John Martin Fischer, “Stories and the Meaning of Life”, Philosophic Exchange 39(1), 2009, article 4, printed pp. 3–15 — read from SUNY’s repository, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/3241.
Key takeaways
- The framework, first-hand. §I lists the elements of what Fischer, “sometimes in collaboration with Mark Ravizza”, calls a “framework for moral responsibility”: the concept of responsibility is kept apart from its conditions of application; regulative control is distinguished from guidance control; guidance control, “and not regulative control, is the ‘freedom-relevant’ condition”; guidance control is analysed as “mechanism ownership and moderate reasons-responsiveness”; it is “compatible with causal determinism”; and its value is a kind of self-expression. An agent “may be morally responsible but never have had genuine metaphysical access to alternative possibilities”.
- The Frankfurt-case basis, and its limit. The moral of Frankfurt-style examples is that responsibility “is a matter of how the actual sequence unfolds, not whether the agent has genuine metaphysical access to alternative sequences” (p. 4). But Fischer says there are “other dialectical routes to the same conclusion”, and that rejecting the examples “should not in itself issue in a rejection of the basic conclusion”. So the view does not stand or fall with the examples.
- The framework survives revisions of its details. The two most contested parts of the 1998 account are the “subjective” condition on mechanism ownership and the claim that reactivity is “all-of-a piece”. Fischer says (p. 4) he can drop both and still hold that responsibility “does not require regulative control, that it is fundamentally a historical notion, and that it is compatible with causal determinism”.
- The value of free action is artistic self-expression. “When I act freely, I write a sentence in the story of my life” (p. 5): free action gives a life a narrative dimension of value that is not a sum of momentary welfare. The activity is aesthetic, but the product, a life, is judged mainly by moral and prudential standards, which makes this “sui generis” among artistic contexts (p. 7). Inferring from the nature of the activity to the mode of evaluation is “The Aesthetic Fallacy” (pp. 8–9). He refines the slogan: in acting freely “we constrain the plausible stories of our lives” (p. 10), since others also interpret them.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request for Fischer and Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness. It is moral philosophy and the philosophy of meaning in life, with no instruction for machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it.
Active: worth reading as the record’s only first-hand statement of the
framework by its author. It is a statement, not an argument. Each element
is named in a sentence and defended elsewhere. It does not say what
moderate reasons-responsiveness is, and it does not mention receptivity,
reactivity in the 1998 sense, or taking responsibility, except for the
remark that ownership involves a “subjective” condition. For those the
record still depends on McKenna and Coates (LIT-291) and on the unread book.
The relation. It extends Responsibility and Control
(LIT-684). Its first section is offered “to give the background” for
its thesis, and that background is the book’s account, cited in its note
- The thesis about the value of guidance control presupposes that account. The two components of the value it proposes, self-expression and assessment by morality and prudence, are matched to the two components of guidance control, ownership and reasons-responsiveness (p. 7).
Narrative. Its idea of narrative value is from Velleman’s “Narrative
Explanation” (2003), which the record does not hold. Note 10 says Galen
Strawson’s psychological Narrativity thesis, a thesis about how people
experience their lives, is “entirely orthogonal” to its claims, which are
about the interpretation of behaviour. That is a direct statement on
Strawson’s “Against Narrativity” (LIT-452). Fischer does not dispute
Strawson’s thesis, he sets it aside, so no rivals is declared. The
paper’s narrative is a life’s value, not the person’s identity, so it is
neither McAdams’s life story as identity (THEORY-060) nor the narrative
unity Bratman denies is needed for diachronic self-governance
(THEORY-076).
Wolf. Wolf is not cited. The paper bears on her Reason View (LIT-688, LIT-685) only through the framework: it states first-hand that responsibility needs no regulative control, which is the point where Wolf’s asymmetry parts from Fischer, for blame.
Access: the PDF in SOAR (SUNY Open Access Repository), found through a web search and opened from the repository’s own bitstream service.