Responsibility Scepticism and the Reactive Attitudes
Date
2023-03-29
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Abstract
A recent and influential view in the free will literature purports that we do not have the sort of free will required to be morally responsible. Optimists about this possibility claim that, although we should be sceptical about moral responsibility, we have good reasons to believe our lives would remain more or less unchanged. Many of the attitudes we take to be centrally important to meaningful interpersonal relationships, they claim, are unaffected by the sceptical perspective. In this dissertation, I challenge this optimistic claim. To do so, I assess whether key components of the sceptical argument preclude the aptness of expressing attitudes such as forgiveness or love. Of particular importance to the sceptical perspective is the claim that, in deterministic worlds, an agent's actions are relevantly similar to actions that are the result of manipulation. Nevertheless, the optimist maintains that determinism does not threaten attitudes like love and forgiveness. So, given the relevant similarity between causally determined actions and manipulated actions, we should expect that cases featuring invasive manipulation do not affect our assessment of the aptness of certain reactive attitudes important to our interpersonal relationships. This, I argue, is incorrect. In chapters 2 and 3, I utilize radical role reversal cases featuring invasive manipulation to show that, because of the manipulation, both forgiveness and love are inapt. Since, according to the optimist, these cases are relevantly similar to ordinary deterministic cases, at least two of the attitudes required for meaningful relationships are threatened by the sceptical perspective. In Chapter 4, I identify ownership of our actions as a necessary condition common to the reactive attitudes we take to be important for our relationships. Upon explicating the details of this ownership, it seems as though this, too, is threatened by the sceptical perspective. Hence, we have strong reason to be pessimistic about the sceptical perspective: contrary to their optimistic claims, living without moral responsibility would seemingly change our lives for the worse.
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Reactive Attitudes, Responsibility Scepticism, Pereboom
Citation
Bohner, E. (2023). Responsibility scepticism and the reactive attitudes (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.