12 Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Determinism
what, for instance, a person’s moral obligations are. It is another to judge that
she is morally responsible for whether or not she lived up to or failed to comply
with them.^4
One of the main controversies in the free will debate concerns the skeptical
thesis that no one has free will and as a result no one is morally responsible—at
least in one key sense (e.g., Pereboom, 2001, 2014). Even if such a skeptical
thesis were established as true, this would not by itself be grounds for a thor-
oughgoing skepticism about morality—a skepticism according to which no one
performs acts that are morally right or wrong, good or bad, virtuous or vicious.
Barring further assumptions, such moral evaluations would not be impugned just
by virtue of establishing that no one is ever morally responsible for anything. It
should, however, be noted that there are further moral theses that, if true, would
yield this result. For instance, suppose morality is a system of categorical imper-
atives expressing agents’ moral duties and demarcating the domain of moral
right and wrong. Assume in addition that a necessary condition of any such
imperative applying to an agent is that she is free to comply with it or instead act
in opposition to what it demands. If it were established that no one is free in that
sense, then morality would apply to no one. It is in this way that free will, moral
responsibility, and morality itself could be tightly linked. But this is a special
and complex proposal, and in general it should not be assumed that morality
itself stands or falls with the prospects for free will and moral responsibility.
But what is it to be morally responsible for something? It is commonplace
in these discussions to note that moral responsibility is only one sort of respons-
ibility. There are other varieties as well, including merely causal responsib-
ility, and more complex and evaluatively loaded notions, such as legal
responsibility. Perhaps we can also speak of aesthetic responsibility, prudential
responsibility, or even athletic responsibility. Mere causal responsibility, which
is not evaluatively loaded, is just a matter of being the cause of something—a
matter of brute fact, so to speak. A lightning bolt can be causally responsible for
something, like a house fire. And a person can be merely causally responsible—
but not morally, legally, or otherwise responsible—for something too, as when a
person innocently flips a light switch causing a short- circuit and then a house
fire. But as far as these other dimensions of responsibility go—moral, legal, aes-
thetic, athletic—what they all share is the potential for evaluation of an agent in
light of an evaluation of her action. For instance, it is because of Matilda’s doing
morally wrong by violating her obligation (an evaluation of her action) that we
can raise a further evaluative question about her in light of her wrongdoing. Was
she responsible for her so acting?
What distinguishes moral responsibility from legal responsibility or any other
variety of responsibility is a matter of the evaluative dimension of an agent’s
actions (moral, rather than legal, aesthetic, prudential, and so on), and then an
assessment of her exercising her agency along that dimension. As far as the
responsibility assessments themselves are concerned, the two fundamental types of
assessment are praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Naturally, when the issue is
moral responsibility, then the assessments will involve moral praiseworthiness and