Dan Haas

Casey, in Supernatural, alludes to one of the oldest and most resilient arguments against the existence of God, the problem of evil. This problem arises from an apparent conflict between the existence of evil and the attributes that Western theists attribute to God. Casey's challenge to the existence of God is called the logical problem of evil by philosophers. Casey's problem of evil focused on an apparent logical inconsistency between believing in a God that is all‐powerful, all‐knowing, and all‐good, while at the same time believing that evil exists. The soul‐making defense doesn't appear to be enough to solve the problem for Dean. While it seems true that an all‐powerful, all‐good, all‐knowing God would have the power to create a universe with soul‐growth, containing significantly less evil and suffering than the universe of Supernatural, that's just not Dean's world.

A leading objection to the compatibility of moral responsibility and determinism (the manipulation argument) involves a thought-experiment in which a person is manipulated such that she satisfies the most robust compatibilist conditions for morally responsible agency. It seems counter-intuitive to hold this person morally responsible for what she has been manipulated to do, and so, the argument goes, compatibilism is flawed. I argue that compatibilists should maintain that agents who experience manipulation are still morally responsible for their actions provided they satisfy compatibilist conditions for being morally responsible. A key challenge to the position I defend is that even if compatibilists have grounds for holding manipulated agents morally responsible the onus is on the compatibilist to address why it seems intuitive to judge that manipulated agents are not morally responsible. To dispel this worry I suggest evaluating the assumptions underlying non-responsibility intuitions, the most important of these being the assumption that basic moral desert is not consistent with determinism. Basic moral desert is under-described in the literature. I propose that there are two distinct ways to understand the desert pertinent to our moral responsibility practices. Desert could be understood as a kind of `fit' between our moral responsibility judgments and properties of the agent and her action such that it would be fitting to claim that the agent is blame/praise-worthy. I argue that many compatibilists discussing manipulation arguments are understanding desert as a kind of fit. Alternatively, desert can be understood as a kind of `merit' such that it is fair to blame or praise the agent precisely because they are worthy of blame and praise given that they performed the act in question and were sensitive to its moral status. Theorists swayed by manipulation arguments are often thinking of desert in this second way, as a kind of merit. If I am correct that desert is understood in different ways by philosophers discussing manipulation arguments, I have identified an important sense in which compatibilists and incompatibilists are misunderstanding each other's commitments. Many compatibilists are merely trying to show that it would be fitting to blame a manipulated agent, whereas incompatiblists who are attracted to the manipulation argument are frequently proposing that it would be unfair to blame a manipulated agent precisely because the agent does not merit blame. These claims are not necessarily inconsistent. Clarifying these distinct notions of desert allows me to argue that the best compatibilist replies to the manipulation argument do establish that manipulated agents can still be morally responsible for their actions in the sense that it would still be fitting to blame the manipulated agent if she satisfied a robust set of compatibilist-relevant conditions on moral responsibility. At the same time, incompatibilists may be correct that manipulated agents are not blameworthy in the sense that they do not merit blame. I argue that this is a partial victory for both sides in the debate. The compatibilists have shown that the theory of moral responsibility that they are interested in does not seem to be threatened by manipulation arguments. At the same time, it is correct to conclude that compatibilists have failed to show that agents can merit blame in deterministic worlds

Basic desert is central to the dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists over the four-case manipulation argument. I argue that there are two distinct ways of understanding the desert salient to moral responsibility; moral desert can be understood as a claim about fitting responses to an agent or as a claim about the merit of the agent. Failing to recognize this distinction has contributed to a stalemate between both sides. I suggest that recognizing these distinct approaches to moral desert will help clarify a central source of disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists and assist both sides in resolving the current stalemate.

I defend a hard-line reply to Derk Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. Pereboom accuses compatibilists who take a hard-line reply to his manipulation argument of adopting inappropriate initial attitudes towards the cases central to his argument. If Pereboom is correct he has shown that a hard-line response is inadequate. Fortunately for the compatibilist, Pereboom’s list of appropriate initial attitudes is incomplete and at least one of the initial attitudes he leaves out provides room for a revised hard-line reply to be successfully mounted against the multiple-case argument