In this article I propose a resolution to the history issue for responsible agency, given a moderate revisionist approach to responsibility. Roughly, moderate revisionism is the view that a plausible and normatively adequate theory of responsibility will require principled departures from commonsense thinking. The history issue is whether morally responsible agency – that is, whether an agent is an apt target of our responsibility-characteristic practices and attitudes – is an essentially historical notion. Some have maintained that responsible agents must have (...) particular sorts of histories, others have argued that no such history is required. Resolution of this contentious issue is connected to a wide range of concerns, including the significance and culpability of different forms of manipulation, the plausibility of important incompatibilist criticisms of compatibilism, and of course, a satisfactory account of moral responsibility. As it turns out, history matters sometimes, but less frequently than we might think. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that to understand minded agency – the capacity we typically find instantiated in instances of human behaviour that could sensibly be questioned by asking “What did you do?” – one needs to understand childhood, i.e. the trajectory of learning to act. I discuss two different types of trajectory, both of which seem to take place during childhood and both of which might be considered crucial to learning to act: a growth of bodily control (GBC) and (...) a growth in taking responsibility (GTR). The discussion of GTR takes up about half of the entire paper. In the final two sections I argue that GTR is the most promising trajectory in terms of which to understand a child’s process of learning to act. (shrink)

No one has done more than John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza to advance our understanding of the important dispute in the theory of responsibility between structuralists and historicists. This makes it all the more important to take the measure of Responsibility and Control, their most recent contribution to the historicist side of the discussion. In this paper I examine some novel features of their most recent version of responsiblity-historicism, especially their new notions of "moderate reasons-responsiveness" and "ownership-of-agency." Fischer and (...) Ravizza intend these new elements to solve two problems untouched by earlier versions of their theory: the "problem of strange preference patterns" and the "reasons-responsiveness problem of induction." I argue that they cannot solve these problems within the theoretical strictures they place upon themselves, namely a minimalist meta-ethics of value and practical reason, and attention only to certain formal features of preference-acquisition. I conclude that historicist compatibilists cannot hope to meet the challenge of structuralist compatibilism, from the one side, and of incompatibilism, from the other, unless they take on the full task of accounting for the difference between the child's acquisition of autonomous substantive preferences and values and her acquisition of heteronomous ones. (shrink)

Compatibilists about determinism and moral responsibility disagree with one another about the bearing of agents’ histories on whether or not they are morally responsible for some of their actions. Some stories about manipulated agents prompt such disagreements. In this article, I call attention to some of the main features of my own “history-sensitive” compatibilist proposal about moral responsibility, and I argue that arguments advanced by Michael McKenna and Manuel Vargas leave that proposal unscathed.

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. (shrink)

What is the connection between action that is caused by inauthentic antecedent springs of action, such as surreptitiously engineered-in desires and beliefs, and moral obligation? If, for example, an agent performs an action that derives from such antecedent springs can it be that the agent is not obligated to perform this action owing to the inauthenticity of its causal antecedents? I defend an affirmative response, assuming that we morally ought to bring about the states of affairs that occur in the (...) intrinsically best worlds accessible to us and that a version of attitudinal hedonism is the axiology for ranking worlds. (shrink)

This is a critical notice of Alfred Mele’s, Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility. I agree with Mele that moral responsibility is a historical phenomenon, but give some considerations in favor of a positive, rather than negative, historical condition for moral responsibility. I focus on Mele’s Zygote Argument, which is intended to present a challenge for compatibilism. I contend that the challenge can be met, and I offer an error theory of the appeal of the Zygote Argument.

I first adumbrate pertinent aspectsof Robert Kane''s libertarian theory of free choice oraction and an objection of luck that has been levelledagainst the theory. I then consider Kane''s recentresponses to this objection. To meet these responses,I argue that the view that undetermined choices (ofthe sort implied by Kane''s theory) are a matter ofluck is associated with a view about actionexplanation, to wit: when Jones does A and hisdoing of A is undetermined, and when hiscounterpart, Jones*, in the nearest possibleworld in (...) which the past and the laws are held constantuntil the moment of choice does B instead, thereis no explanation (deterministic or indeterministic)of the difference in outcome – Jones''s A-ing butJones*''s B-ing – in terms of prior reasonsor motives of either agent. Absence of such anexplanation is one crucial factor that underliesthe charge that Jones''s A-ing and Jones*''sB-ing are matters of luck. I argue that thissort of luck is incompatible with responsibility. (shrink)

The problem of induced pro-attitudes is simply this: why is action which ultimately issues from pro-attitudes such as desires, volitions, and goals, induced by techniques such as direct manipulation of the brain, hypnosis, or “value engineering,” frequently regarded as action for which its agent cannot be held morally responsible? The problem is of interest for several reasons. Ferdinand Schoeman, for instance, believes that the problem poses a resolvable but challenging predicament for compatibilists: if agents can be held morally responsible for (...) actions that are causally determined, then why should actions that result from induced pro-attitudes be regarded as paradigmatically unfree actions for which agents cannot be held morally accountable? Robert Kane exploits the problem to launch a libertarian attack on compatibilists. He says that a covert non-constraining controller controls the will of another agent by arranging “circumstances beforehand so that the agent wants and desires, and hence chooses and tries, only what the controller intends.” Kane claims that compatibilist accounts of freedom cannot distinguish between cases in which an agent behaves freely and those in which an agent falls prey to the covert non-constraining control of some other party. (shrink)

We have conflicting pre-philosophical intuitions about what it means ‘to be true to ourselves.’ On the one hand, autonomy and authenticity seem closely connected to the lucidity of reflectiveness; on the other, they seem tightly interwoven with the immediacy of unreflectiveness. As opposed to a ‘Platonic’ intuition about the inferiority of the unexamined life, we have an equally strong ‘Nietzschean’ intuition about the corrosiveness of the examined life. Broadly speaking, the first intuition is more akin to the tradition of the (...) Enlightenment, and the second, more to that of Romanticism; the one is reminiscent of Descartes and Hume, the other of Rousseau and Herder.The use of the technical term ‘autonomy’ and the concomitant term ‘self’ is primarily limited to philosophy, while in daily life ‘freedom’ and ‘person,’ respectively, are used instead. Unfortunately, in their deployment of these technical terms philosophers have generally failed to acknowledge the two modes of ‘being true to ourselves’ associated with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, for they usually employ the concept of autonomy in a unitary way. (shrink)