Free Will A Contemporary Introduction

Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views 263

given sensitivity to its moral status, and not by virtue of consequentialist or

contractualist considerations.

Basic desert moral responsibility is often thought to be presupposed by our retribu-
tive reactive attitudes, such as indignation and moral resentment. In P.F. Strawson’s
(1962) account, moral responsibility is essentially tied to these reactive attitudes,
and hence the basic desert sense is plausibly the variety that he brings to the fore.
Alternative notions of moral responsibility have not been a focus of the free
will debate. For example, an agent might be held to be morally responsible when
his dispositions to act badly might be modified or eliminated by blaming, and his
dispositions to act well strengthened by praising (Schlick, 1939; Smart, 1963).
Or an agent could be considered morally responsible when it is legitimate to
expect her to respond reasonably to such questions as: “Why did you decide to
do that? Do you think it was the right thing to do?” and that she evaluate criti-
cally what her actions indicate about her moral character (Bok, 1998; Scanlon,
1998). Incompatibilists would not regard the control required for moral respons-
ibility in these senses to be incompatible with determinism, and thus it is open to
free will skeptics to endorse these senses. Instead, it’s the basic desert sense
that’s at issue, and unless otherwise indicated in this chapter, we will use “moral
responsibility” to signify that sense.

11.1. Spinoza, the First Hard Determinist

Baruch Spinoza maintained that it is due to the truth of causal determinism that
we lack the sort of free will required for moral responsibility (Spinoza, 1677:
440–4, 483–4, 496–7; cf. Della Rocca, 2008). In Descartes’s contrasting posi-
tion, which is Spinoza’s target, to have free will is to have the power to assent,
dissent, and to suspend judgment with respect to a proposition. Some proposi-
tions are proposals for action, and assent to such a proposition results in an
action. This view derives from Stoicism (third century bce). Descartes affirms
both that we have this kind of free will and that theological determinism is true,
and that how they might be reconciled is beyond our comprehension (Principles
Part I, 40–1). Spinoza, on the contrary, argues that reconciliation between theo-
logical determinism and the claim that we have such a free power of assent is
impossible, and as a result he denies that we have such a power. Noting that by
the will he understands “a faculty by which the mind affirms or denies some-
thing true or something false, and not the desire by which the mind wants a thing
or avoids it” (Ethics II/129–30), he claims:

In the Mind there is no absolute, or free, will, but the Mind is determined to

will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this

again by another, and so to infinity. (Ethics IIP48/129)

The crucial element in the proof of this proposition is that “all things have been
predetermined by God, not from freedom of the will or absolute good pleasure,