Responsibility, manipulation and ownership

Abstract

John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza have constructed a theory of moral responsibility according to which agents are responsible only if they take responsibility in a particular way. Crucial to taking responsibility is coming to adopt a certain set of beliefs about oneself, such as the belief that one is a legitimate target of attitudes like gratitude and resentment, praise and blame. Moreover, agents must come to adopt this belief in a way that is ‘appropriately based’ upon their evidence, if they are to be genuinely responsible for what they do. In this paper I argue that agents need not meet these conditions in order to be morally responsible. I offer a case in which the agent thinks of himself as responsible, appears to be responsible, but fails to take responsibility in Fischer and Ravizza's sense. I then argue that Fischer and Ravizza's account of responsibility for consequences is in conflict with their contention that individuals who reject the justifiability of responsibility ascriptions fail, thereby, to be morally responsible agents.

Notes

1. For a considerably more thorough treatment of Fischer and Ravizza's place in the overall dialectic, including a number of subtleties I pass over for purposes of space, consult David Zimmerman (2002).

2. Readers will recognize these as rough descriptions of two prominent internalists' theories, Harry Frankfurt's (1971) and Gary Watson's (1975), respectively. I should mention here, too, that the assimilation of ‘time-slice’ theories with ahistorical theories might well blur a significant distinction between the two approaches (see Watson 2001, 383–85), but I do not think there is any danger in lumping them together for present purposes.

3. But see Fischer and Ravizza (1998, 170–206).

4. Of which they are well aware: ‘ … if moral responsibility does not depend upon history, then compatibilism would be easier to defend; perhaps this is part of the motivation for holding that moral responsibility is not historical’ (Fischer and Ravizza 1994, 444).

5. Especially so in view of their contention that agents who are manipulated in sufficiently ‘global’ (e.g., Walden Two-style) ways can be considered responsible, even though such agents cannot plausibly be thought of as having satisfied the first two conditions on taking responsibility in the absence of manipulative influence (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 235, n. 30).

6. Alfred Mele's (1995) negative historical condition, which specifies that an agent is responsible only if she does not have a history in which her values and principles were instilled in her in a manner that bypassed her capacity for rational evaluation, is one such proposal they could adopt.

7. But we should be careful to note the distinction Fischer draws between being morally responsible and being morally blameworthy. Guidance control (or moderate reasons-responsiveness plus ownership) suffices for responsibility, but further conditions are required in order to get blameworthiness—conditions having to do with, e.g., ‘the circumstances under which one's values, beliefs, desires and dispositions were created and are sustained, one's physical and economic status, and so forth’ (2004, 158). So whereas Fischer must hold Plum morally responsible for killing Ms. White, he can at least soften the blow by allowing that Plum is not (or at any rate is not fully) blameworthy for the act.

8. Fischer and Ravizza write: ‘The motivation for [the claim that the notion of responsibility is historical] can be understood by thinking about the apparent inadequacies of various current time-slice models of moral responsibility’ (1998, 183–84), and they proceed to illustrate those inadequacies by discussing instances of ‘hypnosis, brainwashing, and … direct stimulation of the brain’ (1998, 187).

9. The following argument is developed more fully in Judisch (forthcoming).

10. Fischer and Ravizza frequently employ a ‘tracing approach’ of this kind in other contexts. They allow, for example, that agents can be held responsible for actions issuing from mechanisms that are not suitably reasons-responsive at a given time, as long as those actions resulted from a process initiated by the operation of a suitably reasons-responsive mechanism at some prior time (1998, 49). Note also that whether or not it is plausible to suppose that coming to believe that p is the sort of occurrence one might legitimately be held responsible for, Fischer and Ravizza should not contest the supposition. In their view, we can be held responsible for our emotional states and reactions, as long as our having the emotions in question can be traced back in an appropriate way to certain actions or omissions for which we are responsible (1998, 255–59). So even if we have as little control over our beliefs as we do over our emotions, I do not think Fischer and Ravizza would wish to maintain that we can never be held responsible for any of the beliefs we come to have.

11. For discussion, see Judisch (forthcoming).

12. The cases described in Kane (1996, 55ff), for example, suggest that individuals may be held responsible for the consequences of their actions, even if those consequences are quite unlikely.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neal Judisch

Email: [email protected]