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ABSTRACT
Although convinced by Frankfurt-style cases that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise, semicompatibilists have not wanted to accept a parallel claim about moral responsibility for omissions, and so they have accepted asymmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and for omissions. In previous work, I have presented a challenge to various attempts at defending this asymmetry. My view is that semicompatibilists should give up these defences and instead adopt symmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and omissions, and in this paper I highlight three advantages of doing so: first, it avoids a strange implication of the truth of determinism; second, it allows for a principled reply to Philip Swenson’s recent ‘No Principled Difference Argument’; third, it provides a reason to reject a crucial inference rule invoked by Peter van Inwagen’s ‘Direct Argument’ for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Semicompatibilists are also sometimes called ‘actual-sequence compatibilists’ or ‘Frankfurt-style compatibilists’. Hereinafter, I use ‘responsibility’ as shorthand for ‘moral responsibility’ (and likewise for cognates).
2 For a discussion of this and related principles, see van Inwagen [Citation1978].
3 Not all semicompatibilists have stated their view in exactly this way. Fischer [Citation1985] and Fischer and Ravizza [Citation1991] did defend AT, but Fischer has been convinced—partly because of Frankfurt’s [Citation1994] reply—that the simple version of AT is false. Fischer and Ravizza [Citation1998] argue that what matters is whether some state of affairs is sensitive to an agent’s actions, which does not seem equivalent to AT. Nevertheless, Fischer and Ravizza’s view does imply an asymmetry between action cases and (certain) omission cases, even if their view is not motivated primarily by reflection on FSC and Sharks. Interestingly, Fischer’s most recent view [Citation2017], which is closer to AT than the view that he has defended in the meantime, is developed in response to Swenson’s [Citation2015] argument that I will address later in this paper.
4 Of course, as Fischer has always been careful to point out (cf. [Citation1982]), compatibilism about responsibility and determinism doesn’t follow straightaway from the success of some case like FSC. It could be that responsibility and determinism are incompatible for some other reason than that determinism precludes the ability to do otherwise.
5 As an Associate Editor for this journal has pointed out to me, perhaps someone like Fischer could respond to this point by claiming that our responsibility for complex omissions can be entirely explained by our responsibility for simple omissions that are essential elements in the causal chain leading to a complex omission. For three reasons, though, I am sceptical that responsibility for all complex omissions can be derived from responsibility for simple omissions (and actions). First, it is not obvious what the relevant simple omissions (and actions) would be, in typical cases of significant complex omissions like the case of manslaughter by omitting to feed one’s child. Some candidates might include, say, eating all of the remaining food in the house on Sunday, or omitting to decide to feed the child on Monday morning. But, and here is a second worry, it is not clear that the parent’s responsibility for actions and simple omissions like these would add up to responsibility for manslaughter. Finally, setting aside these first two worries, this type of response would require the view that an agent’s responsibility for a complex omission can be ‘traced’ back to the agent’s responsibility for something else, and it remains a matter of dispute whether there can be a satisfactory account of tracing: see, e.g., Vargas [Citation2005] and Fischer and Tognazzini [Citation2009].
6 Cf. Fischer and Ravizza [Citation1998: 138], who credit David Kaplan for suggesting the case.
7 Thanks to two anonymous referees for pointing out this additional support for the view that I am defending.
8 For a widely discussed version of the Manipulation Argument, see Pereboom [Citation2001: 110–17]. For a ‘hard-line reply’ to this argument, see McKenna [Citation2008]. In what follows, I follow McKenna’s presentation of the manipulation argument.
9 For soft-line replies, see Clarke [Citation1994, Citation2011], Fischer and Ravizza [Citation1998: 140–1], Byrd [Citation2007], and Sartorio [Citation2011]. See Swenson [Citation2016] for objections.
10 For another route to the same ‘hard-liner’ position, see Kearns [Citation2011], who notes that cases like Sharks are not relevantly different from Locke’s famous example of the man in the locked room (cf. Locke [Citation1690 (1975), Bk 2, Ch. 21, Sec. 10]). Kearns’s cases are also relevant to Rule A of van Inwagen’s Direct Argument, to which we’ll return below.
11 For examples of incompatibilists who are convinced that agents in FSCs are responsible, see Stump [Citation1996], Hunt [Citation2000], and Pereboom [Citation2003].
12 This error theory parallels McKenna’s [Citation2008: 156–8] suggested explanation for our intuitions about certain manipulated agents.
13 Frankfurt [Citation1969] makes a similar claim about responsibility for actions and the intuitive appeal of PAP.
14 Similarly, as I discuss below, the factors that bring it about that only one action is possible for an agent in FSCs do not also play a role in that action’s actual occurrence.
15 Nor do I think that Frankfurt would disagree with applying these considerations to cases involving omissions. As he points out, ‘There appears to be no fundamental reason why instances of performing actions should be, as such, morally different from instances of not performing them. After all, the distinction between actions and omissions is not a very deep one’ [Citation1994: 620].
16 In more recent work [forthcoming], Swenson offers an alternative explanation for the failure of this sort of excuse. Building on work by Fischer [Citation1985] and Zimmerman [Citation2002], Swenson claims that John (in Sharks) is just as blameworthy as he would have been, had the sharks not been present, but Swenson also claims that the scope of what John is blameworthy for shrinks when the sharks are present. If this is right, then perhaps John’s excuse fails because it does not reduce his degree of blameworthiness, and a successful excuse reduces an agent’s degree of blameworthiness. I do not have space to give a complete assessment of this alternative here, but, because I do not think that Swenson’s scope/degree response to moral luck is successful (for reasons I plan to develop in future work), I do not think that this alternative explanation for the failure of John’s excuse will ultimately be successful either.
17 Part of this quotation is cited by Swenson [Citation2015: 1283].
18 Cf. Fischer [Citation2010: 269], cited by Swenson [Citation2015: 1283].
19 See Capes [Citation2016: 1491] for the full presentation of the modified Direct Argument.
20 See Kearns [Citation2011] and Hermes [Citation2014] for different arguments for this same conclusion.
21 Thanks to an anonymous referee and an Associate Editor for raising this question.
22 This case, suggested by an anonymous referee, is very similar to the one discussed by Kearns [Citation2011: 316ff].
23 For helpful discussion and for comments on previous drafts of this paper, I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, John Fischer, Dana Nelkin, Michael Nelson, Derk Pereboom, and Eric Schwitzgebel, as well as Zac Bachman, Dave Beglin, Andrew Law, Meredith McFadden, Jonah Nagashima, Debbie Nelson, Jeremy Pober, Jared Smith, and Philip Swenson. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers and an Associate Editor for this journal.