Galen Strawson's Your Move: The Maze Of Free Will

Within this essay, I will argue that Galen Strawson’s basic argument, presented in Your Move: The Maze of Free Will, is correct about the impossibility of ultimate moral responsibility. I will do this by first explaining the argument, then raising an objection that concerns self-creation, and finally refuting the objection. Strawson’s basic argument can be boiled down to the simple notion that one cannot be ultimately morally responsible. He claims that anything you do in any circumstance is an effect of who you are, and the way you are. Thus, in order to be ultimately morally responsible for anything you do, you must be ultimately morally responsible for who you are. Strawson continues by saying that because you did not create yourself …show more content…
Some might say though, that people can (and do) change themselves in many different ways. Let’s use a very simple example of a man named Jim who likes to chew gum. He likes to chew gum at school, but as we all know when you pull out a pack of gum at school, all hell breaks loose. Jim really doesn’t want to share, but he was raised to not be greedy with his things and wants to conform to social expectations. He found a solution to this by only purchasing spicy cinnamon gum, which everyone (including himself) dislikes. He figured that he would teach himself to like the gum. Thanks to this, his classmates no longer ask him for gum, solving the dilemma. This basic idea can be applied on a larger, much more complicated scale, but, it remains that Jim created his own psychological makeup. He is ultimately responsible for the version of himself that likes cinnamon gum, thus he is ultimately responsible for who he is. Therefore, by this example, Jim is ultimately responsible for what he …show more content…
Wasn’t Jim’s decision to like cinnamon gum a consequence of prior psychological properties? Unfortunately, Jim still cannot be ultimately morally responsible for what he does. One might say that Jim self-created a new version of himself that likes cinnamon gum, and that his psychology is now self-created also – but this isn’t the case. The pre-cinnamon-liking Jim had a pre-existing set of psychological properties and dispositions that caused Jim to become cinnamon-liking-Jim – he had the pre-existing desire to want to like cinnamon. But Jim never chose to be pre-cinnamon-liking Jim. He "just was" pre-cinnamon-liking Jim. One might reply that there was a pre-pre-cinnamon liking Jim who chose to be pre-cinnamon liking Jim. But, did Jim choose to be the pre-pre-cinnamon-liking Jim that would eventually make possible pre-cinnamon-liking Jim which in turn would make possible cinnamon-liking Jim? For Jim to be responsible for being pre-cinnamon-liking Jim, he has to have been responsible for being pre-pre-cinnamon-liking Jim. At some point we have to accept that the initial psychological makeup that bring about later incarnations of Jim are not self-caused. This is what’s called an infinite regress problem. In essence, it means that every decision "you" make for being a certain way implies that there was a prior "you" that made that decision to take on a new