Online research in philosophy

The paper argues that it is possible for an incompatibilist to accept John Martin Fischer’s plausible insistence that the question whether we are morally responsible agents ought not to depend on whether the laws of physics turn out to be deterministic or merely probabilistic. The incompatibilist should do so by rejecting the fundamentalism which entails that the question whether determinism is true is a question merely about the nature of the basic physical laws. It is argued that this is a better option for ensuring the irrelevance of physics than the embrace of semi-compatibilism, since there are reasons for supposing that alternate possibilities are necessary for moral responsibility, despite Fischer’s claims to the contrary. There are two distinct reasons for supposing that alternate possibilities might be necessary for moral responsibility—one of which is to do with fairness, the other to do with agency itself. It is suggested that if one focuses on the second of these reasons, Fischer’s arguments for supposing that alternate possibilities are unnecessary for moral responsibility can be met by the incompatibilist. Some possible reasons for denying that alternate possibilities are necessary for the existence of agency are then raised and rejected.

On the Reason View of Freedom and Semi-Compatibilism Content Type Journal Article Pages 343-353 DOI 10.1007/s12136-010-0104-y Authors Ishtiyaque Haji, Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive N.W., Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada Journal Acta Analytica Online ISSN 1874-6349 Print ISSN 0353-5150 Journal Volume Volume 26 Journal Issue Volume 26, Number 4.

No one has done more than John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza toadvance our understanding of the important dispute in the theoryof responsibility between structuralists and historicists.This makes it all the more important to take the measure of Responsibility and Control, their mostrecent contribution to the historicist side of the discussion. In this paper I examine some novelfeatures 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 newelements to solve two problems untouched by earlier versions of theirtheory: the ``problem of strange preference patterns'''' and the ``reasons-responsivenessproblem of induction.'''' I argue that they cannot solve these problemswithin the theoretical strictures they place upon themselves, namely aminimalist meta-ethics of value and practical reason, and attentiononly to certain formal features of preference-acquisition. I concludethat historicist compatibilists cannot hope to meet the challenge ofstructuralist compatibilism, from the one side, and of incompatibilism,from the other, unless they take on the full task of accounting for thedifference between the child''s acquisition (via education) of autonomoussubstantive preferences and values and her acquisition (viaindoctrination) of heteronomous ones.

In this paper, I explore some of the motivations behind John Martin Fischer’s semi-compatibilism. Particularly, I look at three reasons Fischer gives for preferring semi-compatibilism to libertarianism. I argue that the first two of these motivations are in tension with each other: the more one is moved by the first motivation, the less one can appeal to the second, and vice versa. I then argue that Fischer’s third motivation ought not move anyone to prefer Fischer’s semi-compatibilist picture to any of the leading contemporary libertarian theories. Finally, I make some methodological comments about the role intuitions play in Fischer’s project.