Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views 273compatibilist conditions are met and that, as a result, these conditions are insuffi-
cient. However, (readers will recall from our earlier discussion of Pereboom’s
argument in Section 7.4) the argument has additional force by virtue of setting
out three such cases, each of which is progressively more like a fourth, in which
the action is causally determined in a naturalistic way. The first case involves
manipulation that is local and determining, and hence most likely to elicit the
non- responsibility intuition. The second is similar to the first, except that it
restricts manipulation to a location at the beginning of the agent’s life. The third
is similar, except the manipulation results from strict community upbringing;
and the fourth, again, is the naturalistic or ordinary deterministic case. The
objective is to formulate these examples so that it is not possible to draw a prin-
cipled line between any two adjacent cases that would explain why the agent
would not be morally responsible in the basic desert sense in the first but would
be in the second. The conclusion is that the agent is not morally responsible in
this sense in all four cases, and the best explanation for this must be that he is
causally determined by factors beyond his control in each of them, and this result
conflicts with the compatibilist’s central claim.
Thus according to Pereboom, free will skeptics, event- causal and agent- causal
libertarianism face significant problems, and compatibilism is vulnerable to the
argument from manipulation cases. The view that remains is free will skepti-
cism, which denies that we have the sort of free will required for moral respons-
ibility in the basic desert sense. Pereboom maintains that the concern for the
skeptical position is not that there is considerable empirical evidence that it is
false, or that there is a powerful argument that it is somehow incoherent. Instead,
the crucial question it faces is practical: Could we live with the belief that it is
true? We will turn to this concern in detail (in Section 11.8) after examining two
additional related positions.
11.6. Neil Levy’s Argument for Free Will Skepticism
Levy contends that the case for free will skepticism can be made on both the
determinist and the indeterminist alternatives. In his view, free will on either
option is ruled out on grounds of luck. The notions of luck that Levy invokes
involve lack of direct control, but other considerations as well. One of these
notions is luck in the chancy sense, the other is not.
An event or state of affairs occurring in the actual world is chancy lucky for
an agent if (i) that event or state of affairs is significant for that agent; (ii) the
agent lacks direct control over that event or state of affairs; and (iii) that event
or state of affairs fails to occur in many nearby worlds; the proportion of
nearby worlds that is large enough for the event to be chancy lucky is inverse
to the significance of the event for the agent. (Levy, 2011: 36)Non- chancy luck is relevant to assessing the responsibility- yielding potential of
psychological dispositions. Such dispositions may be produced deterministically