Tropism and Equivocation: Notes on Dennet's "Mechanism and Responsibilty"

!What has over the years surfaced as perhaps the central issue in the debate surrounding the problem of free will and determinism is the question whether determinism is compatible with responsibility. Recently, however, some philosophers have shifted this debate—rightly, I think— asking not whether determinism and responsibility are compatible, but rather whether mechanism and responsibility are compatible.2 In this essay, I will examine a treatment of the free will/determinism problem which assumes this latter, shifted perspective. But before this is attempted, some answer must be made to the perfectly understandable question, What does the shift from determinism talk to mechanism talk really amount to, and why should we make it?3 Determinism, strictly speaking, is a thesis about how events occur, amounting to roughly this: Every event is causally necessitated by preceding events. If determinism and responsibility are incompatible, it is because determinism is an excusing condition, since (1) determinism implies that we could not (and cannot) do otherwise than we actually did (and do), and (2) we consider not being able to do otherwise an excuse for misconduct (and hence, a reason for not holding the agent to be responsible). Mechanism is a thesis, not about how events occur, but about how they are explained, namely: Every event is subject to explanations that do not use such telelogical concepts as purposes, intentions, and desires. If mechanism and responsibility are incompatible, then it is because mechanism forces us to discard certain explanation modes we feel are necessary to viewing any agent as responsible.