## 1. Freedom, Responsibility, and Determinism



How is the responsible agent related to her actions; what power does
she exercise over them? One (partial) answer is that the relevant
power is a form of control, and, in particular, a form of control such
that the agent *could have done otherwise* than to perform the
action in question. This captures one commonsense notion of free will,
and one of the central issues in debates about free will has been
about whether possession of it (free will, in the
ability-to-do-otherwise sense) is compatible with causal determinism
(or with, for example, divine foreknowledge--see the
 entry on foreknowledge and free will).



If causal determinism is true, then the occurrence of any event
(including events involving human deliberation, choice, and action)
that does in fact occur was made inevitable by--because it was
causally necessitated by--the facts about the past (and the laws
of nature) prior to the occurrence of the event. Under these
conditions, the facts about the present, and about the future, are
uniquely fixed by the facts about the past (and about the laws of
nature): given these earlier facts, the present and the future can
unfold in only one way. For more, see the
 entry on causal determinism.



If possession of free will requires an ability to act otherwise than
one in fact does, then it is fairly easy to see why free will has
often been regarded as incompatible with causal determinism. One way
of getting at this *incompatibilist* worry is to focus on the
way in which performance of a given action should be *up to an
agent* if he has the sort of free will required for moral
responsibility. As the influential Consequence Argument has it (Ginet
1966; van Inwagen 1983: 55-105; Wiggins 1973), the truth of
determinism seems to entail that an agent's actions are
*not* up to him since they are the unavoidable consequences of
things over which the agent lacks control. Here is an informal summary
of this argument from Peter van Inwagen's important book, *An
Essay on Free Will* (1983):



> 
> 
> If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws
> of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what
> went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws
> of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including
> our present acts) are not up to us. (1983: 16)
> 
> 
> 



For an important argument that suggests that the Consequence Argument
conflates different senses in which the laws of nature are not up to
us, see David Lewis (1981). For more on incompatibilism and
incompatibilist arguments, see the entries on 
 free will, 
 arguments for incompatibilism, 
and 
 incompatibilist (nondeterministic) theories of free will, 
as well as Randolph Clarke (2003).



*Compatibilists* maintain that free will (and/or moral
responsibility) is possible even in a deterministic universe. Versions
of compatibilism have been defended since ancient times. For example,
the Stoics--Chryssipus, in particular--argued that the truth
of determinism does not entail that human actions are entirely
explained by factors external to agents; thus, human actions are not
necessarily explained in a way that is incompatible with praise and
blame (see Bobzien 1998 and Salles 2005 for Stoic views on freedom and
determinism). Similarly, philosophers in the Modern period (such as
Hobbes and Hume) distinguished the general way in which our actions
are necessitated if determinism is true from the specific instances of
necessity sometimes imposed on us by everyday constraints on our
behavior (e.g., physical impediments that make it impossible to act as
we choose). The difference is that the necessity involved in
determinism is compatible with agents acting as they choose to act:
even if *S*'s behavior is causally determined, it may be
behavior that she chooses to perform. And perhaps the ability that
matters for free will (and responsibility) is just the ability to act
as one chooses, which seems to require only the absence of external
constraints (and not the absence of determinism).



This compatibilist tradition was carried into the twentieth century by
logical positivists such A. J. Ayer (1954) and Moritz Schlick (1930
[1966]). Here is how Schlick expressed the central compatibilist
insight in 1930 (drawing, in particular, on Hume): 



> 
> 
> Freedom means the opposite of compulsion; a man is *free* if he
> does not act under *compulsion*, and he is compelled or unfree
> when he is hindered from without...when he is locked up, or
> chained, or when someone forces him at the point of a gun to do what
> otherwise he would not do. (1930 [1966: 59])
> 
> 
> 



Since deterministic causal pressures do not always force one to
"do what otherwise he would not do", freedom--at
least of the sort specified by Schlick--is compatible with
determinism.



A closely related compatibilist strategy, influential in the early and
mid-twentieth century, was to offer a *conditional analysis of the
ability to do otherwise* (Ayer 1954, Hobart 1934, Moore 1912; for
earlier expressions, see Hobbes 1654 and Hume 1748). As just noted,
even if determinism is true, agents may often act as they choose, and
it is equally compatible with determinism that an agent who performed
act *A* (on the basis of his choice to do so) might have
performed a different action *on the condition that* (contrary
to what actually happened) she had chosen to perform the other action.
Even if a person's actual behavior is causally determined by the
actual past, it may be that if the past had been suitably different
(e.g., if the person's desires, intentions, choices, etc. had
been different), then she would have acted differently. And perhaps
this is all that the ability to do otherwise comes to: one can do
otherwise if it is true that if one had chosen to do otherwise, then
one would have done otherwise. 



However, this compatibilist picture is open to serious objections.
First, it might be granted that an ability to act as one sees fit is
valuable, and perhaps related to the type of freedom at issue in the
free will debate, but it does not follow that this is *all*
that possession of free will comes to. A person who has certain
desires as a result of indoctrination, brainwashing, or
psychopathology may act as he chooses, but his free will and moral
responsibility may still be called into question. (For more on the
relevance of such factors, see
 SS3.2
 and
 SS3.3.3.)
 More specifically, the conditional analysis is open to the following
sort of counterexample. It might be true that an agent who performs
act *A* would have omitted *A* if she had so chosen, but it
might also be true that the agent in question suffers from an
overwhelming compulsion to perform act *A*. The conditional
analysis suggests that the agent in question retains the ability to do
otherwise than *A*, but, given her compulsion, it seems clear
that she lacks this ability (Broad 1934, Chisholm 1964, Lehrer 1968,
van Inwagen 1983). More generally, incompatibilists are likely to be
dissatisfied with the conditional analysis since it fails to give an
account of an ability that agents can have, right here and right now,
to either perform or omit an action while holding everything about the
here and now, and about the past, fixed.



Despite the above objections, the compatibilist project described so
far has had significant lasting influence. As will be seen below, the
fact that determined agents can act as they see fit is still an
important inspiration for compatibilists, as is the fact that
determined agents may have acted differently in counterfactual
circumstances. For more, see the
 entry on compatibilism.
 For recent accounts related to (and improving upon) early
compatibilist approaches, see Michael Fara (2008), Michael Smith
(2003), and Kadri Vihvelin (2004), and for criticism of these
accounts, see Randolph Clarke (2009).



Another influential trend in compatibilism has been to argue that
moral responsibility does *not* require an ability to do
otherwise. If this is right, then determinism would not threaten
responsibility by ruling out access to behavioral alternatives (though
determinism might threaten responsibility in other ways: see van
Inwagen 1983: 182-88 and Fischer & Ravizza 1998:
151-168). In a very influential 1969 paper, Harry Frankfurt
offers examples meant to show that an agent can be morally responsible
for an action even if he could not have done otherwise. Versions of
these examples are often called *Frankfurt cases* or
*Frankfurt examples*. In the basic form of the example, an
agent, Jones, considers a certain action. Another agent, Black, would
like to see Jones perform this action and, if necessary, Black can
*make* Jones perform it through some type of intervention in
Jones's deliberative process. However, as things transpire,
Black does not intervene in Jones's decision making since he can
see that Jones will perform the action on his own and for his own
reasons. Black does not intervene to ensure Jones's action, but
he could have, and he would have, had Jones showed some sign that he
would not perform the action on his own. Therefore, *Jones could
not have done otherwise*, yet he seems responsible for his
behavior. After all, given Black's non-intervention,
Jones's action is a perfectly ordinary bit of voluntary
behavior.



There are questions about whether Frankfurt's example really
shows that Jones is morally responsible even though he couldn't
have done otherwise. For one thing, it may not be clear that Jones
really couldn't have done otherwise: while he performed the
action on his own, there was the alternative that he perform the
action due to some intervention on Black's part, and not on his
own. Furthermore, though he did not do so, Jones *might have*
given Black some indication that he would not perform the action in
question. Alternatively, an objection might be framed by asking how
Black could be certain that Jones would or would not perform the
action on his own. There seems to be a dilemma here. Perhaps
determinism obtains in the universe of the example, and Black sees
some sign that indicates the presence of factors that *causally
ensure* that Jones will behave in a particular way. But in this
case, incompatibilists are unlikely to grant that Jones is morally
responsible if they think that moral responsibility is incompatible
with determinism. On the other hand, perhaps determinism is not true
in the universe of the example, but then it is not clear that the
example excludes alternatives for Jones: if Jones's behavior
isn't causally determined, then perhaps he *can* do
otherwise. For objections to Frankfurt's original example along
these lines, see Carl Ginet (1996) and David Widerker (1995); for
defenses of Frankfurt, see John M. Fischer (1994: 131-159; 2002;
2010); and for refined versions of Frankfurt's example, meant to
clearly deny Jones access to alternatives, see Alfred Mele and David
Robb (1998), David Hunt (2000), and Derk Pereboom (2000; 2001:
18-28).



