Responsibility and manipulation

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 8, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 145-177

  Fischer, John Martin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Alternative possibilities; Causal determinism; Free will; Manipulation; Moral responsibility

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749399706     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/B:JOET.0000018773.97209.84     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, "Responsibility and History," in Peter French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr. and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19: Philosophical Naturalism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 430-451;
2. and Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially pp. 207-239.
3. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility.
4. My co-author and I develop the account of taking responsibility at greater lengh in Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp. 207-239.
5. John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994).
6. See, for example, Eleonore Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," in Sarah Buss and Lee Overton (eds.), Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 33-60.
7. In "Control and Causal Determinism," Stump also develops a critique of the criticism of the Direct Argument for Incompatibilism offered by Ravizza and me. The Direct Argument purports to show that causal determinism rules out moral responsibility, quite apart from considerations pertaining to alternative possibilities. It employs a modal principle that alleges that nonresponsibility can be transferred in a characteristic way. Ravizza and I criticize this argument in Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp. 151-169. Stump's criticisms are on pages 38-46;
8. she offers related criticisms in, Eleonore Stump, "The Direct Argument for Incompatibilism," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000), pp. 459-466. Stump's paper is a contribution to a book symposium on Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility;
9. Ravizza and I reply to Stump in John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, "Reply to Critics," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000), pp. 477-480.
10. Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," p. 38.
11. Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," p. 36;
12. the quotation from Churchland is from Patricia Churchland, "Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience," The Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987), pp. 548-549.
13. Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," pp. 36 and 38;
14. the quotation from Rorty is from Richard Rorty, "Untruth and Consequences," New Republic (July 31, 1995), p. 36.
15. See, for example, Daniel Dennett, "Intentional Systems," The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), pp. 87-106;
16. and "Mechanism and Responsibility," in T. Honderich (ed.), Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Routlege and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 159-184.
17. See also Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984);
18. and Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003).
19. For a similar conclusion, put in a considerably more genteel fashion,
20. see Harry Frankfurt, "Reply to Eleonore Stump," in Buss and Overton (eds.), Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 61-63.
21. Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," pp. 47-48.
22. Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," pp. 49-50. She goes on to consider even more complex cases, but I think the reply I shall give in the text applies to all of her cases.
23. The example comes from Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, p. 231.
24. Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," pp. 50-51.
25. Frankfurt, "Reply to Eleonore Stump," p. 61.
26. Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," p. 48.
27. Stump, "Control and Causal Determinism," p. 48.
28. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp. 231-232.
29. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, p. 48.
30. Derk Pereboom, Living without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 110-126.
31. Pereboom, Living without Free Will, pp. 112-113.
32. Pereboom, Living without Free Will, pp. 113-114.
33. Pereboom, Living without Free Will, pp. 114.
34. Pereboom, Living without Free Will, pp. 115.
35. Pereboom discusses this point in the context of a discussion of whether the added dimension of mechanism-ownership can help the Fischer-Ravizza account handle the cases presented above in the text: Pereboom, Living without Free Will, pp. 120-123.
36. For a discussion, see Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp. 62-91.
37. In Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control, I made a similar point in regard to God's "providential activity": "Even if God causes human action via a process analogous to causal determination, simply qua causal determination (and not special causation), then arguably the process can be [suitably reasons-responsive, and the agent morally responsible]" (p. 181).
38. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp. 5-8.
39. The notion of "taking responsibility," a key ingredient of moral responsibility, may (quite understandably) get a "bum rap" from what I might call the "politician's use" of the phrase, "I take responsibility for ..." Politicians seem to use this phrase precisely as a way of escaping accountability or blameworthiness. It is really quite galling. To illustrate the point, consider this amusing story I recently heard told by a comedian (although one can all too easily imagine its being entirely true). A conversation between Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton takes place after the revelation of Jesse Jackson's marital infidelity. Bill Clinton says, "Jesse, remember what you told me after the public revelation of my infidelity in the Monica Lewinsky fiasco. Recall that you told me that the best way to avoid blame is to take responsibility!" As Ravizza and I were at pains to emphasize in Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, taking responsibility (on our view) is not merely a matter of mouthing certain words; it is a matter of genuinely having the attitudes in question. One cannot easily avoid blameworthiness by failing to take responsibility. Thus moral responsibility is the gateway to blameworthiness, not a back-door escape.
40. Sam Black and Jon Tweedale, "Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: The Use and Abuse of Examples," The Journal of Ethics 6 (2002), pp. 292-306.
41. Black and Tweedale, "Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: The Use and Abuse of Examples," p. 294.
