Thanks for this article! This is really good, I think you've significantly raised the bar for hard determinist takes on Substack.
Overall, to be clear, we agree more than we disagree. Most importantly, we both reject the spooky libertarian kind of free will that breaks the laws of physics. To some extent we're probably splitting hairs on things like what language to use around moral actions and judgments, and just choosing to emphasize different things.
But to get to the heart of our disagreement: I'm not convinced by the manipulation argument. I've always found it (like many slippery-slope arguments) a bit like saying black and white can't be different because there are shades of grey in between. To me it seems clear that at each step along the argument we're putting in a few more pieces for standard moral responsibility.
But probably more importantly, I don't see how we can just put moral responsibility aside. Our Strawsonian reactive attitudes, values like justice, and even our need for forward-looking/consequentialist deterence and praise all need some concept of accountability. We need to separate intentional and unintentional actions, and fully capable adults who should be held accountable from children who should not. All of these things seem to cohere pretty well with a framework like reasons-responsiveness (or something close to it). Maybe the claim is that the manipulation argument should temper our responsive attitudes and the value we place on justice. Maybe it does for some people, that's an interesting empirical question. I doubt it's possible to completely eliminate them, but at this point we're just talking about speculations around human psychology. None of this changes our need to hold each other accountable to interact socially and cooperate in a larger society, and as long as there is that, we have moral responsibility.
Anyways, seriously, this was a great article, you summarized the hard determinist case and the consequences of it really well. Best article I've read on Substack on free will (excluding my own, of course 😉)
Glad you enjoyed it! I think incompatibilism encourages more complex and nuanced emotional reactions. Granted that we might never be able to do without reactive emotions, we can recognize, while feeling them, that an alternative type of reaction exists. The really important thing is that we not base our criminal justice system on reactive emotions because if we do, the result might be cruel and ineffective punishment.
Really enjoyed this. Determined, by Robert Sapolsky, was gifted to me over the holiday season. I'll likely get to that in the next few months, between my mathematics studies and other readings. I'm not yet well enough read in this area to provide any real comments, but I'll get there hopefully. This article helped. Thanks.
Susan is morally responsible, it’s just that she didn’t do anything wrong. If instead her ex had demanded that she break into a maternity ward and throw all the newborns out of a window, she would be blameworthy. Coercion can affect her place on the praise/blame spectrum, but not remove her from it entirely.
As for the manipulation argument, I agree that people are not responsible for many aspects of their characters, in the sense that there is no set of freely willed actions they could’ve reasonably taken to change those aspects.
However, I think responsibility has something to do with the link between character and actions. For an action to be ‘yours’, it has to be a product of your character. So if you took some drug that made you a violent psychopath for a day, you wouldn’t really be responsible. If it persisted, though, I’d start to be comfortable saying that this is just who ‘you’ are now, and therefore you are responsible.
I know this notion of character is pretty vague. While people do have moral responsibility, I think it can only be as real as the persistent ‘person’ is real. So I agree with the incompatibilist discomfort with retribution.
This is a fantastic article, thanks for sharing. There are good examples here that make us think about free will, punishment, and justice. I think you Marshall a strong case for the incompatibilist position. These newish findings and ideas have yet to trickle into criminal justice in a proper way. The public health model has a lot of appeal.
This was a good read! Thank you for being so thorough. I enjoyed it. A thought that kept coming back to me as I read your argument for incompatibilism: we already acknowledge so much of that in regard to kids. We have far more programs and interventions to help kids who break rules and commit crimes. We want kids to become better people for themselves and for the rest of society, so we try much harder to help them with that than we do with adults. I think this is because we can admit to ourselves that their behavior is heavily influenced by external factors or other things beyond their control. But as soon as a child turns 18 and graduates high school, there's a huge and sudden shift in moral responsibility that happens literally overnight. All the safety nets disappear. There is no effort to help them be better people. I can't help but wonder what it would look like if we invested in adults similar to the way we invest in kids. Is the reason why we don't simply because we can't collectively acknowledge that even adults are influenced by many factors beyond their control? If we need a difference of free will between children and adults, I really wish we could come up with something better than "At the stroke of midnight on your 18th birthday, everything is suddenly and entirely your fault." Good grief.
I have some sympathy for the views you express in this article, but I think you go too far in dismissing moral responsibility (MR).
