264 Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views
but from God’s absolute nature, or infinite power” (Ethics I Appendix, II/77).
Spinoza later affirms: “Experience itself, no less clearly than reason, teaches that
people believe themselves to be free because they are conscious of their own
actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined” (Ethics IIIP2s,
II/143).
Spinoza argues that skepticism about free will is not harmful but instead
advantageous, since it yields a kind of equanimity resulting from the belief that
everything that happens is necessitated by God: What skepticism about free will
teaches is that we must expect and bear calmly both good luck and bad. For
everything that happens follows from God’s eternal decree with the same
necessity as it follows from the essence of a triangle that its three angles are
equal to two right angles. (Spinoza, 1677: 490)The specific benefits include freedom from harmful emotions: “This doctrine
contributes to communal life by teaching us ‘to hate no one, to disesteem no one,
to mock no one, to be angry at no one.. .’ ” (Spinoza, 1677: 490). Far from being
harmful, in Spinoza’s view the skeptical outlook is to be recommended for its
moral and psychological benefits.
11.2. A Contemporary Hard Determinist
Ted Honderich advocates a sophisticated version of non- cognitivism about moral
judgments generally, and thus also about judgments that attribute moral respons-
ibility. According to his position, such judgments essentially express attitudes,
do not report moral facts, and lack truth value. Still, they do involve proposi-
tional content in a distinctive way. For example, one might morally disapprove
of a corrupt politician for some action, where this disapproval includes a retribu-
tive desire. On Honderich’s conception, the attitude then takes the action to be
originated by the agent in such a way as not to be causally determined by factors
beyond his control, and it thereby involves a commitment to this indeterministic
propositional content.
It will not be logically inconsistent to have a retributive desire toward the pol-
itician and at the same time believe he did not originate his action in this way.
Yet Honderich thinks that given our human nature, someone who has retributive
desires for the politician will also believe that she originated the action, and the
belief will function as a reason in support of the attitude. Given human nature,
rejection of the belief will serve as a reason to relinquish the attitude: “If I lose
the belief, I cannot persist in the attitude or the behavior. Currently, at any rate,
that is a psychological impossibility” (Honderich, 1996). Determinism is thus a
threat to retributive desires, and more generally, to the reactive attitudes con-
nected to the practice of holding people morally responsible, because determin-
ism is incompatible with origination, and thus, given human nature, determinism
will serve as a reason to relinquish these attitudes. Honderich (1988) presents
a careful empirical argument for the conclusion that determinism is in fact true.