Reasons-Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility: The Case of Autism

In this paper, I consider a novel challenge to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. According to their view, agents possess the control necessary for moral responsibility if their actions proceed from a mechanism that is moderately reasons-responsive. I argue that their account of moderate reasons-responsiveness fails to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for moral responsibility since it cannot give an adequate account of the responsibility of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Empirical evidence suggests that autistic individuals demonstrate impairments in counterfactual thinking, and these impairments, I argue, are such that they cast doubt on Fischer and Ravizza’s construal of moderate reasons-responsiveness. I then argue that modifying the view in order to accommodate individuals with ASD forces them to defend a strong reasons-responsive account despite the fact that they explicitly deny that such an account can adequately characterize what it is to be morally responsible for one’s actions.     

Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism and the Consequences of Belief

John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer a theory of moral responsibility which makes responsibility dependent upon the way in which moral agents view themselves. According to the theory, agents are responsible for their actions only if they think of themselves as apt candidates for praise and blame; if they come to believe they are not apt candidates for praise and blame, they are ipso facto not morally responsible. In what follows, I show that Fischer and Ravizza’s account of responsibility for consequences is inconsistent with this subjective element of their theory, and that the subjective element may be retained only if they are willing to implausibly restrict their account of responsibility for consequences. I end by discussing the broad significance of the failure of the subjective element for their overall approach to moral responsibility.     

Revising Reasons Reactivity: Weakly and Strongly Sufficient Reasons for Acting

In Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza propose an account of moral responsibility according to which an agent is morally responsible for an action just when that action is the product of her own moderately reasons-responsive mechanism, where reasons-responsiveness is explained in terms of the mechanism’s regular reasons-receptivity and weak reasons-reactivity. In a review of Fischer and Ravizza’s book Mele contends that their weakly reasons-reactivity condition is inadequate, constructing a case in which, according to their theory, an extreme agoraphobic is morally responsible for his staying in his home. In this paper I modify Fischer and Ravizza’s account of moral responsibility in light of Mele’s problematic example, suggesting a refinement of their weakly reasons-reactivity requirement via a distinction between weakly sufficient reasons and strongly sufficient reasons.     

Semicompatibilism: no ability to do otherwise required

In this paper, I argue that it is open to semicompatibilists to maintain that no ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility. This is significant for two reasons. First, it undermines Christopher Evan Franklin’s recent claim that everyone thinks that an ability to do otherwise is necessary for free will and moral responsibility. Second, it reveals an important difference between John Martin Fischer’s semicompatibilism and Kadri Vihvelin’s version of classical compatibilism, which shows that the dispute between them is not merely (or even largely) a verbal dispute. Along the way, I give special attention to the notion of general abilities, and, though I defend the distinctiveness of Fischer’s semicompatibilism against the verbal dispute charge, I also use the discussion of the nature of general abilities to argue for the falsity of a certain claim that Fischer and coauthor Mark Ravizza have made about their account (namely that “reactivity is all of a piece”).     

Blame,desert and compatibilist capacity: a diachronic account of moderateness in regards to reasons-responsiveness

This paper argues that John Fischer and Mark Ravizza's compatibilist theory of moral responsibility cannot justify reactive attitudes like blame and desert-based practices like retributive punishment. The problem with their account, I argue, is that their analysis of moderateness in regards to reasons-responsiveness has the wrong normative features. However, I propose an alternative account of what it means for a mechanism to be moderately reasons-responsive which addresses this deficiency. In a nut shell, while Fischer and Ravizza test for moderate reasons-responsiveness by checking how a mechanism behaves in a given time slice across other possible worlds, on my account we should ask how that mechanism behaves in this world over a span of time – specifically, whether it responds to reasons sufficiently often. My diachronic account is intended as a drop-in replacement for Fischer and Ravizza's synchronic account.     

Fischer and Ravizza on Moral Sanity and Weakness of Will

This essay evaluates John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza'smature semi-compatibilist account of moral responsibility, focusingon their new theory of moderate reasons-responsiveness as a model of``moral sanity.' This theory, presented in Responsibility andControl, solves many of the problems with Fischer's earlier weakreasons-responsiveness model, such as its unwanted implication thatagents who are only erratically responsive to bizarre reasons can beresponsible for their acts. But I argue that the new model still facesseveral problems. It does not allow sufficiently for non-psychoticagents (who are largely reasons-responsive) with localized beliefsand desires incompatible with full responsibility. Nor does it take intoaccount that practical ``fragmentation of the self' over time may alsoreduce competence, since moral sanity requires some minimum level ofnarrative unity in our plans and projects. Finally, I argue that actual-sequenceaccounts cannot adequately explain sane but weak-willed agency. This isbecause without libertarian freedom, such accounts have no way to modelthe perverse agent's determination to be irrational or weak.     

