Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views 275will skepticism. In Relative Justice (Sommers 2012) he contends that since
human cultures feature rationally irresolvable disagreements about moral
responsibility, we should draw an irrealist conclusion, as Richard Double also
does. Sommers’s irrealist contention is that no theory about moral responsibility
is true. His main argument for this conclusion, the argument from disagreement
across cultures, parallels one of the strongest arguments for irrealism about
ethics more generally. One upshot is that the concept of moral responsibility has
no universal applicability conditions. By contrast, uncompromising skeptics such
as Pereboom claim that the basic desert concept of moral responsibility does in
fact have universal applicability conditions, but that they are never satisfied.
Sommers’ specific argument adduces differences in intuitions about moral
responsibility between honor cultures and cultures such as ours, which he calls
institutional cultures (Sommers, 2012; see also Cogley’s (2012) review of
Sommers). In institutional cultures, norms for holding an agent morally respons-
ible include control in acting, acting intentionally, and not being manipulated.
Honor cultures differ in each of these respects. In some honor cultures, killing
any member of a murderer’s family, group, or clan is considered appropriate,
and thus neither control nor intention is required for punishment. In others,
women who are raped are killed because they had extramarital sex, and so again
punishment without intention or control is held to be appropriate. In the Ancient
Greek plays, king Agamemnon is held responsible for decisions he makes as a
result of manipulation by the gods. People in honor cultures find such practices
intuitively appropriate, while people in institutionalized cultures find them inap-
propriate. And this disagreement is rationally irresolvable. The conclusion to
draw is irrealism about moral responsibility claims.
Zac Cogley (2012) registers several objections to Sommers’s argument. One
is that even within institutional cultures there is disagreement about the con-
ditions on appropriate moral responsibility assignments (as the free will debate
indicates!), and we don’t take this to establish irrealism about moral responsib-
ility. To this one might reply that the differences between institutional cultures
and honor cultures are much more radical. By analogy, we don’t take disagree-
ments about the role of teleology in evolutionary biology to count in favor of
irrealism about the claims of that science. Instead, they are disagreements about
how to work out the details of that science, the larger contours of which do
command agreement.
A potentially more telling point of Cogley’s, we think, is that even we in
institutional cultures hold people responsible without believing they are respons-
ible. For instance, we sometimes implement the legal doctrine of strict liability
when significant practical reasons count in its favor. For example, in some juris-
dictions, injury caused to bicyclists or pedestrians by moving cars is the respons-
ibility of the driver regardless of intent or fault. Strict liability has several
practical advantages: It makes judicial processes easier, and can produce
additional incentives to be vigilant. Thus a person in an honor culture might
think that killing a relative of the murderer is not justified on the ground that the
relative is morally responsible for the murder, but that the practice is justified