[...]... consequences of determinism As McKay and Johnson write, “assuming that the world is indeterministic is a problematic way to argue against Beta, since Beta is to be used in drawing out the consequences of determinism If every counterexample to Beta had to be indeterministic, then a very simple revision would suffice to maintain van Inwagen’s argument for incompatibilism” (McKay and Johnson 1996:118)... as Crisp and Warfield (2000) have convincingly shown Their point could be put as follows In this (deterministic) world, if I tossed the coin, the past and the natural laws, together with my tossing, would imply a determinate result (either heads or tails) Remember that I do not in fact toss the coin So it is true that P (the coin does not land heads) and it is true that Q (the coin does not land tails),... premises 4 and 6 of Van Inwagen’s Third Formal Argument also support premise 2 in Finch and Warfield’s incompatibilist argument As they contend, “the conjunction (P & L) offers a description of what might be called the ‘broad past’—the complete state of the world at a time in the distant past including the laws of nature We maintain…that the broad past is fixed in just the way that Van Inwagen maintains that... fixed (and that the laws are fixed)” (Finch and Warfield 1998:523) In a recent article (Huemer 2000), Michael Huemer has presented a related way of defending the incompatibility between determinism and freedom to do otherwise Instead of replacing rule Beta as such, he proposes to change the reading of Van Inwagen’s operator N Remember that, according to Van Inwagen, “N P” is to be read as “P, and no... certain instant However, it is not clear what a complete description of the past or of the state of the world (at a certain instant) can be And if this notion lacks a reasonably definite content, this will infect the Determinism and alternative possibilities (SMR’s premises A and B) 11 thesis of determinism as well, thus compromising the truth of SMR’s premise A and preventing the argument from getting... inevitable outcomes of the past and the natural laws, then, according to incompatibilists, free will is undermined, for there seems to remain no room for either of its aspects, namely alternatives and deep origination or control Since these, in turn, are the freedom-relevant necessary conditions for moral responsibility, this property loses its footing as well But if human choices and actions are instead... means of the following example (cf McKay and Johnson 1996:115) Suppose that I do not toss a coin, but could have done it Let P be the proposition expressed by “the coin does not land heads”, and Q the one expressed by “the coin does not land tails” In this case, both “N P” and “N Q” are true “N P” is true, for the coin does not land heads (it does not land at all, for it is not tossed) and nobody could... attempts to argue for incompatibilism without the aid of Transfer rules Another interesting proposal on these lines can be found in a recent article by Ted Warfield (cf Warfield 2000) And, even more recently, Peter Unger has argued for the incompatibility of determinism and freedom to do otherwise on the basis of, as he puts it, “a line of thinking so perfectly simple and, I think, so obviously correct... certain act (such as choosing, or deciding, or trying, etc.) and so it does not lead to an infinite regress The conditional analysis may therefore stop with C* or, alternatively, it can go on with causal conditions that should have been met in order for the agent to be able to have had those reasons Given determinism, this causal chain may well be potentially infinite, but this regress is not vicious, in. .. derived from B* and C* (and vice versa) Contrary to appearances, however, this derivation is not correct, in that it contains a fallacy of equivocation concerning the term “could” In C*, assuming determinism (as one should, since the analysis is intended to show the compatibility of alternative possibilities and determinism) “could” means roughly “it is logically possible that” But, in A, “could” means, . Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory 1. The Contradictions of Modern Moral Philosophy Ethics after Wittgenstein Paul Johnston 2. Kant, Duty and Moral. responsibility and subjects them to sustained and penetrating critical analysis. Moral Responsibility lays out the intricate dialectic involved in these issues in