266 Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views
pre- programmed with a set of strong self- interested motivations and a set of
roughly equally strong altruistic motivations, and motivations of no other kinds
(e.g., to do evil for evil’s sake). These fundamental motivations thus come to be
non- rational. Basic Argument- style reasoning might well show that we’re not
morally responsible for the fact that our actions are all either self- interested or
altruistic. But when it’s up to someone to make either a self- interested choice or an
altruistic choice, and she makes the altruistic one, it seems that she can be morally
responsible for making the altruistic one rather than the self- interested one.
Clarke’s criticism of Strawson’s argument might be supported by the charge
that the standard for rationality it assumes is too stringent (Pereboom, 2001).
Imagine that you are in a situation of conflict between self- interested and moral
reasons; one possible decision is morally justified but is not on balance in your
self- interest, the other is not morally justified but is in your self- interest. You
have the capacity to make either choice, you make the moral one, and this deci-
sion is on balance justified by your reasons overall. Strawson would argue that
the agent is unfree because the choice is not fully caused by your reasons, and
thus rationally speaking random. Yet in this situation it is intuitive that the action
might well be sufficiently connected to your reasons to count as rational. The
rationality of action would then not require its complete determination by the
agent’s reasons, but rather only being justified by them (cf. Pereboom, 2001).
Saul Smilansky (1993, 2000) concurs with Strawson’s argument that the sort
of free will required for moral responsibility is impossible for us, and thus he too
is a no- free-will- either-way theorist. Nevertheless he believes that he can at the
same time accept a picture that combines aspects of both hard determinism and
compatibilism, since what he calls the Assumption of Exhaustiveness—that one
must either be a compatibilist and not an incompatibilist, or an incompatibilist
and not a compatibilist, is false (Smilansky, 2000). The most striking aspect of
Smilansky’s view is that we should maintain, in certain respects, the illusion of
free will, and that we should do so for practical reasons. For example, he argues
that a valuable type of self- respect would be undermined if determinism were
true, and that the illusion of free will is needed to maintain this self- respect
(1997, 2000). He also contends that the illusion of free will is required to sustain
certain valuable aspects of criminal justice, for example that only those who
have committed crimes should be punished, and that we should punish criminals
rather than provide luxurious accommodations for them (2000, 2011). But even
if he is recommending here that we retain the view we ordinarily hold, and that
this position indeed combines aspects of compatibilism and hard determinism, it
is nevertheless clear that by virtue of this fact his philosophical position is still
skeptical. For according to his philosophical position the goods at issue require
an illusion of free will, and not its reality.
Richard Double (1991, 1996) also contends, independently of consideration
of determinism or indeterminism, that the claim that we have the free will
required for moral responsibility cannot be true. His most fundamental reason
for believing this is that the concept of free will is internally incoherent, and thus
cannot be realized. One supporting argument he proposes is that the debate