Epistemic issues in the free will debate: can we know when we are free?

In this paper, I argue that the views of Robert Kane on the one hand and John Fischer and Mark Ravizza on the other both lead to the following conclusion: we should have very low confidence in our ability to judge that someone is acting freely or in a way for which they can be held responsible. This in turn means, I claim, that these views, in practice, collapse into a sort of hard incompatibilist position, or the position of a free will denier. That would at least be an unintended consequence, and it might be regarded as a virtual reductio. Versions of the objection could likely be made against a number of other accounts of free will, but I will limit my focus to Kane and Fischer. Along the way, by way of response to some possible objections to my argument, I make some comments about epistemic closure principles.     

Responsibility and Manipulation

I address various critiques of the approach to moral responsibility sketched in previous work by Ravizza and Fischer. I especially focus on the key issues pertaining to manipulation. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Dispositional Theory of Love

On a naive reading of the major accounts of love, love is a kind of mental event. A recent trend in the philosophical literature on love is to reject these accounts on the basis that they do not do justice to the historical dimension of love, as love essentially involves a distinctive kind of temporally extended pattern. Although the historicist account has advantages over the positions that it opposes, its appeal to the notion of a pattern is problematic. I will argue that an account of love as disposition, suitably construed, is superior to the historicist account in that it has the advantages the historicist account has without its problems. In addition, the dispositional account has advantages of its own.     

Fischer and Ravizza on Moral Responsibility

The author argued elsewhere that a necessary condition that John Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer for moral responsibility is too strong and that the sufficient conditions they offer are too weak. This article is a critical examination of their reply. Topics discussed include blameworthiness, irresistible desires, moral responsibility, reactive attitudes, and reasons responsiveness.     

Moral Responsibility and Motivational Mechanisms

This paper provides a discussion and defense of a recent formulation of the idea that moral responsibility for actions depends on the capacity to respond to reasons. This formulation appears in several publications by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, where the authors argue that moral responsibility involves a kind of control over one’s actions which they call “guidance control.” This kind of control does not require an agent’s ability to do something different from what he actually does, but instead requires only that the actual process leading to the action be responsive in some suitable way to the reasons that the agent has for acting. After summarizing this view, I offer the following two innovations to the authors’ view: I argue that the level of control required for moral responsibility (which I call “regular reasons-responsiveness”) is much stronger than what the author’s view allows for; and 2) I give a common-sense account of the kinds of motivational mechanism relevant to moral responsibility. Given these innovations, I show that this kind of view allows us to easily answer some counterexamples that appear in the current literature on moral responsibility.     

Affordance-Based Control of Visually Guided Action

The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast existing theoretical approaches to understanding the visual guidance of action and to introduce a new approach. The focus is on tasks, such as steering, braking, and intercepting, that are (more or less) continuously guided on the basis of visual information. The prominent approach, information-based control, captures important aspects of behavior but is incompatible with the theory of affordances, a core principle of the ecological approach. Information-based control also fails to capture how actors behave in ways that take the limits of their action capabilities into account. I attempt to resolve these problems by introducing a new approach, affordance-based control, which asserts that a primary function of vision is to allow actors to see the world in terms of what they can and cannot do. Affordance-based control captures the tight coupling between information in optic flow and movement that is characteristic of visually guided action but also provides a parsimonious explanation of how actors take into account the dynamic properties of their body and the environment.     

Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

In this essay, I focus on two biographical works by Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir that I read as political texts: Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (Arendt 1957 ) and “Must We Burn Sade?” (Beauvoir 2012 ). Reading Arendt's Varnhagen and Beauvoir's “Sade” side by side illuminates their shared preoccupation with lived experience and their common political premises: the antagonism between freedom and sovereignty, and the centrality of action and constructive relations with others. My argument is that these texts constitute an original style of political thinking, which I call politico‐biographical hermeneutics, or reading the life of others as exercises in political theory. Politico‐biographical hermeneutics, as I take it, is not a systematic methodology, but an approach to interpreting sociopolitical forces as they come to bear and are embodied and inscribed in the lived experiences, struggles, and works of representative or exemplary individuals. This approach identifies the political lessons of lived experience and supports one of the central claims of feminist philosophy, namely, that the personal and the political are not antithetical, but relational.     

