Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Determinism 15Another requirement on being morally accountable is an epistemic one. A
person who is blameworthy must understand or at least be able to understand
that what she is doing is morally wrong (or bad or vicious). Likewise, our excus-
ing practices bear this out. We excuse people who, through no fault of their own,
did not know that the poison was placed in the ketchup jar, or that turning the
light switch on would alert a burglar, and so on.
Now consider the distinction between morally responsible agency and being
morally responsible for something. Morally responsible agency in the account-
ability sense is a matter of status—a matter of being a person of a certain sort,
one who is sufficiently developed or capable that she can be held to account for
her conduct. Young children, the insane, and the severely mentally disabled,
while being persons, are not morally responsible agents in the accountability
sense. They are not candidates for being held to moral account for their conduct.
Free will, as we shall understand it, is an ability that is a requirement for being a
morally responsible agent in the accountability sense.^8 Acting freely, insofar as
it is an exercise of the free will ability, is a requirement for being morally
responsible in this sense for what one does.
While naturally we will be interested in various cases in which there is some
dispute as to whether a person acted freely, the larger question informing the
free will debate is not just about whether this act or that act was a free one but
about whether and how there might be agents who act with free will. On a skep-
tical view about the existence of agents with free will, assuming free will is a
necessary condition for moral accountability, no one is a morally responsible
agent in the accountability sense.
Two points are worth noting here. First, it should be clear that if no one had
free will and no one was a morally responsible agent in the accountability sense,
one could not conclude from this alone that there were no persons. Our conception
of what persons are would be revised insofar as we presume that most persons are
or will develop into morally responsible agents in this sense. But free will skepti-
cism would not amount to a wholesale rejection of the thesis that there are persons.
Second, we can now come to see a less commonly registered manner in which the
free will debate is a distinctly metaphysical issue. The commonly registered
assumption is that this debate concerns a metaphysical issue because it attends to
the question of how there might be agents who act with free will given various
constraints about how the natural world is ordered. (This is a topic we will soon
consider in detail.) However, a different way to see the free will debate as a meta-
physical issue is in terms of the metaphysics of personhood. Persons are regarded
as distinct sorts of beings within the domain of conscious, minded creatures; and
one especially interesting issue concerns what distinguishes persons from these
other creatures with minds. Questions of free will and moral responsibility are then
themselves questions about, at best, a narrower class of beings—persons who
satisfy both epistemic and control conditions of a sort that constitutes their being
morally responsible agents in the accountability sense. This would mark out a dis-
tinctive class of persons. The free will debate has independent metaphysical
importance insofar as it asks whether and how we can understand such beings.