Three Source Incompatibilist Arguments 171So, according to Pereboom, the appropriate initial response toward his Case 4 by
members of the pertinent target audience is the neutral inquiring response. But
what kind of clarifying considerations would be of use for such an audience?
Pereboom writes:
adducing an analogy in which one’s intuitions are clearer might itself count
as the relevant sort of clarifying consideration. In a situation in which the
neutral inquiring response to an ordinary determined agent is at first epi-
stemically rational, it may be that an analogous manipulation case functions
as a clarifying consideration that makes rational the belief that the ordinary
determined agent is not morally responsible. (162)As Pereboom sees it, intuitions about a case like Case 1 or Case 2 are clearly
friendly to incompatibilism, and these cases provide the right sort of analogy to
Case 4 to help clarify the rationality of one’s beliefs. This is so, even granting
that attention to the agential and moral properties of Plum in Case 1 (carrying
over from Case 4) do lend some weight to a compatibilist diagnosis.^23
The dispute between Pereboom and McKenna—that is, the dispute between
us, your co-authors—appears to hinge primarily upon these two interrelated
questions: In light of cases like Case 1 and Case 2, has the neutral inquiring
audience been given sufficient reason to move away from an open- minded
agnosticism and toward an incompatibilist conclusion? Or does the hardline
compatibilist have sufficient resources to maintain that, once set out, it remains
rational for such an audience to remain neutral—thus persisting in treating it as
an open question whether determined agents are free and responsible?^24 We will
not pursue the matter here, except to note that McKenna thinks Pereboom is
deluded, and Pereboom thinks McKenna is bat- shit crazy.
One further question we have not pursued here is whether the sorts of closer-
to-real- life cases McKenna and Arpaly identify should carry greater or instead
lesser weight (as in contrast with more remote cases) in assessing what it would
be rational for a neutral inquiring audience to believe. McKenna (2008a; 2014)
thinks that we should assign greater probative value to the closer- to-real- life
cases, which (no surprise) are friendlier to a compatibilist diagnosis. Pereboom
(2008b; 2014) thinks we should assign greater probative value to the more eso-
teric cases like his Case 1. He points out that we do not ordinarily bring to bear
on our judgments of responsibility any theory about the general causal nature of
the universe that might threaten their rationality. The Spinozistic concern is that
in ordinary cases such judgments will have been shaped by a supposition of
indeterministic free will. The local and remote manipulation cases may be artifi-
cial, but the artificiality is required to make the deterministic causation salient,
while for the ordinary cases the concern is that it is not, and thus is readily sup-
pressed. On this issue, Dana Nelkin concurs:
One might argue that their unrealistic quality helps ensure that we are focused
on the stipulated features, and that we aren’t implicitly but unconsciously