Three Source Incompatibilist Arguments 173Strawsonian fashion to blame him and to want to punish him harshly, as is evid-
enced by our strong negative reactive emotions. But, Watson notes, when we
really do examine carefully the life- history of a case like Harris’s, which
involved cruelty and misery from birth onwards, our reactive emotions begin to
soften, and our resentment is mixed with sympathy. There is a concern here that
learning of the sources of even an extremely evil person’s history can issue in an
exempting or at least a mitigating stance, which results in a challenge to a com-
patibilist diagnosis. Indeed, incompatibilists might contend that it suggests a dif-
ferent path to a source incompatibilist conclusion, one that is not built on
imaginary thought experiments about teams of neuroscientists manipulating
agents, but by way of actual, real- life cases.
Suggestions for Further Reading
For an excellent book devoted to assessing all of these arguments for incompati-
bilism, as well as others, see:
Haji, Ishtiyaque. 2009. Incompatibilism’s Allure. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview
Press.
Here we offer a sampling of works related to each of the three distinct arguments:
The Ultimacy Argument
Clarke, Randolph. 2005. “On an Argument for the Impossibility of Moral Responsib-
ility.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29: 13–24.
McKenna, Michael. 2008d. “Ultimacy & Sweet Jane.” In Nick Trakakis and Daniel
Cohen, eds., Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing: 186–208.
Smilansky, Saul. 2003. “The Argument from Shallowness.” Philosophical Studies 115:
257–82.
Strawson, Galen. 1994. “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility.” Philosophical
Studies 75: 5–24.
The Direct Argument
Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. 1998. “The Direct Argument for Incompatibi-
lism.” In Responsibility and Control: An Essay on Moral Responsibility. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press: chapter 7.
McKenna, Michael. 2008c. “Saying Goodbye to the Direct Argument the Right Way.”
Philosophical Review 117 (3): 349–83.
Ravizza, Mark. 1994. “Semicompatibilism and the Transfer of Non- Responsibility.” Phil-
osophical Studies 75: 61–94.
Shabo, Seth. 2010b. “The Fate of the Direct Argument and the Case for Incompatibi-
lism.” Philosophical Studies 150: 405–24.
van Inwagen, Peter. 1983. “What Our Not Having Free Will Would Mean.” In An Essay
on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press: chapter 5.