Is Moral Responsibility Compatible With Determinism?

[The Grand Nudger]

I have been told that absent an ability to do otherwise is essential to say a person is morally responsible (or in other areas, though I'll concentrate on morality) as this rests on "ought" statements. So "you should not murder" etc. As ought implies can, there is a problem with determinism. This would include both compatibilist and incompatibilist views, I'd assume. What do others here think?

There's already a point where desert is modified even if we don't assume determinism. 

We already accept that it at least can be the case that a person is incapable of not doing some Bad Thing™.  That it can be the case that the actions of a second and/or third party are more properly the cause of some Bad Thing™.  That it can be the case that the momentum of circumstance predicates a specific Bad Thing™ as an outcome. 

From the other end...unless it's impossible to modify or compel human behavior (free will or no free will) then no, there's no fundamental problem between moral responsibility and determinism.  Even compelled, we still own our acts.  When we find that this is the case, we modify desert by accounting for it, but not (generally) by positing that it washes the slate entirely clean.  We assume that people simply can be compelled, and further that our oughts are in the compelling set...but we don't assume that they're equally compelling to all or that all could be compelled specifically towards them.

In the most sympathetic instance, we'd no longer trust the offending person - a judgement unto itself in which free will is completely irrelevant.  Whether a person chooses to lie or lie's compulsively, they are a liar (you can repeat this with any dishonorific - thief, murderer, rapist, etc).  To an extent, our own inability to meticulously distinguish between whether a person did some horrid thing on purpose or by weight of circumstance (or on purpose because of the weight of circumstance, lol) only deepens that mistrust.  Maybe they don't even know why they did it.  Obviously these distinctions can get weedy, and can be gamed, and can backfire.  It's the distinction between a crime of passion and a premeditated murder.  

Ultimately, all that's required for determinism and moral responsibility to gel is for human beings to be capable of making choices, which we are, regardless of whether we freely make them.  Our moral agency is compromised at so many levels in so many ways that we really don't need to refer to determinism to effect the same scenario in a freely willed world.

---

* with regards to something Vulcan mentioned, our justice system (loosely based on our moral principles) is already a shitshow.  We already know that prisons are full of people who are there for less than solid reasons - and I'm talking about guilty people, here.  We put potheads and other assorted addicts in cages.  Financial crimes that ruin dozens (even millions) of families lives at once are treated more lightly than knocking over a convenience store.  Punitive sentencing directly correlates with increased criminality and rates of recidivism but has no known preventative effect.  Somehow, our prisons are filling up with a certain shade of lipstick.

Does the addition of a free will justify or explain any of that?  Howsabout hard determinism?  No in both cases. This is just my opinion...but, alot of the things people use as examples of problems between a deterministic universe and moral agency and desert are problems more specific to the example. If hard determinism is right then the way we treat prisoners is wrong. If hard determinism is wrong, then the way we treat prisoners is wrong. The way we treat prisoners probably isn't the best representative of a determinists ethical theory, ofc, lol. The ground level view of this stuff is deontological, intentionally simplified - but at a granular level of detail I'm not aware of the issue of will being a problem for any given determinists ethics. Determinism is baked into consequentialism, for example. That doesn't make people hop up and down and say, "but-but-but determinism?!?". Mostly, because we think it's true. We think that actions have consequences, which is to say that states of affairs have some cause..and that we can dial the conceptual clock forward to see the outcome of our decisions. This is how we do consequentialist ethics. It proceeds directly from determinism. No apparent problem. What, then, would the apparent problem be if determinism where also true of the brain? So what if we don't freely choose our actions? It's true that we don't but why would this be a problem?

The entire business of deontological ethics (and legal code) is to constrain your choices in the first place. We don't want people freely making moral choices, lol.