ABSTRACT
Kai Nielsen argues that '[w]e make our own history, as Marx said, but not under conditions of our own choosing'. He sides with the compatibilists in the Free will/ determinism debate – arguing that we are the products of a 'genetic and social roulette'. However, whereas most compatibilists believe that no revision is required regarding our understandings of moral responsibility and desert, he believes that we should revise these understandings. However, contra Peter Strawson and some contributors to this collection, he thinks that this revision would neither altogether threaten our moral understandings nor our capacity to act in the face of heinous wrongdoings. Analogously, the abandonment of other influential moral concepts such as original sin, heresy and apostasy has not, as we know, brought about a moral collapse. We can be free in the Rawlsian sense of freedom and autonomy without having to worry about the sort of moral responsibility required by retributivism.
