Moral aspects of compatibilism

Abstract

Most participants in the current free will debate do not believe that the thesis of physical determinism is true in the actual world. Regardless of this fact, compatibilists keep argu­ing that free will is compatible with physical determinism, and incompatibilists keep challenging this claim. In the first and second section of this paper, I show that the com­patibility of free will with physical determinism is mainly discussed as a means to clarify what the criteria of free will and moral responsibility are. Many naturalistically minded libertarians accept the same criteria of free and morally responsible action as many com­patibilists do, but they introduce an additional criterion of indeterminism. In the last three sections, I question the moral implications of this additional criterion. In the third section, I propose a thought experiment in which agents meeting the incompatibilist criteria of freedom (IC-agents) and agents meeting the compatibilist criteria of freedom (CC-agents) live in the same possible world. If libertarians are right that an agent’s moral status depends on whether that agent meets the additional incompatibilist criterion of indeter­minism, then our treatment of IC- and CC-agents in that world should be sensitive to the moral difference between these two types of agents. However, at least in some cir­cumstances this is not the case, as I demonstrate with the example of two moral dilemmas in sections four and five. I conclude that the assumption about the different moral status of CC- and IC-agents is not supported by our moral intuitions, and thus cannot be as­serted by incompatibilists as a self-evident truth, but requires further justification.