Free Will A Contemporary Introduction

Three Source Incompatibilist Arguments 161

compatibilist would see it—and one for which she is (allegedly) responsible.
Suppose an incompatibilist critic were to deploy a TNR principle by pointing out
that just prior to FFA, she was not morally responsible for the state she was in.
And, assuming determinism is true, she was not morally responsible for it being
the case that, given that prior state (and the laws), she would subsequently
perform that act FFA. Hence, the incompatibilist would conclude, she is not
morally responsible for FFA. In response, a compatibilist would be right to claim
that without independent backing for a principle like TNR, the incompatibilist is
not entitled to deploy it here without begging the question against the compatibi-
list. It is a transparent fact about what compatibilism comes to that, at some
point, an agent’s first free and responsible act will arise from antecedent con-
ditions over which she had no control and for which she was not responsible.
What this suggests, McKenna has argued, is that prior to the incompatibilist
applying TNR to a case like the above case of Ann by way of an argument like
the Direct Argument, she first needs confirming instances of how the principle
can apply that are not question- begging instances. Cases like Snakebite and
Plato will not do, since they are plainly beside the point. They are not in any
way about effects of prior nonresponsibility facts on normally functioning exer-
cises of agency.
Some critics of McKenna’s assault on the Direct Argument (e.g., Haji, 2010;
Schnall and Widerker, 2012) have countered by pointing out that there are
various familiar cases of nonresponsibility transferring from one fact to another
implied by the first, where the latter involves exercises of normal deliberative
agency, cases that are not question- begging regarding the present dispute
between compatibilist and incompatibilists. These cases, these critics contend,
could be used as credible confirming instances of a TNR principle. In one
(Schnall and Widerker, 2012: 29–36), a commanding officer in the military rep-
rimands a subordinate, Jones, for lying about being sick and missing work. The
officer happened to see someone frolicking on the beach, Smith, who looked like
Jones, and with this good evidence at hand, proceeded to issue Jones a severe
reprimand. This appears to be a solid confirming instance of TNR:

The officer is not responsible (in the sense of being blameworthy) for the

fact that he sees someone who looks like Jones on the beach (and so comes

to believe it is Jones in a way that is not epistemically culpable), nor for the

fact that if he sees someone he believes to be Jones on the beach, then he

reprimands Jones. So, finally, he is not responsible for (unjustly) reprimand-

ing Jones.

Call this case Reprimand. Will examples such as Reprimand suffice to meet
McKenna’s challenge? In our estimation, it seems that they will not. While we
can simply grant the judgments of nonresponsibility (in the sense of not being
blameworthy) in Reprimand and in similar cases are all true, the question is
whether there is special reason to postulate a principle like TNR to explain the
reasoning about them. There are familiar principles regarding nonculpable