“…To be morally responsible, one might suggest, it is necessary that one is suitably invested in one's background evaluative scheme. It must be, in some sense, one's own (see Haji and Cuypers 2007). This, it might be held, calls into question whether it really is appropriate to revise one's judgement about the agent's moral responsibility even with the addition of libertarian elements.…”
Cases involving certain kinds of manipulation seem to challenge compatibilism about responsibility-grounding free will. To deal with such cases many compatibilists give what has become known as a 'soft line' reply. In this paper I present a challenge to the soft line reply. I argue that any relevant case involving manipulation-and to which a compatibilist might wish to give a soft line replycan be transformed into one supporting a degree of moral responsibility through the addition of libertarian elements (such as alternative possibilities of a kind unavailable under determinism and executive control of the sort commonly associated with agent-causation). From a compatibilist's perspective the subtraction of libertarian elements should make no difference to any assessment of the agent's responsibility. The compatibilist should therefore judge the agent morally responsible after the removal of the libertarian elements. Yet removal of the libertarian elements returns the case to its original form and thus what started out as a soft line has now collapsed into a hard line reply. Various ways of resisting my argument are considered, but each is shown to carry important burdens.
“…To be morally responsible, one might suggest, it is necessary that one is suitably invested in one's background evaluative scheme. It must be, in some sense, one's own (see Haji and Cuypers 2007). This, it might be held, calls into question whether it really is appropriate to revise one's judgement about the agent's moral responsibility even with the addition of libertarian elements.…”
Cases involving certain kinds of manipulation seem to challenge compatibilism about responsibility-grounding free will. To deal with such cases many compatibilists give what has become known as a 'soft line' reply. In this paper I present a challenge to the soft line reply. I argue that any relevant case involving manipulation-and to which a compatibilist might wish to give a soft line replycan be transformed into one supporting a degree of moral responsibility through the addition of libertarian elements (such as alternative possibilities of a kind unavailable under determinism and executive control of the sort commonly associated with agent-causation). From a compatibilist's perspective the subtraction of libertarian elements should make no difference to any assessment of the agent's responsibility. The compatibilist should therefore judge the agent morally responsible after the removal of the libertarian elements. Yet removal of the libertarian elements returns the case to its original form and thus what started out as a soft line has now collapsed into a hard line reply. Various ways of resisting my argument are considered, but each is shown to carry important burdens.
“…Here, I do not wish to claim that it is only the first that is plausible and not the second. Rather, I want to claim only that the plausibility of the 74 Haji and Cuypers (2007) offer a different explanation of why the cases of Beth and Suzie Instant should be treated asymmetrically. They do so by way of defending a positive historical thesis, but one that only applies to agents who have a history.…”
Manipulation arguments for incompatibilism all build upon some example or other in which an agent is covertly manipulated into acquiring a psychic structure on the basis of which she performs an action. The featured agent, it is alleged, is manipulated into satisfying conditions compatibilists would take to be sufficient for acting freely. Such an example used in the context of an argument for incompatibilism is meant to elicit the intuition that, due to the pervasiveness of the manipulation, the agent does not act freely and is not morally responsible for what she does. It is then claimed that any agent's coming to be in the same psychic state through a deterministic process is no different in any relevant respect from the pertinent manner of manipulation. Hence, it is concluded that compatibilists' proposed sufficient conditions for free will and moral responsibility are inadequate, and that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. One way for compatibilists to resist certain manipulation arguments is by appealing to historical requirements that, they contend, relevant manipulated agents lack. While a growing number of compatibilists advance an historical thesis, in this paper, I redouble my efforts to show, in defense of nonhistorical compatibilists like Harry Frankfurt, that there is still life left in a nonhistorical view. The historical compatibilists, I contend, have fallen shy of discrediting their nonhistorical compatibilist rivals.
“…Haji and Cuypers (, ) are clearly aware of the problem of the infinite regress and their version of HTMR is carefully designed to circumvent it. They distinguish between an agent's ‘initial evaluative scheme’ and subsequent schemes that the agent may come to adopt later.…”
Section: Haji and Cuypersmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…It is not required for the authenticity of an initial evaluative scheme that it be ‘chosen’ or that the agent be in any sense MR for having come to adopt that scheme (for indeed, how could he be?). Rather, the authenticity of the initial scheme is understood in terms that are ‘forward looking’ or ‘relational’ – thus H&C propose: Authenticity‐1: An agent's initial evaluative scheme is responsibility‐wise authentic if its pro‐attitudinal elements (i) include all those, if any, that are required to ensure that the agent will be morally responsible for its future behavior; (ii) do not include any that will subvert the agent's being responsible for future behavior that issues from these elements; and (iii) have been acquired by means that, again, will not subvert the agent's being responsible for its future behavior (, p. 355).…”
Section: Haji and Cuypersmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Authenticity‐1: An agent's initial evaluative scheme is responsibility‐wise authentic if its pro‐attitudinal elements (i) include all those, if any, that are required to ensure that the agent will be morally responsible for its future behavior; (ii) do not include any that will subvert the agent's being responsible for future behavior that issues from these elements; and (iii) have been acquired by means that, again, will not subvert the agent's being responsible for its future behavior (, p. 355).…”
Some compatibilists have responded to the manipulation argument for incompatibilism by proposing an historical theory of moral responsibility which, according to one version, requires that agents be morally responsible for having their pro‐attitudes if they are to be morally responsible for acting on them. This proposal, however, leads obviously to an infinite regress problem. I consider a proposal by Haji and Cuypers that addresses this problem and argue that it is unsatisfactory. I then go on to propose a new solution inspired by the libertarian theory of Robert Kane.
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