In response to criticisms such as the above, Frankfurt has said that
his example was intended mainly to draw attention to the fact
"that making an action unavoidable *is not the same
thing* as bringing it about that the action is performed"
(2006: 340; emphasis in original). In particular, while determinism
may make an agent's action unavoidable, it does not follow that
the agent acts as he does *only* because determinism is true:
it may also be true that he acts as he does because he wants to and
because he sees reasons in favor of so acting. The point of his
original example, Frankfurt suggests, was to draw attention to the
significance that the *actual* causes of an agent's
behavior (such as her reasons and desires) can have independently of
whether the agent might have done something else. Frankfurt concludes
that "[w]hen a person acts for reasons of his own...the
question of whether he could have done something else instead is quite
irrelevant" for the purposes of assessing responsibility (2006:
340). A focus on the actual causes that lead to behavior, as well as
investigation into when an agent can be said to act on *her
own* reasons, has characterized a great deal of work on
responsibility since Frankfurt's essay (see 
 SS2.3
and 
 SS3.3.3).


## 2. Some Approaches to Moral Responsibility



This section discusses three important approaches to responsibility.
Additional perspectives (attributionism, conversational theories, mesh
or structural accounts, skeptical accounts, etc.) are introduced in
more or less detail in the discussions of contemporary debates
below.


### 2.1 Forward-Looking Accounts



Forward-looking approaches to moral responsibility justify
responsibility practices by focusing on the beneficial consequences
that can be obtained by engaging in these practices. This approach was
influential in the earlier parts of the twentieth century (as well as
before), had fallen out of favor by the closing decades of that
century, and has recently been the subject of renewed interest.



Forward-looking perspectives tend to emphasize one of the central
points discussed in the previous section: an agent's being
subject to determinism does not entail that he is subject to
constraints that force him to act independently of his choices. If
this is true, then, regardless of the truth of determinism, it may be
useful to offer certain incentives to agents--to praise and blame
them and generally to treat them as responsible--in order to
encourage them to make certain choices and thus to secure positive
behavioral outcomes.



According to some articulations of the forward-looking approach, to be
a responsible agent is simply to be an agent whose motives, choices,
and behavior can be shaped in this way. Thus, Moritz Schlick argued
that



> 
> 
> The question of who is responsible is the question concerning the
> *correct point of application of the motive*.... in this
> its meaning is completely exhausted; behind it lurks no mysterious
> connection between transgression and requital.... It is a matter
> only of knowing who is to be punished or rewarded, in order that
> punishment and reward function as such--be able to achieve their
> goal. (1930 [1966: 61]; emphasis in original)
> 
> 
> 



And, according to Schlick, the goals of punishment and reward have
nothing to do with the past: the idea that punishment "is a
natural *retaliation* for past wrong, ought no longer to be
defended in cultivated society" (1930 [1966: 60]; emphasis in
original). Instead, punishment ought to be 



> 
> 
> concerned only with the institution of causes, of *motives* of
> conduct.... Analogously, in the case of reward we are concerned
> with an incentive. (1930 [1966: 60]; emphasis in original) 
> 
> 
> 



J. J. C. Smart (1961) also defended a well-known, forward-looking
approach to moral responsibility in the mid-twentieth century. Smart
claimed that to blame someone for a piece of behavior is simply to
assess the behavior negatively (to "dispraise" it, in
Smart's terminology) while simultaneously ascribing
responsibility for the behavior to the agent. And, for Smart, an
ascription of responsibility merely involves taking an agent to be
such that he would have omitted the behavior if he had been provided
with a motive to do so. Whatever sanctions may follow on an ascription
of responsibility are administered with eye to giving an agent motives
to refrain from such behavior in the future.



Smart's general approach has its contemporary defenders (Arneson
2003), but many have found it lacking in important ways. For one
thing, as R. Jay Wallace notes, an approach like Smart's
"leaves out the underlying *attitudinal* aspect of moral
blame" (Wallace 1996: 56, emphasis in original; see the next
subsection for more on blaming attitudes). According to Wallace, the
attitudes involved in blame are "backward-looking and focused on
the individual agent who has done something morally wrong"
(Wallace 1996: 56). But a forward-looking approach, with its focus on
bringing about desirable outcomes 



> 
> 
> is not directed exclusively toward the individual agent who has done
> something morally wrong, but takes account of *anyone else* who
> is susceptible to being influenced by our responses. (Wallace 1996:
> 56; emphasis added) 
> 
> 
> 



In exceptional cases, a focus on beneficial outcomes may provide
grounds for treating as blameworthy those who are known to be innocent
(Smart 1973). This last feature of (some) forward-looking approaches
has led to particularly strong criticism.



Recent efforts have been made to develop partially forward-looking
accounts of responsibility that evade some of the criticisms mentioned
above. These (somewhat revisionary) accounts justify our
responsibility practices by appeal to their suitability for fostering
moral agency and the acquisition of capacities required for such
agency. Most notable in this regard is Manuel Vargas's
"agency cultivation model" of responsibility (2013; also
see Jefferson 2019 and McGeer 2015). Recent conversational accounts of
responsibility
 (SS3.2.2)
 also have an important forward-looking component insofar as they
regard those with whom one might have fruitful moral interactions as
candidates for responsibility. Some responsibility skeptics have also
emphasized the forward-looking benefits of certain responsibility
practices. For example, Derk Pereboom--who rejects desert-based
blame--has argued that some conventional blaming practices can be
maintained (even after ordinary notions of blameworthiness have been
left behind) insofar as these practices are grounded in
"non-desert invoking moral desiderata" such as
"protection of potential victims, reconciliation to
relationships both personal and with the moral community more
generally, and moral formation" (2014: 134; also see Caruso
2016, Levy 2012, and Milam 2016). In contrast to some of the
forward-looking approaches described above, Pereboom (2017) proposes
that only those agents who have in fact acted immorally should be open
to forward-aiming blaming practices. (For more on skepticism about
responsibility, see
 SS3.3
 and the
 entry on skepticism about moral responsibility.)


### 2.2 The Reactive Attitudes Approach


#### 2.2.1 "Freedom and Resentment"



P. F. Strawson's 1962 paper, "Freedom and
Resentment", is a touchstone for much of the work on moral
responsibility that followed it, especially the work of
compatibilists. Strawson's aim was to chart a course between
incompatibilist accounts committed to a free will requirement on
responsibility, and forward-looking compatibilist accounts that did
not, in Strawson's view, appropriately acknowledge and account
for the interpersonal significance of the affective component of our
responsibility practices. In contrast with forward-looking accounts
such as J. J. C. Smart's and Moritz Schlick's
 (SS2.1),
 Strawson focuses directly on the emotions--the reactive
attitudes--that play a fundamental role in our practices of
holding one another responsible. Strawson's suggestion is that
attending to the logic of these emotional responses yields an account
of what it is to be open to praise and blame that need not invoke the
incompatibilist's conception of free will. Indeed,
Strawson's view has been interpreted as suggesting that no
metaphysical facts beyond our praising and blaming practices are
needed to ground these practices.



Part of the novelty of Strawson's approach is its emphasis on
the "importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions
towards us of other human beings" (1962 [1993: 48]) and on 



> 
> 
> how much it matters to us, whether the actions of other
> people...reflect attitudes towards us of goodwill, affection, or
> esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on
> the other. (1962 [1993: 49]) 
> 
> 
> 



For Strawson, our practices of holding others responsible are largely
responses to these things: that is, "to the quality of
others' wills towards us" (1962 [1993: 56]). 



To get a sense of the importance of *quality of will* for our
interpersonal relations, note the difference in your response to one
who injures you accidentally as compared to how you respond to one who
does you the same injury out of "contemptuous disregard"
or "a malevolent wish to injure [you]" (P. Strawson 1962
[1993: 49]). The second case is likely to arouse a type and intensity
of resentment that would not be (appropriately) felt in the first
case. Corresponding points may be made about positive responses such
as gratitude: you would likely not have the same feelings of gratitude
toward a person who benefits you accidentally as you would toward one
who does so out of concern for your welfare. The focus here is on
*personal* reactive attitudes directed toward another on
one's own behalf, but Strawson also discusses "sympathetic
or vicarious" attitudes felt on behalf of others, and
"self-reactive attitudes" that an agent may direct toward
herself (1962 [1993: 56-7]). 



On Strawson's view, the tendency to respond with relevant
reactive attitudes to displays of good or ill will implicates a demand
for moral respect and due regard. Indeed, for Strawson, "[t]he
making of the demand *is* the proneness to such
attitudes", and the attitudes themselves are the
"correlates of the moral demand in the case where the demand is
felt to be disregarded" (1962 [1993: 63]; emphasis in original). Thus, among the
circumstances that mollify a person's (negative) reactive
attitudes, are those which show that--despite initial
appearances--the demand for due regard has not been ignored or
flouted. When someone explains that the injury she caused you was
entirely unforeseen and accidental, she indicates that her regard for
your welfare was not insufficient and that she is therefore not an
appropriate target for the negative attitudes involved in moral
blame.



Note that the agent who excuses herself from blame in the above way is
not calling into question her status as a generally responsible agent:
she is still open to the demand for due regard and liable, in
principle, to reactive responses. Other agents, however, may be inapt
targets for blame and the reactive emotions precisely because they are
not legitimate targets of a demand for regard. In these cases, an
agent is not *excused* from blame, he is *exempted* from
it: it is not that his behavior is discovered to have been
non-malicious, but rather that he is seen to be one of whom better
behavior cannot reasonably be demanded. (The widely-used terminology
in which the above contrast is drawn--"excuses"
versus "exemptions"--is due to Watson 1987
[2004]).



