Culpability Without Ability: A Hard Determinist Proposal

Abstract

This essay defends a coherent form of hard determinism against the charge that, if agents are never able to do otherwise, our practices of moral advice and blame lose their ground. I formulate the pressure as the Culpability Dilemma: powerful incompatibilist arguments deny any genuine ability to do otherwise, whether determinism or indeterminism is true, yet ordinary moral life still trades in “you should have…” and “it’s your fault…”, judgments that seem to presuppose exactly that ability. Against van Inwagen’s Moral Advice Argument, I argue that second-person ‘ought’ claims are not primarily reports of an antecedent normative fact that presupposes present categorical ability; they are practical interventions aimed at influencing what an agent will do. On a deterministic picture, correct advice need only satisfy a weaker condition: if the advice were given and taken up, it would causally issue in the advised action. I then revisit Broad’s ‘ought implies can’ by distinguishing comparative, deliberative, and retrospective uses of ‘ought’ and by analyzing the retrospective ‘ought’ in terms of counterfactual correct prior guidance rather than the categorical ability. These revisions allow the hard determinist to preserve the intelligibility of advice and much of the grammar of fault and blame while rejecting the claim that culpability requires the ability to do otherwise.