42. Black and Tweedale, "Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: The Use and Abuse of Examples," p. 294. It is not clear why exactly "shame" would be appropriate, although perhaps the authors are thinking of a shame that does not involve moral responsibility.
43. Black and Tweedale, "Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: The Use and Abuse of Examples," p. 294.
44. Black and Tweedale, "Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: The Use and Abuse of Examples," pp. 294-295.
45. Black and Tweedale, "Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: The Use and Abuse of Examples," p. 295.
46. Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control
47. Fischer and Ravizza, "Responsibility and History", and Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp 170-206.
48. For probing discussions of this set of issues, see Gary Watson, "Some Worries about Semi-Compatibilism: Remarks on John Fischer's The Metaphysics of Free Will, Journal of Social Philosophy 29 (1998), pp. 153-143
49. and "Reasons and Responsibility," Ethics, 111 (2001), pp. 383-386;
50. and David Zimmerman, "Reasons-Responsiveness and Ownership-of-Agency: Fischer and Ravizza's Historicist Theory of Responsibility," The Journal of Ethics 6 (2002), pp. 199-234, and "That Was Then This Is Now: Personal History vs. Psychological Structure in Compatibilist Theories of Autonomous Agency," Nous (forthcoming).
51. This sort of hierarchical account was suggested (in contemporary philosophy) by Harry Frankfurt in "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), pp. 5-20; it has subsequently been developed in additional essays by Frankfurt, and discussed widely.
52. David Zimmerman suggests that in order to have a plausible, deeply historicist approach to moral responsibility one must address a certain fundamental question: "How do some children manage to develop the capacity to make up their own minds about what values to embrace, by virtue of having gone through a process in which they play an increasingly active role in making their own minds, a process which begins with their virtually having no minds at all?" (Zimmerman, "Reasons-Responsiveness and Ownership-of-Agency: Fischer and Ravizza's Historicist Theory of Responsibility," p. 233) Addressing this question would be perhaps crucial as part of an overall theory that encompassed both moral responsibility and also an account of the conditions of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness; but our goal in presenting the account of moral responsibility was not so lofty. In order to provide a complete theory that includes a specification of the conditions of blameworthiness, praiseworthiness, indignation, resentment, resentment, and so forth, one would need to have an account of autonomous value and preference-formation; but we did not set out to give such an account. An account of the kind of control required for moral responsibility need not address the very fundamental, and dauntingly difficult, question of the different between (say) indoctrination and education, or, at the very basic level, autonomous value formation. Whew!
53. In recent work, Harry Frankfurt has given a particularly perspicuous and nuanced account of love: Harry Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
54. This thought-experiment comes from Mark Bernstein, "Love, Particularity, and Selfhood," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 23 (1985), pp. 287-293
55. It is discussed in Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp. 192-94.
56. Originally, the suggestion that love is historical was made by Robert Nozick: Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 67-68.
57. Zimmerman, "Reasons-Responsiveness and Ownership-of-Agency: Fischer and Ravizza's Historicist Theory of Responsibility," pp. 231-232.
58. There is a helpful and penetrating alternative account of love's particularity in Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 131-176. If I may explicate Adams' view in an over-simple way, I believe that Adams holds that one loves another particular individual by first loving certain tropes - certain property instances (her courage, her sensitivity, and so forth). Loving the tropes is prior, and one constructs love of general properties from love of the tropes. In this way love is particular.
59. For the latter notions, see Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp. 62-91.
60. For particularly forceful and penetrating discussions, see: Michael McKenna, "Review of John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza: Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility," The Journal of Philosophy 98 (2001), pp. 93-100;
61. and Gary Watson, "Reasons and Responsibility: Review Essay on John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility," Ethics 111 (2001), pp. 374-394.
62. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, p. 40.
63. McKenna, "Review of John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza: Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility," p. 100.
64. McKenna, "Review of John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza: Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility," p. 97.
65. For interesting and subtle cases that press essentially this concern, see Watson, "Reasons and Responsibility: Review Essay on John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsiblility," pp. 379-383.
66. I discuss certain aspects of this isomorphism in Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control.
67. Robert Nozick develops this sort of theory of knowledge, and points out the structural isomorphism with a theory of "tracking bestness" (which is not exactly an account of moral responsibility), in Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 167-362.
68. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, pp. 179-185.
69. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, p. 11.
70. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, pp. 34ff.
71. These arguments are offered in our work as a whole, including Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Free Will, as well as Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility.
72. Watson, "Reasons and Responsibility: Review Essay on John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility," p. 382.
73. I discuss Schizophrenic Situations, and the associated swerve in metaphysical (or logical) space, in Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Free Will, pp. 154-158.
74. Alvin Goldman presented his piece of salt example in, Alvin Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 199-200.
75. So what happens in other possible worlds is not irrelevant to one's moral responsibility. On my view; rather, what happens in other possible worlds is relevant not in virtue of pointing to regulative control, but only in virtue of specifying the modal characteristics of the actual sequence mechanisms that potentially count as part of the agent's guidance control.