a philosopher tries to clearly and precisely analyze the notion of free will, they end up with a compatible analysis." (pg 185)
Why? Huemer gives three reasons. One, there are ways, as noted above, of interpreting 'could' in a way that's compatible with determinism. Two, there is what I consider to be the key intuition of the compatibilist: constrained actions don't say anything about your moral character in the way unconstrained actions do. Huemer shares an illustration from another philosopher where a person goes without food for a week because they were lost in a desert, and another person goes without food for a week because they went on a hunger strike for political reasons. Going hungry doesn't tell us anything about the first person, but it does about the second. Three, free will requires determinism because if indeterminism is true then your actions are, like the radioactive atom, not up to you but up to chancy processes.
How does Huemer respond? He gives the Consequence Argument, which I think (along with the Manipulation Argument and Zygote Argument) attack the weakness of the key compatibilist intuition. Remember, the key compatibilist intuition is that some of our actions say something about the kind of person we are, even if that action is determined. If your actions come from your desires, values, moral convictions, reasons, beliefs, dispositions, or some combination of these things, then your actions come from you. Your actions tell us who you are in that case. When your actions are truly forced, such as by addiction or disease or dire circumstances, then compatibilists are ready to admit that those actions say nothing about you, only about your luck.
(By the way, I've heard Alfred Mele distinguish luck and chance in the following way: Luck is real on both determinism and indeterminism, but chance is only real on indeterminism. You are lucky if something good happens to you out of your control, and something can be out of your control on either determinism or indeterminism. See: /watch?v=YqjfYWddW9Y.)
However, the Consequence Argument, etc., shows, I think successfully, that we can imagine scenarios in which we grant all the freedoms that the compatibilist might want, and yet these freedoms themselves were forced on you, resulting in forced actions. To put it simply, having evil desires does make you an evil person. But if those desires were caused by something other than you, then you are not responsible for being an evil person. The compatibilist is, I think, correctly observing how there really are good and evil actions, and good and evil people. But the defender of the above arguments against compatibilism is correctly observing how no one chooses to be good or bad. Humans, just like non-human animals, do not choose to be what they are. They just are what they are.
(You might not like my use of the word 'evil' there. We might say wasps, snakes, and spiders are bad, but we wouldn't say they are evil. So perhaps we should say some humans are bad, but none are evil. That's fine with me, though there is a neutral sense of 'evil' that I think we can use for bad things in general. We also might want to reserve 'evil' for a very specific kind of badness, namely the badness involved in poor moral reasoning and poor moral actions.)
I mentioned above that Kilgrave is at fault for the crimes that Jessica Jones commits when he controls her. So do I believe in fault?
I mentioned in my post on Alyssa Ney's chapter 12 two interpretations of what goes on when we experience a sense of making a choice. On one interpretation, the sense of choice is illusory; our brains and bodies, in combination with our environment, are generating a deliberation process, and that process is determined to start and end in the ways it does by the inputs that shaped it. When we feel as though we have made a choice, really it's not us, the conscious self, that has done anything, but rather we have experienced the conclusion of a process that we have no control over, and the conclusion of that process generates this misleading feeling of us making a choice. On the other interpretation, the conscious self is the true cause of the choice. In that case, it really is me that is the cause of my actions.
Let's say the latter interpretation is true. Kilgrave himself then is the cause of the crimes. Kilgrave, the person, is at fault. Because of that, his actions say something meaningful about the quality of his character. But what is the self? What is that thing that does the choosing, and how does it do it? If Kilgrave himself chooses to control others in an evil way, on what basis did he make that choice? Let's say he made that choice on the basis of his desires, his second order-desires, his reasons, his values, his beliefs, his moral standards, his own dispositions. His choice is truly unconstrained; it truly is he himself who causes the evil action. But where did these desires, second-order desires, reasons, values, beliefs, moral standards, and dispositions come from? What explains the existence of that? Is it a brute contingency? If Kilgrave's circumstances, his genetics, epigenetics, parents, upbringing, trauma, brain structure, intelligence, culture, social pressures, psychological mechanisms, etc., caused Kilgrave's desires, etc., then we can trace the fault back another step. Ultimately, all fault traces back to non-personal fault. No person has ultimate fault for anything.
It's tempting to stop at the end of a causal chain (e.g., Kilgrave) and place all blame on it without looking at the whole causal chain. This makes sense, as the end of the causal chain is the closest to us, which means 1) it's the most likely step we have control over and can thus prevent, and 2) it tells us about the goodness and badness of nearby things, about risk and danger. While the laws of nature might ultimately be at fault for a murderer, we have no control over the laws of nature. But we do have control over the murderer, by installing security measures in our homes and by locking up violent criminals. And if someone is willing and able to commit murder, that says a lot about the risk and danger associated with that person, even if that person had no control over whether they ended up the way they did.
Returning to the Central Intuition: It's incorrect to blame x as the cause of y when ~x was the cause of y. But what if x was the cause of y and w was the cause of x? In that case, y says something about x, and x says something about w, and so y says something about w. Our actions say something about the way we are, and the way we are says something about our circumstances, and so our actions say something about our circumstances. The goodness of what we are reflects the goodness of our circumstances, and the badness of what we are reflects the badness of our circumstances. If responsibility transfers down the causal chain, then we should hold circumstances, not people, responsible for actions, all the while acknowledging the real goodness or badness of the people themselves.
***
Huemer gives four arguments in favor of free will. Here are my responses:
Argument 1: From intuition
Here I will distinguish freedom from free will. Freedom is something we certainly have in degrees. Freedom concerns the number of options we have to choose from. But free will is concerned with the nature of our choosing one option from a list of available options.
We certainly feel free because we certainly see that we do have options. That's one source of the sense of freedom.
Another source of our sense of freedom goes back to what I said about the witnessing of our choices. It's self-evident that we experience making choices. Whether it's really us making the choice or our brains, that's another question.
However, despite all the talk about how we have this deeply entrenched feeling of being free, I don't feel free at all beyond the above senses. All my life I have been forced to do things against my will. And yet, even when I do things I "want" to, I often later see how I didn't really want it. I only wanted it because I was forced to. So even my wants are forced. And even when I want something and the desire is enduring, such as my desire for God to be real and for heaven to be real, I don't feel free to stop wanting that thing. I see the goodness of a perfect being. I see the goodness of heaven. My wanting these things very simply stems from seeing their goodness. When I want something, why do I want it? Maybe my biology caused it (such as wanting food), or maybe social pressures caused me to want it. So when I do something I don't want to, I feel stuck and forced. And when I do something I do want to, I feel stuck in my wants, forced to want what I do.
(I believe Alex O'Connor has said something similar in defense of free will skepticism. Everything we do we do either because we want to or because we don't want to, and we are not free either way.)
So that's one sense in which I really feel not free.
Another sense in which I feel really not free is from accusation, blame, and failure. At times in life I have messed up in various ways, and I have felt the judgment and wrath of others. Immediately, I see two things. One, I see that I really do fail to understand things, or I fail to perform in some way. I see my badness or lack of quality in some respect. Two, I see that I had no choice in the matter whatsoever. If I could snap my fingers and choose to understand everything perfectly, or succeed at everything all the time, I would do so. Obviously, I don't have that control. So when I do fail at something and catch the judgment of others, I feel incredibly powerless and unfree.
Importantly, I see how blame and praise really work. We engage in non-moral blame and praise all the time (this is the point of my willow tree illustration below). The fact that I don't choose to be limited doesn't matter in people's eyes. Being limited is what people hate. While I can easily admit that I am limited in the ways I am, I cannot admit that this is my fault. While my limitations are real, my choices thereof are not. There are times where the opposite occurs, and I see how I am ahead of someone in some way. I do not blame them; I see how they too had no choice in the matter. And this applies in the reverse: whatever gifts I have, or virtues that may be ascribed to me, I see how my circumstances caused them.
I take no credit and I take no blame. This doesn't mean there is no room for pride or shame. Absolutely I can feel good about the goodness of what I happen to be, and I can feel bad about the badness of what I happen to be. The desire to maximize feeling good about myself and to minimize feeling bad about myself motivates my self-improvement.
Argument 2: 'Should' statements
I've addressed this above. But I will now talk about praise, blame, and just deserts. Praise and blame make perfect sense as acknowledgments of quality. I praise the willow tree for its beauty; I blame the Callery pear tree for its foul odor in the spring. Does the willow tree deserve credit for its beauty? No. Is the Callery pear tree at fault for its foul odor? No. There is no person to ascribe credit or fault to. But it is a causal fact that a willow tree strikes me as beautiful and that the odor of the Callery pear tree causes me trouble. So something can be causally at fault without being morally at fault. Or: something can be good or bad without being responsible for its goodness or badness. (It goes without saying that the willow tree is good for me and the Callery pear tree is bad for me. Maybe the goodness/badness is reversed for other humans or animals.)
We can give a consequentialist gloss over just deserts. There is a way to explain why we feel so strongly as if good people deserve good things and bad people deserve bad things, even when free will skepticism is true and there are no just deserts there is no moral responsibility and in a sense no one deserves anything.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines justice as "assignment of deserved reward or punishment". (https://www.oed.com/dictionary/justice_n) The SEP article on justice gives some deeper insights into what justice is and what kinds of justice there are (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/).
Argument 3: Self-defeat
Huemer complains about lame arguments, but he gives a very lame argument here against determinism: If determinism is true, then those who reject determinism cannot be blamed for their rejection of it. That's exactly right. No one can be blamed for anything, including their beliefs. Free will skepticism is consistent.
Even philosophers who accept free will accept doxastic involuntarism, the belief that we cannot change our beliefs at will. We can't choose to believe something that seems false to us. Except, those who believe in free will say that while it's not up to us what we believe, it is up to us whether we investigate our beliefs or just lazily assume we're right about everything. But that only pushes the problem back a step. If we don't choose our beliefs, then we don't choose our beliefs surrounding whether and how we should go about questioning or investigating our beliefs.
So it seems to me doxastic involuntarism, a very common sensical view, fits best on free will skepticism.
Here are four further arguments Huemer gives for the self-defeat of determinism (pg 192) (in my own paraphrase):
a) If you say we should accept determinism instead of indeterminism, then you are saying we could accept it. But if determinism is true, we can't.
There are lots of people who believe lots of false things. Do they want to believe false things? I doubt it. So people believe incorrectly because they are forced to, not because they want to. Sure, it's obvious that things would be better if we believed in the truth. We should pursue truth over falsehood; it seems incoherent to deny this. So again, 'should' statements have to do with comparing alternatives and seeing that one is better than the other. We come across options all the time and we need some kind of language to deal with identifying and choosing the best option. Shoulds and oughts are part of that language.
So yes, people should accept the truth (whether it's determinism or indeterminism) in the sense that things would be better if they did, but that doesn't mean people can accept it. What's imaginably better is not always what's actually possible.
b) It's pointless to try to convince someone of something they cannot believe. And it's pointless to try to convince someone of something they must believe anyway. So if determinism is true, then it's pointless to give an argument for it.
This doesn't make any sense. Why is it that someone "must believe anyway"? Do humans magically have their belief in determinism zapped into their head at a certain age? The reason why people come to believe in determinism is because of certain events. One of those events could very well be reading an argument in favor of determinism.
It's wrong to try to stop people from giving arguments for determinism. On determinism it's wrong because determinism is true. But on indeterminism it's wrong for the following reason:
Free will advocates want to say we have control over our beliefs in the sense that we can choose to test them or not. But if it's impossible to test your belief, then it's impossible for you to be blameworthy for it. If no one ever gave an argument for determinism, then those who reject determinism could never test their beliefs. Those who believe in indeterminism would be forced to believe in indeterminism. Ironically then, arguments for determinism are needed to prevent belief in indeterminism from being determined.
c) ". . . deliberation presupposes the existence of alternatives that one has control over."
No, it doesn't. Deliberation is the process of calculating what option in a list of options is the best one to choose. We have no control over our deliberation process (most importantly, we don't choose our intelligence). So we have no control over the conclusion of that process. So we have no control over our choices.
"It makes no sense to deliberate about whether to do A if you don't think you have any choice about it."
Yes, it does. By deliberating, you are maximizing your chances of picking the best choice. It matters because you have to live with your choices, so you really want your choices to be good ones. We hope and pray that our deliberation process will have the quality needed to make the right choice when the time comes, but that's up to our luck, not up to us.
d) " . . . any rational belief . . . has to be governed by norms, such as that one should prefer to believe true things over false things . . . But any norm about what should be done presupposes that there are alternatives that we have some control over."
What I say under (a) covers this.
***
Huemer gives a further seven step argument for why determinism is self-refuting. But Step 2 says: "In general, if S cannot do A, then it is not the case that S should do A."
Again, while it feels like I could have invested in Bitcoin in 2010, because it's so easily imaginable, that doesn't mean it really was possible. If me investing in Bitcoin in 2010 requires the past and/or the laws of nature to be different than they were, then despite the initial imaginability of the scenario, the scenario is impossible. I really couldn't have done so. And yet it's obviously true that I should have done so in the sense that had I done so, I would be better off.
So I reject Step 2 of the argument. I reject 'ought implies can'; we can make sense of 'should' statements without the ability to do otherwise. What ought to be the case is what's best. So if we can imagine two situations and see how one is better than the other, then we see how the better one ought to be chosen if the choice is available, and it often feels like the choice is available (due to partial imaginability) when it isn't (due to whole unimaginability).
Argument 4: Degrees of freedom
As I noted in my response to Argument 1, freedom does come in degrees. However, free will does not.