This is a Tricky Situation: Situationism and Reasons-Responsiveness

Situations are powerful: the evidence from experimental social psychology suggests that agents are hugely influenced by the situations they find themselves in, often without their knowing it (this, roughly-speaking, is the thesis of situationism). In our paper, we evaluate how situational factors affect our reasons-responsiveness, as conceived of by John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, and, through this, how they also affect moral responsibility. We argue that the situationist experiments suggest that situational factors impair, among other things, our moderate reasons-responsiveness, which is plausibly required for moral responsibility. However, even though we argue that situational factors lower the degree of our reasons-responsiveness, we propose that agents remain moderately reasons-responsive to the degree required for moral responsibility. Nonetheless, those (adversely) affected by situational factors are arguably less morally responsible than those who are not subject to similar situational factors. We further evaluate an understanding of reasons-responsiveness (developed by Manuel Vargas in the light of situationist data) which relativizes reasons-responsiveness to agents’ circumstances. We argue that the situationist data do not warrant this kind of divergence from Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account. We conclude by discussing what situationist experiments tell us about our relationship to non-reasons.     

Deterministic Frankfurt cases

According to the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), people are morally responsible for what they do only if they could have done otherwise. Over the last few decades, this principle has dominated discussions of free will and moral responsibility. One important strand of this discussion concerns the Frankfurt-type cases or Frankfurt cases, originally developed by Frankfurt (J Philos 66:829–839, 1969), which are alleged counterexamples to PAP. One way in which proponents of PAP have responded to these purported counterexamples is by arguing that they fall prey to a dilemma, both horns of which undermine their cogency. Recently, Fischer (Philos Rev 119: 315–336, 2010) has defended the Frankfurt cases against one horn of this dilemma. In this essay, I criticize Fischer’s defense of the Frankfurt cases and argue that he does not successfully show how the cases can avoid this horn of the dilemma. If I am right, then, despite Fischer’s claims to the contrary, the original dilemma plaguing the cases still stands.     

Reasons and ideals

This paper contributes to the debate on whether we can have reason to do what we are unable to do. I take as my starting point two papers recently published in Philosophical Studies, by Bart Streumer and Ulrike Heuer, which defend the two dominant opposing positions on this issue. Briefly, whereas Streumer argues that we cannot have reason to do what we are unable to do, Heuer argues that we can have reason to do what we are unable to do when we can get closer to success but cannot have reason to try to do what we are unable to do when we cannot get closer to success. In this paper, I reject both positions as they are presented, on the grounds that neither can accommodate an important category of reasons, which are the reasons to realise and to try to realise dimensions of value that lie at the boundary of what is realisable, specifically, genuinely valuable ideals. I defend a third view that we can have reason to do and to try to do what we are unable to do even when we cannot, in Heuer’s sense, get closer to success. Moreover, I argue that we can have reason to realise and to try to realise genuinely valuable ideals for their own sake and not simply for the sake of achieving mundane, realisable ends.     

Emergence and reduction: Reply to Kim

In this paper I examine Jaegwon Kim’s view that emergent properties are irreducible to the base properties on which they supervene. Kim’s view assumes a model of ‘functional reduction’ which he claims to be substantially different from the traditional Nagelian model. I dispute this claim and argue that the two models are only superficially different, and that on either model, properly understood, it is possible to draw a distinction between a property’s being reductively identifiable with its base property and a property’s being reductively explainable in terms of it. I propose that we should take as the distinguishing feature of emergent properties that they be truly novel properties, i.e., ontologically distinct from the ‘base’ properties which they supervene on. This only requires that emergent properties cannot be reductively identified with their base properties, not that they cannot be reductively explained in terms of them. On this conception the set of emergent properties may well include mental properties as conceived by nonreductive physicalists.     

Choice, Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities

Is choice necessary for moral responsibility? And does choice imply alternative possibilities of some significant sort? This paper will relate these questions to the argument initiated by Harry Frankfurt that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility, and to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza's extension of that argument in terms of guidance control in a causally determined world. I argue that attending to Frankfurt's core conceptual distinction between the circumstances that make an action unavoidable and those that bring it about that the action is performed – a distinction emphasised in his recent restatement – provides a new route into an analysis of Frankfurt's argument by showing how it depends on a person's ‘decision to act’ involving the exercise of choice. The implicit reliance of Frankfurt's argument on this notion of choice, however, undermines his claim that the example of the counterfactual intervener strengthens the compatibilist case by providing a counter-example to the principle of alternative possibilities. I also argue that Frankfurt's reliance on the exercise of choice for moral responsibility is also evident in the Fischer/Ravizza argument, and that a close analysis of both arguments shows that such exercise of choice is not available if causal determinism is true.