Moral responsibility and the problem of manipulation reconsidered

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 439-464

  Haji, Ishtiyaque ^a   Cuypers, Stefaan E ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN   (Belgium)

Author keywords

Authenticity; Compatibilism; Free will; Incompatibilism; Moral responsibility; The manipulation problem

Indexed keywords

EID: 36749080926     PISSN: 09672559     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0967255042000278076     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. See, for example, Harry Frankfurt, 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person', Journal of Philosophy, 68 (1971), pp. 5-20.
2. See, for instance, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: An Essay on Moral Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
3. R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994);
4. and Ishtiyaque Haji, Moral Appraisability: Puzzles. Proposals, and Perplexities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
5. Robert Kane in The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
6. and Laura Ekstrom in Free Will: A Philosophical Study (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), among others, defend this sort of libertarianism.
7. For elaboration, see Ishtiyaque Haji and Stefaan E. Cuypers, "Libertarian Free Will and CNC Manipulation', Dialectics, 55 (2001), pp. 221-38.
8. See, for example, Gary Watson, 'Soft Libertarianism and Hard Compatibilism', Journal of Ethics, 3 (1999), pp. 351-65, pp. 360-5.
9. Kane, The Significance of Free Will, p. 65.
10. Robert Kane, 'The Dual Regress of Free Will and the Role of Alternative Possibilities', Philosophical Perspectives, 14 (2000), pp. 57-79, p. 69.
11. Similarly, Alfred Mele claims that ultimate control involves the lack of deterministic causal influence upon one's action of agent-external events. For an agent to have ultimate control over, for instance, his making some decision, it should not be the case that there are minimally causally sufficient conditions, that do not include any event or state internal to the agent, for the agent's making this decision. Hence, agents could have ultimate control over their actions only if determinism is false. See Alfred Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 211.
12. See, for example, Timothy O'Connor, 'The Agent As Cause,' in Robert Kane (ed.), Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), pp. 196-205, esp. pp. 197-8;
13. and Randolph Clarke, "Agent Causation and Event Causation in the Production of Free Action', Philosophical Topics, 24 (1996), pp. 19-48, esp. p. 27.
14. Haji has argued elsewhere, for example, in 'Control Conundrums: Modest Liber-tarianism, Responsibility, and Explanation', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 82 (2001), pp. 178-200, that the sort of indeteminism Kane's account of freedom assumes does not enhance the active or causal control the agent exercises in performing a free action in comparison to the control the agent wields over her actions on leading compatibilist accounts. Nor does this sort of indeterminism endow the agent with positive powers to influence which alternative, from a set of open alternatives, is made actual. (On this point, see Clarke's "Agent Causation and Event Causation in the Production of Free Action'.) It should, then, come as no surprise that Kane's account of freedom succumbs to the problem of CNC manipulation. If one takes determinism to threaten responsibility because one regards determinism as relevantly analogous to CNC control, then, it seems, one should also take Kanian libertarianism to threaten responsibility for similar reasons.
15. In "Moral Responsibility without Libertarianism' (n.d.), Lynne Rudder Baker proposes that only agents with 'first-person perspectives' can be morally responsible, and that this perspective cannot be acquired by neural manipulation. See also her "The First-Person Perspective: A Test for Naturalism', American Philosophical Quarterly, 35 (1998), pp. 327-48.
16. See, for instance, Timothy O'Connor, Persons and Causes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 52-3;
17. and Randolph Clarke, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 153-4.
18. Mele, Autonomous Agents, p. 172.
19. Such eases of global manipulation have been discussed by various authors. See, for example, Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984);
20. Richard Double, 'Puppeteers, Hypnotists, and Neurosurgeons', Philosophical Studies, 56 (1989), pp. 163-73;
21. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control;
22. and Haji, Moral Appraisability, esp. ch. 6.
23. and his The Mental Basis of Responsibility (Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing limited, 2002), esp. ch. 4.
24. O'Connor, Persons and Causes, p. 97.
25. For elaboration, see Haji and Cuypers, "Libertarian Free Will and CNC Manipulation', pp. 232-5.
26. See Michael McKenna, 'The Relationship between Autonomous and Morally Responsible Agency', in James Taylor (ed.) Personal Autonomy: New Essays on Personal Autonomy and its Role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), sec. 6.
27. In a similar vein, Gary Watson has remarked that CNC control appears to threaten all compatibilist views of control, hierarchical, reasons-responsive, or others. See his 'Free Action and Free Will', Mind, 96 (1987), pp. 145-72, p. 151.
28. For an account of the first two, see Haji, Moral Appraisabilily, chs 4, 8, and 9.
29. See, for example, Haji, "The Emotional Depravity of Psychopaths and Culpability', Legal Theory, 9 (2003), pp. 63-82.
30. For concerns about this internalist (non-historical) suggestion, see Cuypers, 'The Trouble with Harry: Compatibilist Free Will Internalism and Manipulation', Journal of Philosophical Research, 29 (2004), pp. 235-54.
31. For elaboration of this connection between moral agency and the moral reactive attitudes, see Peter Strawson, 'Freedom and Resentment', Proceedings of the British Academy, 48 (1962), pp. 1-25.
32. Reprinted in Gary Watson (ed.) Free Will (Oxford: Oxford'University Press, 1982), pp. 59-80.
33. Joel Feinberg, Harm to Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 34-5.
34. Galen Strawson suggests that the implantation or fostering of the attitude or disposition of seeing oneself in control of one's actions, as a suitable subject of moral responsibility, may well - at least in the very initial stages of development - be required to ensure responsibility for subsequent behaviour. Fostering this sort of attitude is presumably morally required. See Strawson's Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 293.
35. See Alfred Mele's 'Goal-Directed Action: Teleological Explanations, Causal Theories, and Deviance', Philosophical Perspectives, 14 (2000), pp. 279-300, in which Mele underscores the importance of neurophysiology in his response to the problem of causal deviance discussed in the literature on intentional action.
36. Michael McKenna, 'Compatibilism', in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004 edition), URL = http://plato.stan-ford. edu/archives/sum2004/entries/compatibilism/, supplement, sec. C.
37. Tomis Kapitan, 'Autonomy and Manipulated Freedom', Philosophical Perspectives, 14 (2000), pp. 81-103, p. 83.
38. Tomis Kapitan, Philosophical Perspectives, Ibid., p. 101, n. 10.
39. Tomis Kapitan, Philosophical Perspectives, Ibid.
40. See, for example, Robert Kane, 'Non-Constraining Control and the Threat of Social Conditioning', Journal of Ethics, 4 (2000), pp. 401-3;
41. and Derk Pereboom, Living Without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 110-17.
42. Pereboom, Living Without Free Will, p. 113.