There are two distinctions I'd like to recommend to you:
* MR vs. retributivism
* MR vs. moral culpability
The problems you identify in the justice system pertain to retributivism, not to MR more generally. In particular, it is the view that punishment (for wrongs) is intrinsically good. But that view is not an intrinsic part of MR. As you mention earlier, to hold someone MR is to deem them "deserving of praise or blame because of the moral value of their actions." The issue of punishment is separate -- as, indeed it must be if being MR is ever to deserve praise!
It is perfectly possible to have a backward-looking notion of desert and a forward-looking notions of punishment and reward. You deserve praise for your article because it is good and you wrote it. You deserve blame for the errors (if any) in it because you wrote it. Maybe this article will win you an award. (That'd be nice, wouldn't it?) But even if it doesn't win an award, that doesn't mean it wasn't praiseworthy. And even if we don't punish you for the errors in it, that doesn't mean you weren't blameworthy for those errors. (I dispense now with the notion that there might not have been any!)
Here is another example to drive the distinction between being morally responsible and being punished. Consider the standard story of the person lost in the woods in a blizzard coming upon a locked cabin with "No Trespassing" signs posted on and around it. The person will die if they don't break into the cabin. So they break into the cabin. The door is damaged, and some snow gets into the entryway, causing some water damage when it later melts. (The person at this time is asleep in a separate room, exhausted from their travails.)
Should this person be punished for breaking into the cabin? I say not.
Should this person pay to repair the damage? I say so.
This person had morally sufficient reason to do that damage, and their action was appropriately responsive to their reasons. By Blanchard's reasons-responsiveness definition, they are morally responsible for the damage. It is proper to blame them for that damage, but not proper (I say, and I hope you agree) to punish them for it. It is proper for them to take the blame, and make amends -- pay to have it repaired. For them to take moral responsibility for their actions, however un-punishment-worthy they were.
So, I say, the arguments you give here are against retributivism and not, as you claim, against moral responsibility.
I think it would be terribly unjust to hold the person MR for breaking into the cabin if it was the only way of saving their lives. I don't think that they should be obligated to repair the damage. Rather, I think that the government or an insurance company should be obligated to.
However, in cases of real criminal wrong-doing, restorative justice is sometimes a good option. If someone has burgled houses, then it makes sense to require the criminal to restore the stolen value to the owners in some way, whether by giving the goods back or working for free for the owners. In Rejecting Retributivism, Caruso argues that restorative justice can be theorized in a way that is not backward but forward-looking, as it can improve the future behavior of a criminal. So he thinks that MR is not a requirement for restorative justice.
> I think it would be terribly unjust to hold the person MR for breaking into the cabin if it was the only way of saving their lives. <
Even a non-retributive MR? What is it about a non-retributive assignment of MR that would be unjust?
> I think that the government or an insurance company should be obligated to [pay for the damages]. <
There's a deductible on the cabin-owner's insurance. Who should pay that? The government? Well, if the government had a policy of paying the deductible on all insurance policies, the insurance companies would put the deductibles way up. And you can't blame them for that. (That is, no one who rejects MR can reasonably hold that that would be a morally blameworthy thing for them to do.)
> [Caruso] thinks that MR is not a requirement for restorative justice. <
Even if that were so, the objection I raised was not that MR is necessary, but that it doesn't have the negative effects that you attributed to it.
And I don't agree that it is so. AFAICT, if no one is morally responsible for an event, then that event is not an injustice. It may be a tragedy or an inconvenience, but if no one is MR for it, then there's no particular person that needs to "restore" any status quo ante.
"There's a deductible on the cabin-owner's insurance. Who should pay that? The government? Well, if the government had a policy of paying the deductible on all insurance policies, the insurance companies would put the deductibles way up. And you can't blame them for that. (That is, no one who rejects MR can reasonably hold that that would be a morally blameworthy thing for them to do.)"
Of course, the property owner pays the deductible, just as they would in the event of damage from wind or any other natural cause. That's how insurance works. If insurance companies were price-gouging, then they could be sanctioned on the principle of the public's right to self-defense without holding them morally blameworthy. If MR leads us to blame someone for doing what it takes to save their life, I think that's obviously a terrible negative effect.
> [Overcharging insurance companies] could be sanctioned on the principle of the public's right to self-defense without holding them morally blameworthy. <
Again, my argument against you is not that MR is necessary, but that it doesn't have the terrible effects you claim it to have.
