Arguing about moral responsibility
Outside applied ethics and neuroethics, I work in philosophy of agency, specifically on the interlinked topics of free will and moral responsibility (interlinked because I, like most participants in the debate, understand free will, if it exists, to be the power we have to act in a way that makes us morally responsible for our actions). I defend a very unusual position in the free will debate, which I won’t get into now. But one feature it shares with some others (a relatively small minority) is that it holds that we don’t have free will, in the sense defined, and therefore we are not morally responsible for our actions (or for anything else). In this post, I want to address a common criticism of my argument, and of other arguments for the same conclusion. The criticism, roughly, is this: you are arguing for a radical revision of our beliefs and our practices: the overturning of a central component of our conception of ourselves and one another. But arguments for radical revisions of common sense must meet higher standards than arguments for less radical conclusions. As the stakes go up, so do the argumentative standards.