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Manipulation and mitigation

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An Erratum to this article was published on 04 June 2013

Abstract

Manipulation arguments are commonly deployed to raise problems for compatibilist theories of responsibility. These arguments proceed by asking us to reflect on an agent who has been manipulated to perform some (typically bad) action but who still meets the compatibilist conditions of responsibility. The incompatibilist argues that it is intuitive that the agent in such a case is not responsible even though she met the compatibilist conditions. Thus, it is argued, the compatibilist has not provided conditions sufficient for responsibility. Patrick Todd has recently argued that incompatibilists have taken on a heavier dialectical burden than is necessary. Todd argues that incompatibilists need not argue that an agent in a manipulation case is not at all responsible, but only that her responsibility is mitigated in order to refute compatibilism. Hannah Tierney has responded to Todd’s argument by arguing that a compatibilist can admit that manipulation mitigates responsibility without eliminating it. I argue that Tierney’s response is unsuccessful on its own terms. But, I argue, Todd’s argument can be resisted by way of a parallel counter-argument for compatibilism. I argue that Todd’s argument for incompatibilism is no more powerful than my argument for compatibilism. And since Todd’s manipulation argument is offered as an objection to compatibilism, this amounts to a victory for the compatibilist; the objection is defused.

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Notes

  1. Some terminology: determinism is the view, roughly, that a complete description of the universe at a time together with the laws of nature entails every future truth. Incompatibilism is the view that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility. Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.

  2. In McKenna’s (2008) article, he argues that the compatibilist who takes the hard-line against Pereboom’s argument need not argue that the manipulated agent is responsible, but only call into doubt the claim that the manipulated agent is not responsible. In the remainder of the paper I will treat the hard-line reply as the claim that a manipulated agent is responsible since compatibilists are ultimately committed to this claim.

  3. For example, Fischer and Ravizza (1998), Haji (1998), and Mele (1995, 2009) hold that there is a historical requirement on moral responsibility. In addition to having the appropriate “snap-shot” or “current time-slice” properties such as being reasons-responsive or having the right structure among her desires, an agent must also have the appropriate history in order to be responsible. This looks to be motivated, in large part, by the manipulation cases. These theorists respond to cases involving manipulation at, or shortly before, the action by claiming that the agent is not responsible because she fails to meet the historical condition on responsibility. But now the incompatibilist can simply modify the case such that the historical condition is met. Thus, it looks as if compatibilists who take the soft-line will ultimately be forced to take the hard-line in response to the newly tailored manipulation case.

    The debate over whether manipulation can result in responsible agency is closely related to the debate over whether responsibility is essentially historical (which is itself, I believe, closely related to the debate over whether responsibility is compatible with determinism, even though it is typically understood as a debate among compatibilists). Elsewhere I have defended, what I call, quality of will accounts of responsibility which are a form of non-historical compatibilism. According to these accounts there is some set of psychological factors at, roughly, the time of action that are both necessary and sufficient for responsibility. Manipulation cases are put forward as objections to the sufficiency claim. Tracing cases, such as the drunk driver example, are put forward as objections to the necessity claim. I have offered responses to these objections in Khoury (forthcoming, 2012), respectively.

  4. One might resist this claim. For it is true that an agent can sometimes exercise compatibilist control over the development of her character (the incompatibilist denies that this form of control meets the control condition on responsibility, not that it is a form of control). An agent in a determined world may, for example, commit to volunteering at a soup kitchen as a result of a reasons-responsive mechanism and this may develop her generous nature. In such a case it seems strange to insist that the agent’s character is entirely the result of factors beyond her control, even though it is true that her character is not entirely due to factors within her control. I won’t press this point further here.

  5. The hard-line response grants the point that the incompatibilist can set up the cases such that there is no difference in what the compatibilist takes to be relevant to responsibility.

  6. And, presumably, in which he also meets some incompatibilist condition on responsibility.

  7. Another way to see the tension in Tierney’s account involves her remarks towards premise (1) in Todd’s argument: if blameworthiness is mitigated for Plum in Case 2, blameworthiness is mitigated if mere causal determinism is true. Tierney appears to grant the truth of this premise since she agrees with McKenna that a soft-line response will be ultimately ineffective; she says that she will grant the argument for the symmetry between manipulation and determinism (Sect. 3, para. 3). But she also appears to be committed to the rejection of this premise: “Though individuals can be determined to be more appropriate loci of blame and punishment than other agents, it is not in virtue of determinism alone that this is the case” (Sect. 5, para. 4) and later, “Recall, however, the compatibilist need not grant that determinism or manipulation in themselves are enough to undermine judgments of responsibility. Rather, it is how an agent is so determined or manipulated that affects our judgments” (Sect. 6, para. 2). Tierney seems to be claiming that determinism does not mitigate in itself. Premise (1) is intended by Todd, I think, to express the idea that if blameworthiness is mitigated for Plum in Case 2, then determinism mitigates in itself. Given that she grants that Plum’s blameworthiness in Case 2 is mitigated, she appears to be committed both to the acceptance and rejection of premise (1). That is, she seems to grant the truth of premise (1) since she intends to take a hard-line reply. But she also grants the antecedent of premise (1) while denying the consequent.

  8. I mean this to be understood as the claim that if blameworthiness is mitigated in Case 2, then it is mitigated if determinism is true and if blameworthiness is eliminated in Case 2, then it is eliminated if determinism is true. Premise (1) is simply meant to express that there is some possible manipulation that gets all the compatibilist conditions right such that there is no relevant difference between the manipulation and determinism.

  9. Note that while one cannot consistently reject both (3) and (3*) one can consistently accept both (3) and (3*). I will return to this possibility shortly.

  10. Indeed, my strategy in responding to Todd is similar to McKenna’s strategy in responding to Pereboom insofar as it involves a parallel counter-argument to the opposite effect.

  11. This is why (2) and (2*) are trivially true.

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Correspondence to Andrew C. Khoury.

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Khoury, A.C. Manipulation and mitigation. Philos Stud 168, 283–294 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0125-7

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