For example...
> If MR leads us to blame someone for doing what it takes to save their life <
... Blanchard's reasons-responsiveness definition of MR does not have this "terribly negative effect." To hold someone MR for their actions (per Blanchard, and me) is to judge that their actions are of a nature that makes them a suitable target for moral evaluation. That may lead to blame; it may lead to praise; it may lead to simple acceptance -- that the action is neither bad nor particularly good.
The distinction is between cases where moral evaluation is appropriate and where it is not. Actions undertaken with malice vs. actions undertaken in reasonable ignorance, for example. The distinction between an injustice and a tragedy.
Maybe you think that's not a useful distinction. But it's a big step from saying something is not useful to saying it's pernicious. In your article, you claimed that holding people MR is a bad thing. I think your arguments rely on confusions between MR and moral culpability (blameworthiness) and retributionism (the supposed intrinsic goodness of punishment).
I read your suggestion to say that because our choices are determined, we don't have moral responsibility and we should change the criminal justice system to reflect that. In other words, because we can’t make choices, we should make a choice (to reform).
Can you help me understand how these reforms can be chosen in a determined world?
But which is the self that decided that moral evaluation and criminal punishment must be rejected? And which is the self that has the power to choose to accept your recommendations? I'm not just trying to be awkward. I genuinely don't understand.
FWIW I believe in the spooky libertarian kind of free will that breaks the laws of physics but I think determinists have more paradoxes to overcome than libertarians.
I don't say that moral evaluation must be rejected: far from it! I also don't reject incapacitation for criminals, although I don't call it punishment because the notion of punishment implies retribution.
So how do I get to be a self who chooses to be a hard determinist? There may be a conceptual problem here that I would need to address somewhere else in the future. But here's how I see it: I was raised by two humanities professors who encouraged me to read as a child and instilled in me the sense that intellectual achievements were the most important goals in life. This environmental influence, combined with my genes, made me a great reader and a logical thinker. So I became this self without choosing it. As an adult, these formative influences led me to read a lot of books and think logically. Eventually, I came to read hard determinists and this self chose to accept this philosophy because it seemed the most logically consistent, clear, and encompassing explanation of human behavior. Does this story not make sense to you?
That all makes sense to me. The bit that doesn't make sense to me is when the folks on the receiving end of your suggestion — how do they decide whether or not to follow it? If their choice is determined, why make the suggestion? Do they even need the suggestion?
So I think you're getting at a deep issue with determinism that I don't fully understand and that puzzles a lot of people. Maybe the meme theory would be of use here: memes are ideas that spread like viruses from one mind to another. You catch an idea from me the way you might catch a cold.
Thanks Erick! I put a little bibliography of helpful works on incompatibilism in a footnote. If you're interested in finding out more, I recommend starting with Pereboom's Free Will.
It’s very difficult to address that question in a single article just because free will has so many meanings. But my article is dealing with the question of whether free will of a certain type exists or not.
"Andy’s parents are both violent and heartless egotists who frequently murder people. They train Andy as a child to believe that murdering someone for money is morally justified and even admirable. They also shield him from other viewpoints. He grows up to be a violent and heartless egotist who murders someone for money.
In this case, Andy is capable of judging right from wrong”
Andy does not need to be trained to believe that acting as a heartless egoist is justified, that is self-evident. The example says Andy was shielded from information that would inform him that this behavior will generate adverse reaction from other people and can land you in prison or worse.
In this case Andy will never have right from wrong (e.g. men in blue will take you by force and put you in a cage if you act like that).
If so, Andy is NOT capable of judging right from wrong. But he is dangerous, so the authorities would imprison him anyway and prosecute his parents for murder.
In reality, nobody grows up like this. The very fact than a murderer tries to avoid getting caught is evidence for their moral responsibility for their crime. They may be a sociopath who doesn't feel it is wrong, but they know that others have a different view and they can end up in prison for what they did. This latter realization is all you need for moral responsibility, You don't need to believe murder is wrong, just act as if you believed that.
Thanks for this article! This is really good, I think you've significantly raised the bar for hard determinist takes on Substack.
Overall, to be clear, we agree more than we disagree. Most importantly, we both reject the spooky libertarian kind of free will that breaks the laws of physics. To some extent we're probably splitting hairs on things like what language to use around moral actions and judgments, and just choosing to emphasize different things.
