Abstract
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.
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Notes
Readers will notice that these stories assume the existence of morally responsible agents. This assumption begs no questions against my opponents in this article. Neither McKenna nor Vargas would reject it.
As I understand valuing, “S at least thinly values X at a time if and only if at that time S both has a positive motivational attitude toward X and believes X to be good” (Mele 1995, p. 116). When values are understood as psychological states, I take them to have both of these dimensions by definition. This account of thinly valuing and the corresponding thin account of values are not intended as contributions to the theories of valuing and values; their purpose is to make my meaning clear.
Some readers may worry that Beth has been replaced by “another person.” I lack the space to discuss worries about personal identity here, but see Mele (1995, p. 175, n. 22).
For a critique of an instance of this use, see Mele (2006, pp. 150–153).
I prefer writing in terms of positive and negative moral credit to writing in terms of moral credit and moral blame. Although I am willing to bow to tradition and use “blame,” deserved “praise” seems to suggest more than is entailed by being morally responsible for performing a good intentional action. Praise is a pretty lofty notion.
McKenna focuses on another pair of stories of mine. I have focused here on the Chuck/Beth scenario because I take it to present “an intuitively more gripping challenge” to the view being criticized (Mele 1995, p. 156).
McKenna offers some guidance on what the “very richest” properties include: being “richly self-controlled,” satisfying “something like Frankfurt’s hierarchical account of freely willed conduct,” and being “reasons-responsive” (2004, p. 180).
An analysis of X identifies not only conceptually sufficient conditions for X but also the conceptually necessary conditions for X. Even if satisfying nonhistorical condition C is a sufficient condition for an agent’s being morally responsible for A-ing, it may be that some agents who do not satisfy C are morally responsible for A-ing and that some such agents must satisfy some historical condition in order to be morally responsible for A-ing.
Imagine a bad-to-good transformation story that features Chuck’s being given a vivid vision of the Platonic Form of the Good for one day and his performing the good deeds described above. Would he be morally responsible for those deeds in this story? If someone were to explain the magic of The Good to me, I might be in a position to venture an answer. But notice that One Good Day is very different kind of story. Giving someone a vision of a Platonic Form is one thing; implanting values in him (after erasing his former values) is another.
Vargas reports that a revisionist theory will attempt to vindicate “historicist intuitions” if they are “justifiable and/or metaphysically innocuous” (2006, p. 361).
I am grateful to Michael McKenna, Manuel Vargas, and two anonymous referees for comments on a draft of this article. A draft of this article was written during my tenure of a 2007–2008 NEH Fellowship. (Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)
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Mele, A.R. Moral Responsibility and History Revisited. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 12, 463–475 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9131-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9131-9