For Strawson, the most important group of exempt agents includes those
who are, at least for a time, significantly impaired for normal
interpersonal relationships. These agents may be children, or
psychologically impaired like the "schizophrenic"; they
may exhibit "purely compulsive behaviour", or their minds
may have "been systematically perverted" (P. Strawson 1962
[1993: 51]). Alternatively, exempt agents may simply be "wholly
lacking...in moral sense" (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 58]),
perhaps because they suffered from "peculiarly
unfortunate...formative circumstances" (P. Strawson 1962
[1993: 52]). These agents are not candidates for the range of
emotional responses involved in our personal relationships because
they do not participate in these relationships in the right way for
such responses to be sensibly applied to them. Rather than taking up
interpersonally-engaged attitudes (that presuppose a demand for
respect) toward exempt agents, we instead take an objective attitude
toward them. The exempt agent is not regarded "as a morally
responsible agent...as a member of the moral community" (P.
Strawson 1962 [1993: 59]); though he may be regarded as "an
object of social policy" and as something "to be managed
or handled or cured or trained" (P. Strawson 1962 [1993:
52]).



Strawson's perspective has an important compatibilist upshot. We
may be able, in limited circumstances, to take up a detached,
objective perspective on the behavior of normal (that is, non-exempt)
agents. But Strawson argues that we cannot take up with this
perspective permanently, and certainly not on the basis of discovering
that determinism is true:



> 
> 
> The human commitment to participation in ordinary interpersonal
> relationships is, I think, too thoroughgoing and deeply rooted for us
> to take seriously the thought that a general theoretical conviction
> [e.g., about the truth of determinism] might so change our world that,
> in it, there were no longer any such things as interpersonal
> relationships as we normally understand them; and being involved in
> inter-personal relationships...precisely is being exposed to the
> range of reactive attitudes and feelings that is in question. (1962
> [1993: 54])
> 
> 
> 



More specifically, the truth of determinism would not show that human
beings generally occupy excusing or exempting conditions that would
make the attitudes involved in holding one another responsible
inappropriate. It would not follow from the truth of determinism, for
example, "that anyone who caused an injury *either* was
quite simply ignorant of causing it *or* had acceptably
overriding reasons for" doing so (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 53];
emphasis in original); nor would it follow (from the truth of
determinism) 



> 
> 
> that nobody knows what he's doing or that everybody's
> behaviour is unintelligible in terms of conscious purposes or that
> everybody lives in a world of delusion or that nobody has a moral
> sense. (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 59]) 
> 
> 
> 


#### 2.2.2 Criticisms of Strawson's Approach



Various objections have been raised regarding P. F. Strawson's
general theoretical approach to moral responsibility, his assumptions
about human psychology and sociality, and his arguments for the
compatibility of determinism and responsibility.



As noted in the previous subsection, Strawson argues that learning
that determinism is true would not raise general concerns about our
responsibility practices. This is because the truth of determinism
would not show that human beings are *generally abnormal* in a
way that would call into question their openness to the reactive
attitudes: "it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is
not itself self-contradictory that abnormality is the universal
condition" (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 54]). In reply, it has been
noted that while the truth of determinism might not suggest universal
abnormality, it might well show that normal human beings are morally
incapacitated in a way that is relevant to our responsibility
practices (Russell 1992: 298-301). Strawson's assumptions
that we are too deeply and naturally committed to our
reactive-attitude-involving practices to give them up, and that doing
so would irreparably distort our moral lives, have also been
criticized (Nelkin 2011: 42-45; G. Strawson 1986: 84-120;
Watson 1987 [2004: 255-258]).



A different sort of objection emphasizes the
*response-dependence* of Strawson's account: that is, the
way it explains an agent's responsibility in terms of the moral
responses that characterize a given community's responsibility
practices, rather than in terms of independent facts about whether the
agent *is* responsible. This feature of Strawson's
approach invites a reading that may seem paradoxical:



> 
> 
> In Strawson's view, there is no such independent notion of
> responsibility that explains the propriety of the reactive attitudes.
> The explanatory priority is the other way around: It is not that we
> hold people responsible because they *are* responsible; rather,
> the idea (*our* idea) that we are responsible is to be
> understood by the practice, which itself is not a matter of holding
> some propositions to be true, but of expressing our concerns and
> demands about our treatment of one another. (Watson 1987 [2004: 222];
> emphasis in original; see Bennett 1980 for a related, non-cognitivist
> interpretation of Strawson's approach)
> 
> 
> 



Strawson's approach would be particularly problematic if, as the
above reading might suggest, it entails that a group's
responsibility practices are--as they stand and *however*
they stand--beyond criticism simply because they are that
group's practices (Fischer & Ravizza 1993a: 18).



But there is something to be said from the other side of the debate.
It may seem obvious that people are appropriately held responsible
only if there are independent facts about their responsibility. But on
reflection--and following R. Jay Wallace's (1996)
influential Strawsonian approach--it may be difficult "to
make sense of the idea of a prior and thoroughly independent realm of
moral responsibility facts" that is separate from our practices
and yet to which our practices must answer (1996: 88). For Wallace,
giving up on practice-independent responsibility facts doesn't
mean giving up on facts about responsibility; rather, "we must
interpret the relevant facts [about responsibility] as somehow
dependent on our practices of holding people responsible" (1996:
89). Such an interpretation requires an investigation into our
practices, and what emerges most conspicuously, for Wallace, from this
investigation is the degree to which our responsibility practices are
organized around a fundamental commitment to fairness (1996: 101).
Wallace develops this commitment to fairness, and to norms of
fairness, into an account of the conditions under which people are
appropriately held morally responsible for their behavior (1996:
103-109). (For a more recent defense of the response-dependent
approach to responsibility, see Shoemaker 2017b; for criticism of such
approaches, see Todd 2016.)


### 2.3 Reasons-Responsiveness Views



As noted in
 SS1,
 one of the lasting influences of Harry Frankfurt's defense of
compatibilism was to draw attention to the actual causes of
agents' behavior, and particularly to whether an
agent--even a causally determined agent--acted for her own
reasons. Reasons-responsiveness approaches to responsibility have been
particularly attentive to these issues. These approaches ground
responsibility by reference to agents' capacities for being
appropriately sensitive to the rational considerations that bear on
their actions. Interpreted broadly, reasons-responsiveness approaches
include a diverse collection of views, such as David Brink and Dana
Nelkin (2013), John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998), Ishtiyaque
Haji (1998), Michael McKenna (2013), Dana Nelkin (2011), Carolina
Sartorio (2016), R. Jay Wallace (1996), and Susan Wolf (1990). Fischer
and Ravizza's *Responsibility and Control* (1998), which
builds on Fischer (1994), offers the most influential articulation of
the reasons-responsiveness approach.



Fischer and Ravizza begin with a distinction between regulative
control and guidance control. Regulative control involves the
possession of a dual power: "the power freely to do some act
*A*, and the power freely to do something else instead"
(1998: 31). Guidance control, on the other hand, does not require
access to alternatives: it is manifested when an agent guides her
behavior in a particular direction (and regardless of whether it was
open to her to guide her behavior in a different direction). Since
Fischer and Ravizza take Frankfurt cases
 (SS1)
 to show that access to behavioral alternatives is not necessary for
moral responsibility, they conclude that "the sort of control
necessarily associated with moral responsibility for action is
*guidance control*" and not regulative control (1998: 33;
emphasis in original).



A number of factors can undermine guidance control. If a
person's behavior is brought about by hypnosis, brainwashing, or
genuinely irresistible urges, then that person may not be morally
responsible for her behavior since she does not reflectively guide it
in the way required for responsibility (Fischer & Ravizza 1998:
35). More specifically, an agent in the above circumstances is not
likely to be responsible because he "is not responsive to
reasons--his behavior would be the same, no matter what reasons
there were" (1998: 37). Thus, Fischer and Ravizza characterize
possession of guidance control as (partially) dependent on
responsiveness to reasons. In particular, guidance control depends on
whether the psychological *mechanism* that issues in an
agent's behavior is responsive to reasons. (Guidance control
also requires that an agent *owns* the mechanism on which she
acts. According to Fischer and Ravizza, this requires placing
historical conditions on responsibility; see
 SS3.3.3.)



Fischer and Ravizza's focus on mechanisms is motivated by the
following reasoning. In a Frankfurt case, an agent is responsible for
an action even though his so acting is ensured by external factors.
But the presence of these external factors means that the agent in a
Frankfurt case would have acted the same no matter what reasons he was
confronted with, which suggests that the responsible agent in a
Frankfurt scenario is not responsive to reasons. This is a problem for
Fischer and Ravizza's claim that guidance control, and thus
reasons-responsiveness, is necessary for responsibility. Fischer and
Ravizza's solution is to argue that while *the agent* in
a Frankfurt case may not be responsive to reasons, the agent's
mechanism--"the process that leads to the relevant upshot
[i.e., the agent's action]"--may well be responsive
to reasons (1998: 38). In other words, the agent's
generally-specified psychological mechanism might have responded
(under counterfactual conditions) to considerations in favor of
omitting the action that the agent actually performed (and that he was
guaranteed to perform, regardless of reasons, since he was in a
Frankfurt-type scenario).



