Revisionism and Some Remaining Issues 289appeal to folk intuitions about, for instance, the plausibility of the conditions for
blaming.
None of this is to suggest that Vargas is wrong that the—or instead a crucial—
commonsense view of free will and moral responsibility is incompatibilist. It
does, however, seem that before he can claim that his prescriptive compatibilist
proposal is a revisionary departure from commonsense, he will have to settle the
more basic dispute as to which non- revisionary account of freedom and respons-
ibility is the correct one. In doing this, he’ll need to crawl through the messy
details of the Consequence Argument, the argument from Frankfurt examples, as
well as numerous others, like the Manipulation Argument. A more conventionally
minded compatibilist—one attempting to settle the descriptive issue—will try to
show that reflection occasioned by these arguments lends support to a compatibil-
ist account of our commonsense concepts of freedom and responsibility. Vargas
shoulders the burden of showing why these compatibilists are wrong.
Vargas offers further grounds for his descriptive thesis. As he notes, the
experimental research aiming to specify the folk concept supports his contention
(see, e.g., Nichols, 2006; Nichols and Knobe, 2007).^1 Now, Vargas grants that
there is also competing strong evidence that ordinary people often make straight-
forwardly compatibilist judgments in a range of circumstances (see, e.g.,
Nahmias, 2006; Nahmias, et al., 2006). But he does not find these results ade-
quate to help the compatibilists. One reason he offers is that our concept might
be fragmented, and this would still leave us with incompatibilist- friendly strands
(37–8). Since it is not problematic for incompatibilists to grant that sometimes
people invoke a compatibilist understanding of freedom, we are left with the fact
that “in a significant class of cases our responsibility depends on the thesis of
determinism being false” (39). At this juncture, however, a critic might protest
that the simplest way to understand the dispute between Nichols and Nahmias is
either that there is something unified—a folk concept—that is the subject of
dispute between them and that needs settling, or instead there are distinct folk
concepts and it is an open question which is able to underwrite our responsibility
practices. Either way, it does not seem that we are positioned given the current
state of the controversy to decisively rule out a commonsense form of
compatibilism.
12.1.2. Vargas’s Prescriptive Thesis
Next consider Vargas’s prescriptive thesis. Grant Vargas that the commonsense
view of free will and moral responsibility is incompatibilist. And grant as well
that no libertarian theory is viable because it outstrips what is naturalistically
plausible. In doing so, Vargas finds himself in the company of Caruso (2012),
Levy (2011), Pereboom (2001, 2014), G. Strawson (1986), and Waller (1990).
What is Vargas’s argument for why, in opposition to these philosophers, we
should opt for a revisionary form of compatibilism? Why not just go skeptical as
regards the prescriptive question and opt for eliminating responsibility—or at
least a relevant kind of responsibility, one characterized in terms of basic desert?