Defending Hard Incompatibilism Again - Derk Pereboom

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common between the deterministic and indeterministic cases is that Plum is manipulated, and he contends that causal determination not being the best explanation is also supported by the intuition that agents can be morally responsible in ordinary causally deterministic scenarios (which don’t involve manipulation or other monkey-business). Thus the better explanation for Plum’s non- responsibility in these earlier cases is not his being causally determined, but rather his being manipulated. However, the best explanation in the four-case argument for Plum’s non-responsibility in Cases 1 and 2 cannot be manipulation by other agents, since if in those cases the manipulators are replaced by machines that randomly form in space and that have the same effect on Plum as the manipulators do, the intuition that Plum is not morally responsible persists (Pereboom 2001, 115-6). This is a key part of the argument, and to overturn it, a stronger case needs to be made that manipulation can be the best explanation for non-responsibility in these cases. One might contend that manipulation either by other agents or by machines is the best explanation for Plum’s non- responsibility, but then one would need to specify the difference between machine-manipulation and ordinary causal determination that would explain in a principled and satisfactory way why an agent can be responsible in the ordinary case but not when machine-manipulated. This I think cannot be done. Furthermore, the fact that we can substitute an indeterministic for a deterministic case and still have the intuition that Plum is not morally responsible (in effect I endorse this idea in Pereboom 2001, pp. 41-54) does not show that determinism isn’t the best explanation for non-responsibility in deterministic Cases 1 and 2. Here is an analogy. 13 Imagine that a dam at one end of a reservoir 13 I provide this example in Pereboom (2007, 169-70), and here I embellish my account by responding to Mele’s reply in (Mele 2007, 204). 30
would break if the reservoir were filled with more than one billion gallons of water, because the dam could not withstand the pressure that this volume of water would exert. Suppose the reservoir is in fact filled with more than one billion gallons of water, and the dam breaks. It is natural to say here: “what explains the dam’s breaking is the water pressure.” However, someone might object: “if the reservoir were filled with more than one billion gallons of oil, it would also have broken. So the water pressure doesn’t explain the dam’s breaking.” To this the correct response would be: some true causal explanations set out the actual sufficient conditions for an event’s occurring, and accordingly the explanation by way of the water pressure is true. At the same time, there is an explanation common to both the water pressure and the oil pressure scenarios that is in a sense deeper than the water pressure explanation: liquid pressure higher than a certain level caused the dam to break. Moreover, the water-pressure explanation doesn’t compete with the more general, deeper explanation – they are explanations at different levels of generality (Pereboom 2005, 2007). 14 This example shows that an explanation that lays out sufficient causal conditions for X can be true even if X would still result if some features of those sufficient causal conditions were altered; and also that in such cases there can be a deeper and more general explanation for X, common to both the actual and the counterfactual situation. Thus even if Plum would still be non-responsible for his act of murder if the determinism in Case 2 were changed to some kind of indeterminism, determinism might still explain his non-responsibility in Case 2, while a more general fact, such as the presence of causal circumstances that preclude responsibility-relevant control, might explain his non-responsibility in both cases. In my broader story, causal determinism precludes moral responsibility for the more general reason that it is a type of causal circumstance that precludes 14 I agree with Mele’s point (2007, 205) that this fact about non-competition of different levels of 31
Page 1 and 2: Defending Hard Incompatibilism Agai
Page 3 and 4: incompatibilism I advocate takes no
Page 5 and 6: The intuition that underlies the pr
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Page 35 and 36: actions, and if we were, we would o
Page 37 and 38: admonishment and encouragement. One
Page 39 and 40: others for theirs” (Sher 2006, 10
Page 41 and 42: References Baker, L. (2006). “Mor
Page 43 and 44: Mele, A, and D. Robb (1998). "Rescu

Defending Hard Incompatibilism Again - Derk Pereboom

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