Abstract
John Martin Fischer’s most recent collection of essays, Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value, is both incredibly wide-ranging and impressively detailed. Fischer manages to cover a staggering amount of ground in the free will debate, while also providing insightful and articulate analyses of many of the positions defended in the field. In this collection, Fischer focuses on the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. In the first section of his book, Fischer defends Frankfurt cases as an important and useful tool in rejecting the necessity of regulative control for moral responsibility. In the second section, Fischer turns his attention to his own account of guidance control. In this essay, I first focus on Fischer’s defense of Frankfurt cases, specifically his response to the argument that the assumption of determinism in such cases is question-begging. I then analyze two objections to Fischer’s account of guidance control. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the metaphor of the pilgrimage, which Fischer introduces in the opening essay of his collection.
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Notes
Some philosophers also accept an autonomy or authenticity condition where, in order for an agent to be responsible for her behavior, she must in some way be the authentic source of her actions. For an account of such an authenticity condition, see Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (1984). Many philosophers also argue that there is a tracing component to moral responsibility. By tracing back to a time when an agent fulfills the epistemic and control conditions, we can understand how an individual can be responsible for a given act even though she doesn’t fulfill the epistemic or control conditions at the time she commits the act. Fischer, along with co-author Neal Tognazzini, tackles this issue in the essay, “The Triumph of Tracing” (Fischer 2012, 206–233).
One could also defend a weaker epistemic condition, one that requires agents to justifiably believe that they are performing a certain act in order to be responsible for that act.
The original version of this case can be found in Fischer (1982).
Though Frankfurt does not include a prior sign in his original case, he does note the possibility of doing so in a footnote: “We can imagine that Jones4 has often confronted the alternatives—A and B—that he now confronts, and that his face has invariably twitched when he was about to decide to do A and never when he was about to decide to do B. Knowing this, and observing the twitch, Black would have a basis for his prediction” (Frankfurt 1969, 835).
Furthermore, there are some compatibilists who contend that we cannot be morally responsible unless determinism is true or, less demandingly, unless deterministic causal relations can obtain. For example: Ayer (1954), Hobart (1934), Nowell-Smith (1948), and Smart (1961). These theorists in particular must be able to respond to the first horn of the Dilemma Defense.
Vihvelin’s full case can be found in Deep Control on p. 56 and in Vihvelin (2000).
If this were to occur, then Black would have a false belief about the coin flip. Fischer grants that Black can have knowledge about the future, but this does not mean that Black is infallible. If he were incapable of having false beliefs, then this would call into question whether the coin really could have come up tails. Rather, Black has human foreknowledge, as opposed to divine foreknowledge. He can know contingent propositions; this doesn’t make these propositions necessary. Fischer clarifies: “Although the conditional ‘If Black knows that p, then p is true’ can be necessary, this necessity does not attach to the consequent of the conditional, even given the truth of the antecedent” (Fischer 2012, 59).
Fischer also responds to arguments for premise 3 of the dilemma defended by Ishtiyaque Haji, Robert Kane, and Alfred Mele (Fischer 2012, 99–101). Though it is beyond the scope of this review essay to discuss the specifics of these objections and replies, Fischer provides an excellent and comprehensive discussion of the problem of luck.
Where a “mechanism” is to be understood as a process or way of making decisions and producing actions (Fischer 2012, 186).
Of course, Fischer importantly does not require agents to be able to do otherwise in order to be morally responsible. So, this sentence is best interpreted as the claim that Schmidt’s voting mechanism wouldn’t have the capacity to properly weigh such information in that time.
Indeed, Fischer grants that the agoraphobe is reasons-responsive. And though Fischer argues that the agoraphobe is insufficiently reasons-responsive to warrant attributions of responsibility, this is because he is responsive to very few reasons, which is presumably not the case with Schmidt.
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Michael McKenna for his guidance and his valuable remarks on earlier drafts of this essay. I am also grateful to John Martin Fischer, whose work on free will and moral responsibility has been hugely influential in my thinking on these matters.
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Tierney, H. A Pilgrimage Through John Martin Fischer’s Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value . Criminal Law, Philosophy 10, 179–196 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9301-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9301-x