292 Revisionism and Some Remaining Issues
If McKenna is correct about this, then it is open to Vargas to advance his com-
patibilist proposal in a nonrevisionist way by first resisting the incompatibilist at
the descriptive stage. If instead he is committed to his incompatibilist diagnosis
of the folk concept, then he appears forced to agree that his compatibilist pro-
posal is at odds with the folk concept. Absent this, Vargas is in danger of chang-
ing the subject by remaining committed to his revisionist proposal. If this is so,
then it’s not that there is this independent subject matter which is successfully
accessed and described by Vargas’s proposed compatibilist theory, while the
rejected incompatibilist folk concept gets that subject matter wrong. It is rather
that one concept is given up, another one is fashioned, and then the latter just
picks out a different subject matter from what the former picks out. This is what
McCormick (2013) calls the reference- anchoring problem.
Pereboom considers the possibility that what Vargas proposes is a matter of
revising our conception of moral responsibility but not the concept of it.^3 This
would allow Vargas to avoid the charge that he is changing the subject. But then
Pereboom asks whether the conception is:
near enough to the folk’s to count as a natural extension of it, one that can
do enough of the work the folk conception does in adjudicating questions of
moral responsibility and punishment, and in governing our attitudes to the
actions of those around us. (Pereboom, 2009c: 25)Here, as McCormick (2013) explains, if it is not, then it seems we have com-
pletely different concepts and a changing of the subject, as McKenna suggests.
But if it is near enough to the folk’s, then we have a way to anchor the reference
of the concept so that Vargas can coherently defend his contention that by way
of his revisionist proposal he is not just talking past his interlocutors.
Cast in these terms, consider how those like Pereboom would measure Var-
gas’s success in avoiding the charge of changing the subject. For the concept
Vargas proposes to remain a natural extension of the folk concept and so only be
a revised conception of a shared concept, it would have to preserve a basic
desert- entailing form of responsibility, since according to moral responsibility
skeptics like Pereboom, this is all that is meant to be at issue in the debate. But
since Vargas (2013: 249–56) wishes to reject this strong link to basic desert-
entailing responsibility, it seems he is not merely altering our conception of
responsibility. He is proposing a new concept, just as McKenna charges. Ironic-
ally, if Vargas’s proposal is understood as changing the subject, basic desert
moral responsibility skeptics such as Pereboom are in a position to endorse Var-
gas’s compatibilist proposal, because they are open to preserving a socially
beneficial set of moral responsibility practices which does not presuppose basic
desert (Section 11.6).
Vargas, however, is alive to these challenges. Against them, he argues that it
is wrong to tie our responsibility practices so closely to basic desert (2013: 257).
But if we bracket this debate about basic desert, does Vargas avoid the
McKenna/Pereboom charge of changing the subject? According to McCormick