Constitutive Moral Luck and Strawson's Argument for the Impossibility of Moral Responsibility

Abstract

Galen Strawson's Basic Argument is that because self-creation is required to be truly morally responsible and self-creation is impossible, it is impossible to be truly morally responsible for anything. I contend that the Basic Argument is unpersuasive and unsound. First, I argue that the moral luck debate shows that the self-creation requirement appears to be contradicted and supported by various parts of our commonsense ideas about true moral responsibility, and that this ambivalence undermines the only reason that Strawson gives for the self-creation requirement. Second, I argue that the self-creation requirement is so demanding that either it is an implausible requirement for a species of true moral responsibility that we take ourselves to have or it is a plausible requirement of a species of true moral responsibility that we have never taken ourselves to have. Third, I explain that Strawson overgeneralizes from instances of constitutive luck that obviously undermine true moral responsibility to all kinds of constitutive luck.

Free Will, Self‐Creation, and the Paradox of Moral Luck

“…There has been a promising uptick in explicit defenses of the Basic Argument over the last decade (cf. Coates 2017, Hartman 2018, Hendrickson 2007, Istvan 2011, Klemick 2013 (i) it must not stop the regress in an ad hoc or otherwise arbitrary way (e.g., by insisting, without argument, that the regress in unproblematic or uninteresting 46 ), and (ii) it must not answer the regress in a way that gives rise to another vicious regress, where this new regress stopped in an ad hoc or arbitrary way (e.g., by insisting, without argument, that the new regress in not problematic and/or is not sufficiently interesting to warrant a reply 47 ). So, even if the unstoppable regress challenge does not decisively establish the impossibility of free will or moral responsibility, it gives us a distinct metric by which to measure the "cost" of possibilism-friendly accounts of free will.…”

“…according to which the problem of free will and determinism is a narrow debate about whether causal-relation luck-perhaps in conjunction with circumstantial luck 5 -precludes free will (cf. Hartman 2017, Latus 2001, Nelkin 2019, Sartorio 2019. 6 It also implies that we need a noncausal explanation for what makes it impossible-at least for beings like us-to act freely when determinism is true.…”

“…Perhaps one could plausibly argue that posterior luck is a fourth category of luck by claiming that it (unlike antecedent luck) results from our epistemic limitations in a way that antecedent luck does not (cf. Levy 2016, Hartman 2017, Herdova 2019, but I will not address this position here. 11.…”

“…The original "lorry driver" case of posterior luck is from Bernard Williams (1976). For a review of refined versions of such cases and their import, see Hartman (2017). 12.…”

Kant Does Not Deny Resultant Moral Luck

“…9 The idea that we mistakenly attribute the denial of resultant moral luck to Kant by collapsing different kinds of moral evaluation has a striking parallel in the moral luck literature. In Hartman (2016. It is often unrecognized that Kant thinks that no one actually has a good will on this reading of the good will.…”