Responsibility, Ignorance and our Duty

Posted on July 30, 2008
Filed Under Free Will, Philosophy, Religion |

Sorry to keep harping on the free will debate. I know some aren’t interested. I should have some other posts coming as well as the much promised post on revisionist accounts of responsibility. I sort of wanted to get a lot of this out of my system so I could think about other things. I did want to discuss a nice little argument I encountered the other day at Garden of Forking Paths. It was in a comment by Eddy Nahmias. (He attributed it to Randy Clarke)

1. Moral responsibility requires free will. (Typical Libertarian assumption)

2. Free will requires indeterminism (of the right sort). (Ditto)

3. So, we are not morally responsible if indeterminism (of just the right sort) does not occur in us. (from 1 & 2)

4. We do not have good evidence that such indeterminism occurs in us.

5. So, we do not have good evidence that we actually are morally responsible. (from 3 & 4)

6. To treat someone as morally responsible (in a retributivist sense) without good evidence that they are morally responsible is unjust. (To me the more controversial premise - but perhaps defensible in terms of burden of proof)

7. In order to avoid being unjust, we should not treat people as morally responsible (in a retributivist sense).

Now I wanted to discuss this in an LDS setting. It seems to me that the obvious approach of most Libertarians will be that since God does attribute responsibility we can generally attribute it. That is the burden of proof shifts to proof that a particular person isn’t responsible. Further it’s the reverse of this argument that provides the strongest reason to accept free will. That is since (7) is false one of the premises must be false and the chosen one is (4).

I don’t want to argue against that since I think it follows fairly obviously once you accept (1) and (2). Some, such as Fischer, reject (1) but I don’t want to get into that either.

What I do want to do is move the argument down one step and, ignoring for the moment the purported direct intuition of causal connections Blake may ascribe to God, ask what would happen if God didn’t have that ability. That is if God at a fundamental level comes to knowledge the same way you or I do (i.e. is merely an ideal knower) what should his behavior be? My argument the past couple of weeks is that if justification for knowledge is mediated then (4) is false. It would then seem to logically follow that God shouldn’t hold people responsible in a retributivist sense. (He might of course adopt the approach of a medical treatment of people engaged in immoral acts). The problem would then be reconciling this with scriptural views.

If it can’t be reconciled then this would be stronger argument for Blake’s position.

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