276 Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views
nonetheless because it produces incentives for members of a family or clan to
keep each other in line, and achieves the best results given the absence of the
expensive sort of judicial system we find in institutional cultures.
Sommers sets out his metaskepticism together with a defense of his own per-
sonal preference for a skeptical view, tempered to a certain degree by some
accommodation of retributive desires. In accord with his metaskepticism he does
not claim that first- order skepticism about moral responsibility holds for every
culture. But that’s consistent with thinking that it holds for ours. The result
nicely unifies these two accounts and shows that they form a coherent package.
11.8. Living without Free Will
First- order free will skepticism denies that we have the sort of free will required
for moral responsibility in the basic desert sense. The concern for this 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
questions it faces are practical. Could we live with the belief that it is true? Or
would we be better off keeping our moral responsibility practices more or less as
they are, as Vargas (2013) believes? A number of free will skeptics, including
Honderich (1988), Pereboom (1995, 2001, 2014), Sommers (2007), Levy (2011),
and Caruso (2012) argue that living without free will is a practically sound
option. A variant on this view is Bruce Waller’s (1990, 2011, 2014); he argues
that we are not morally responsible—at least in a sense that involves desert—
while we do have free will. He contends that life without this notion of moral
responsibility is not only practically viable, but strongly to be preferred on moral
grounds. (Arguably, Waller denies that we have the sort of free will required for
basic desert moral responsibility, whereupon the difference between him and
free will skeptics listed above would be merely verbal.) All of this is in opposi-
tion to P.F. Strawson’s (1962) contention that we could not, and that, even if we
could, it would not be rational to do so (see our discussion of Strawson on this
point in Sections 6.4 and 6.5).
11.8.1. Morality and Responsibility
Accepting free will skepticism requires giving up our ordinary view of ourselves
as blameworthy in the basic desert sense for immoral actions and praiseworthy
in that sense for actions that are morally exemplary. One might object at this
point that a skeptical belief would have harmful consequences, maybe so
harmful that thinking and acting as if this skeptical view is true is not a practical
possibility. Thus even if the claim that we are morally responsible turns out to be
false, there might yet be significant practical reasons to believe that we are, or at
least to treat people as if they were morally responsible in the sense at issue.
First, one might think that if we gave up the belief that people are blamewor-
thy and praiseworthy, we could no longer legitimately judge any actions as
morally bad or good. But this thought is mistaken. Even if we came to believe