Abstract
Cases involving certain kinds of manipulation seem to challenge compatibilism about responsibility-grounding free will. To deal with such cases many compatibilists give what has become known as a ‘soft line’ reply. In this paper I present a challenge to the soft line reply. I argue that any relevant case involving manipulation—and to which a compatibilist might wish to give a soft line reply—can be transformed into one supporting a degree of moral responsibility through the addition of libertarian elements (such as alternative possibilities of a kind unavailable under determinism and executive control of the sort commonly associated with agent-causation). From a compatibilist’s perspective the subtraction of libertarian elements should make no difference to any assessment of the agent’s responsibility. The compatibilist should therefore judge the agent morally responsible after the removal of the libertarian elements. Yet removal of the libertarian elements returns the case to its original form and thus what started out as a soft line has now collapsed into a hard line reply. Various ways of resisting my argument are considered, but each is shown to carry important burdens.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I have borrowed the term ‘Compatiblists Agential Structure’ and the ‘CAS’ abbreviation from McKenna 2008.
After reflecting on manipulation cases it is conceivable that a compatibilist might come to the conclusion that determinism is sufficiently analogous to manipulation to prompt us to reduce the degree of moral responsibility agent’s bear for their actions. To take this line to a given manipulation case (to agree to premise 2, but to insist that the agent is still morally responsible to some degree for their manipulated action) is still to make a hard line reply. There are, we might say, degrees of hardness. Nevertheless, I will have something to say about those who might try this moderately hard line later in the paper. I believe that it makes costly concessions to incompatibilism that most compatibilists will, on reflection, be unwilling to bear.
In the literature the tendency has been to talk about hard and soft line compatibilists. But as a reviewer for this journal has pointed out to me (and I agree) it is better to think in terms of hard and soft-line replies to particular manipulation cases. After all, it is possible for compatibilists to take a soft line reply to some cases and not to others with the result that it is largely artificial to talk of hard and soft line compatibilists per se.
Note I am not suggesting that all libertarians or incompatibilists agree that alternative possibilities are a necessary part of possessing free will. Some think that it is possible for an agent to exercise executive control without having genuine alternative possibilities available. Derk Pereboom is an incompatibilist who denies that genuine alternative possibilities are needed. But the possibility of this kind of position does not affect anything in my argument. For even these so called ‘hyper’ libertarians/incompatibilits think only that alternative possibilities are not necessary for free will; they do not think that the existence of alternative possibilities would actually annul free will.
The most comprehensive discussion of libertarian conceptions of control is given by Clarke in his 2003.
Nearly all contemporary compatibilists accept that the addition of libertarian free will components would not undermine responsibility grounding free will. For instance, if it turns out that we do regularly have genuine alternative possibilities at decision-making moments and furthermore we have the kind of contrastive control over these decisions of the sort associated with agent-causation, then the compatibilist is not going to judge us non-responsible. For the possession of such things is perfectly compatible with satisfying compatibilist control.
Of course, the agent still retains compatibilist executive control. But by hypothesis, possession of this control alone was not capable of making the agent morally responsible in this case. To insist otherwise is to take a hard line. One might object that compatibilist control has a historical condition—a historical condition that is violated in this case—but then I mean by compatibilist control ‘compatibilist control minus whatever historical condition the compatibilist would append to deal with manipulation cases’. The agent still has compatibilist control of this sort.
I am not suggesting here that all compatibilists deny any role to genuine alternative possibilities. There are a number of compatibilists who believe that free will does involve having genuine alternative possibilities but that these are available under determinism (such as Berofsky and Kapitan (Berofsky 2002; Kapitan 2002)). But even these compatibilists should agree that removing the indeterminism from the case would not change anything in terms of the agent’s moral responsibility.
Mele believes that manipulation cases such as his Ann and Beth case cannot be fixed simply by adding indeterministic breaks along the way (2006, pp. 138–146). But first, Mele does not introduce indeterminism in quite the same way as it has been introduced in my cases above. And secondly, I have introduced not just indeterminism, but libertarian control too. I agree that it is unclear exactly how one can have libertarian control. I’m assuming that libertarian control is coherent—though I will have something to say to those who insist it isn’t, later. If we allow that such control is coherent, then providing an agent with it entails that we cannot now control exactly how they exercise it, and furthermore that however they exercise it, it will not have been chancy that they exercised it in that manner. That’s very different from simply introducing indeterministic breaks in the mechanism in virtue of which the clandestine controller is manipulating their victim.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this layout.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer at this journal for making me consider this line of response.
Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer for making me address this particular line of resistance.
References
Berofsky, B. (2002). Ifs, cans, and free will: the issues. In: R. Kane (ed.), The Oxford handbook of free will.
Clarke, R. (2003). Libertarian accounts of free will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fischer, J. M. (2006). My way: essays on moral responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fischer, J. M., & Ravizza, M. (1998). Responsibility and control: a theory of moral responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frankfurt, H. (2002). Reply to John Martin Fischer. In S. Buss & L. Overton (Eds.), Contours of agency: essays on themes from Harry Frankfurt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haji, I., & Cuypers, S. (2001). Libertarian free will and CNC manipulation. Dialectica, 55, 221–338.
Haji, I., & Cuypers, S. (2007). Magical agents, global induction, and he internalism/externalism debate. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 85(3), 343–371.
Kane, R. (1996). The significance of free will. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kapitan, T. (2002). A master argument for incompatibilism? In The Oxford handbook of free will. R. Kane (ed.).
McKenna, M. (2004). Responsibility and globally manipulated agents: why Mele’s Beth might be blameworthy. Philosophical Topics, 32, 169–192.
McKenna, M. (2008). A Hard-line Reply to Pereboom’s Four-Case ManipulationArgument. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. LXXVII no. 1.
Mele, A. (1995). Autonomous agents: from self-control to autonomy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mele, A. (2006). Free will and luck. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pereboom, D. (1995). Determinism al dente. Nous, 29, 21–45.
Pereboom, D. (2001). Living without free will. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Russell, P. (2002). Critical notice of John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza, responsibility control. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 32.4, 587–606.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Harrison, G.K. A Challenge for Soft Line Replies to Manipulation Cases. Philosophia 38, 555–568 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9220-6
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9220-6