John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza (2000), “Précis of Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61(2):441–445 — DOI-10.2307/2653660
Key takeaways
- Guidance, not regulative, control. “Regulative control involves alternative possibilities: it is a kind of dual power of free action. In contrast, guidance control does not, by its nature, involve alternative possibilities.” Moral responsibility “simply requires guidance control” (p. 441).
- Two elements. Guidance control is “understood in terms of two elements”: the agent’s “ownership” of the mechanism that actually issues in the behaviour, and that mechanism’s “reasons-responsiveness” (p. 441).
- Ownership is taken, not found. “We contend that individuals make certain kinds of mechanisms their own by taking responsibility for them” (p. 441). In the ordinary case this happens through moral education, as a child comes to see itself as an agent and a fair target of the reactive attitudes (p. 442). Taking responsibility “is a matter of having certain (dispositional) beliefs about oneself (and having acquired those beliefs in appropriate ways)” (p. 443), and it works as “a kind of “standing policy"" for that kind of mechanism (p. 442).
- Historical. Two agents identical in their present properties can differ in responsibility, because only one took responsibility by an appropriate route (p. 443).
- Moderate reasons-responsiveness. Weak responsiveness “is too little to demand”. A mechanism is moderately responsive “insofar as it is “regularly” receptive to reasons (some of which are moral), and at least weakly reactive to reasons” (p. 444), with receptivity forming an understandable pattern to a third party who knows the agent’s values.
- Semicompatibilism. “causal determinism is compatible with moral responsibility, even if causal determinism rules out alternative possibilities” (p. 445).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-05 at the owner’s request, as the authors’ own statement of the account the record holds as THEORY-121, which until now rested on encyclopedia reports. It confirms those reports on every point they make: the mechanism rather than the agent, regular receptivity with weaker reactivity, ownership by taking responsibility, and compatibility with determinism.
For the owner’s essay (§7.2), the précis makes the ownership test precise. A mechanism is one’s own when one has come, by an appropriate history, to see oneself as answerable for what it produces. Whether an organization can take responsibility for its own decision procedures in this sense is the question the essay would have to answer; the précis does not raise it, and the book sets groups aside (NOTE-575).