Abstract
Think of the last thing someone did to you to seriously harm or offend you. And now imagine, so far as you can, becoming fully aware of the fact that his or her action was the causally inevitable result of a plan set into motion before he or she was ever even born, a plan that had no chance of failing. Should you continue to regard him or her as being morally responsible—blameworthy, in this case—for what he or she did? Many have thought that, intuitively, you should not. Recently, Alfred Mele has employed this line of thought to mount what many have taken to be a powerful argument for incompatibilism: the “Zygote Argument”. However, in interesting new papers, John Martin Fischer and Stephen Kearns have each independently argued that the Zygote Argument fails. As I see it, the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns reveal some important questions about how the argument is meant to be—or how it would best be—understood. Once we make a slight (but important) modification to the argument, however, I think we will be able to see that the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns do not detract from its substantial force.
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Notes
Mele, however, remains agnostic about whether the argument succeeds; it keeps him from endorsing compatibilism, but neither does he endorse incompatibilism.
Notably, this is (more or less) exactly how Mele characterizes the general structure of ‘manipulation arguments’ in later work, but he did not originally present the Zygote Argument in a similar way. See his 2008: 265. Here, Mele does not include any ‘because’ clause in the relevant first premise; the premise simply reads, “Manny does not freely A and is not morally responsible for Aing,” and the second premise is similar to premise (2) of the Zygote Argument considered here. Likewise, Ishtiyaque Haji’s formulation of “The Manipulation Argument” simply starts with the following premise: “1. Manipulated S does not freely A and is not morally responsible for A-ing.” (Haji 2009: 120) Via a ‘no relevant difference’ premise, we thus (again) get incompatibilism. Here again no ‘because’ clause is in the relevant premise itself; we are simply supposed to find the no-responsibility premise intuitive on reflecting about the case. I think the Zygote Argument should proceed in just the same way.
Of course, someone might complain here that replacing (1) with (1*) is not a way of modifying “the Zygote Argument”, but is simply a way of creating an entirely new argument—perhaps the New Zygote Argument, or the Zygote* Argument. Here I am simply assuming that it is fair to say that the argument obtained in this manner is still a version of the same argument as Mele originally gave. Of course, I have no ready account of what the identity conditions for arguments are, so if someone wished to object this assumption, then what I should instead like to say is that we ought to give up on “the Zygote Argument” and instead consider this new argument, which seems to me to better articulate the basic idea behind the original “Zygote Argument.” The essential points would remain the same.
Or perhaps we should follow van Inwagen’s lead when he remarks in the Essay on Free Will that his first argument for incompatibilism “takes the form of a commentary on the premises of the ‘argument in the logic-text sense’. My argument, in fact, is coterminous with Sect. 3.5 of this book.” (1983: 69) So perhaps we could say that the 3-line argument that begins with (1*) is the “Zygote Argument in the logic text sense,” but that the Zygote Argument includes “commentary” on (1*) and (2), i.e. that the Zygote Argument includes ways of motivating (1*), rather than such ways being sub-arguments for the first premise of the Zygote Argument. I’m indifferent.
Perhaps we might best interpret Mele as follows: we might think of (1) as capturing a possible first ‘overall judgment’ concerning Ernie. Then (in the next ‘step’) (2) captures one’s further realization that the ‘role’ of Diana could be played equally well by blind causes, thus in a sense ‘going back on’ the ‘because’ in (1). If so, then (on this interpretation) (1) and (2) are not properly speaking premises of a (presumably deductive, even if enthymematic) argument at all, but rather something like related summary judgments that (in some sense) imply a conclusion. Of course, there is nothing in principle wrong with arguing this way. The point here is just to try to get clear on the structure of the argument. If the argument is taken deductively (as I would prefer), however, I think it is best to modify it along the lines I have suggested.
Perhaps some compatibilists would be prepared to concede the weaker claim that (given such knowledge) we would have to regard others as being less blameworthy—worthy of less blame—than we had been supposing. However, I think such a concession would place compatibilism on ‘thin ice’. Plausibly, whatever factors could explain why we would be less blameworthy in the given scenario would likewise explain why we are not blameworthy at all in that scenario. Thus, the weaker claim is (arguably) all the incompatibilist needs in order to cause trouble for the compatibilist. For a development of this argument, see Todd (2011). For an interesting new reply, however, see Capes (forthcoming).
One further important theme (to which I cannot do full justice) from Fischer’s paper is that we could just as well ‘start’ with the plausibility of Ernie’s being responsible in the John and Mary scenario and reason to his responsibility in the Diana scenario, rather than ‘starting’ with the plausibility of Ernie’s non-responsibility in the Diana scenario and reasoning to his non-responsibility in the John and Mary scenario. This is a perfectly fair point, and I don’t want to dispute it; as they say, one philosopher’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens. That is, if it strikes you on reflection that it is clearer that Ernie is responsible in the John and Mary scenario (even though you recognize that what he does is determined in that scenario) than that he isn’t responsible in the Diana scenario, then the Zygote Argument will of course fail to bring you over to incompatibilism. The incompatibilist presenting the argument must simply hope that you aren’t a ‘natural compatibilist’ for whom it will initially seem clear that Ernie is responsible in the John and Mary scenario despite being determined, and thus that she can use the Diana scenario to bring you over to incompatibilism. Or perhaps she hopes she can use the Diana scenario to make it less clear to you that Ernie is responsible in the John and Mary scenario, thus bringing you from compatibilism to less-confident-compatibilism, or perhaps to agnosticism. In any case, the point remains that the argument will have some force to whatever extent one judges that Ernie isn’t responsible in the Diana scenario. .
Of course, I am leaving out here Kearns’ discussion of the other horn of his dilemma, the horn on which manipulation does do work in making the agent unfree. As I see it, however, the proponent of the argument should clearly not take this horn of the dilemma; this would (again) open up the proponent of the argument to the sorts of Fischer-style replies considered above. Moreover, as Kearns rightly argues, if she says that the manipulation is part of what makes the agent unfree, then the proponent of the argument will clearly have difficulties in generalizing from a lack of freedom in these cases to lack of freedom in cases in which such manipulation is absent. Thankfully, however, once appropriately understood, I think taking the first horn of the dilemma is unproblematic for the proponent of the argument.
References
Capes, J. Mitigating soft compatibilism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming).
Fischer, J. M. (2011). The zygote argument remixed. Analysis, 71, 267–272.
Haji, I. (2009). Incompatibilism’s Allure: Principal arguments for incompatibilism. Toronto: Broadview Press.
Kearns, S. (2011). Aborting the zygote argument. Philosophical Studies (online April 2011).
Mele, A. (2006). Free will and luck. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mele, A. (2008). Manipulation, compatibilism, and moral responsibility. The Journal of Ethics, 12, 263–286.
Todd, Patrick. (2011). A new approach to manipulation arguments. Philosophical Studies, 152, 127–133.
van Inwagen, Peter. (1983). An essay on free will. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on previous versions of this paper, I wish to thank Neal Tognazzini, Ben Mitchell-Yellin, Justin Coates, Philip Swenson, and Al Mele. For helpful conversations about these topics, I thank Andrew Chignell and Kristen Inglis. Finally, I'm deeply grateful (as usual) to John Martin Fischer for extensive comments on multiple drafts of the paper; the paper is (I believe) much improved as a result.
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Todd, P. Defending (a modified version of) the Zygote Argument. Philos Stud 164, 189–203 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9848-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9848-5