But to get to the heart of our disagreement: I'm not convinced by the manipulation argument. I've always found it (like many slippery-slope arguments) a bit like saying black and white can't be different because there are shades of grey in between. To me it seems clear that at each step along the argument we're putting in a few more pieces for standard moral responsibility.
But probably more importantly, I don't see how we can just put moral responsibility aside. Our Strawsonian reactive attitudes, values like justice, and even our need for forward-looking/consequentialist deterence and praise all need some concept of accountability. We need to separate intentional and unintentional actions, and fully capable adults who should be held accountable from children who should not. All of these things seem to cohere pretty well with a framework like reasons-responsiveness (or something close to it). Maybe the claim is that the manipulation argument should temper our responsive attitudes and the value we place on justice. Maybe it does for some people, that's an interesting empirical question. I doubt it's possible to completely eliminate them, but at this point we're just talking about speculations around human psychology. None of this changes our need to hold each other accountable to interact socially and cooperate in a larger society, and as long as there is that, we have moral responsibility.
Anyways, seriously, this was a great article, you summarized the hard determinist case and the consequences of it really well. Best article I've read on Substack on free will (excluding my own, of course 😉)
Glad you enjoyed it! I think incompatibilism encourages more complex and nuanced emotional reactions. Granted that we might never be able to do without reactive emotions, we can recognize, while feeling them, that an alternative type of reaction exists. The really important thing is that we not base our criminal justice system on reactive emotions because if we do, the result might be cruel and ineffective punishment.
Really enjoyed this. Determined, by Robert Sapolsky, was gifted to me over the holiday season. I'll likely get to that in the next few months, between my mathematics studies and other readings. I'm not yet well enough read in this area to provide any real comments, but I'll get there hopefully. This article helped. Thanks.
Susan is morally responsible, it’s just that she didn’t do anything wrong. If instead her ex had demanded that she break into a maternity ward and throw all the newborns out of a window, she would be blameworthy. Coercion can affect her place on the praise/blame spectrum, but not remove her from it entirely.
As for the manipulation argument, I agree that people are not responsible for many aspects of their characters, in the sense that there is no set of freely willed actions they could’ve reasonably taken to change those aspects.
However, I think responsibility has something to do with the link between character and actions. For an action to be ‘yours’, it has to be a product of your character. So if you took some drug that made you a violent psychopath for a day, you wouldn’t really be responsible. If it persisted, though, I’d start to be comfortable saying that this is just who ‘you’ are now, and therefore you are responsible.
I know this notion of character is pretty vague. While people do have moral responsibility, I think it can only be as real as the persistent ‘person’ is real. So I agree with the incompatibilist discomfort with retribution.
This is a fantastic article, thanks for sharing. There are good examples here that make us think about free will, punishment, and justice. I think you Marshall a strong case for the incompatibilist position. These newish findings and ideas have yet to trickle into criminal justice in a proper way. The public health model has a lot of appeal.
This was a good read! Thank you for being so thorough. I enjoyed it. A thought that kept coming back to me as I read your argument for incompatibilism: we already acknowledge so much of that in regard to kids. We have far more programs and interventions to help kids who break rules and commit crimes. We want kids to become better people for themselves and for the rest of society, so we try much harder to help them with that than we do with adults. I think this is because we can admit to ourselves that their behavior is heavily influenced by external factors or other things beyond their control. But as soon as a child turns 18 and graduates high school, there's a huge and sudden shift in moral responsibility that happens literally overnight. All the safety nets disappear. There is no effort to help them be better people. I can't help but wonder what it would look like if we invested in adults similar to the way we invest in kids. Is the reason why we don't simply because we can't collectively acknowledge that even adults are influenced by many factors beyond their control? If we need a difference of free will between children and adults, I really wish we could come up with something better than "At the stroke of midnight on your 18th birthday, everything is suddenly and entirely your fault." Good grief.
Yes, you're right! The yawning gap between how we treat children and adults is one absurdity caused by the idea of moral responsibility.
I have some sympathy for the views you express in this article, but I think you go too far in dismissing moral responsibility (MR).
