I want to suggest that it would be bad if compatibilism were true, and that this gives us good reason to think that it isn't. This is, you might think, an outlandish argument, and the considerable burden of this paper is to convince you otherwise. There are two key elements at stake in this argument. The first is that it would be - in a distinctive sense to be explained - bad if compatibilism were true. The thought here is that compatibilism ultimately presents us with a picture on which, in principle, powerful manipulators can effectively guarantee that finite moral agents should become blameworthy. To my mind, this isn't just false - though I think that it is - it is also such that it would be bad (unfortunate, undesirable…) if it were true. The second is that the fact that it would be - in this sense - bad if true gives us reason to think that it isn't. It may be bad that there is no afterlife. But that, in itself, hardly gives us reason to think that there is an afterlife. That is true, but - as others before me have suggested - when the object of the relevant badness is morality itself, the inference seems secure. A more general aim of the paper is to investigate the nature of this very form of argument in itself, and I compare my argument (inter alia) to a recent argument from Sayre–McCord against the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas.

中文翻译：

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如果相容论是真的那就糟糕了。因此，它不是

我想说的是，如果相容论为真那就糟糕了，这让我们有充分的理由认为事实并非如此。您可能会认为这是一个奇怪的论点，而本文的相当大的负担就是要让您相信事实并非如此。这个论点有两个关键要素。首先，如果相容论为真，那么——从一种独特的意义上来解释——那将是糟糕的。这里的想法是，相容主义最终向我们展示了一幅图景，原则上，强大的操纵者可以有效地保证有限的道德主体应该受到谴责。在我看来，这不仅仅是错误的——尽管我认为它是错误的——如果它是真的，那也将是糟糕的（不幸的，不可取的……）。第二个事实是，从这个意义上说，如果为真，那么它会很糟糕，这让我们有理由认为事实并非如此。没有来世可能会很糟糕。但这本身并不能让我们有理由相信有来世。确实如此，但正如我之前的其他人所暗示的那样，当相关恶行的对象是道德本身时，这一推论似乎是可靠的。本文的一个更普遍的目标是调查这种论证形式本身的本质，我将我的论证（除其他外）与塞尔-麦科德最近反对真正道德困境的可能性的论证进行了比较。