Fischer and Ravizza thus arrive at the following provisional
conclusion: "relatively clear cases of moral
responsibility"--that is, those in which an agent is not
hypnotized, etc.--are distinguished by the fact that "an
agent exhibits guidance control of an action insofar as the mechanism
that actually issues in the action is his own, reasons-responsive
mechanism" (1998: 39). But *how responsive* to reasons
does an agent's mechanism need to be for that agent to have the
type of control over his behavior associated with moral
responsibility? A *strongly* reasons-responsive mechanism would
both *recognize* and *respond* to *any sufficient
reason* to act otherwise (1998: 41). (In Fischer and
Ravizza's terminology, such a mechanism is strongly
"receptive" and "reactive" to reasons). But
strong reasons-responsiveness cannot be required for guidance control
since many intuitively responsible agents--i.e., many garden
variety wrongdoers--fail to attend to sufficient reasons to do
otherwise. On the other hand, *weak* reasons-responsiveness is
not enough for guidance control. An agent with a weakly
reasons-responsive mechanism will respond appropriately to
*some* sufficient reason to do otherwise, but the pattern of
responsiveness revealed in the agent's behavior might be too
arbitrary for the agent to be credited with the kind of control
required for responsibility. A person's pattern of
responsiveness to reasons would likely seem erratic in the relevant
way if, for example, she would forego purchasing a ticket to a
basketball game if it cost one thousand dollars, but not if it cost
two thousand dollars (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 66).



Fischer and Ravizza settle on *moderate* reasons responsiveness
as the sort that is most germane to guidance control (1998:
69-85). A psychological mechanism that is moderately responsive
to reasons exhibits regularity with respect to its receptivity to
reasons: that is, it exhibits "an *understandable
pattern* of (actual and hypothetical) reasons-receptivity"
(Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 71; emphasis in original). Such a pattern
will indicate that an agent understands "how reasons fit
together" and that, for example, "acceptance of one reason
as sufficient implies that a stronger reason must also be
sufficient" (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 71). (In addition, a
pattern of regular receptivity to reasons will include receptivity to
a range of *moral* considerations (Fischer & Ravizza 1998:
77). This will rule out attributing moral responsibility to non-moral
agents; see Todd and Tognazzini 2008 for criticism of Fischer and
Ravizza's articulation of this condition.) However, a moderately
responsive mechanism may be only weakly *reactive* to reasons
since, as Fischer and Ravizza put it (somewhat mysteriously),
"reactivity is all of piece" such 



> 
> 
> that if an agent's mechanism reacts to *some* incentive
> to...[do otherwise], this shows that the mechanism *can*
> react to *any* incentive to do otherwise. (1998: 73; emphasis
> in original)
> 
> 
> 



Fischer and Ravizza's account has generated a great deal of
attention and criticism. Some critics focus on the contrast (just
noted) between the conditions they impose on receptivity to reasons
and those they impose on reactivity to reasons (McKenna 2005, Mele
2006a, Watson 2001). Additionally, many are dissatisfied with Fischer
and Ravizza's presentation of their account in terms of the
powers of mechanisms as opposed to agents. This has led some authors
to develop agent-based reasons-responsiveness accounts that address
the concerns that led Fischer and Ravizza to their mechanism-based
approach (Brink & Nelkin 2013, McKenna 2013, Sartorio 2016).


## 3. Contemporary Debates


### 3.1 The "Faces" of Responsibility


#### 3.1.1 Attributability versus Accountability



Do our responsibility practices accommodate distinct forms of moral
responsibility? Are there different senses in which people may be
morally responsible for their behavior? Contemporary interest in these
possibilities has its roots in a debate between Susan Wolf and Gary
Watson. Among other things, Wolf's important 1990 book,
*Freedom Within Reason*, offers a critical discussion of
"Real Self" theories of responsibility. According to these
views, a person is responsible for behavior that is attributable to
her real self, and 



> 
> 
> an agent's behavior is attributable to the agent's real
> self...if she is at liberty (or able) both to govern her behavior
> on the basis of her will and to govern her will on the basis of her
> valuational system. (Wolf 1990: 33) 
> 
> 
> 



The basic idea is that a responsible agent is not simply moved by her
strongest desires, but also, in some way, approves of, or stands
behind, the desires that move her because they are governed by her
values or because they are endorsed by higher-order desires.
Wolf's central example of a Real Self view is Watson's
(1975). In an important and closely related earlier paper, Wolf (1987)
characterizes Watson (1975), Harry Frankfurt (1971), and Charles
Taylor (1976) as offering "deep self views". For more on
real-self/deep-self views, see
 SS3.3.3;
 for a recent presentation of a real-self view, see Chandra Sripada
(2016).



According to Wolf, one point in favor of Real Self views is that they
explain why people acting under the influence of hypnosis or
compulsive desires are often not responsible (1990: 33). Since these
agents are typically unable, under these conditions, to govern their
behavior on the basis of their valuational systems, they are alienated
from their actions in a way that undermines responsibility. But, for
Wolf, it is a mark against Real Self views that they tend to be silent
on the topic of how agents come to have the selves that they do. An
agent's real self might, for example, be the product of a
traumatic upbringing, and Wolf argues that this would give us reason
to question the "agent's responsibility *for* her
real self" and thus her responsibility for the present behavior
that issues from that self (1990: 37; emphasis in original). For an
important account of an agent with such an upbringing, see
Wolf's (1987) fictional example of JoJo (and see Watson 1987
[2004] for a related discussion of the convicted murderer Robert Alton
Harris). For discussion of JoJo in this entry, see
 SS3.2.1,
 and for general discussion of the relevance of personal history for
present responsibility see
 SS3.3.3.



Wolf suggests that when a person's real self is the product of
serious childhood trauma (or related factors), then that person is
potentially responsible for her behavior only in a superficial sense
that merely attributes bad actions to the agent's real self
(1990: 37-40). However, Wolf argues that ascriptions of moral
responsibility go deeper than such attributions can reach:



> 
> 
> When...we consider an individual worthy of blame or of praise, we
> are not merely judging the moral quality of the event with which the
> individual is so intimately associated; we are judging the moral
> quality of the individual herself in some more focused,
> noninstrumental, and seemingly more serious way. (1990: 41)
> 
> 
> 



This deeper form of assessment--assessment in terms of
"deep responsibility" (Wolf 1990: 41)--requires more
than that an agent is "able to form her actions on the basis of
her values", it also requires that "she is able to form
her values on the basis of what is True and Good" (Wolf 1990:
75). This latter ability will be impaired or absent in an agent whose
real self is the product of pressures (such as a traumatic childhood)
that have distorted her moral vision. (For the relevance of moral
vision, or "moral competence", for responsibility, see
 SS3.2.)



In "Two Faces of Responsibility" (1996 [2004]), Gary Watson
responds to Wolf. Watson agrees with Wolf that some approaches to
responsibility--i.e., *self-disclosure views* (a phrase
Watson borrows from Benson 1987)--focus narrowly on whether
behavior is attributable to an agent. But Watson denies that these
attributions constitute a merely superficial form of responsibility
assessment. After all, behavior that is attributable to an
agent--in the sense, for example, of issuing from her valuational
system--often discloses something interpersonally and morally
significant about the agent's "fundamental evaluative
orientation" (Watson 1996 [2004: 271]). Thus, ascriptions of
responsibility in this *responsibility-as-attributability*
sense are "central to ethical life and ethical appraisal"
(Watson 1996 [2004: 263]).



However, Watson agrees with Wolf that the above story of
responsibility is incomplete: there is more to responsibility than
attributing actions to agents. In addition, we *hold agents
responsible* for their behavior, which "is not just a matter
of the relation of an individual to her behavior" (Watson 1996
[2004: 262]). When we hold responsible, we also "demand
(require) certain conduct from one another and respond adversely to
one another's failures to comply with these demands"
(Watson 1996 [2004: 262]). The moral demands, and potential for
adverse treatment, associated with holding others responsible are part
of our *accountability* (as opposed to attributability)
practices, and these features of accountability raise issues of
fairness that do not arise in the context of determining whether
behavior is attributable to an agent (Watson 1996 [2004: 273]). Therefore,
conditions may apply to accountability that do not apply to
attributability: for example, perhaps "accountability
blame" should be--as Wolf suggested--moderated in the
case of an agent whose "squalid circumstances made it
overwhelmingly difficult to develop a respect for the standards to
which we would hold him accountable" (Watson 1996 [2004:
281]).



There are, then, two forms, or "faces", of responsibility
on Watson's account. There is responsibility-as-attributability,
and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of
responsibility, behavior is properly attributed to her as reflecting
morally important features of her self--her virtues and vices,
for example. But there is also responsibility-as-accountability, and
when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility,
which requires more than the correct attribution of behavior, she is
open to being held accountable for that behavior in the ways that
predominantly characterize moral blame.


#### 3.1.2 Attributionism



It has become common for the views of several authors to be described
(with varying degrees of accuracy) as instances of
"attributionism"; see Neil Levy (2005) for the first use
of this term. These authors include Robert Adams (1985), Nomy Arpaly
(2003), Pamela Hieronymi (2004), T. M. Scanlon (1998, 2008), George
Sher (2006a, 2006b, 2009), Angela
Smith (2005, 2008), and Matthew Talbert (2012, 2013). Attributionists take
moral responsibility assessments to be mainly concerned with whether
an action (or omission, character trait, or belief) is attributable to
an agent for the purposes of moral assessment, where this usually
means that the action (or omission, etc.) reflects the agent's
"judgment sensitive attitudes" (Scanlon 1998),
"evaluative judgments" (A. Smith 2005), or, more
generally, her "moral personality" (Hieronymi 2008).



