Reasons-Responsive Theories and the Nature of Reasons

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211120.059How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Free will; Determinism; Reasons-responsive theories; Source compatibilism

Abstract

In the contemporary free will debate between compatibilism — the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism, and incompatibilism — that free will is incompatible with determinism, many scholars are sympathetic to compatibilism, yet disagree in how the position is best characterized. As one of the most important branches of source compatibilism, reasons-responsive theories attempt to address an important issue, namely, what type of person can be regarded as moral agents. There are several controversial points within the theory. This paper aims to show that reasons-responsive theories fail as a solution to the free will debate, to the extent that they remain silent on the issue of the nature of reasons. It is this silence and inadequacy that constitute a rebuttal to reasons-responsive theories. In what follows I will propose a dilemma to reasons-responsive theories: if moral reasons are objective in the sense that one could be wrong about them, it appears that one must be a moral expert to possess the so-called “reasons-reactivity”, a necessary condition for the possession of free will. This will later be shown to be deeply implausible. If moral reasons are instead subjective in the sense that whether one has a moral reason to do X crucially depends on his mental states, then reasons-responsiveness seems to have no connection with free will at all. In addition, there are independent grounds on which the subjective account of the nature of reason can be challenged. Therefore, no matter which road reasons-responsive theorists choose to go down, there are serious objections that cast doubt on their plausibility. At the end of the paper, I will touch on the question of why reasons-responsive theories are doomed to failure due to their lack of concern with the agent’s own psychology.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Qiuxuan Zheng
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/11/29
TI  - Reasons-Responsive Theories and the Nature of Reasons
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 3rd International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 319
EP  - 324
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211120.059
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211120.059
ID  - Zheng2021
ER  -