Manipulation and Moral Standing: An Argument for Incompatibilism

Todd, Patrick

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Manipulation and Moral Standing: An Argument for Incompatibilism

Patrick Todd

March 2012, Volume 12, No. 7, pp. 1-18

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0012.007

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Abstract

A prominent recent strategy for advancing the thesis that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism has been to argue that agents who meet compatibilist conditions for responsibility could nevertheless be subject to certain sorts of deterministic manipulation, so that an agent could meet the compatibilist’s conditions for responsibility, but also be living a life the precise details of which someone else determined that she should live. According to the incompatibilist, however, once we became aware that agents had been manipulated or ‘set up’ in the relevant way, we should no longer judge that they are responsible for their behavior, nor should we hold them responsible for it by blaming them, in case what they did was wrong. In this paper, I aim to shift the debate to different terrain. The focus so far has been simply on what we may or may not permissibly say or do concerning manipulated agents. But I believe a powerful new incompatibilist argument can be mounted from considering whether the manipulators themselves can justifiably blame the agents they manipulate in compatibilist-friendly ways. It seems strikingly counterintuitive to suppose that they may do so. The argument of this paper, however, is that, given the right story, incompatibilism provides the best explanation for why this is so. In short, the compatibilist must say that, while such manipulated agents are still responsible, the manipulators lack the moral standing to blame them. But I argue that, on compatibilist assumptions, this explanation ultimately fails.

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What counts as “holding” an agent morally responsible? This is a difficult question. Here I simply stipulate that one holds an agent morally responsible if and only if (1) one responds to the agent’s behavior with the relevant so-called reactive attitudes, such as resentment, anger, and indignation or (2) one punishes the agent, even if one does not respond to the agent with the reactive attitudes. (For purposes of this paper, I focus only on blame, punishment, and the associated negative reactive attitudes.) Thus, it is necessary for holding responsible that one does more than simply judging that the agent is responsible (or is blameworthy). Concerning the reactive attitudes, such responses, as I will have it, need not be expressed directly to the agent in question. One might hold a wrongdoer responsible by becoming inwardly angry with him, or by expressing one’s outrage to a friend. Lastly, I assume that an agent’s being responsible (or being blameworthy) for a particular action is a necessary condition for the appropriateness of someone’s holding that agent responsible. In other words, in the sense of ‘appropriateness’ at stake, it is never appropriate to blame or punish an agent who actually isn’t responsible; no one ever has the moral standing to blame the innocent. Moreover, for purposes of this paper, I will suppose that free will is simply whatever sort of control is required for moral responsibility; it is the “control condition” on moral responsibility. Having free will is thus a necessary condition on being responsible, which is in turn a necessary condition on the appropriateness of being held responsible.

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