SUSPENDING THE DEBATE ABOUT DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY AND HUMAN FREEDOM

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2008 by Ciocchi, David M

1. Description of agnostic autonomism. An agnostic autonomist believes in moral responsibility, and so also believes in the freedom or "autonomy" human beings must have in order to be moral agents. But, in addition, he takes the stalemate about free will seriously, and consequently is agnostic as to which theory of free will is the correct one. More specifically, the agnostic autonomist affirms Proposition D: For some of their actions human beings have the type and degree of control that is necessary and sufficient to ground ascriptions of deep moral responsibility. Proposition D requires clarification; I will comment on four of its features.

First, Proposition D addresses some, but not all, human actions. This is in keeping with the commonly accepted view that we are morally responsible for the conduct of our lives but not always for all the acts we perform. Imagine the case of a man who drinks a beverage that, without his knowledge, has been laced with a mind-altering drug. If the man then commits a violent act due entirely to the effects of that drug, we would not regard him as morally responsible for the act.

Second, Proposition D affirms a "control" that appears to be a broader concept than "free will" understood as "whatever sort of freedom is necessary for moral responsibility." This is an important contrast. Consider the case of that man who innocently drinks a drug-laced beverage. We may assume that he had free will in choosing to drink, and free will (as we are using the term) is necessary, but not sufficient, for moral responsibility. The man freely chose to drink, but he did not know about the drug and so is not morally responsible for his subsequent violent behavior. In the language of Proposition D, he lacked the relevant control. As a necessary condition of moral responsibility, free will is a component of responsibility-grounding control; it is not the whole of it.

Third, Proposition D affirms a form of control that grounds deep moral responsibility. The concept of moral responsibility is every bit as puzzling as free will, and it creates all sorts of intellectual disputes.25 Even with a statement as brief as Proposition D, the agnostic autonomist cannot entirely avoid those disputes. By speaking of deep moral responsibility, Proposition D commits the agnostic autonomist to the existence of a type of responsibility that can justify vigorous social institutions of praise and blame, punishment and reward. Competing, more "shallow" types of responsibility - e.g. the sort of responsibility some libertarians think compatibilism allows-will not justify all those institutions. For instance, an advocate of shallow or mild moral responsibility is likely to reject the death penalty.

And fourth, Proposition D is neutral with respect to all the questions that divide participants in the free will stalemate. It offers no hints about the identity of "the type and degree of control" that grounds moral responsibility; as an expression of agnostic autonomism it could hardly do so.