288 Revisionism and Some Remaining Issues
philosophical incompatibilism has its limitations” (29). But doing so does at
least help reveal a “natural understanding of the sense of ability relevant to the
free will problem” (29).
Turning to Frankfurt’s argument against an alternative- possibilities condition
on moral responsibility, Vargas challenges the relevance of Frankfurt- defenders’
limiting the debate to robust alternatives, which includes a constraint of norm-
ative relevance. (See our discussion of robustness in Section 5.2.) About
McKenna’s (2003) proposal for robustness, Vargas asks why we should assume
that normative relevance is a constraint on folk intuitions. As he notes, it is pos-
sible “that our ordinary concepts have normatively irrelevant conditions built
into them” (32). He then contends that, at the “level of characterizing the archi-
tecture of our ordinary moral thought, the normative relevance demand is inap-
propriate” (32). If so, then those debating Frankfurt’s argument in terms of
robustness are working from a misguided and false assumption—at least insofar
as they are attempting to uncover how our actual concepts of freedom and
responsibility work.
At this juncture, a more conventionally oriented theorist—compatibilist or
incompatibilist—might object to Vargas’s grounds for identifying what the
commonsense notion of moral responsibility is, or instead, what the relationship
is between familiar styles of philosophical argumentation and our folk concept, a
distinction Vargas himself invokes in distinguishing between philosophical
incompatibilism and folk psychological incompatibilism. One way to evaluate
the credibility of an argument like the Consequence Argument by whether it
bottoms out in premises that can be grounded in unobjectionable folk concepts.
Prior to thinking through the argument, many will be inclined to construe the
disputed ability in incompatibilist terms. Vargas is right about this. But isn’t the
point of the argument itself as a piece of serious philosophy to attempt to show
that under scrutiny those initial impressions are vindicated? And if they are not
vindicated, doesn’t this help to cast doubt on those initial impressions? That is,
one way to construe traditional forms of philosophical argumentation at least in
this area of philosophy is in terms of their helping us to clarify what our
commonsense concepts really come to, or instead, what they really commit us
to. Thus, the more conventional theorist might protest, before we draw incom-
patibilist conclusions about what our folk concept is, we actually have to hash
out the philosophical arguments themselves. If so, then Vargas’s indirect
remarks about the Consequence Argument cannot help establish his descriptive
thesis; he’ll have to take it up directly if he wants to draw upon it as evidence for
a descriptive thesis that is incompatibilist in character.
A similar point applies to Vargas’s assessment of Frankfurt’s argument. He
suggests that worries about robust alternatives simply might have no relevance
to the folk notion, since that notion might after all have elements that are norma-
tively irrelevant. Of course this is possible. But those like Fischer (1994),
McKenna (2003), and Pereboom (2001, 2014) who have sought to limit the
debate to robust alternatives have done so by taking steps drawing on conceptual
resources—typically by way of thought experiments—all of which are meant to