Culpability incompatibilism

Here are three plausible theses:

1. You’re only culpable for a morally wrong choice determined by a relevantly abnormal mental state if you are culpable for that mental state.

2. A mental state that determines a morally wrong choice is relevantly abnormal.

3. You are not culpable for anything that is prior to the first choice you are culpable for.

Given these theses and some technical assumptions, it follows that:

4. If determinism holds, you are not culpable for any morally wrong choice.

For suppose that you are blameworthy for some choice and determinism holds. Let t₁ be the time of the first choice you are culpable for. Choices flow from mental states, and if determinism holds, these mental states determine the choice. So there is a time t₀ at which you have a mental state that determines your culpable choice at t₁. That mental state is abnormal by (2). Hence by (1) you must be culpable for it given that it determines a wrong choice. But this contradicts (3).

The intuition behind (1) is that abnormal mental states remove responsibility, unless either the abnormality is not relevant to the choice, or one has responsibility for the mental state. This is something even a compatibilist should find plausible.

Moreover, the responsibility for the mental state has to have the same valence as the responsibility for the choice: to be culpable for the choice, you must be culpable for the abnormal state; to be praiseworthy for the choice, you must be praiseworthy for the abnormal state. (Imagine this case. To save your friends from a horrific fate, you had to swallow a potion which had a side-effect of making you a kleptomaniac. You are then responsible for your kleptomania, but in a praiseworthy way: you sacrificed your sanity to save your friends. But now the thefts that come from the kleptomania you are not blameworthy for.)

Premise (2) is compatible with there being normal mental states that determine morally good choices, as well as with there being normal mental states that non-deterministically cause morally wrong choices (e.g., a desire for self-preservation can non-deterministically cause an act of cowardice).

What I find interesting about this argument is that it doesn’t have any obvious analogue for praiseworthiness. The conclusion of the argument is a thesis we might call culpability incompatibilism.

The combination of culpability incompatibilism with praiseworthiness compatibilism (the doctrine that praiseworthiness is compatible with determinism) has some attractiveness. Leibniz cites with approval St Augustine’s idea that the best kind of freedom is choosing the best action for the best reasons. Culpability incompatibilist who are praiseworthiness compatibilists can endorse that thesis. Moreover, they can endorse the idea that God is praiseworthy despite being logically incapable of doing wrong. Interestingly, though, praiseworthiness compatibilism makes it difficult to run free will based defenses for the problem of evil.