Against Moral Responsibility

Chapter 2. The Basic Argument against Moral Responsibility

2 The best account of moral responsibility was given more than five centuries ago by a young Italian nobleman, Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. In his “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” Pico della Mirandola explained the origins of the uniquely human miraculous capacity for moral responsibility . In the process of creation, God gave special characteristics to every realm of His great cosmos, but when His work was finished, God “longed for someone to reflect on the plan of so great a creation, to love its beauty, and to admire its magnitude,” so He created humans for that role. But all the special gifts had already been bestowed on other elements of His creation , and there was nothing left for humans. So God decreed that humans “should share in common whatever properties had been peculiar to each of the other creatures”; that is, only humans would have the special power to make of themselves whatever they freely chose to be: The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine. (Pico della Mirandola 1496/1948, 224–225) This is a marvelous account of moral responsibility, which meets all the essential requirements: we make ourselves, by our own independent ab initio choices; past history, the genetic lottery, social circumstances, and cultural influences play no part. It might be hard to understand how such The Basic Argument against Moral Responsibility 20 Chapter 2 special choices work—after all, who is doing the choosing?—but with miracles, anything is possible; besides, such miraculous events are not supposed to fall within the range of human understanding. The delights of Pico della Mirandola’s moral responsibility account notwithstanding, it does have one problem: it requires miracles. And although that was one of its charms for Pico della Mirandola and his contemporaries , it is a daunting problem for those devoted to a naturalistic world view that has no room for gods, ghosts, or miracles. The basic claim of this book is that moral responsibility belongs with the ghosts and gods and that it cannot survive in a naturalistic environment devoid of miracles. Roderick Chisholm has the right idea: “If we are responsible, and if what I have been trying to say is true, then we have a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we really act, is a prime mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events to happen, and nothing and no one, except we ourselves, causes us to cause those events to happen” (1982, 32). But because—in the naturalistic system—we do not have such miracle-working powers, then (by modus tollens) it follows that we are not morally responsible. Once we adopt a naturalistic world view and give up miraculous selfcreating powers, it would seem an easy and obvious conclusion that we must also give up moral responsibility. But the moral responsibility system was too entrenched and the emotional underpinnings of retributive “justice” were too powerful: giving up moral responsibility was—and for many still is—unthinkable. So most philosophers pushed the argument in the opposite direction. The original argument (as Pico della Mirandola might have framed it) claimed that miraculous ultimate self-making powers are a necessary condition for moral responsibility—we do have moral responsibility; therefore, we must have miraculous self-making powers. Naturalists who reject moral responsibility agree that miraculous self-making powers are necessary for moral responsibility and conclude that because naturalism leaves no room for such powers, it thus leaves no room for moral responsibility. Those who embrace naturalism but refuse to abandon moral responsibility take a different line: we know that we are morally responsible, so—because miraculous self...