There are two distinctions I'd like to recommend to you:
* MR vs. retributivism
* MR vs. moral culpability
The problems you identify in the justice system pertain to retributivism, not to MR more generally. In particular, it is the view that punishment (for wrongs) is intrinsically good. But that view is not an intrinsic part of MR. As you mention earlier, to hold someone MR is to deem them "deserving of praise or blame because of the moral value of their actions." The issue of punishment is separate -- as, indeed it must be if being MR is ever to deserve praise!
It is perfectly possible to have a backward-looking notion of desert and a forward-looking notions of punishment and reward. You deserve praise for your article because it is good and you wrote it. You deserve blame for the errors (if any) in it because you wrote it. Maybe this article will win you an award. (That'd be nice, wouldn't it?) But even if it doesn't win an award, that doesn't mean it wasn't praiseworthy. And even if we don't punish you for the errors in it, that doesn't mean you weren't blameworthy for those errors. (I dispense now with the notion that there might not have been any!)
Here is another example to drive the distinction between being morally responsible and being punished. Consider the standard story of the person lost in the woods in a blizzard coming upon a locked cabin with "No Trespassing" signs posted on and around it. The person will die if they don't break into the cabin. So they break into the cabin. The door is damaged, and some snow gets into the entryway, causing some water damage when it later melts. (The person at this time is asleep in a separate room, exhausted from their travails.)
Should this person be punished for breaking into the cabin? I say not.
Should this person pay to repair the damage? I say so.
This person had morally sufficient reason to do that damage, and their action was appropriately responsive to their reasons. By Blanchard's reasons-responsiveness definition, they are morally responsible for the damage. It is proper to blame them for that damage, but not proper (I say, and I hope you agree) to punish them for it. It is proper for them to take the blame, and make amends -- pay to have it repaired. For them to take moral responsibility for their actions, however un-punishment-worthy they were.
So, I say, the arguments you give here are against retributivism and not, as you claim, against moral responsibility.
I think it would be terribly unjust to hold the person MR for breaking into the cabin if it was the only way of saving their lives. I don't think that they should be obligated to repair the damage. Rather, I think that the government or an insurance company should be obligated to.
However, in cases of real criminal wrong-doing, restorative justice is sometimes a good option. If someone has burgled houses, then it makes sense to require the criminal to restore the stolen value to the owners in some way, whether by giving the goods back or working for free for the owners. In Rejecting Retributivism, Caruso argues that restorative justice can be theorized in a way that is not backward but forward-looking, as it can improve the future behavior of a criminal. So he thinks that MR is not a requirement for restorative justice.
> I think it would be terribly unjust to hold the person MR for breaking into the cabin if it was the only way of saving their lives. <
Even a non-retributive MR? What is it about a non-retributive assignment of MR that would be unjust?
> I think that the government or an insurance company should be obligated to [pay for the damages]. <
There's a deductible on the cabin-owner's insurance. Who should pay that? The government? Well, if the government had a policy of paying the deductible on all insurance policies, the insurance companies would put the deductibles way up. And you can't blame them for that. (That is, no one who rejects MR can reasonably hold that that would be a morally blameworthy thing for them to do.)
> [Caruso] thinks that MR is not a requirement for restorative justice. <
Even if that were so, the objection I raised was not that MR is necessary, but that it doesn't have the negative effects that you attributed to it.
And I don't agree that it is so. AFAICT, if no one is morally responsible for an event, then that event is not an injustice. It may be a tragedy or an inconvenience, but if no one is MR for it, then there's no particular person that needs to "restore" any status quo ante.
"There's a deductible on the cabin-owner's insurance. Who should pay that? The government? Well, if the government had a policy of paying the deductible on all insurance policies, the insurance companies would put the deductibles way up. And you can't blame them for that. (That is, no one who rejects MR can reasonably hold that that would be a morally blameworthy thing for them to do.)"
Of course, the property owner pays the deductible, just as they would in the event of damage from wind or any other natural cause. That's how insurance works. If insurance companies were price-gouging, then they could be sanctioned on the principle of the public's right to self-defense without holding them morally blameworthy. If MR leads us to blame someone for doing what it takes to save their life, I think that's obviously a terrible negative effect.
> [Overcharging insurance companies] could be sanctioned on the principle of the public's right to self-defense without holding them morally blameworthy. <
Again, my argument against you is not that MR is necessary, but that it doesn't have the terrible effects you claim it to have.
For example...
