ABSTRACT
We said in the last chapter that there are at least two different sets of consideration that cast doubt on the view that moral responsibility is pivotal to our lives. The hard incompatibilist marshals one of these, arguing that a life devoid of moral praise-and moral blameworthiness may still be rich and fulfi lling. In this chapter, we appeal to the second set of considerations: we devote special attention to what people actually care about in their lives. Essential to this approach is the concept of a non-moral though normative rather than merely a causal variety of responsibility. We explain this concept. We propose that assessments of love, in particular, praiseworthiness from the point of view of love-what we term “commendability”—in contrast to, for example, moral praiseworthiness, are especially signifi cant in our lives. We then advance an initial cluster of reasons that tell against love’s being immune from hard incompatibilism. We conclude with a defense of the thesis that the importance of lovable behavior in our lives is fundamentally tied, in a manner to be explicated, to commendability. This thesis will be instrumental to exposing further reasons against the submission that relationships of love survive intact in a hard incompatibilist world (something we take up in Chapter 9).
