Responsabilidade moral segundo o semicompatibilismo

Abstract

This work aims to present a notion of semicompatibilism regarding moral responsibility. Semicompatibilism is the thesis on which freedom for moral responsibility can be achieved in both deterministic and indeterministic scenarios. For this purpose, it is necessary for the individual to exert guidance control, which requires mechanism-ownership and moderately reasons-responsive mechanisms but dismisses the need for access to alternative possibilities. This idea opposes incompatibilist positions, which claim that free will is incompatible with causal determinism. Libertarians are incompatibilists who argue that we would not have freedom in a deterministic world but that our world is indeterminate, allowing for free will and, consequently, moral responsibility. Despite its strong intuitive appeal, this position faces difficulties aligning with our best scientific theories and explaining how control can be achieved in indeterministic scenarios. Hard incompatibilists, on the other hand, assert that it is unlikely that the world would be such as to allow for free will, so we should adopt a skeptical stance on free will and, therefore, we should completely revise moral responsibility to exclude practices and notions dependent on this freedom. This position fails to capture our practice of moral accountability and cannot connect past actions to preventive sanctions. To demonstrate itself as a viable position, semicompatibilism needs to distinguish how determinism affects us from cases of manipulation that affect the free will, which will be done through the idea that certain global manipulations do not alter relevant mental states of the agent but constitute them. It will also be necessary to show that the concept of moral responsibility does not depend on access to alternative possibilities but only on the authorship of the action. To achieve this goal, it will be proposed that semicompatibilism needs to be revisionist regarding the concept of moral responsibility, as some of its understanding is anchored in libertarian intuitions that cannot be maintained. In this way, it will be argued that the notion of authorship of actions, added to the idea of responsiveness to reasons, helps explain the necessary conditions for moral responsibility in our world.