The purpose of this post is to encourage some sort of discussion about moral responsibility and free will, two topics that interest me quite a bit. I argue that people cannot be held accountable morally - at least not reliably. I will begin with some definitions and an introduction to some of the most prominent views on free will and moral responsibility.

Compatibilism: a solution to the problem between free will and determinism; it is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism.

Incompatibilism: the doctrine that free will and determinism are incompatible.

Determinism: the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Some philosophers have taken determinism to imply that individual human beings have no free will and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.

Free will: the ability to choose between different courses of action unaffected by causes external to the will, or, according to Hobbes, the ability to act without external impediments to the will.

I’ll begin with the typical incompatibilist argument regarding free will:

1. A person acts of her own free will only if she is its ultimate source.
2. If determinism is true, no one is the ultimate source of her actions.
3.Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will.

This argument has heavy implications for moral responsibility: if determinism is true, it is difficult to see how people can be held morally responsible for their decisions; the conditions necessary for anyone’s decisions have already occurred long before said decisions happened; our brains are bound by the laws of cause and effect like any other observable physical process.

A compatibilist reply to the incompatibilist argument might be that all that is required to hold one responsible for one’s actions is the ability to act freely in accordance with one’s will. It remains that even if causal determinism is true and one is not the ultimate source of one’s actions, one is still acting in accordance with their will much of the time, a fact that is compatible with causal determinism. Furthermore, Hobbes asserts that freedom is merely the ability to do what one will in the absence of external impediments. With this new understanding of what it means to act freely it appears that perhaps people can be held morally responsible for their actions.

The compatibilist argument put formally for an instance in which one acts in accordance with an unimpeded will:

1. An agent, x, can be held responsible for an action, a, iff said agent acts in accordance with an unimpeded will.
2. X commits act a in accordance with an unimpeded will.
3. X can be held responsible for act a.

While this might allow for a certain form of moral responsibility, it doesn’t address the fundamental argument raised by the incompatibilist argument - one is still not the ultimate source of one’s actions. That being said, one might argue that it doesn’t need to; it redefines what it means for an act to be free and then establishes a new model for moral responsibility compatible with determinism - not to mention the burden of proof is on the incompatibilist to demonstrate that causal determinism is true to negate said argument. I would argue, however, that the previous argument is not sufficient for establishing moral responsibility for any acts because of the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), which is as follows:

1. An agent is only responsible for an act if said agent could have done otherwise.
2. An agent could have done otherwise only if causal determinism is false.
3. Therefore, an agent is responsible for an action only if causal determinism is false.

Implicit in (2) of this argument is the assumption that no one has power over the facts of the future if determinism is true. This seems to me to be a reasonable claim, but if someone can offer a compelling counterargument I would be receptive.

When the PAP is applied to the compatibilist argument for free will one is left with the mere assertion that people act in accordance with their wills (which is itself compatible with determinism); how can one act freely if they must be able to have chosen otherwise to be held morally responsible for an act, even if they acted free of external impediments? Thus, the burden of proof is shifted to the compatibilist to prove determinism wrong in order to hold people morally responsible for acts. This leads to a gray zone in which it is uncertain if people can be held culpable, and it seems to me that until it is proven that determinism is false we should withhold judgement on whether or not people can be held morally responsible for their actions.

I am aware that there are more contemporary forms of compatibilism but I thought this would be a good place to start a discussion.