Against Moral Responsibility

Chapter 10. What Does Not Follow from the Denial of Moral Responsibility: Living Morally without Moral Responsibility

10 It is widely believed that moral responsibility is a necessary condition for moral judgments and moral evaluations and moral acts. Peter van Inwagen takes that position: I have listened to philosophers who deny the existence of moral responsibility. I cannot take them seriously. I know a philosopher who has written a paper in which he denies the reality of moral responsibility. And yet this same philosopher, when certain of his books were stolen, said, “That was a shoddy thing to do!” But no one can consistently say that a certain act was a shoddy thing to do and say that its agent was not morally responsible when he performed it. (1983, 207) Along similar lines, C. A. Campbell (1957, 167) asserts that denying justly deserved praise and blame means denying “the reality of the moral life.” F. C. Copleston claims that without moral responsibility, “there would be no objective moral distinction between the emperor Nero and St. Francis of Assisi” (1965, 488). Susan Wolf insists that without moral responsibility, we must “stop thinking in terms of what ought and ought not to be” (1981, 401). Jeffrie Murphy claims that the demise of moral responsibility would mean the demise of “the moral significance of human beings that is founded upon such responsibility—would, indeed, spell the end of one’s own moral significance” (1988, 400). J. Angelo Corlett states the implications of denying moral responsibility: “If causal determinism is true in the hard deterministic sense, then there is no sense to be made of ethics and moral responsibility, and not even moral practices such as forgiving others make much sense” (2006, 123).1 This widely held premise—no moral judgments without moral responsibility —occurs in philosophical arguments in two ways: first, in arguments from the existence of moral judgments to the existence of moral responsibility. This is the argument famously developed by Kant: the moral What Does Not Follow from the Denial of Moral Responsibility: Living Morally without Moral Responsibility 180 Chapter 10 law obligates us to live morally and be better, and therefore “it follows inevitably that we must be able to be better men” (1960, 46). The second use of this premise is in arguing that the denial of moral responsibility has grievous implications that moral responsibility abolitionists have failed to recognize. This often includes a secondary argument: because no one who recognizes these egregious consequences can really accept them, we must hold onto moral responsibility at all costs—even including the embracing of illusion (Smilansky 2000) or the refusal to consider the rejection of moral responsibility (Strawson 1962). (The great exception to this trend is Sartre [1946/1989], who argues from the nonexistence of objective moral judgment to the existence of moral responsibility.) Consider the first argument: if there are moral judgments, then there must be moral responsibility; there are moral judgments; therefore, there must be moral responsibility. The argument is modus ponens, so its validity cannot be challenged, but what about its soundness? Is it true that if there are moral judgments, then there must be moral responsibility? Is moral responsibility a necessary condition of moral judgments? If we step back a moment and look at that claim, it hardly seems as obvious as philosophers have generally supposed. Indeed, some noteworthy philosophers have not only denied that it is obviously true, but even claimed that it is obviously false: John Stuart Mill asserted that in the absence of belief in moral responsibility we can still maintain “the highest and strongest sense of the worth of goodness, and the odiousness of its opposite” (1865/1979, 456). More recently, Harry Frankfurt maintained that judgments of moral distaste and even moral contempt are consistent with denial of moral responsibility (1973, 79), and Jonathan Bennett insisted that rejecting moral responsibility and all claims of justified praise and blame would not pose “the slightest threat to the value-system according to which we judge some actions to be good or right or successful and others to be bad or wrong or failures” (1980, 31). Derk Pereboom concludes, “When the assumption that wrongdoers are blameworthy is withdrawn for hard incompatibilist reasons, the conviction that they have in fact done wrong could legitimately survive” (2001, 212). There would indeed seem to be many exceptions to the principle that moral judgments require belief in moral responsibility. Martin Luther (1525/1823) believed that humans have no moral responsibility; we are fashioned by God according to God’s unfathomable purposes, and some are...