Attributionism resembles the self-disclosure views mentioned by Watson
(see the previous subsection) insofar as both focus on the way that a
responsible agent's behavior discloses interpersonally and
morally significant features of the agent's self. However, it
would be a mistake to conclude that contemporary attributionist views
are interested only in specifying the conditions for what Watson calls
responsibility-as-attributability. In fact, attributionists typically
take themselves to be giving conditions for holding agents responsible
in Watson's *accountability* sense. (See the previous
subsection for the distinction between accountability and
attributability.)



According to attributionism, fulfillment of attributability conditions
is sufficient for holding agents accountable for their behavior. This
means that attributionism rejects conditions on moral responsibility
that would excuse agents if their characters were shaped under adverse
conditions (Scanlon 1998: 278-85), or if the thing for which the
agent is blamed was not under her control (Sher 2006b and 2009, A.
Smith 2005), or if the agent can't be expected to recognize the
moral status of her behavior (Scanlon 1998: 287-290; Talbert
2012). Attributionists reject these conditions on responsibility
because morally and interpersonally significant behavior is
attributable to agents that do not fulfill them, and such attributions
are taken to be sufficient for an agent to be open to the responses
involved in holding agents accountable for their behavior.
Attributionists have also argued that blame may profitably be
understood as a form of moral protest (Hieronymi 2001, A. Smith 2013,
Talbert 2012); part of the appeal of this move is that moral protests
may be legitimate in cases in which the above conditions are not
met.



Several objections have been posed to attributionism. Some argue that
attributionists are wrong to reject the conditions on responsibility
mentioned in the last paragraph (Levy 2005, 2011; Shoemaker 2011,
2015a; Watson 2011). It has also been argued that the attributionist
account of blame is too close to mere negative appraisal (Levy 2005;
Wallace 1996: 80-1; Watson 2002). In addition, Scanlon (2008)
has been criticized for failing to take negative emotions such as
resentment to be central to the phenomenon of blame (Wallace 2011,
Wolf 2011; a similar criticism would apply to Sher 2006a).


#### 3.1.3 Answerability



Building on the distinction between attributability and accountability
 (SS3.1.1),
 David Shoemaker (2011 and 2015a) has introduced a third form of
responsibility: answerability. On Shoemaker's view,
attributability-responsibility assessments respond to facts about an
agent's character, accountability-responsibility responds to an
agent's degree of regard for others, and
answerability-responsibility responds to an agent's evaluative
judgments. However, A. Smith (2015) and Hieronymi (2008 and 2014) use
"answerability" to refer to a view more like the
attributionist perspective described in the previous subsection, and
Pereboom (2014) has used the term to indicate a form of responsibility
more congenial to responsibility skeptics.


### 3.2 Moral Competence


#### 3.2.1 The Moral Competence Condition on Responsibility



The possibility that moral competence--the ability to recognize
and respond to moral considerations--is a condition on moral
responsibility has been suggested at several points above
 (SS2.2.1,
 SS2.2.2,
 SS2.3,
 SS3.1.1,
 SS3.1.2).
 Susan Wolf's (1987) fictional story of "JoJo" is
one of the best-known illustrations of this proposal. JoJo was raised
by an evil dictator, and as a result he became the same sort of
sadistic tyrant that his father was. As an adult, JoJo is happy to be
the sort of person that he is, and he is moved by precisely the
desires (e.g., to imprison, torture, and execute his subjects) that he
wants to be moved by. Thus, JoJo fulfills important conditions on
responsibility
 (SS3.1.1,
 SS3.3.3), however, Wolf argues that it may be unfair to hold him
responsible for his bad behavior.



JoJo's upbringing plays an important role in Wolf's
argument, but only because it left JoJo unable to fully appreciate the
wrongfulness of his behavior. Thus, it is JoJo's impaired moral
competence that does the real excusing work, and similar conclusions
of non-responsibility should be drawn about all those whom we think
"could not help but be mistaken about their [bad] values",
if possession of these values impairs their ability to tell right from
wrong (Wolf 1987: 57).



Many others join Wolf in arguing that impaired moral competence
(perhaps on account of one's upbringing or other environmental
factors) undermines one's moral responsibility (Benson 2001,
Doris & Murphy 2007, Fischer & Ravizza 1998, Fricker 2010,
Levy 2003, Russell 1995 and 2004, Wallace 1996, Watson 1987 [2004]).
Part of what motivates this conclusion is the thought that it can be
unreasonable to expect morally-impaired agents to avoid wrongful
behavior, and that it is therefore unfair to expose these agents to
the harm of moral blame on account of their wrongdoing. For detailed
development of the moral competence requirement on responsibility in
terms of considerations of fairness, see R. Jay Wallace (1996); also
see Erin Kelly (2013), Neil Levy (2009), and Gary Watson (1987
[2004]). For rejection of the claim that blame is unfair in the case
of the morally-impaired agent, see several of the defenders of
attributionism mentioned in
 SS3.1.2
 (particularly Hieronymi 2004, Scanlon 1998, and Talbert 2012)



The moral competence condition on responsibility can also be motivated
by the suggestion that impaired agents are not able to commit wrongs
that have the sort of moral significance to which blame would be an
appropriate response. The basic idea here is that, while
morally-impaired agents can fail to show appropriate respect for
others, these failures do not necessarily constitute the kind of
flouting of moral norms that grounds blame (Watson 1987 [2004: 234]).
In other words, a *failure to respect* others, is not always an
instance of blame-grounding *disrespect* for others, since the
latter (but not the former) requires the ability to comprehend the
norms that one violates (Levy 2007, Shoemaker 2011).


#### 3.2.2 Conversational Approaches to Responsibility



Considerations about moral competence play an important role in the
recent trend of *conversational* theories of responsibility,
which construe elements of our responsibility practices as
morally-expressive moves in an ongoing moral conversation. The thought
here is that to fruitfully (and fully) participate in such a
conversation, one must have some degree of competence in the (moral)
language of that conversation.



Several prominent versions of the conversational approach develop P.
F. Strawson's suggestion
 (SS2.2.1)
 that the negative reactive attitudes involved in blame are
expressions of a *demand* for moral regard from other agents.
Gary Watson argues that a demand "presumes", as a
condition on the intelligibility of expressing it,
"understanding on the part of the object of the demand"
(1987 [2004: 230]). Therefore, since, "[t]he reactive attitudes
are incipiently forms of communication", they are intelligibly
expressed "only on the assumption that the other can comprehend
the message", and since the message is a moral one,
"blaming and praising those with diminished moral understanding
loses its 'point,'" at least in a certain sense
(Watson 1987 [2004: 230]; see Watson 2011 for a modification of this
proposal). R. Jay Wallace argues, similarly, that since responsibility
practices are internal to moral relationships that are 



> 
> 
> defined by the successful exchange of moral criticism and
> justification.... it will be reasonable to hold accountable only
> someone who is at least a candidate for this kind of exchange of
> criticism and justification. (1996: 164)
> 
> 
> 



Michael McKenna's *Conversation and Responsibility*
(2012) offers the most developed conversational analysis of
responsibility. For McKenna, the "moral responsibility
exchange" occurs in stages: an initial "moral
contribution" of morally salient behavior; the "moral
address" of, e.g., blame that responds to the moral
contribution; the "moral account" in which the first
contributor responds to moral address with, e.g., apology; and so on
(2012: 89). Like Wallace and Watson, McKenna notes the way in which a
morally impaired agent will find it difficult "to appreciate the
challenges put to her by those who hold [her] morally
responsible", but he also argues that a suitably impaired agent
cannot even make the first move in a moral conversation (2012: 78).
Thus, the morally impaired agent's responsibility is called into
question not only because she is unable to respond appropriately to
moral demands, but also because "she is incapable of acting from
a will with a moral quality that could be a candidate for assessment
from the standpoint of holding responsible" (McKenna 2012: 78).
This point is related to Neil Levy's and David Shoemaker's
contention, noted in the previous subsection, that impairments of
moral competence can leave an agent unable to harbor and express the
type of ill will or lack of regard to which blame responds. By
contrast, Watson (2011), seems to allow that significant moral
impairment is compatible with the ability to perform blame-relevant
wrongdoing, even if such impairment undermines the wrongdoer's
moral accountability for her actions.



For another important account of responsibility in broadly
conversational terms, see Shoemaker's discussion of the sort of
moral anger involved in holding others accountable for their behavior
(2015a: 87-117). For additional defenses and articulations of
the conversational approach to responsibility, see Stephen Darwall
(2006), Miranda Fricker (2016), and Colleen Macnamara (2015).


#### 3.2.3 Psychopathy



Impairments of moral competence come in degrees. Susan Wolf's
JoJo
 (SS3.2.1)
 has localized impairments of the capacity to recognize and respond to
moral considerations, but it is not clear that he is entirely immune
to moral considerations. However, at the far end of the spectrum, we
encounter more globally and thoroughly impaired figures such as the
psychopath. In philosophical treatments, the psychopath is typically
presented as an agent who, while retaining other psychological
capacities, is entirely--or as nearly so as
possible--incapable of responding appropriately to moral
considerations. (This is something of a philosophical construct since
real-life psychopathy admits of varying degrees of impairment,
corresponding to higher or lower scores on diagnostic measures.)



