Contribution
A compressed statement, by the authors, of the mature version of Fischer’s reasons-responsiveness account. Compared with Fischer’s 1987 paper (LIT-687, read in NOTE-579), it adds two things: moderate in place of weak responsiveness, and an ownership condition met by taking responsibility.
Key insight
What makes an action free enough for responsibility is not the agent’s ability to do otherwise. It is the kind of process the action actually came from: one that tracks reasons in an intelligible pattern, and that the agent has, by an ordinary history, come to treat as hers to answer for.
Assumptions
- Responsibility in the Strawsonian sense: being “an appropriate candidate for the reactive attitudes” (book, ch. 1, p. 6).
- An epistemic condition exists alongside the control condition, and is set aside (book, p. 13).
- Mechanisms can be individuated into kinds; the précis does not say how.
Key results
Argument, summarised rather than made:
- Moral responsibility “simply requires guidance control”; footnote 1 calls guidance control “the freedom-relevant condition necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility” (p. 441).
- Ownership by taking responsibility, through moral education, as a standing policy carried by sameness of kind of mechanism (pp. 441–443).
- Moderate reasons-responsiveness: regular receptivity, including to moral reasons, in a pattern a third party can understand, and at least weak reactivity (p. 444).
- Responsiveness is a “general capacity”, not an alternative possibility (n. 3, p. 444).
- Semicompatibilism (p. 445).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Responsibility requires guidance control, not regulative control | moderate | summarised; argued in chapters 1–2 via Frankfurt-type cases (unread) |
| C2 | The relevant mechanism must be moderately reasons-responsive | moderate | summarised; argued in chapter 3 (unread) |
| C3 | A mechanism is one’s own when one has taken responsibility for it | moderate | summarised; argued in chapters 7–8 (unread) |
| C4 | Agents identical now can differ in responsibility because of history | moderate | stated, with the authors’ Picasso analogy |
| C5 | The view is compatible with causal determinism | moderate | stated as following from C1–C3 |
Concepts
- regulative control — dual power over alternatives.
- guidance control — acting from one’s own moderately reasons-responsive mechanism.
- taking responsibility — coming, by an appropriate route, to see oneself as an agent whose choices make a difference and as a fair target of the reactive attitudes for what a kind of mechanism produces.
- moderate reasons-responsiveness — regular receptivity, at least weak reactivity.
Connections
It summarises the book (LIT-684) and descends from Fischer’s 1987 paper (LIT-687), which had weak responsiveness and no ownership condition. Its subjectivist element is acknowledged: “being free and morally responsible requires one to see oneself as free and morally responsible” (n. 2, p. 442).
Bearing on the record
THEORY-121 cited this précis in its promotion condition as the reading that would confirm the account. It does confirm the account as the encyclopedia reports gave it, and the theory now takes it as a source.
For groups: the book sets them aside explicitly. “We shall be focusing on the moral responsibility of individuals. Perhaps the theory will also be relevant to evaluating the moral responsibility of groups, but it is intended in the first instance to apply to individual responsibility” (ch. 1, n. 13, p. 10). It lists “corporate responsibility” among uses of “responsibility” other than the moral one (ch. 1, n. 1, p. 2). The owner’s essay (§7.2) would be extending it, not applying it.
Limitations
A summary: none of the arguments is given here. Its subjectivism means an agent who never comes to see herself as responsible fails the ownership condition. How mechanisms are individuated is not addressed.
Open questions
Whether ownership by taking responsibility can be had by an organization, whose “beliefs about itself” would have to be corporate attitudes in List and Pettit’s sense (THEORY-127).