> If MR leads us to blame someone for doing what it takes to save their life <
... Blanchard's reasons-responsiveness definition of MR does not have this "terribly negative effect." To hold someone MR for their actions (per Blanchard, and me) is to judge that their actions are of a nature that makes them a suitable target for moral evaluation. That may lead to blame; it may lead to praise; it may lead to simple acceptance -- that the action is neither bad nor particularly good.
The distinction is between cases where moral evaluation is appropriate and where it is not. Actions undertaken with malice vs. actions undertaken in reasonable ignorance, for example. The distinction between an injustice and a tragedy.
Maybe you think that's not a useful distinction. But it's a big step from saying something is not useful to saying it's pernicious. In your article, you claimed that holding people MR is a bad thing. I think your arguments rely on confusions between MR and moral culpability (blameworthiness) and retributionism (the supposed intrinsic goodness of punishment).
Great article!
I read your suggestion to say that because our choices are determined, we don't have moral responsibility and we should change the criminal justice system to reflect that. In other words, because we can’t make choices, we should make a choice (to reform).
Can you help me understand how these reforms can be chosen in a determined world?
I never deny that we can make choices. I'm just saying that we don't choose the self that chooses.
But which is the self that decided that moral evaluation and criminal punishment must be rejected? And which is the self that has the power to choose to accept your recommendations? I'm not just trying to be awkward. I genuinely don't understand.
FWIW I believe in the spooky libertarian kind of free will that breaks the laws of physics but I think determinists have more paradoxes to overcome than libertarians.
I don't say that moral evaluation must be rejected: far from it! I also don't reject incapacitation for criminals, although I don't call it punishment because the notion of punishment implies retribution.
So how do I get to be a self who chooses to be a hard determinist? There may be a conceptual problem here that I would need to address somewhere else in the future. But here's how I see it: I was raised by two humanities professors who encouraged me to read as a child and instilled in me the sense that intellectual achievements were the most important goals in life. This environmental influence, combined with my genes, made me a great reader and a logical thinker. So I became this self without choosing it. As an adult, these formative influences led me to read a lot of books and think logically. Eventually, I came to read hard determinists and this self chose to accept this philosophy because it seemed the most logically consistent, clear, and encompassing explanation of human behavior. Does this story not make sense to you?
That all makes sense to me. The bit that doesn't make sense to me is when the folks on the receiving end of your suggestion — how do they decide whether or not to follow it? If their choice is determined, why make the suggestion? Do they even need the suggestion?
So I think you're getting at a deep issue with determinism that I don't fully understand and that puzzles a lot of people. Maybe the meme theory would be of use here: memes are ideas that spread like viruses from one mind to another. You catch an idea from me the way you might catch a cold.
I'll stick with my spooky free will!
Thanks for humouring me! I appreciate it.
This is very well done Ian, thank you so much for sharing. I've been looking for just this kind of argument for some time now.
Thanks Erick! I put a little bibliography of helpful works on incompatibilism in a footnote. If you're interested in finding out more, I recommend starting with Pereboom's Free Will.
Isn’t the most fundamental debate in the philosophy of free will about whether it exists?
It’s very difficult to address that question in a single article just because free will has so many meanings. But my article is dealing with the question of whether free will of a certain type exists or not.
The author writes:
"Andy’s parents are both violent and heartless egotists who frequently murder people. They train Andy as a child to believe that murdering someone for money is morally justified and even admirable. They also shield him from other viewpoints. He grows up to be a violent and heartless egotist who murders someone for money.
In this case, Andy is capable of judging right from wrong”
Andy does not need to be trained to believe that acting as a heartless egoist is justified, that is self-evident. The example says Andy was shielded from information that would inform him that this behavior will generate adverse reaction from other people and can land you in prison or worse.
In this case Andy will never have right from wrong (e.g. men in blue will take you by force and put you in a cage if you act like that).
If so, Andy is NOT capable of judging right from wrong. But he is dangerous, so the authorities would imprison him anyway and prosecute his parents for murder.
In reality, nobody grows up like this. The very fact than a murderer tries to avoid getting caught is evidence for their moral responsibility for their crime. They may be a sociopath who doesn't feel it is wrong, but they know that others have a different view and they can end up in prison for what they did. This latter realization is all you need for moral responsibility, You don't need to believe murder is wrong, just act as if you believed that.