Moral Responsibility without Free Will. An Argument for Ethics Naturalized.

Abstract

Although naturalistic approach is widely accepted in contemporary philosophy of mind, there lingers a suspicion that this approach is incompatible with morality, because ethics declares that responsibility requires free will, and free will is incompatible with naturalism. I am trying to show that moral responsibility does not require that there exists metaphysically real “free will”, because responsibility is not a fact to be discovered, but something ascribed to a person based on other facts. I conclude that naturalism does not threaten the existence of ethics and morality, although it demands that we reconsider metaphysical foundations of moral philosophy.