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Free Will Skepticism and Personhood as a Desert Base

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Benjamin Vilhauer
Benjamin Vilhauer*
Affiliation:
William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ07470, USA
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Extract

In contemporary free will theory, a significant number of philosophers are once again taking seriously the possibility that human beings do not have free will, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. (Free will is understood here as whatever satisfies the control condition of moral responsibility.) Free will theorists commonly assume that giving up the belief that human beings are morally responsible implies giving up all our beliefs about desert. But the consequences of giving up the belief that we are morally responsible are not quite this dramatic. Giving up the belief that we are morally responsible undermines many, and perhaps most, of the desert claims we are pretheoretically inclined to accept. But it does not undermine desert claims based on the sheer fact of personhood. Even in the absence of belief in moral responsibility, personhood-based desert claims require us to respect persons and their rights. So personhood-based desert claims can provide a substantial role for desert in free will skeptics’ ethical theories.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 489 - 511
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2009

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