John Martin Fischer, “Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility”, in Ferdinand Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology, Cambridge University Press, pp. 81–106 (chapter 5) — DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511625411.005. Reprinted in Fischer’s My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2006), which I did not verify against a copy.
Key takeaways
Read in the My Way reprint (NOTE-579); pages are its pages.
- What responsibility is. An agent is morally responsible “insofar as he is rationally accessible to certain kinds of attitudes and activities as a result of performing the action” (p. 63), so he can be responsible for a morally “neutral” act.
- Mechanism, not agent. Frankfurt-type cases show an agent can be responsible though he could not have done otherwise. Hence “An agent is morally responsible for performing an action insofar as the mechanism that actually issues in the action is reasons-responsive” (p. 66).
- Weak responsiveness. Strong responsiveness is too demanding, because of weakness of will and culpable wrongdoing (pp. 67–68). What is required is that “there must exist some possible world in which there is a sufficient reason to do otherwise, the agent’s actual mechanism operates, and the agent does otherwise” (p. 68).
- History and tracing. “Moral responsibility is a historical phenomenon” (p. 79), with tracing to a responsive mechanism at “some suitable earlier time” (p. 76). There is no ownership condition yet.
- Semicompatibilism. Responsibility “is compatible with causal determinism, even if causal determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise” (p. 78).
- Admitted gaps. A seemingly insane agent weakly responsive only to a bizarre reason “poses a problem” (n. 11), and “same mechanism” is left “extremely vague” (n. 18).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 as the origin of Fischer’s reasons-responsiveness and read on 2026-10-05, when the owner authorised the copy in Andrew M. Bailey’s collection of Fischer’s papers. The reading confirms what the encyclopedia reported (LIT-291, supplement §B): the account was mechanism-based from the start, rested on weak responsiveness, and had no ownership condition. Those are the two things Fischer and Ravizza’s book (LIT-684; précis LIT-728) changed.
Its neighbours in the same volume. Wolf’s “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility” (LIT-690) is chapter 3 and Frankfurt’s “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (LIT-575) is chapter 2. This paper does not discuss either; it argues against Frankfurt’s and Watson’s hierarchical accounts in general, as “purely structural and ahistorical” (p. 79).
How it bears on THEORY-040. That account says a condition stated only in present psychology is met by a manipulated agent. This paper’s historicism is aimed at that problem, but its only historical element is tracing; the ownership condition that answers manipulation comes in the 1998 book.