Abstract
In Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, John Fischer and Mark Ravizza argue against incompatibilist principles of moral responsibility and offer a compatibilist account of moral responsibility. The book has sparked much discussion and criticism. In this article I point out a significant flaw in Fischer and Ravizza’s negative arguments against the incompatibilist Principle of the Transfer of Non-Responsibility. I also criticise their positive argument that moral responsibility for consequences depends on action-responsiveness. In the former case I argue that their putative counterexamples against Transfer NR and Transfer NR* are underdescribed but once fully described depend upon consequence-particulars and not consequence-universals as they claim. In the latter case I argue that their account is unable to cope with quite ordinary cases of jointly determined consequences.
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Notes
- 1.
The book brings together and refines material from a series of earlier articles.
- 2.
I do not mean to say that a compatibilist must attempt to do both of these things, only that a complete compatibilist approach would. Nor do I mean to suggest that the business of developing a positive account of moral responsibility is idiosyncratic to compatibilists. For, it is available to an incompatibilist to combine such an account (even the positive account of Fischer and Ravizza) with the requirement that the agent must have genuinely open alternative possibilities (see Ginet 2006:241).
- 3.
The original Frankfurt case runs as follows. Suppose Black places Jones in a set of circumstances which leave Jones no alternative but to do the thing that Black wants him to do. If Jones begins to look as though he is not going to do as Black desires, then Black will take “effective steps” to ensure that he does, although Jones does not know that Black will intervene. In the end Jones decides to do the thing without Black actually having to step in to make him do it. Although Jones could not have acted otherwise in that sense, we nonetheless tend to think that he is morally responsible for his actions (Frankfurt 1969:835).
- 4.
For alleged counterexamples in which the preempting agent is not morally responsible after all, see Levy (2002).
- 5.
The path for which the agent is putatively responsible must, on Fischer and Ravizza’s account, involve guidance control with respect to both inner mechanisms (from mind to act or omission) and outer processes (from act or omission to consequence). Since my interest in this article is with outer processes and not internal mechanisms, I shall not discuss Eleonore Stump’s objection that if causal determinism is true and inner mechanisms are constituted by physical matter (i.e. neurons), then the path for which the agent is putatively responsible fails (Stump 2000). For a reply, see Fischer and Ravizza (2000).
- 6.
At first glance, it is not clear why it is important in the case of Assassins that the two agents are acting independently of each other. But perhaps the importance can be underlined as follows. Suppose a married couple are living beyond their means. They rack up large debts they cannot afford to pay off. They each know what the other is doing. Nevertheless, the actions of each agent would have been sufficient to produce debts which they cannot repay. This is a case of simultaneous overdetermination of consequence, but it is not a counterexample of the right sort. That is because it might be argued that the husband is partly responsible for the actions of the wife and vice versa. This looks likely if each is aware of what the other is doing, each does not attempt to stop the other and each encourages the spending of the other.
- 7.
For an interesting discussion of a possible tension between Fischer and Ravizza’s account of guidance control over consequence-particulars and their account of taking responsibility, see Judisch (2007).
- 8.
I do not consider here the fact that there is an ambiguity in the concept of crushing a camp. On one reading, the camp is not crushed until every last part of the camp, P1, P2 to Pn, is crushed. This is “crushed” in the sense of complete obliteration. According to another reading, the camp is crushed only provided that all of the core parts, P*1, P*2 to P*n, are crushed, where the core parts might be the foundation blocks of the main living quarters, the supporting legs of the observation tower, the camp flag, the fence posts, the walls of the ammunition store and the communications dish. This is “crushed” in the sense of rendered useless as a camp but not completely obliterated. I believe that the example could be made to work whichever of the two readings of the concept of crushing a camp is given.
- 9.
I shall not discuss here an example put forward by Glannon (1997) in which an agent is in a situation such that even though her act was not, and could not have been, sufficient to bring about or prevent the occurrence of an undesirable consequence directly, she is nevertheless morally responsible for the consequence through her own negligent interference in the actions of another person who is in a position to determine what happens directly.
- 10.
I do not intend to consider cases of analytic joint responsibility; that is to say, cases in which it is true by virtue of the meanings of the terms that two agents are responsible for the consequence in question since the consequence must involve joint action. For example, we might say that two people must be jointly responsible for the consequence, that the boss had an affair with his secretary, since given the ordinary meaning of “an affair” the consequence must be the result of the joint actions of two agents. This is captured by the popular dictum, “it takes two to tango”.
References
Fischer, John, and Ravizza, Mark. 1998. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Frankfurt, Harry. 1969. “Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Journal of Philosophy 66:829–39.
Frankfurt, Harry. 1971. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy 68:5–22.
Frankfurt, Harry. 1987. “Identification and Wholeheartedness.” In Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essay in Moral Psychology, edited by Ferdinand Schoeman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 27–45.
Ginet, Carl. 2006. “Working with Fischer and Ravizza’s Account of Moral Responsibility.” Journal of Ethics 10:229–53.
Glannon, Walter. 1997. “Sensitivity and Responsibility for Consequences.” Philosophical Studies 87:223–33.
Grann, David. 2009. “Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” In The New Yorker, September 7. Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann, last accessed July 1, 2011.
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Levy, Neil. 2002. “Excusing Responsibility for the Inevitable.” Philosophical Studies 111:43–52.
McKenna, Michael. 2008. “Saying Good-Bye to the Direct Argument the Right Way.” Philosophical Review 117:349–83.
Stump, Eleonore. 2000. “Review: The Direct Argument for Incompatibilism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61:459–66.
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Brown, A. (2011). Moral Responsibility and Jointly Determined Consequences. In: Vincent, N., van de Poel, I., van den Hoven, J. (eds) Moral Responsibility. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1878-4_10
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