One interesting question is whether the psychopath's
inability--or at least consistent failure--to respond
appropriately to moral incentives is primarily the result of a
motivational rather than cognitive failure: does the psychopath in
some way know what morality requires and simply not care? If a
positive answer is given to this last question (Fischer & Ravizza
1998: 76-81; Nichols 2002), then it seems likely that the
psychopath could be responsible for at least some of his bad behavior.
And some have argued that even if psychopathy is primarily a cognitive
impairment, it may still be the case that psychopaths possess a
sufficient capacity for distinguishing right and wrong--or that
they possess sufficient related capacities--to be held
responsible, at least to some extent and in certain ways (Glannon
1997, Greenspan 2003, Maibom 2008, Shoemaker 2014, Vargas &
Nichols 2007). On the other hand, many believe that the
psychopath's capacity for grasping moral considerations is too
superficial to sustain responsibility (Kennett 2019; Levy 2007; Nelkin
2015; Wallace 1996: 177-78; Watson 2011; see Mason 2017 for the
claim that the relevant deficiency is one of moral knowledge rather
than moral capacity). And still others have argued that even those who
are fully impaired for moral understanding are open to blame as long
as they possess broader rational competencies (Scanlon 1998:
287-290; Talbert 2014). However, the psychopath's
possession of these broader competencies has been called into question
(Fine & Kennett 2004, Greenspan 2003, Litton 2010).


### 3.3 Skepticism and Related Topics



This section introduces contemporary skepticism about moral
responsibility by way of discussions of several topics that have broad
relevance for thinking about responsibility.



If moral responsibility requires free will, and free will involves
access to alternatives in a way that is not compatible with
determinism, then it would follow from the truth of determinism that
no one is ever morally responsible. The above reasoning, and the
skeptical conclusion it reaches, is endorsed by the *hard
determinist* perspective on free will and responsibility, which
was defended historically by Spinoza and d'Holbach (among
others) and, more recently, by Ted Honderich (2002). But given that
determinism may well be false, contemporary skeptics about moral
responsibility more often pursue a *hard incompatibilist* line
of argument according to which the kind of free will required for
desert-based (as opposed to forward-looking, see
 SS2.1)
 moral responsibility is incompatible with the *truth or
falsity* of determinism (Pereboom 2001, 2014). The skeptical
positions discussed below are generally of this sort: the skeptical
conclusions they advocate do not depend on the truth of
determinism.


#### 3.3.1 Moral Luck



According to Thomas Nagel, a person is subject to moral luck if
factors that are not under that person's control affect the
moral assessments to which he is open (Nagel 1976 [1979]; also see
Williams 1976 [1981] and the
 entry on moral luck.)
 



Is there such a thing as moral luck? More specifically, can luck
affect a person's moral responsibility? Consider a would-be
assassin who shoots at her target, aiming to kill, but fails to do so
only because her bullet is deflected by a passing bird. It seems that
such a would-be assassin has good moral *outcome luck* (that
is, good moral luck in the outcome of her behavior). Because of
factors beyond her control, the would-be assassin's moral record
is better than it would have been: in particular, she is not a killer
and is not morally responsible for causing anyone's death. One
might think, in addition, that the would-be assassin is less
blameworthy than a successful assassin with whom she is otherwise
identical, and that the reason for this is just that the successful
assassin intentionally killed someone while the unsuccessful assassin
(as a result of good moral luck) did not. (For important recent
defenses of moral luck, see Hanna 2014 and Hartman 2017.) 



On the other hand, one might think that if the two assassins just
mentioned are identical in terms of their values, goals, intentions,
and motivations, then the addition of a bit of luck to the
unsuccessful assassin's story cannot ground a deep contrast
between these two agents in terms of their moral responsibility. One
way to sustain this position is to argue that moral responsibility is
a function solely of internal features of agents, such as their
motives and intentions (Khoury 2018; also see Enoch & Marmor 2007
for some of the main arguments against moral luck). Of course, the
successful assassin is responsible *for something* (killing a
person) for which the unsuccessful assassin is not, but it might be
possible to argue that both are morally responsible--and
presumably blameworthy--*to the same degree* insofar as it
was true of both of them that they aimed to kill, and that they did so
for the same reasons and with the same degree of commitment toward
bringing about that outcome (see M. Zimmerman 2002 and 2015 for this
influential perspective). 



But now consider a different would-be assassin who does not even try
to kill anyone, but only because his circumstances did not favor this
option. This would-be assassin is *willing to kill* under
favorable circumstances (and so he may seem to have had good
*circumstantial* moral luck since he was not in those
circumstances). Perhaps the degree of responsibility attributed to the
successful and unsuccessful assassins described above depends not so
much on the fact that they both tried to kill as on the fact that they
were both willing to kill; in this case, the would-be assassin just
introduced may share their degree of responsibility since he shares
their willingness to kill. But an account that focuses on how agents
would be willing to act under counterfactual circumstances is likely
to generate unintuitive conclusions about responsibility since many
agents who are typically judged blameless might willingly perform
terrible actions under the right circumstances. (M. Zimmerman 2002 and
2015 does not shy away from this consequence, but criticisms of his
efforts to reject moral luck--Hanna 2014, Hartman 2017--have
made much of it; see Peels 2015 for a position that is related to
Zimmerman's but that may avoid the unintuitive consequence just
mentioned.) 



Another approach to luck holds that it is inimical to moral
responsibility in a way that generally undermines responsibility
ascriptions. To see the motivation for this skeptical position,
consider *constitutive* moral luck: that is, luck in how one is
constituted in terms of the "inclinations, capacities, and
temperament" one finds within oneself (Nagel 1976 [1979: 28]).
Facts about a person's inclinations, capacities, and temperament
explain much--if not all--of that person's behavior,
and if the facts that explain why a person acts as she does are a
result of good or bad luck, then perhaps it is unfair to hold her
responsible for that behavior. As Nagel notes, once the full sweep of
the various kinds of luck comes into view, "[t]he area of
genuine agency" may seem to shrink to nothing since our actions
and their consequences "result from the combined influence of
factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the
agent's control" (1976 [1979: 35]). If this is right, then
perhaps, 



> 
> 
> nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we
> are left with nothing but a...sequence of events, which can be
> deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised. (Nagel 1976 [1979:
> 37]) 
> 
> 
> 



The above quotations notwithstanding, Nagel himself doesn't
fully embrace a skeptical conclusion about responsibility on grounds
of moral luck, but others have done so, most notably, Neil Levy
(2011). According to Levy's "hard luck view", the
encompassing nature of moral luck means "that there are no
desert-entailing differences between moral agents" (2011: 10).
Of course, there are differences between agents in terms of their
characters and the good or bad actions and outcomes that they produce,
but Levy's point is that, given the influence of luck in
generating these differences, they don't provide a sound basis
for differential treatment of people in terms of moral praise and
blame. (See Russell 2017 for a compatibilist account that is led to a
variety of pessimism, though not skepticism, on the basis of the
concerns about moral luck just described.)


#### 3.3.2 Ultimate Responsibility



Another important skeptical argument--related to the observations
about constitutive moral luck in the previous subsection--is
Galen Strawson's Basic Argument, which concludes that "we
cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our
actions" (1994: 5). (Since the argument targets
"ultimate" moral responsibility, it does not necessarily
exclude other forms, such as forward-looking responsibility
 (SS2.1)
 and, on some understandings, responsibility-as-attributability
 (SS3.1.1).)
 The argument begins by noting that an agent makes the choices she
does because of certain facts about the way she is: for example, the
facts about what seems choiceworthy to her. But if this is true, then,
in order to be responsible for her subsequent choices, perhaps an
agent also needs to be responsible for the facts about what seems
choiceworthy to her. But how can one be responsible for these prior
facts about herself? Wouldn't this require a prior choice on the
part of the agent, one that resulted in her present dispositions to
see certain ends and means as choiceworthy? But this prior choice
would itself be something for which the agent is responsible only if
the agent is also responsible for the fact that *that* prior
choice seemed choiceworthy to her. And now we must explain how the
agent can be responsible for this additional prior fact about herself,
which will require positing another choice by the agent, and the
responsibility for that choice will also have to be secured, which
will require explaining why it seemed choiceworthy to her, and so on.
A regress looms here, and Strawson claims that it cannot be stopped
except by positing an initial act of self-creation on the responsible
agent's part (1994: 5, 15). Only self-creating agents could be
fully responsible for their own tendencies to exercise their powers of
choice as they do, but self-creation is impossible, so no one is every
truly or ultimately morally responsible for their behavior.



A number of replies to this argument (and the argument from
constitutive moral luck) are possible. One might simply deny that
*how* a person came to be the way she is matters for present
responsibility: perhaps all we need to know in order to judge a
person's present responsibility are facts about her present
constitution and about how that constitution is related to the
person's present behavior. (For views like this, see the
discussion of attributionism
 (SS3.1.2)
 and the discussion of non-historical accounts of responsibility in
the next subsection). Alternatively, one might think that while
personal history matters for moral responsibility, Strawson's
argument sets the bar too high, requiring *too much* historical
control over one's constitution (see Fischer 2006; for a reply,
see Levy 2011: 5). Perhaps what is needed is not literal
self-creation, but simply an ability to enact changes in oneself so as
to acquire responsibility for the self that results from these changes
(Clarke 2005). A picture along these lines can be found in
Aristotle's suggestion that one can be responsible for being a
careless person if one's present state of carelessness is the
result of earlier choices that one made (Aristotle, *Nicomachean
Ethics*; see also Michele Moody-Adams 1990).



