Against Moral Responsibility

Chapter 5. Moral Responsibility in the Gaps

5 Pico della Mirandola was perfectly comfortable with miracles: the bigger the better. After all, if you accept the idea of almighty God miraculously creating the cosmos in all its splendor, then you aren’t likely to flinch at allowing humans to miraculously create themselves. But the centuries rolled by, and scientists from William Harvey and Isaac Newton to Charles Darwin and B. F. Skinner expanded our naturalistic understanding of humans and our world, and as naturalistic explanations waxed, enthusiasm for miracles waned. Rather than full-scale unlimited creation of the self—with the open possibilities ranging from bestial to divine—the selfde fining choices became smaller and smaller. As biologists and psychologists enlarged the areas explicable by causal forces outside our ultimate control, the space available for special acts of free will was squeezed tighter. Under pressure from the natural sciences, the miraculous powers of the deities retreated into obscure corners, and Almighty God became a “godof -the-gaps” whose powers were confined to “whatever science cannot yet explain.” In similar fashion, the advance of biological and psychological science has narrowed the power of miracle-working free will down to human powers that science has not yet explained or has not yet reduced to straightforward causal accounts. Of course compatibilists—who insist that moral responsibility is compatible with naturalism (and with determinism)—insist that the advance of natural science poses no problem for moral responsibility, but their actual practice and their proposed accounts indicate otherwise. Before examining the compatibilists, however, consider the career of the incompatibilists , particularly the traditional libertarians, who maintain that the special human freedom essential for moral responsibility must be independent of natural explanation and natural causes. Pico della Mirandola Moral Responsibility in the Gaps 76 Chapter 5 represents the high-water mark of libertarian thought: God grants us the miraculous godlike power of fashioning ourselves in any form we choose with no restrictions on powers or possibilities. By the twentieth century, libertarian free will—buffeted by the increasing success of natural science explanations—had become much more modest. Campbell’s Minimized Free Will C. A. Campbell, a twentieth-century libertarian of great subtlety, proposes a fascinating small-scale account of the libertarian free will that props up moral responsibility. Campbell understands and acknowledges the fundamental challenge that our knowledge of biology and psychology poses for moral responsibility: If we are mindful of the influences exerted by heredity and environment, we may well feel some doubt whether there is any act of will at all of which one can truly say that the self is sole author, sole determinant. No man has a voice in determining the raw material of impulses and capacities that constitute his hereditary environment , and no man has more than a very partial control of the material and social environment in which he is destined to live his life. Yet it would be manifestly absurd to deny that these two factors do constantly and profoundly affect the nature of a man’s choices. (1957, 160–161) Campbell’s solution to this problem is to radically reduce the scope of the vital free will operation. Rather than “making ourselves from scratch,” we make small but decisive choices that are the basis of our moral responsibility . In Campbell’s account, our special power of making free choices between “genuinely open alternatives”—choices “of which the person judged [to be morally responsible] can be regarded as the sole author” (160)—operates within a very limited space: only when we experience conflict between desire and duty do we have the special power to exert or withhold the moral effort required to combat our desires and rise to duty. Campbell’s own version of libertarian free will has few contemporary champions, but his legacy endures, for Campbell marked the path that many contemporary libertarians have followed: minimal free will. This is a free will of the gaps. Campbell acknowledges that science may explain how our desires were shaped and the causes of much of our character and behavior. But science has no causal account of the inner act of exerting or withholding will power, and that leaves a gap for the exercise of “contracausal free will,” in which a special human creative activity of willing Moral Responsibility in the Gaps 77 chooses which path will be taken, and in such cases “nothing determines the act save the agent’s doing of it...