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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2010
Many people seem to find it quite impossible to doubt that if a person did not do something freely, then he can be neither praised nor blamed for doing it. This assumption is shared by people with very different views about freedom, determinism and moral responsibility. It is held by most ‘libertarians’, who, to preserve moral responsibility, reject determinism. It is held by ‘hard determinists’, who accept determinism and therefore reject moral responsibility; and it is held by ‘soft determinists’, who accept determinism, but argue that determinism does not exclude any kind of freedom that is relevant to whether a person may be held responsible.
1 The expression ‘good excuse’, although we will not adopt it, might be preferable here, since in ordinary speech there is some confusion about the concept of an excuse: in ‘That is just an excuse’, an excuse is treated as a lame or unsuccessful plea; while ‘That is no excuse’ does not mean ‘That is not a lame plea’.
2 An example of the latter procedure would be to argue that a person must be excused of a charge of negligence on the ground that he is a careless person, and therefore was not free to act circumspectly.
3 Throughout the above examples I have used expressions like ‘he will often be excused’ and ‘he may be excused’, in order to avoid the objection that there are cases of any of those general kinds in which a person would not be excused. I do not wish to deny that, but only to say that in at least some cases of any of the general kinds indicated, a person would be excused.
4 Of course, societies in which such extreme requirements were imposed could be imagined; but that only emphasizes the point that the key question here is not one of freedom, but of what to regard as reasonable or workable demands.