Roughly in this Aristotelian vein, Robert Kane offers a detailed
incompatibilist account of how we can secure ultimate responsibility
for our actions (1996 and 2007). On Kane's view, for an agent




> 
> 
> to be *ultimately* responsible for [a] choice, the agent must
> be at least in part responsible by virtue of choices or actions
> voluntarily performed in the past for having the character and motives
> he or she now has. (2007: 14; emphasis in original) 
> 
> 
> 



This position may appear to be open to the regress concerns presented
in Galen Strawson's argument above. But Kane thinks a regress is
avoided in cases in which a person's character-forming choices
are undetermined. Since these undetermined choices will have no
*sufficient* causes, there is no relevant prior cause for which
the agent must be responsible, so there is no regress problem (Kane
2007: 15-16; see Pereboom 2001: 47-50 for criticism of
Kane on this point.)



Of particular interest to Kane are potential character-forming choices
that occur "when we are torn between competing visions of what
we should do or become" (2007: 26). In such cases, if a person
sees reasons in favor of either choice that he might make, and the
choice that he makes is undetermined, then whichever choice he makes
will have been chosen for his own reasons. According to Kane, when an
agent makes this kind of choice, he shapes his character, and since
his choice is not determined by prior causal factors, he is
responsible for it and for the character it shapes and for the
character-determined choices that he makes in the future.



Kane's approach is an important instance of those
incompatibilist theories that attempt to explain how free will, while
requiring indeterminism, could clearly be at home in the natural world
as we know it (also see Balaguer 2010, Ekstrom 2000, and Franklin
2018). (This is as opposed to agent-causal accounts of free
will--Chisholm 1964, O'Connor 2000--that invoke a type
of causal power that is less easily naturalized). However, many have
argued that any account like Kane's, which inserts an
indeterministic link in the causal chain leading to action, actually
reduces an agent's control over an action or at least leaves it
unclear why such an insertion would increase agential control over
actions as compared to a deterministic story of action (Hobart 1934;
Levy 2011: 41-83; Pereboom 2014: 31-49; van Inwagen 1983:
126-52; Watson 1999).


#### 3.3.3 Personal History and Manipulation



Accounts such as Neil Levy's (2011) and Galen Strawson's
(1994), described in the two preceding subsections, assume that the
facts about the way a person came to be the way she is are relevant
for determining her present responsibility. But non-historical views,
such as attributionism
 (SS3.1.2)
 and the views that Susan Wolf calls "Real Self" theories
 (SS3.1.1),
 reject this contention. Real Self accounts are sometimes referred to
as "structural" or "hierarchical" theories,
and John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998: 184-187) have called
them "mesh" theories. By whatever name, the basic idea is
that an agent is morally responsible insofar as her will has the right
sort of structure: in particular, there needs to be a mesh or fit
between the desires that actually move the agent and her values, or
between the desires that move her and her higher-order desires, the
latter of which are the agent's reflective preferences about
which desires should move her. (For approaches along these lines, see
Dworkin 1970; Frankfurt
1971, 1987; Neely 1974; and Watson 1975.)



Harry Frankfurt's comparison between a willing drug addict and
an unwilling addict illustrates important features of his version of
the structural approach to responsibility. Both of Frankfurt's
addicts have desires to take the drug to which they are addicted, and
the nature of their addictions is such that both addicts will
ultimately act to fulfill their first-order addictive desire. But
suppose that both addicts are capable of taking higher-order
perspectives on their first-order desires, and suppose that they take
*different* higher-order perspectives. The willing addict
endorses and identifies with his addictive desire. The unwilling
addict, on the other hand, repudiates his addictive desire to such an
extent that, when it ends up being effective, Frankfurt says that this
addict is "helplessly violated by his own desires" (1971:
12). The willing addict has a kind of freedom that the unwilling
addict lacks: they may both be bound to take the drug to which they
are addicted, but insofar as the willing addict is moved by a desire
that he endorses, he acts freely in a way that the unwilling addict
does not (Frankfurt 1971: 19). A related conclusion about
responsibility may be drawn: perhaps the unwilling addict's
desire is alien to him in such a way that his responsibility for
acting on it is called into question (for a recent defense of this
conclusion, see Sripada 2017). 



One objection to Frankfurt's view goes like this. His account
seems to assume that the addicts' higher-order desires have the
authority to speak for them--they reveal (or constitute) the
agent's "real self", to use Wolf's language
(1990). But if higher-order desires are invoked out of a concern that
an agent's first-order desires may not stem from his real self,
why won't the same worry recur with respect to higher-order
desires as well? In other words, when ascending through the orders of
desires, why stop at any particular point, why not think that appeal
to a still higher order is always necessary to reveal where an agent
stands? (See Watson (1975) for an objection along these lines, which
partly motivates Watson--in his articulation of a structural
approach--to focus on whether an agent's desires conform
with her *values*, rather than with her higher-order
desires).



And even if one agrees with Frankfurt (or Watson) about the structural
elements required for responsibility, one might wonder how an
agent's will came to have its particular structure. Thus, an
important type of objection to Frankfurt's view notes that the
relevant structure might have been put in place by factors that
intuitively undermine responsibility, in which case the presence of
the relevant structure is not itself sufficient for responsibility
(Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 196-201; Locke 1975; Slote 1980).
Fischer and Ravizza argue that 



> 
> 
> [i]f the mesh [between higher- and lower-order desires] were produced
> by...brainwashing or subliminal advertising...we would not
> hold the agent morally responsible for his behavior 
> 
> 
> 



because the psychological mechanism that produced the behavior would
not be, "in an important intuitive sense, the *agent's
own*" (1998: 197; emphasis in original). In response to this
type of worry, Fischer and Ravizza argue that responsibility has an
important historical component, which they attempt to capture with
their account of how agents can "take responsibility" for
the psychological mechanisms that produces their behavior (1998:
207-239). (For criticism of Fischer and Ravizza's account
of taking responsibility, see Levy 2011: 103-106 and Pereboom
2001: 120-22; for quite different accounts of taking
responsibility, see Enoch 2012; Mason 2019: 179-207; and Wolf
2001. For work on the general significance of personal histories for
responsibility, see Christman 1991, Vargas 2006, and D. Zimmerman
2003.)



Part of Fischer and Ravizza's motivation for developing their
account of "taking responsibility" was to ensure that
agents who have been manipulated in certain ways do not turn out to be
responsible on their view. Several examples and arguments featuring
the sort of manipulation that worried Fischer and Ravizza have played
important roles in the recent literature on responsibility. One of
these is Alfred Mele's Beth/Ann example (1995, 2006b), which
emphasizes the difficulties faced by accounts of responsibility that
eschew historical conditions. In the example, Ann has acquired her
preferences and values in the normal way, but Beth is manipulated by a
team of neuroscientists so that she now has preferences and values
that are identical to Ann's. After the manipulation, Beth is
capable of reflecting on her new values, and when she does so, she
endorses them enthusiastically. But whereas we might normally take
such an endorsement to be a sign of the sort of self-governance
associated with responsibility, Mele suggests that Beth, unlike Ann,
exhibits merely "ersatz self-government" since
Beth's new values where imposed on her (1995: 155). And if
certain kinds of personal histories similarly undermine an
agent's ability to genuinely or authentically govern her
behavior, then agents with these histories will not be morally
responsible. (For replies to Mele and general insights into
manipulation cases, see Arpaly 2003, King 2013, McKenna 2004, and Todd
2011; for discussion of issues about personal identity that arise in
manipulation cases, see Khoury 2013, Matheson 2014, Shoemaker
2012)



Now one can take a hard line in Beth's case (McKenna 2004). Such
a stance might involve noting that while Beth acquired her new values
in a strange way (and in a way that involved moral wrongs done to
her), *everyone* acquires their values in ways that are not
fully under their control. Indeed, following Galen Strawson's
line of argument (1994), described in
 SS3.3.2,
 it might be noted that *no one* has ultimate control over
their values, and even if normal agents have some capacity to address
and alter their values, the dispositional factors that govern how this
capacity is used are ultimately the result of factors beyond
agents' control. So perhaps it is not as clear as it might first
appear that Beth is distinguished from normal agents in terms of her
powers of self-governance and her moral responsibility for her
behavior. But this reasoning can cut both ways: instead of showing
that Beth is assimilated into the class of normal, responsible agents,
it might show that normal agents are assimilated into the class of
non-responsible agents like Beth. Derk Pereboom's four-case
argument employs a maneuver along these lines (1995, 2001, 2007,
2014).



Pereboom's argument presents Professor Plum in four different
scenarios. In each scenario, Plum kills Ms. White while satisfying the
conditions on desert-involving moral responsibility most often
proposed by compatibilists (and described in earlier sections of this
entry): Plum kills White because he wants to, and while this desire is
in keeping with Plum's character, it is not irresistible; Plum
also endorses his desire to kill White from a higher-order volitional
perspective; finally, Plum is generally morally competent, and the
process of deliberation that leads to his decision to kill White is
appropriately responsive to reasons.



In Case 1, Plum is "created by neuroscientists,
who...manipulate him directly through the use of radio-like
technology" (Pereboom 2001: 112). These scientists cause
Plum's reasoning to take a certain (reasons-responsive) path
that culminates in Plum concluding that the self-serving reasons in
favor of killing White outweigh the reasons in favor of not doing so.
Pereboom believes that in such a case Plum is clearly not responsible
for killing White since his behavior was determined by the actions of
the neuroscientists. In Cases 2 and 3, Plum is causally determined to
undertake the same reasoning process as in Case 1, but in Case 2 Plum
is merely programmed to do so by neuroscientists (rather than having
been created by them), and in Case 3 Plum's reasoning is the
result of socio-cultural influences that determine his character. In
Case 4, Plum is just a normal human being in a causally deterministic
universe, and he decides to kill White in the same way as in the
previous cases.



