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Over at the Leiter reports, Brian gives an overview of the state of Nietzsche studies, and asks philosophers to post on 'where the action is' in their own subfields. Since I'm interested in folks' perception of the state of the art in our subfield(s) (one or many?), I encourage you to comment on where the action is in free will/moral responsibility. Are Frankfurt-style cases the cutting edge or now passe? The consequence argument? X-philosophy?
One of the benefits of compatibilism about determinism and moral responsibility is that our ordinary conception of ourselves isn't "held hostage" to any arcane scientific discoveries. Or, at least, this is a sentiment that I've heard expressed by some compatibilists (notably John Fischer). So even if it turns out that the appropriate interpretation of quantum mechanics (for instance) is deterministic, we don't have to give up our view of ourselves as responsible.
Given this sentiment, I take it that it's as much a part of compatibilism that moral responsibility is compatible with indeterminism, as well. But one rarely hears this claim defended. And now I'm wondering about it.
Consider, for instance, Fischer and Ravizza's account of guidance control, which is supposedly both necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility (at least regarding the freedom-relevant condition of MR), no matter whether determinism is true or false. According to F&R, an agent is responsible for an action that issues from the agent's own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism. And they spell out what it means for a mechanism to be moderately reasons-responsive in terms of how the mechanism responds at other relevant (though not necessarily accessible) possible worlds.
My worry is -- is their account of guidance control compatible with indeterminism? Suppose that the world is fundamentally indeterministic in a way that doesn't get cancelled out, so we have indeterminism at the macro level as well. If the indeterminism is at the right place, we'll now have two worlds that are exactly the same in terms of the past and the laws of nature, but that differ with respect to the action that issues from the mechanism under consideration. Is this a problem for moderate reasons-responsiveness?
More specifically, I'm worried that something like the Luck Objection that usually is raised against libertarian accounts of free will might be legitimately raised against this particular compatibilist account as well. Does the agent really have guidance control if what action actually issues from the mechanism under consideration appears to be a mere matter of luck? And if in some of the relevant possible worlds, the mechanism issues in A, but in other relevant worlds the mechanism issues in B, is the mechanism still appropriately reasons-responsive, even though the reasons would seem to be the same in both worlds?
I haven't thought this through too much, so I'm not saying that this objection is a good one, but I'd be interested to hear what people think.
After much soul-searching and procrastination, the Willies committee has decided to suspend operations. As we were putting together the category list, we received an email laying out some concerns about handing out semi-serious Willies awards (like best book, best article of 2004-2005 etc.). The author said (a) that it would harm the non-competitive spirit of the Garden, and (b) that most of us hadn't had time to read the books and articles that have come out that recently anyway. I have my doubts about (a), but from personal experience I can vouch for (b). Taking out the serious categories left us with a bunch of jokey categories many of which have been offered by Gardeners. But while joke categories are great, it seemed silly to have an involved semi-formal nominating and voting process, and even sillier to then take the nominees to the big guns in the free will debate. And so the 2nd Annual Willies was put on hold. Any suggestions about how (or whether) to resolve this problem are welcome, either here or via email to Manuel or me. The good news is that the earlier post provoked some lively discussion that can hopefully be developed in the future.
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