12 Revisionism and Some Remaining Issues
In this book we have attempted to offer a comprehensive introduction to the
major contemporary philosophical issues bearing on free will. The first seven
chapters featured our introduction of the key controversies in the debate and the
developments that animate the most recent philosophical work on free will.
Chapters 8 and 9 were then devoted to the different forms of compatibilism and
their advantages and disadvantages. Chapters 10 and 11 canvassed the various
incompatibilist positions together with their problems and prospects. In this con-
cluding chapter, we address a cluster of important issues that we have yet to con-
sider. We begin with Manuel Vargas’s nuanced revisionist position, and then we
briefly address recent debates concerning responsibility for omissions, the com-
patibility of rational deliberation with belief in causal determination, experimen-
tal philosophy, and, finally, free will and religious issues.
12.1. Manuel Vargas’s Revisionism
In a number of articles and book chapters (e.g., Vargas 2005a, 2007, 2009,
2011), and now in his book Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Respons-
ibility (2013), Manuel Vargas defends revisionism. As Vargas understands it,
revisionism is neither a straightforward compatibilist view, nor is it a straight-
forward incompatibilist one. Rather, it is a hybrid view that is in one respect an
incompatibilist form of skepticism and in another an innovative form of
compatibilism.
How could free will skepticism and compatibilism be conjoined? Vargas’s
theory has two distinct elements, a descriptive one that is incompatibilist and
skeptical, and a prescriptive one that is compatibilist. Cast in purely descriptive
terms, according to Vargas our folk concept of moral responsibility includes
incompatibilist presuppositions requiring libertarian satisfaction conditions
(2013: chapter 1). But for empirical reasons that dovetail with those Pereboom
(2001, 2014) finds compelling (see our discussion of Pereboom in Section 11.4),
Vargas doubts that actual persons could possess and act from libertarian resources
(Vargas, 2013: chapter 2). He contends that it is not credible in light of a reason-
able “standard of naturalistic plausibility” (2013: 58–60). Hence, the ordinary
folk concept yields a skeptical result: Persons are not free and responsible given