156 Three Source Incompatibilist Arguments
determinism is true, and the assumptions of nonresponsibility for the past and
nonresponsibility for laws of nature. Given these assumptions, here is a simpli-
fied sketch of the argument:
- No one is even partly morally responsible for either the facts of the remote
past or the laws of nature. - No one is even partly morally responsible for the fact that the facts of the
remote past in conjunction with the laws of nature imply that there is only
one unique future. - Therefore, no one is even partly morally responsible for the facts of the
future.
According to the Direct Argument, if determinism is true, no one is even partly
morally responsible for how the future will unfold, including how one acts. In
short, determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility.
In this section, we will make do with the preceding formulation and will forgo
a fully developed version of the Direct Argument, which is, as van Inwagen puts
it (1983: 185), “inscriptionally identical” with the advanced version of the Con-
sequence Argument (which we set out in Section 4.4). However, two formal
details of the more advanced expression of the argument will prove useful to
explicate here. First, the modal operator of nonresponsibility, NR, when applied
to a proposition, p, for an agent, S, and a time, t, is represented as follows:
NRS,t(p), and can be understood in English as:
p and agent S at time t is not even partly morally responsible for the fact
that p.In relevant contexts, the indexing to agents and times can be dropped, as in NRp,
and then can be read as:
p and no one is even partly morally responsible for the fact that p.Treating the first conjunct as elliptical, this can be shortened to:
No one is even partly morally responsible for the fact that p.Second, the argument employs a closure inference principle that is the analog to
the Transfer principle deployed in the Consequence Argument. Van Inwagen
refers to this closure principle as Rule B, but it is often referred to as the Prin-
ciple of the Transfer of Non- Responsibility, or just Transfer NR, and it is a for-
malized way of expressing what we set out above as an intuitive expression of
the pertinent pattern of inference. It can be formulated as follows:
TNR: NRp, NR(p → q) ˫ NRq