Moderate Reasons-Responsiveness, Moral Responsibility, and Manipulation: A
Challenge for Fischer and Ravizza?

Todd Long

= Complete Essay =

In Responsibility and Control, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza argue that, in the free will debate, guidance control, which does not require the existence of genuine alternative possibilities, is the freedom-relevant condition that is sufficient for moral responsibility. Their view is that an agent has guidance control when the deliberative mechanism that issues in behavior is reasons-responsive in an acceptable way. Hence, their theory hinges on a satisfactory account of the deliberative mechanism operant in agents. I believe there is some trouble for Fischer and Ravizza's account of how these mechanisms apply to Frankfurt-type alternative-sequence examples. Specifically, Fischer and Ravizza assume that the mechanism in an alternative-sequence case is always a different mechanism from the one that operates in an actual-sequence case. Presenting a new Frankfurt-type example that features three alternative-sequence cases, I argue that either  two of my cases are counterexamples to Fischer and Ravizza's claim that moderate reasons-responsiveness is sufficient for moral responsibility, or my examples show that Fischer and Ravizza are under a false assumption about how their theory applies to Frankfurt-type examples. Finally, I offer a solution to the problem that saves Fischer and Ravizza's theory, but I show that the solution comes at the cost of the appealing, and initially plausible, intuition many people have that rather severe cases of external manipulation rule out moral responsibility. I argue that, despite its appeal, this manipulation intuition is false and that, so long as Fischer and Ravizza deny the intuition, their theory comes out of the fire relatively unscathed.