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WiP - Patrick Todd / Innocent Incompatibilism, Contractualism, and Substantive Responsibility 

A man in three-quarter profile, grinning in a conference venue.

WiP - Patrick Todd / Innocent Incompatibilism, Contractualism, and Substantive Responsibility 

Philosophy Wednesday, October 14, 2026 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Skinner Building, 1116

Wednesday October 14, our WiP meeting has a special guest: we are joined by Patrick Todd from Edinburgh University, who will discuss his work on blame and responsibility, abstracted below.

The purpose of this talk is to give an introduction to a position in the “responsibility debate” I wish to call “Innocent Incompatibilism”. I argue that there is a contractualist justification for a principle allowing blame, even if, due to our lack of free will, no one is blameworthy – and I situate this view in the context of the longstanding debate concerning whether moral responsibility is consistent with determinism. The ultimate idea is that what we owe to one another, if no one merits the so-called “reactive attitudes”, is not to abandon these attitudes; what we owe to one another is to agree that this fact can be properly ignored. Given our human natures, I claim, the burden of suppressing the reactive attitudes (in normal contexts) is smaller than the burden of being subject to those very attitudes. On this view, we are (in Scanlon’s terminology) “substantively responsible” for how our wrongdoing is liable to trigger the relevant attitudes (no one owes it to us to eliminate those attitudes, or compensate us after the fact), even if we are not morally responsible for that wrongdoing. Incompatibilism is therefore "innocent": it is practically irrelevant, even if true. We can therefore safely grant what is most plausible in "incompatibilism", and what is most plausible in "compatibilism".  (My book project defending this view is under contract with OUP, and expected in 2027.)

Add to Calendar 10/14/26 13:00:00 10/14/26 14:00:00 America/New_York WiP - Patrick Todd / Innocent Incompatibilism, Contractualism, and Substantive Responsibility 

Wednesday October 14, our WiP meeting has a special guest: we are joined by Patrick Todd from Edinburgh University, who will discuss his work on blame and responsibility, abstracted below.

The purpose of this talk is to give an introduction to a position in the “responsibility debate” I wish to call “Innocent Incompatibilism”. I argue that there is a contractualist justification for a principle allowing blame, even if, due to our lack of free will, no one is blameworthy – and I situate this view in the context of the longstanding debate concerning whether moral responsibility is consistent with determinism. The ultimate idea is that what we owe to one another, if no one merits the so-called “reactive attitudes”, is not to abandon these attitudes; what we owe to one another is to agree that this fact can be properly ignored. Given our human natures, I claim, the burden of suppressing the reactive attitudes (in normal contexts) is smaller than the burden of being subject to those very attitudes. On this view, we are (in Scanlon’s terminology) “substantively responsible” for how our wrongdoing is liable to trigger the relevant attitudes (no one owes it to us to eliminate those attitudes, or compensate us after the fact), even if we are not morally responsible for that wrongdoing. Incompatibilism is therefore "innocent": it is practically irrelevant, even if true. We can therefore safely grant what is most plausible in "incompatibilism", and what is most plausible in "compatibilism".  (My book project defending this view is under contract with OUP, and expected in 2027.)

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