Pereboom argues that we ought to focus on both Plum’s agency and the manipulation, and points out that he describes both these features in the thought experiment. Prima facie, this sounds perfectly reasonable; surely, our intuitions will be most trustworthy if we try to take everything into account. Depending on what we mean by “focusing on agency”, however, I doubt that this is possible.
We can simultaneously keep in mind that Plum is manipulated and that the manipulation is of a sophisticated kind, causing him to respond to reasons for action and so on, rather than acting like a simple robot or machine. However, in doing so, we still keep our eyes on the causal chain leading up to his action, from a kind of detached third-person perspective. It is a very different matter to place oneself in Plum’s shoes and consider what the situation looks like to him, as I have done (somewhat inadequately, as we need fully fleshed-out fiction in order to really see a situation from someone else’s point of view) in the previous sections, and as we frequently do when watching TV shows, reading novels and so on. I will distinguish between regarding Plum from a causal and an agential perspective respectively. When taking up a causal perspective, we focus on what caused the agent to do what she does. When taking up an agential perspective, we focus on what the deliberation, decision and action was like to her. This distinction is somewhat inspired by the traditional Kantian distinction between regarding people from a theoretical or practical perspective, but in order to avoid bringing on all the baggage from centuries of Kantianism and deal with all the radically different interpretations Kant’s texts have given rise to, I prefer to coin new terms. (There are also comparisons to be made with Strawson’s participant/objective distinction—I will come back to that later).
It is important to note that the kind of switch in perspective that I here describe does not entail switching beliefs. When I take up an agential perspective on Plum, and see his choice to murder White from his point of view, it is not the case that I cease to believe that he is manipulated into doing what he does; that there is a deterministic causal chain running from the scientists’ programming him through various environmental influences that interact with the program and culminates in the murder of White. I still believe this; it is just not what I focus on. Conversely, when I take up a causal perspective on Plum, and focus on the scientists and their manipulation, it is not the case that I cease to believe that there is something that it is like to be Plum, or that Plum must focus on his reasons for action in order to decide what to do. I still believe this, but I do not focus on it. Even keeping one’s beliefs intact, however, a shift in focus can affect one’s intuitions. And we can legitimately ask how we ought to focus or which perspective we ought to take up, the agential or the causal one, in order to arrive at trustworthy moral responsibility intuitions.
Pereboom writes that it would be question-begging of the compatibilist to suggest that we simply focus on Plum’s agency and ignore the manipulation. If we imagine someone taking Pereboom’s own description and then using a black marker to blot out the parts of the text describing the manipulation, afterwards repeating only the “agency” parts of the description over and over again, finally announcing that she feels responsibility intuitions coming on—I agree, this would be arbitrary and question-begging. However, considering what the situation looks like to Plum is not the same thing as merely focusing on fewer features of the situation, but on different features. To say that we should focus on the causal chain and disregard what things are like for Plum is no less question-begging than the suggestion that we do the opposite.
We might try to take everything into account by simultaneously focusing on what Plum’s decision is like for him and on the fact that the manipulation deterministically causes him to do what he does, or by at least flipping back and forth between perspectives. In reality, I think this will be hard to do; either the causal or agential perspective will tend to dominate. We will tend to either focus on how the choice seemed from Plum’s point of view, the options he had to choose between and his reasons for action, or on the causal chain (including the manipulation) leading up to the murder, but not on both at the same time.
Furthermore, it is not even obvious that our intuitions become more reliable the more information we try to take in. It is possible that adding irrelevant information will disturb our intuitions rather than helping them. It has been shown, for instance, that when asking people whether a fat man should be pushed down from a bridge in front of a runaway trolley in order to save others, suggesting that he is either black or white will influence people’s judgments, even though the participants of the survey hold the explicit belief that race does not matter (Uhlmann et al. 2009). Additional, irrelevant information about the man’s race distort people’s moral intuitions. I am not saying that the case of Plum and White is comparable to this version of the trolley problem, just that we have no reason to believe that moral intuitions generally improve the more information we try to take into account. Our intuitions might very well be at their best when we focus on all the relevant information and nothing else—but if so, we return to the question of what is relevant; Plum’s own agential perspective or the causal one.
