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Notes
H. G. Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 24–25.
See D. Blumenfeld, "Freedom and Mind Control," American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 25 (1988). For a similar account, see A. Mele, Autonomous Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 167. The proposal in the text ignores certain complications. Note that manipulation in the sense defined perhaps occurs but rarely in real life. Perhaps it requires brain washing or neurosurgery or the like. Yet the frequency of manipulation is not the issue. The notion is brought in to test Frankfurt's claim that the conditions he specifies are logically sufficient for moral responsibility. (It is not as if Frankfurt is saying that moral responsibility usually holds when his conditions are met.) But to test such a claim it is legitimate, and sometimes necessary, to devise far-fetched counterexamples.
See especially H. G. Frankfurt, "Three Concepts of Free Action," in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For a different interpretation of Frankfurt, see S. Cuypers, "The Trouble with Harry: Compatibilist Free Will Internalism and Manipulation," Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. 29 (2004). Frankfurt restates his position in "Reply to John Martin Fischer," in L. Overton & S. Buss, eds., Contours of Agency (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 27–28. We find a similar uncompromising internalist response to manipulation cases in G. Watson, "Soft Libertarianism and Hard Compatibilism," in Agency and Answerability, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
For examples of externalist treatments of manipulation, see J. M. Fischer and M. Ravizza, Responsibility and Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and I. Haji and S. Cuypers, "Moral Responsibility and the Problem of Manipulation Reconsidered," International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 12 (2004). Also, some philosophers argue that manipulation provides an argument for incompatibilism (e.g., D. Pereboom, Living Without Free Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I will not be concerned with these arguments here.
The distinction described in the text at least resembles the one between responsibility as attributability and substantive responsibility, sketched in T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 249. No closer comparison will be attempted here, though. We find a related distinction between two faces of responsibility in G. Watson, "Two Faces of Responsibility," in Agency and Answerability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). However, Watson's notion of responsibility as accountability seems narrower than the notion of validity employed here.
A. Ripstein, "Equality, Luck, and Responsibility," Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 23, (1994), p. 19n31.
An anonymous referee raised this worry.
See J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 84.
See A. J. Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 76.
For a similar use of 'consent', see D. Owens, "The Possibility of Consent," Ratio, vol. 24 (2011), p. 407.
It could be maintained that (4) is false for another reason, namely because it overlooks the possibility of partial validity (by presupposing that manipulated consent is either always fully valid or always fully invalid). Now, there are indeed contexts in which it makes sense to talk of partial validity, and we will return to that notion in Sect. 3. But it is not relevant to the issue that concerns us in the present section. In particular, a person could not meaningfully be only partially absolved of the charge of having wrongfully interfered with another's freedom. And in any case, should that out to be mistaken, the argument concerning criminal responsibility presented in Sect. 3 is applicable, mutatis mutandis, also to the case discussed in the present section.
For this type of picture, see R. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), pp. 28–33.
Wlodek Rabinowicz made helpful suggestions here.
It is tempting to apply a contractualist view to this question of validity, a view along the lines suggested by J. Lenman. See his "Contracting Responsibility," In T. van den Beld, ed., Moral Responsibility and Ontology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); and "Compatibilism and Contractualism: The Possibility of Moral Responsibility," Ethics, vol. 117, (2006). (Lenman does not discuss manipulation specifically, though, and he is primarily concerned with what we have called attributability, rather than validity.) The question is whether the contracting parties have reason to reject any principle treating manipulated consent as valid. As usual, the answer depends on what description we offer of these parties, an issue that will not be addressed here.
An anonymous referee raised this objection.
An anonymous referee pressed this worry.
It appears that Frankfurt himself never makes the attributability/validity distinction. Probably that is because he is only interested in attributability (see Watson, "Two Faces of Responsibility," p. 264n12).
A caveat: in this section it will be presupposed that manipulation proceeds by altering the agent's preferences or values only, and not his beliefs. This is because manipulation of the latter type—which need of course involve nothing fancier than good old-fashioned lying—often affects the resulting action's degree of attributability. It does so as it changes the agent's view of what he is doing. And as we will see presently, the mixed view becomes interesting precisely when it asserts that a manipulated action is no less attributable to its agent than an otherwise similar non-manipulated action would be.
For a related view, see R. J. Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 3.
See note 11 above.
This paragraph has benefited from remarks from an anonymous referee.
There is a complication here, reminiscent of remarks in Sect. 1 about the possibility of invalid consent. We might be unwilling to grant that A gave away his car, and so that action could not be attributed to him in the first place. But we can in any case attribute to him the act of trying to do so, and he could be blameworthy also for that action. So the point in the text remains.
See note 18 above.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful for comments from participants at a seminar discussion of this paper at the Lund philosophy department, and especially to Wlodek Rabinowicz. András Szigeti commented helpfully on a later version, as did several anonymous referees.
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Alm, D. Manipulation, Responsibility and Rights. J Value Inquiry 47, 1–15 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9376-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-013-9376-y