Parfit Comes Out...

...as a semi-compatibilist (of sorts).

I’ve just read Chapter Ten of Derek Parfit’s long promised On What Matters (and only Chapter Ten, since I’m disposed to believe that many things matter more than wading through 659 pages on Kantian ethics). In it, Parfit comes out as a ‘reversed’ semi-compatibilist: he’s a compatibilist about free will but an incompatibilist about moral responsibility. A few comments below:

Parfit argues that morality requires freedom on the following grounds:

(1) Our acts cannot be wrong unless we ought have acted differently;
(2) But we ought to have acted differently only if we could have acted differently (‘ought implies can’).
(3) Morality requires that we could have acted differently.

Parfit does not engage with the literature on ought implies can inspired by Frankfurt-style cases, or with Frankfurt-style cases themselves. There are good reasons for thinking that (2) is not secure.

Parfit understands the 'could' of (2) in a hypothetical manner. His compatibilism about free will is based on the respectable thought that our decisions can be responsive to reasons, even though determined. But he gives this thought an odd twist. We should be compatibilists about free will, he holds, because it is ‘worth asking’ how we ought to have acted in the past: reflecting on questions like this may alter how we act in the future. This claim is one that an incompatibilist should accept: I don’t see the argument from ‘it is worth reflecting on how I ought to have acted in the past because so doing may improve the quality of my decisions’ to (what?) ‘I acted freely in the past’ or ‘I act freely now’.

Parfit’s incompatibilism about moral responsibility is based on a very (G.) Strawsonian argument:

(1) If we are morally responsible for our wrongful actions, we deserve to suffer.
(2) We can deserve to suffer only if we are responsible for the state of character that led us to choose as we did.
(3) Responsibility for our character would require the completion of an infinite series of actions,
(4) We cannot be morally responsible for our wrongful actions.

Some comments. By ‘suffer’ Parfit means suffer in Hell. He might therefore be accused of having a hyperbolic conception of moral responsibility (the same accusation commonly aimed at Strawson). Parfit does argue that people can deserve ‘moral dispraise’, even if such dispraise ‘would make them feel very badly about what they have done’. Since that is clearly suffering, the claim that his conception of moral responsibility is hyperbolic seems strengthened.

Parfit adds the following claim: our reasons for wanting others to know that what they have done is wrong and feel bad accordingly are akin to our reasons for wanting others to grieve when a loved one dies.  He doesn't tell us what these reasons are. Off the top of my head, I can come up with two possible reasons for wanting others to grieve in that kind of situation: (a) because the world is somehow a better place if fitting attitudes are expressed; and (b) because agents’ lives will tend to go better if they experience appropriate emotions. Whichever claim is meant by Parfit, though, precisely the same claim could be used to justify (non-hyperbolic) suffering, like ordinary punishment. It might be ‘fitting’ if wrongdoers suffer, and it is a familiar Kantian thought that wrongdoers have a right to punishment, on the grounds that only thereby can they properly reintegrate to the moral community. So the incompatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism seems ill-founded.

Comments

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Neil,

I cannot see the incompatibilism you find in Parfit, unless it is that suffering is incompatible with determinism?

He seems to reject consequentialism, that it can be "fitting" for wrongdoers to suffer.

Because he finds that all our actions are merely events in Kant's phenomenal time (like Jack Smart's block universe), he concludes we are never even justified in wishing ill for evil-doers, merely that we should cease to like them.

And although it might make them feel bad if we have nothing more to do with them, he does not think such "moral dispraise" makes them suffer.

Unless I am misreading him somehow?

Parfit says:

According to the argument we are now discussing:

(J) If our acts were merely events in time, we could never deserve to suffer.

(R) We can deserve to suffer.

Therefore
(S) Our acts are not merely events in time.
We ought, I have claimed, to reject this argument’s conclusion.
Our acts are merely events in time. Since this argument is valid,
and we ought to reject its conclusion, we must reject one of its premises.

Some people would reject (J). There are people who believe
that, though our wrong acts are merely events in time, and
causally inevitable, we could deserve to suffer in Hell. On such
a view, to deserve to suffer, we don’t have to be free, or to be in
any way responsible for being as we are.

Rather than rejecting (J), we ought, I believe, to reject (R). Kant rightly claims that

(J) if our acts were merely events in time, we could not
deserve to suffer.

We can add
(T) Our acts are merely events in time.

Therefore
(U) We cannot deserve to suffer.
Kant, I have said, came close to seeing the truth of (U). Kant
believed that

(V) we could not deserve to suffer if our acts were all causally
inevitable, or were subject to blind chance, and we were not
responsible for our own character.

These things would be true, Kant believed, if our acts were
merely events in time. If Kant had lost his belief in our
noumenal freedom, and come to believe that our acts are merely
events in time, he might have continued to believe (V), and
drawn the conclusion that we cannot deserve to suffer. But he
might instead have ceased to believe (V), concluding that we can
deserve to suffer even if our acts are causally inevitable or subject
to blind chance, and we are not responsible for our own
character. I can merely hope that Kant would have continued
to believe (V), and would have therefore concluded that we
cannot deserve to suffer.

We can deserve many things, such as gratitude, praise, and the
kind of blame that is merely moral dispraise. But no one could
ever deserve to suffer. When people treat us or others wrongly,
we can justifiably be indignant. And we can have reasons to
want these people to understand the wrongness of their acts,
even though that would make them feel very badly about what
they have done. But these reasons are like our reasons to want
people to grieve when those whom they love die. We cannot
justifiably have ill will towards these wrong-doers, wishing things
to go badly for them. Nor can we justifiably cease to have good
will towards them, by ceasing to wish things to go well for them.
We could at most be justified in ceasing to like these people, and
trying, in morally acceptable ways, to have nothing to do with
them."