My suggestion is that different perspectives and different ways of seeing people’s choices are appropriate in different contexts. Suppose, for instance, that I am a neuro-scientist myself, and I study what happens in people’s brains when they deliberate and make decisions. In this context, I ought to focus on the causal, neurological chains leading up to the decision, and if I happen to have Plum as my subject, on the manipulation, since this is my job. In most contexts, however, it is appropriate to try to see things from other people’s point of view. To which extent we ought to do this varies, of course, depending on how close our relationship is. With close friends, friendship might obligate me to really put myself in their shoes and try to appreciate as fully as possible what things were like for them when they acted. But even everyday interaction with people whom I do not have a close friendship with requires taking up their point of view to some extent. Simple, everyday conversations often involve references to options and the reasons we have for them. My colleague at work might say, for instance “Should I go to the Indian place or the Thai place for lunch? What do you think?” Even answering such a simple question becomes difficult if I start to ponder that wherever he ends up, it was determined by the past and the laws of nature (if the world is deterministic) or he was programmed to do it (if my colleague is Professor Plum). In order to answer, I need not empathize deeply with him and feel what he feels and so on. But I must think of “going to the Thai place” and “going to the Indian place” as two options, and think of some pro tanto reason for at least one of them (maybe the Thai place is cheaper)—just like my colleague thinks of his options and his reasons.
Deep friendships as well as simple everyday interactions thus require that we often see things from the other agent’s point of view rather than focusing on what caused him to act. Furthermore, if we were to consistently take up a causal perspective on other people, this would come off as cold, even demeaning. I morally ought not to regard myself as an agent while regarding other people as sophisticated vending machines. If I focus, in my interactions with Plum, on his manipulation, I might try to influence him in various ways and figure out which figurative buttons to push in order to get desired results. But seeing him this way precludes treating him with the respect we owe other people—at least if this perspective dominates. Just like the Hologram Doctor occasionally pondered his programmed state, we might occasionally ponder determinism—or manipulation, if we came to interact with people whom we knew were manipulated. But we normally have to set this aside as soon as we consider what to do, or when we are engaged in anything resembling normal interaction with other people. And when we set determinism/manipulation aside, people also seem morally responsible for what they do.
It should be noted that I do not claim that we have to take up a participant stance towards other people in the full Strawsonian sense. Strawson (1962/2013) famously argued that we can take up either a participant or an objective stance. The former is, Strawson claimed, absolutely necessary for ordinary, adult human relationships. When we take up this stance towards others, we care about whether their actions express an ill, indifferent or good will towards us, and when the former, we react with resentment, indignation or anger. We hold people responsible and blame them for wrongdoing because this is so deeply ingrained in us that we cannot give it up, and even if we could, doing so would be undesirable, seeing as reacting against wrongdoing in this way is essential to normal relationships. Paul Russell (2010) argues that even if we came to interact with manipulated agents like Plum in the low number cases, we ought to take up a participant stance towards them (although the people responsible for the manipulation ought not to do so). However, whether the reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation and anger really are necessary for normal, adult human relationships is highly contested; perhaps we could replace these attitudes with calmer and friendlier ones of, e.g., sadness and disappointment, and perhaps our relationships would be the better for it (see, for instance, Pereboom 2014; Sommers 2007; Milam 2016).
My claim is much weaker than Strawson’s. Strawson claimed that normal interactions with other people requires us to react with resentment and related attitudes to wrongdoing, but I take no stand on this issue in this paper. I merely claim that we cannot have normal interactions with other people unless we mostly see their choices from their point of view, rather than focusing on the causal chains behind their actions. Seeing their choices as they perceive them, in turn, entails a focus on options and reasons rather than distant causes, determinism or (in the case of Plum) manipulation. However, taking up an agential perspective on others does not entail holding them responsible or blaming them when they do wrong; I leave it open that there might be reasons independent of the four-case manipulation argument not to hold people responsible for what they do. The agential perspective does, however, extinguish our non-responsibility intuitions about classic manipulation cases. If we ought to regard Plum in this way, as I have argued, the four-case manipulation argument does not get off the ground. I leave it open that Pereboom’s hard incompatibilism might be true after all; my business in this paper is merely to undermine one of his primary arguments for it.
Now, Pereboom might agree with quite a lot of what I have argued for so far. He does argue that if the world is deterministic, it can still be rational to consider various options and deliberate about what to do (Pereboom 2008, 2014: Chap. 5). Possibly, Pereboom agrees as well that it makes sense for Plum to disregard the fact that he is manipulated when deliberating about what to do, and for us to disregard it in much of our interactions with him. Still, according to Pereboom, in order to determine whether Plum can really be morally responsible for what he does, we must adopt a more detached, causal perspective and focus on the causal chain behind his actions. It is only when we do this that trustworthy intuitions arise. However, this claim clearly needs to be argued for, and I have already pointed out the problems with the idea that our intuitions become more trustworthy the more information we try to simultaneously focus on. First, it is not obviously true that the more information we try to focus on the better, since irrelevant information might disturb our intuitions rather than help them. Second, regarding an agent and his choice from an agential perspective, putting oneself in his shoes, means regarding him differently—it is not just a case of arbitrarily ignoring certain pieces of information while keeping others.
It might still be argued that we cannot account for certain intuitively plausible cases of diminished responsibility, or the tracing of responsibility back to previous actions, without leaving the agential perspective and focus on the causal chains leading up to the agent’s deliberation and decision. This argument, however, can be resisted.