It has been alleged that compatibilists are committed to the view that agents act freely and responsibly even when subject to certain forms of radical manipulation. In this paper I identify and elucidate a form of compatibilist freedom, social autonomy, that is essential to understanding what is wrong with ordinary indoctrination and argue that it also holds the key to understanding what goes wrong in more fanciful manipulation cases.
I. THE MANIPULATION ARGUMENTImagine a causally predetermined action that meets all of the standard compatibilist requirements on freedom and responsibility, such as relevant knowledge, reasonsresponsiveness, higher-order endorsement, non-coercion, and so on. Then suppose that the distant causal chains inevitably leading to this action's performance were in fact initiated by some sinister manipulator. Since this further supposition is not precluded by any of the standard compatibilist requirements, the compatibilist looks committed to the implausible view that agents insidiously controlled by unwelcome manipulators may nevertheless be paragons of freedom and responsibility. Moreover, the root source of the compatibilist's problem seems to be her very claim that freedom and responsibility are compatible with determinism. For this is, after all, just the claim that freedom and responsibility are compatible with 'manipulation' by natural forces-and once it is allowed that agents may be free and responsible despite being no more than marionettes, what can it matter who or what is pulling the strings? This is the incompatibilist's Manipulation Argument (Kane 1985, Ch. 3; 1996, Ch. 5;Kapitan 2000; Pereboom 2001, pp. 110-26; Mele 1995, pp. 190-1; 2006, pp. 188-90). Alfred Mele motivates one version of it with a widely-discussed case in which a 'supremely intelligent being', Diana, creates a zygote in a woman, Mary. Diana combines [the zygote] Z's atoms as she does because she wants a certain event E to occur thirty years later. From her knowledge of the state of the universe just prior to her creating Z and the laws of nature of her deterministic universe, she deduces that a zygote with precisely Z's constitution located in Mary will develop into an ideally self-controlled agent [Ernie] 2 who, in thirty years, will judge, on the basis of rational deliberation, that it is best to A and will A on the basis of that judgement, thereby bringing about E. (2006, p. 188) Many are reluctant to concede that, when Ernie As, he does so with full freedom and moral responsibility. Yet this is precisely the claim to which the compatibilist seems unavoidably committed.Although the Manipulation Argument is generally taken to target compatibilist accounts of both freedom and responsibility, to date the focus has mostly been on the latter (indeed, the reference to freedom is frequently redundant, insofar as it is restricted to freedom 'in the sense required for moral responsibility'). Yet the argument also poses a formidable challenge to compatibilist attempts to understand human freedom in its own rig...
