Relative Justice by Sommers Tamler

Author:Sommers, Tamler.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

Metaskepticism and Free Will Subjectivism

The previous discussion leads me to the final position I will consider: the position that Double termed “metacompatibilism” and later “free will subjectivism.” According to Double, com-patibilist and incompatibilist theories amount to nothing more than subjective attitudes about free will, moral responsibility, and their connection with determinism. Consequently, there is no fact of the matter about whether compatibilism or incom-patibilism is correct.

The argument for metacompatibilism is as follows.4

1. If there is an answer to the dispute between compatibil-ists and incompatibilists, then moral responsibility is an objective property that a person might instantiate in certain situations.

2. Moral responsibility, if it is exists, is a moral property.

3. If there is an answer to the dispute over the correct analysis of moral responsibility, then at least one class of moral properties are objective properties that might be instantiated under certain conditions.

4. There can be no objective moral properties.

5. So, there is no answer to the dispute between compati-bilists and incompatibilists over the correct analysis of moral responsibility.

The free will subjectivist and the metaskeptic share roughly the same conclusion, stated in premise (5). Although Double is sometimes lumped in with first-order skeptics on the issue of free will, it is clear that his argument, if successful, would also undermine the hard incompatibilism of Derk Pereboom and Galen Strawson. To see where the metaskeptic and the free will subjectivist differ, it is helpful to go through Double’s argument. Metaskeptics accept the first three premises, with the caveat that it must at least be possible that objective moral properties are naturalistic properties. The question then is, what kind of objective moral property would moral responsibility have to be? Double does not commit himself to an answer, but I follow Wallace (1994) in defining the property of moral responsibility in terms of the fairness or appropriateness of holding someone morally responsible.

Premise (4) is where my argument veers away from Double’s. Double’s argument against metaethical objectivism is a clear and distilled version of familiar arguments put forward by Mackie (1977) and Harman (1977). Consequently, it is vulnerable to critiques from what Doris and Plakias (2008) call “con-vergentist” moral realists who argue that moral properties can be identified in terms of attitudes, beliefs, or judgments that people would converge upon under ideal conditions of rational-ity.5 Unlike Double and Mackie, I see the convergentist strategy as a plausible analysis of what could constitute objective moral facts, including facts about moral responsibility. If there were a set of actions that would be universally condemned by fully rational people, then I think it would make sense to call those actions objectively wrong (or to assign the property of universal wrongness to the act). And if there were universal agreement about the conditions under which we should hold agents blameworthy for committing wrong actions, then it would make sense to call the agents objectively blameworthy for committing them.

To undermine such theories, one would have to show either that this analysis of moral properties is faulty or that there

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