Defending Hard Incompatibilism Again - Derk Pereboom

morally responsible should not be accorded unmodified weight unless it can be shown that there is a
relevant difference between the manipulation cases and ordinary deterministic ones (the soft-line
reply, in McKenna’s terminology (McKenna, forthcoming)), or supposing that this reply is
unavailable, that it is more plausible to judge that Plum is morally responsible in the manipulation
examples than that he is not responsible in the ordinary deterministic cases (the hard-line reply). But
to my mind, neither of these replies has been established as compelling; (see (Pereboom 2005 and
Pereboom forthcoming) for a response to hard-line replies, McKenna’s in particular.)
Thus, in answer to Mele, manipulation per se cannot explain Plum’s non-responsibility in
Cases 1 and 2, nor can manipulation that bypasses agent’s ordinary capacities to control their mental
lives over time. Causal determination remains a candidate for the best explanation of his non-
responsibility in these cases, and this does not conflict with manipulation absent causal determinism
yielding non-responsibility in other examples. Finally, if the incompatibilist’s concern is to be
engaged, our initial intuition that agents can be morally responsible in ordinary deterministic
situations should not automatically be accorded unmodified weight in our reflective assessment of
the manipulation cases, and so ruling out causal determinism as the best explanation of Plum’s non-
responsibility by means of this intuition would seem dialectically inappropriate.
9. George Sher on blame and the palatability of hard incompatibilism.
In his recent book, In Praise of Blame, George Sher takes my hard incompatibilist position
to task for disallowing blame and allowing only etiolated responses to wrongdoing (Sher 2006). He
begins by citing two passages from my article “Determinism as Dente” (Pereboom 1995):
Instead of blaming people, the determinist might appeal to the practices of moral
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