An Examination of the Direct Argument against Moral Responsibility

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Authors

Assistant professor in Islamic Sciences and Cultures Academy

Abstract

Relying on the two conditions of the “necessity of open alternatives to moral agents” and “genuine choice of the person from among the alternatives” as well as the agent being a true origin of his or her actions, incompatibilists believe that causal determination is incompatible with free will and moral responsibility. One such philosopher is van Inwagen who brings a direct argument—without drawing on notions such as “the ability to do otherwise” or “inevitability”—to show that any causal determinism is incompatible with the responsibility of moral agents, because, in his view, such an inevitable necessity amounts to the absence of the agent’s free will and moral responsibility. In this paper, we show that the first premise of this argument, and the picture van Inwagen provides for the relationship between causal necessity and free will in human actions, are unacceptable and objectionable.

Keywords

References

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Naqd Va Nazar
Volume 23, Issue 89
May 2018
Pages 57-74

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