Chapter 5 - The Methodological Burdens for Eliminativism

Summary

Here I explicate two methodological burdens for the kind of eliminativist views about free will and moral responsibility that might threaten a prescriptive preservationist view of reactive blame. The first burden is that eliminativists must fix the skeptical spotlight, and offer at least some comparative support for their claim that the error they identify for free will and moral responsibility that threatens blame cannot be resolved by abandoning some other assumption, belief, or feature of our concept. Second, eliminativists must explicitly motivate elimination over some variety of revisionist preservation. I call this second burden the motivational challenge, and examine two possible eliminativist strategies for meeting it. The first involves appeals to gains and losses intended to directly motivate elimination, and the second involves explicit appeal to some claim about the essence of free will and moral responsibility. What both of these strategies reveal is that their success ultimately depends on thorny issues about reference and essence.