Strawsonian Optimism for Libertarians

In this paper, I defend the idea that libertarians may be “Strawsonian Optimists”—that is to say, that they may consistently hold that even if determinism is true, there need be no threat of any kind to the concepts and practices constituting our commitments to moral responsibility and personhood. My defence of this position takes place in the context of John Fischer’s attempt to defend what I call the “Invulnerability Intuition”—that is to say, the intuition that it would not be the case that we ought to give up our commitments to moral responsibility and personhood if we were to be told unequivocally one day by theoretical physicists that there is simply no doubt that the universe is deterministic. Fischer not only defends the Invulnerability Intuition; he also insists that the libertarian cannot accept it—and criticizes what he takes to be van Inwagen’s attempt to claim otherwise, characterizing van Inwagen’s strategy as a variety of “metaphysical flipflopping.” In this paper, I not only insist that flipflopping can be acceptable—I claim also (i) that flipflopping is easier to defend if one is an Agency Incompatibilist, than if one is a more standard kind of libertarian; and (ii) that flipflopping is a preferable strategy for saving the Invulnerability Intuition than Fischer’s own strategy—the metaphysics of semicompatibilism

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · Law and economics · Libertarianism · Optimism · Sociology · Education and Cultural Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Responsibility and Control

  Open Access•John Martin Fischer, Mark Ravizza•Responsibility and Control•1998

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• The importance of what we care about

  Open Access•Harry G Frankfurt, Harry Frankfurt•Synthese•1982

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• In defense of flip-flopping

  Open Access•Andrew M Bailey, Amy Seymour•Synthese•2021

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