Moral responsibility without free will

Question

Are there any theories of moral responsibility that don't require free will?

Sam Harris rejects the notion of free will and attempts to construct some form of moral calculus, but "The Moral Landscape" didn't sound very convincing to me exactly because the notion of responsibility wasn't there, it was all about optimization of multidimensional functions. (Disclaimer Or may be I missed/forgot the responsibility and need to reread the book).

Are there other attempts to formulate the responsibility without appeal to free will?

Answer 1

Daniel Dennett (among others) advocates a type of moral responsibility with only as much free will as you can get with determinism or determinism + unwilled randomness (more or less compatible with Sam Harris' assumptions).

There's a pretty good summary post here.

In brief, the argument ends up redefining terms somewhat while claiming that this is what we actually mean anyway (or is good enough): you, as a complex information-processing agent, are said to be responsible for those actions that you have computed to be the ones you want to take (with provisos for being subject to decisions made by others).

Answer 2

“Are there other attempts to formulate the responsibility without appeal to free will?”

Yes, from Daniel Dennett

Wikipedia and further readings summary:

Determinism does not rule out moral responsibility.

In determinism all physical events are caused and determined by the sum total of all previous events. If people are determined to act as they do, then what about personal responsibility? How can we hold people responsible and punish them for their behaviors if they have no choice in how they behave? We hold people responsible for their actions because we know from historical experience that this is an effective means to make people behave in a socially acceptable way. Holding people responsible only works when people respond to the state of affairs by controlling their behavior so as to avoid punishment. People who break the rules set by society and get punished may be behaving in deterministic ways, but if people don't respond to the threat of punishment, people would behave even worse. This is a totally utilitarian approach to the issue of moral responsibility. Is it moral to punish people behaving in deterministic ways? Yes, people have the right to create rules and enforcing them. We would be worse off if we did not do so, an argument for utility. Moral sentiments may be viewed as a reward mechanism, to make someone more sensitive to distant rewards and punishments.

If people do not have real behavioral choices, why not collapse into fatalism? People who lose the feeling that they can plan and execute alternative behaviors tend to stop struggling for survival and become fatalistic. Evolution has designed us to feel that our effort of planning pays off, that we control what we do. Free will is merely the ability to choose among available options. The ability to have all options available is not free will but omnipotence. Humans are not able to kill everyone by simply wishing it; does the lack of this ability mean that humans do not have free will?