Pereboom claims that there is no relevant difference between Cases 1,
2, and 3 such that our judgments about Plum's responsibility
should be different in these three cases. Furthermore, the reason that
Plum is not responsible in these cases seems to be that, in each case,
his behavior is causally determined by forces beyond his control
(Pereboom 2001: 116). But then we should conclude that Plum is not
responsible in Case 4 (since causal determinism is the defining
feature of that case). And since, in Case 4, Plum is just a normal
human being in a causally deterministic universe, the conclusion we
draw about him should extend to all other normal persons in causally
deterministic universes. (For an important, related manipulation
argument, see Mele's "zygote argument" in Mele 1995,
2006b, and 2008.)



Pereboom's argument has inspired a number of objections. For
example, it could be argued that in Case 1, the manipulation to which
Plum is subject undermines his responsibility for some reason besides
the fact that the manipulation causally determines his behavior, which
would stop the generalization from Case 1 to the subsequent cases
(Fischer 2004, Mele 2005, Demetriou 2010; for a response to this line
of argument, see Matheson 2016; Pereboom addresses this concern in his
2014 presentation of the argument; also see Shabo 2010).
Alternatively, it might be argued, on compatibilist grounds, that Plum
is responsible in Case 4, and this conclusion might be extended to the
earlier cases since Plum fulfills the same compatibilist-friendly
conditions on responsibility in those cases (McKenna 2008).



The four-case argument attempts to show that if determinism is true,
then we cannot be the sources of our actions in the way required for
moral responsibility. It is, therefore, an argument for
incompatibilism rather than for skepticism about moral responsibility.
But, in combination with Pereboom's argument that we lack the
sort of free will required for responsibility even if determinism is
false (2001: 38-88; 2014: 30-70), the four-case argument
has emerged as an important part of a detailed and influential
skeptical perspective. For other skeptical accounts, see Caruso
(2016), Smilansky (2000),
Waller (2011); also see the
 entry on skepticism about moral responsibility.


#### 3.3.4 The Epistemic Condition on Responsibility



There has been a recent surge in interest in the epistemic, or
knowledge, condition on responsibility (as opposed to the freedom or
control condition that is at the center of the free will debate). In
this context, the following epistemic argument for skepticism about
responsibility has been developed. (In certain structural respects,
the argument resembles Galen Strawson's skeptical argument
discussed in
 SS3.3.2.)



Sometimes agents act in ignorance of the likely bad consequences of
their actions, and sometimes their ignorance excuses them from blame
for so acting. But in other cases, an agent's ignorance might
not excuse him. How can we distinguish the cases where ignorance
excuses from those in which it does not? One proposal is that
ignorance fails to excuse when the ignorance is itself something for
which an agent might be blamed. And one proposal for when ignorance is
blameworthy is that it issues from a blameworthy *benighting*
act in which an agent culpably impairs, or fails to improve, his own
epistemic position (H. Smith 1983). In such a case, the agent's
ignorance seems to be his own fault, so it cannot be appealed to in
order to excuse the agent.



But when is a benighting act blameworthy? Several philosophers have
suggested that we are culpable for benighting acts only when we engage
in them knowing that we are doing so and knowing that we should not do
so (Levy 2011, Rosen 2004, M. Zimmerman 1997). Ultimately, the
suggestion is that ignorance for which one is blameworthy, and that
leads to blameworthy unwitting wrongdoing, has its source in
*knowing* wrongful behavior. Thus, if someone unwittingly does
something wrong, then that person will be blameworthy only if we can
explain his lack of knowledge (his "unwittingness") by
reference to something else that he *knowingly* did wrong.



Consider an example from Gideon Rosen (2004) in which a surgeon orders
her patient to be transfused with the wrong type of blood, and suppose
that the surgeon was unaware that she was making this mistake.
According to Rosen, the surgeon will be blameworthy for harming her
patient only if she is blameworthy for being ignorant about the
patient's blood type when she requests the transfusion, and she
will be blameworthy for this only if her ignorance stems from some
instance in which the surgeon knowingly failed to do something that
she ought to have done to avoid her later ignorance. It won't,
for example, be enough that the surgeon's ignorance is explained
by her failure to doublecheck the patient's medical records. In
order to ground blame, this omission on the surgeon's part must
itself have been culpable, which requires that the surgeon knew that
this omission was wrong. And if the surgeon wasn't aware that
she was committing a wrongful omission (when she failed to doublecheck
her patient's medical records), then *this* failure of
knowledge on the surgeon's part must be explained by some prior
culpable--that is, knowing--act or omission. In the end, for
Rosen, 



> 
> 
> *the only possible locus of original responsibility* [for a
> later unwitting act] *is an akratic act*.... a knowing
> sin. (2004: 307; emphasis in original) 
> 
> 
> 



Similarly, Michael Zimmerman argues that 



> 
> 
> all culpability can be traced to culpability that involves lack of
> ignorance, that is, that involves a belief on the agent's part
> that he or she is doing something morally wrong. (1997: 418)
> 
> 
> 



The above reasoning may apply not just to cases in which a person is
unaware of the consequences of her action, but also to cases in which
a person is unaware of the moral status of her behavior. A slaveowner,
for example, might think that slaveholding is permissible, and so, on
the account considered here, he will be blameworthy only if he is
culpable for his ignorance about the moral status of slavery, which
will require, for example, that he ignored evidence about its moral
status while knowing that this is something he should not do (Rosen
2003 and 2004).



These reflections can give rise to a couple forms of skepticism about
moral responsibility (and particularly about blameworthiness). First,
we might come to endorse a form of epistemic skepticism on the grounds
that we rarely have insight into whether a wrongdoer was
akratic--that is, was a knowing wrongdoer--at some suitable
point in the etiology of a given action (Rosen 2004). Alternatively,
or in addition, one might endorse a more substantive form of
skepticism on the grounds that a great many normal wrongdoers
don't exhibit the sort of knowing wrongdoing supposedly required
for responsibility. In other words, perhaps very many wrongdoers
don't know that they are wrongdoers *and* their ignorance
on this score is not their fault since it doesn't arise from an
appropriate earlier instance of knowing wrongdoing. In this case, very
many ordinary wrongdoers may fail to be morally responsible for their
behavior. (For skeptical suggestions along these lines, see M.
Zimmerman 1997 and Levy 2011.) 



There is more to the epistemic dimension of responsibility than what
is contained in the above skeptical argument, but the argument does
bring out a lot of what is of interest in this domain. For one thing,
it prominently relies on a *tracing* strategy. This strategy is
used, for example, in accounts that feature a person who does not, at
the time of action, fulfill control or knowledge conditions on
responsibility, but who nonetheless seems morally responsible for her
behavior. In such a case, the agent's responsibility may be
grounded in the fact that her failure to fulfill certain conditions on
responsibility is traceable to earlier actions undertaken by the agent
when she did fulfill these conditions. For example, a person may be so
intoxicated that she lacks control over, or awareness of, her
behavior, and yet it may still be appropriate to hold her responsible
for her intoxicated behavior insofar as she freely took steps to
intoxicate herself. The tracing strategy plays an important role in
many accounts of responsibility (see, e.g., Fischer & Ravizza
1998: 49-51), but it has also been subjected to important
criticisms (see Vargas 2005; for a reply see Fischer and Tognazzini
2009; for more on tracing, see Khoury 2012, King 2014, Shabo 2015, and
Timpe 2011).



Various strategies for rejecting the above skeptical argument also
illustrate stances one can take on the relevance of knowledge for
responsibility. These strategies typically involve rejecting the claim
that knowing wrongdoing is fundamental to blameworthiness. For
example, it might be argued that it is often morally reckless to
perform actions when one is merely uncertain whether they are wrong,
and that this recklessness is sufficient for blameworthiness (see
Guerrero 2007; also see Nelkin & Rickless 2017b and Robichaud
2014). Another strategy would be to argue that blameworthiness can be
grounded in cases of morally ignorant wrongdoing if it is reasonable
to expect the wrongdoer to have avoided her moral ignorance, and
particularly if her ignorance is itself caused by the agent's
own epistemic and moral vices (FitzPatrick 2008 and 2017). Relatedly,
it might be argued that one who is unaware that he does wrong is
blameworthy if he possessed relevant capacities for avoiding his
failure of awareness; this approach may be particularly promising in
cases in which an agent's lack of moral awareness stems from a
failure to *remember* her moral duties (Clarke 2014, 2017 and
Sher 2006b, 2009; also see
Rudy-Hiller 2017). Finally, it might simply be claimed that morally
ignorant wrongdoers can harbor, and express through their behavior,
objectionable attitudes or qualities of will that suffice for
blameworthiness (Arpaly 2003, Bjornsson 2017, Harman 2011, Mason
2015, Talbert 2013). This approach may be most promising in cases in
which a wrongdoer is aware of the material outcomes of her conduct but
unaware of the fact that she does wrong in bringing about those
outcomes.



For more, see the
 entry on the epistemic condition for moral responsibility.