Free Will A Contemporary Introduction

Three Source Incompatibilist Arguments 155

past and the laws to nonresponsibility for their consequences. As a first pass,
we’ll borrow from van Inwagen’s pithy formulation of the Consequence Argu-
ment (1983: 16, quoted in Chapter 4), modifying it by substituting the notion of
nonresponsibility for not being up to us. So, consider this equally pithy expres-
sion of the Direct Argument:

If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of

nature and events of the remote past. But we are not responsible for what

went on before we were born, and neither are we responsible for what the

laws of nature are. Therefore, we are not responsible for the consequences

of these things (including our present acts).

This formulation of the Direct Argument masks significant and interesting com-
plexity, just as van Inwagen’s similar formulation of the Consequence Argument
did. Here too van Inwagen and other philosophers have developed the argument
in impressive ways, sorting through this complexity in admirable detail. We
shall now explore these issues, but not quite with the same level of detail and
scrutiny we did when assessing the Consequence Argument.
To begin, we need a more developed expression of the argument. The Direct
Argument invokes a compelling pattern of inference applied to modal pro-
positions about nonresponsibility (rather than about power necessity, as in
van Inwagen’s more precise formulation of the Consequence Argument). Non-
responsibility can be understood in terms of what a person is not even partly
morally responsible for. No one is, for instance, even partly morally responsible
for the truths of mathematics, or the fact that water is composed of hydrogen and
oxygen. Intuitively, the pattern of inference drawing upon these modal proposi-
tions about nonresponsibility can be expressed as follows:

If a person is not even partly morally responsible for certain facts, and if she

is not even partly morally responsible for the fact that these facts have a par-

ticular consequence, then she is not even partly morally responsible for the

consequence either.

In short, nonresponsibility transfers from one fact to consequences of it. Here is
an example that van Inwagen offered to help show the appeal of this pattern of
inference, which we can refer to as Snakebite (1983: 187):

If John is bitten by a cobra on his thirtieth birthday, and no one is even

partly morally responsible for this fact, and if a consequence of his being

bitten is that he dies, and no one is even partly morally responsible for this

distinct conditional fact, then no one is even partly morally responsible for

John dying.

This general pattern of inference is applied to determinism to yield an appealing
source incompatibilist argument. The argument requires the assumption that