If a baby crawls and knocks over a vase and breaks it, we don't hold the baby responsible. Strictly speaking, from a causal point of view, it's a matter of fact that if there had been no baby, then the vase would not have been broken. So the baby's body is the cause for the vase breaking, but the baby as a soul or a person is not the cause. However, if an adult is being petulant and petty, and knocks over a vase because they are angry, then not only is it the body of the adult that causes the vase to break, but it's the conscious self of the adult that causes the vase to break. So now we can blame the person for breaking the vase. There seems to be this additional thing that warrants our blame of the person, and that thing is free will. As we get older, our control over our actions increases, and so our responsibility increases.
Here's another example. Let's say my cat somehow gets hit by a ray gun that makes things huge. My cat is now the size of a city and walks around confused and scared, crushing houses and buildings where it goes. Now imagine a super villain who goes around crushing houses and buildings because they enjoy feeling powerful over others and causing others to suffer. The villain warrants our blame in a way my cat doesn't. Why is that?
I don't think there are degrees of responsibility. Rather, there are degrees of irrationality. I mentioned above how we might "reserve 'evil' for a very specific kind of badness, namely the badness involved in poor moral reasoning and poor moral actions." My cat is not irrational for crushing buildings. My cat is non-rational, it cannot reason. So we don't blame the cat. But we do blame the villain. With the giant cat, we have two evils: the damage the cat is doing, and the danger the cat poses. With the villain, we have three evils: the damage the villain is doing, the danger the villain poses, and the irrationality of the villain. The villain fails to be responsive to reasons. There are very good reasons to maximize flourishing, found in the goodness of flourishing itself. And clearly the villain is failing to maximize flourishing. This failure to be responsive to reasons is a shock to us, as it violates our expectations of a typical human, and certainly violates our standards of an ideal human. "He should have known better," we say.
As we grow and our brains develop, we become more sensitive to reasons. A teenager shoplifting carries a different implication than an adult shoplifting. Punishing an adult carries different implications than punishing a teenager (though we certainly do, as Derk Pereboom points out, punish our children as a way of shaping their behavior and not as a way of satisfying just deserts).
Adults do not have a greater degree of moral responsibility than teenagers. Rather, we expect a typical adult to reason better than a typical teenager, and so an adult expresses a greater degree of irrationality for making the same mistake that only a teenager would typically make. Our degrees of blame reflect the degrees of irrationality, or the degree of violated expectations. Irrational people do not choose to be irrational, they just are that way. (Or perhaps more accurately, everyone is irrational to varying degrees, but when we do something that is particularly irrational, we don't choose to be particularly irrational in that moment, but we are, nonetheless, particularly irrational in that moment.) Nonetheless, our acknowledgement of the irrationality of the super villain must take shape, and it takes shape in the form of our attitudes of blame. The super villain (or the petulant adult) has this unique, additional bad quality that the giant cat (or the baby) does not.
We care far more about the way something is than about why it is the way it is. What we really care about is the goodness or the badness of the thing. We can cash out all praise and blame in this way. (Descriptively, this is what's really going on when we praise and blame. Prescriptively, insofar as this is not what's really going on when we praise and blame, this is what should be going on when we praise and blame.)
***
I will briefly respond to three further arguments against the no free will view:
Your standard of control is too strong
This is currently my strongest worry for free will skepticism.
Recall the Central Intuition: It's incorrect to blame x as the cause of y when ~x was the cause of y.
But now consider the Central Intuition*: It's incorrect to blame x as the cause of y when w was the cause of x causing y.
While the Central Intuition sounds obviously right, the Central Intuition* might not, and yet that's the principle I am committed to. There are certain "transferability principles" of moral responsibility that I rely on, and I haven't yet defended those principles.
Our actions are not meaningful
If our actions are not ours, and we are simply souls along for the ride, then how could our lives be meaningful?
Our lives are meaningful because our experiences are meaningful. Our actions, while not up to us, are nevertheless part of our experiences.
There are no moral facts
If there is no moral blame, then we can't say there is any wrong or right. Or, if 'should' statements refer to the comparative goodness of options, and not to the ability to do otherwise, then there is no fact of the matter that one should do one thing or the other, because no one can do one thing over the other.
Above, I stated the following: "So the 'should' statement is a statement of preference, as well as, potentially, a statement of understanding how one outcome is genuinely better than the other outcome."
It can be a fact that one outcome is genuinely better than another, and so it can be a fact that one choice is better than another. Put another way, it can be a matter of fact that the good reasons to phi outweigh and/or outnumber the good reasons to not phi, or to psi instead. Put another way, it's a matter of fact that some moral reasoning is bad. Moral facts are a species of epistemic fact, facts about what's rational to believe. Belief and action go hand-in-hand, so irrational beliefs beget irrational actions, and rational beliefs beget rational actions. So the fact that it's wrong to murder can be interpreted as the fact that the reasons to not murder outweigh the reasons to murder. This commits me to "reasons externalism" over reasons internalism, a debate for another time.
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