Source incompatibilism
So-called “source incompatibilists” claim that in order to choose freely and be morally responsible for your choices, you must be the ultimate source of your choices. I deny that claim. This topic has its own literature: see this SEP section and its references. I can’t hope to address all of it in a blog. So I’ll focus on three reasons commonly given for the claim I deny.
First, some argue that you can’t choose freely or bear responsibility for your choices unless you choose the mental states (in particular, the beliefs and desires) that lead to your choices. I’ve already criticized this argument and won’t repeat myself here.
Second, if (as determinism says) your choices were necessitated by conditions that held before your birth, then, some argue, your choices can’t be free and you can’t be responsible for them. Here I suspect the influence of one or both of these false assumptions: (1) You can’t choose freely or be responsible for your choices unless you could have chosen otherwise; (2) The conditions that necessitate your choices bypass, rather than crucially include, your beliefs, desires, and deliberations.
Third, unless you’re the ultimate source of your choices, it would make no sense to think you could deserve an infinite reward (heaven) or an infinite punishment (hell) for your choices. But it hardly needs saying that one can defend a robust form of free choice and moral responsibility without thinking that any of us finite beings could deserve infinite reward or punishment.
According to determinism, your choices have no ultimate source: there’s no earliest set of conditions that necessitate your choice. Furthermore, demanding that you be the ultimate source of your choices is like demanding that you jump by pulling on your own bootstraps: an unreasonable demand and impossible to fulfill. Just as you need the ground’s resistance in order to jump, you need unchosen prior conditions in order to make any choices.
