TRansfer Principles and Moral Responsibility

It is useful to divide contemporary arguments for the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility into two types: indirect and direct. The indirect arguments present reasons why causal determinism is incompatible with the possession of the relevant kind of alternative possibilities and conclude from this that causal determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility. It is, of course, a presupposition of the indirect arguments that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities. The direct arguments contain no such presupposition, although some of their proponents may believe that moral responsibility does indeed require alternative possibilities. The direct arguments employ what might be called “transfer” principles. These are principles that transfer a certain property; the relevant property here is lack of moral responsibility.1 Let “Np” abbreviate “p and no one is even partly morally responsible for the fact that p.” Then this is a transfer principle introduced by Peter van Inwagen: