This sort of case shows the problem of benign manipulation , manipulation that is not relevant to the action in question. The attitudes leading to his decision to take out the loan, on the other hand, were changed or acquired as a result of bypassing. The attitudes issuing in his decision to take out a loan for a new car were the same ones he had before the manipulation, and with the same strength.
The relevant change in the case of Matt is in the relative strength of his selfish attitudes, relative to competing attitudes.
However, attitudes that compete in one context of practical deliberation might not compete in another context. Suppose, for instance, that at some point prior to the manipulation, Matt deliberated about whether he should politely engage in conversation with his conspiracy theorist neighbor or whether he should avoid him and go to the beach with his daughter.
So, a more refined explanation would focus on the strength of the attitudes leading to action relative to attitudes that would compete in this context of practical deliberation , were he to still have them.
When he was deliberating about whether to take out the loan for the car, his parental values would have competed with his selfish values. Further, since Matt lost his parental values, they are absent from this deliberation. In this case, as well as the case of Paul, the relevant competing attitudes are ones that the agent had prior to the change and would compete in this context of deliberation.
Footnote 4. The relative strength of concern is in relation to attitudes had by the agent prior to the bypassing that would have competed, in this context of practical deliberation, with the attitudes that led to action.
For ease of presentation, we can call such attitudes B-attitudes. In the case of Matt, the change occurred via the elimination of his parental values, resulting in selfish values that are B-attitudes in this context of deliberation. Before going further, we should consider an objection to my claim that traditional bypassing views cannot accommodate the verdict that Matt is not responsible. An important part of this case is that none of the attitudes that lead to his action were acquired through bypassing; this feature is necessary for the case to pose a problem for bypassing views.
It is not clear how this objection would best be developed, but doing so would likely involve various complications. In order to avoid this, I offer some general points in response. First, although it is true that Matt is indifferent towards his daughter, it is not clear that we need to posit a further entity like an attitude of indifference; one might think that Matt is indifferent towards his daughter simply because he has neither a pro- nor a con-attitude towards his daughter.
Second, even if we grant that this new attitude was produced, it is not clear that this attitude plays a role in the production of his action. At least, when it comes to how the action was produced, it is unclear what difference the presence of the attitude of indifference makes. We could then modify the case such that, after the attitude of indifference is produced, but before Matt wakes up, the neuroscientists also erase the attitude of indifference.
We can now turn to considering bypassing views in further detail. Mele offers two conditions. A sufficient condition for responsibility-level free action, and a necessary condition on direct responsibility intended to rule out cases like that of Paul; though it is not intended to rule out all cases of manipulated agents. Mele does not attempt to offer a full analysis of moral responsibility for actions, and neither condition is clearly intended to be exhaustive Mele, , p. That is, it is consistent with the overall view that there are agents who act freely yet fail to meet the sufficient condition, and that there are manipulated agents who are not directly morally responsible for an action yet meet the necessary condition.
We can begin with the sufficient condition for free action, intended to apply to agents like us. An agent A- s freely if he nondeviantly A -s on the basis of a rationally formed deliberative judgment that it would be best to A , has no compelled or coercively produced attitudes that influence his deliberative judgment, is well informed on the topic of his deliberation, and is mentally healthy.
Pat, the unmanipulated father, meets H for his decision to take out the loan. Paul, on the other hand, fails to meet H, and thus fails to meet 1b. Now consider the case of Matt, who has no compelled or coercively produced attitudes that influence his judgment.
After all, he has only lost attitudes, he has not gained any new ones. Matt meets H for his decision, and according to 1b, freely decides. The specification of B-attitudes suggests a simple revision. Since the set of attitudes an agent is compelled to possess will be a subset of B-attitudes, one simple way to revise H is as follows:. To say than an agent is directly responsible for an action is to say that they are not responsible for this action merely in virtue of being responsible for some other action Mele, , p.
Footnote 6 Manipulated agents are typically not thought to be indirectly responsible for the relevant actions, and for the rest of this paper, one can assume that if a manipulated agent is not directly responsible for an action, then he is not responsible for that action. If an agent is directly morally responsible for A -ing, then the following is false:. Mele, , pp. One concept in need of clarification is that of a Luther-style inability, which appears in 4b.
Notably, this sense of ability is concerned with doing otherwise in relevantly similar circumstances. The cases of Pat and Paul are intended to be understood as cases of agents who are Luther-style unable to do otherwise than take out the loan Mele, , pp.
Footnote 7 How does DMR apply to these cases? Pat, on the other hand, meets DMR for his similar action, since the conjunction of 1—4 is false with respect to that action. Unlike 1b, it does not imply that Matt is responsible for his action, since DMR is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for direct responsibility for an action. However, DMR also does not imply that Matt is not responsible for his action, given that the conjunction of 1—4 is false for his action as well, or so I will argue.
Insofar as one wishes to offer a theory that can account for cases like that of Matt as well, one would do well to extend the condition. With this purpose in mind, I suggest provisional revisions to DMR. Conjuncts 1 and 3 help to characterize the degree of change that the victim of manipulation underwent. His pre-change system of values was, however, such as to preclude him from performing a selfish action if it conflicted with his parental values.
Thus, I suggest the following revisions in italics :. Conjunct 4, a disjunction, further specifies how significant the manipulation is, in relation to the particular action. We can revise 4 as follows:. Suppose instead, that he has the relevant sort of ability in virtue of other attitudes that he retained; suppose, for instance, that he could have instead taken out a loan to install a state-of-the-art pool in his back yard.
If this were the case, then these other values would seem to be B-attitudes as well. Footnote 9 On positive historical views , in order for an agent to be responsible for an action, she needs to have had a certain sort of history.
Working out the details of the relevant sort of opportunity will be a complicated matter, and we will return to some of these complications later. One detail on which the positive views differ concerns which attitudes one needs to have had the relevant opportunity for.
The pertinent duration of time is at the time of action or shortly before it McKenna, , pp. To be clear, the fact that a value is unsheddable now does not imply that the value was always unsheddable, nor that it always will be. PH : An agent performs a directly free act and is directly morally responsible for it only if any unsheddable values playing a role in the production of her action arose from a history whereby she was afforded the opportunity to critically assess, endorse, and sustain them from abilities that she possessed, and so none were acquired through means that bypassed those abilities.
McKenna, , p. One thing to notice with PH , as stated, is that if an agent had the relevant opportunity with respect to some unsheddable value, we can infer that it was not acquired through means that bypassed those abilities. This suggests that if it was acquired through bypassing, then the agent did not have the relevant opportunity with respect to that value.
Thus, the agent needs to have the relevant opportunity at the time of acquisition. Even if the agent has the opportunity to assess the value later on, this will not change the fact that she did not have the opportunity relevant to PH. A different version of the view would only require that one have had the relevant opportunity at some time , regardless of how the values were acquired. Footnote Each of these versions faces its own challenges, and I discuss them separately.
According to PH , Paul is not responsible for his decision, since his unsheddable parental values were acquired via bypassing. If Matt met PH for actions that issued from unsheddable selfish values prior to the manipulation, he would seem to meet PH for his decision after the manipulation.
Did Matt meet PH for these pre-manipulation actions? Notice that PH is intended to pick out a relevant difference between agents like Pat and Paul.
This means that, at least for some unsheddable values leading to actions, typical agents like Pat need to have had the relevant opportunity at the moment of acquisition. Otherwise, they will fail to meet PH as well. If typical agents do not have the relevant opportunity at the time of acquisition, then PH fails to capture the difference between typical agents and standard victims of manipulation.
If it is possible for typical agents to have this opportunity with respect to some unsheddable values, it is not clear why Matt, a typical agent prior to the manipulation, could not have had it with respect to his selfish values. For our purposes, then, we can assume that Matt meets PH for his selfish actions prior to the manipulation; or, at least, that there is a version of the case where he does.
Consider, then, a version of the view along these lines:. PHO : An agent performs a directly free act and is directly morally responsible for it only if, for any unsheddable value, v , that plays a role in the production of her action, v is either not a B-attitude, or if it is, the agent was afforded the opportunity to critically assess, endorse, and sustain v from abilities that she possessed. On this version of the view, one can be directly free and responsible for actions that issue from unsheddable B-attitudes, insofar as one has had the relevant opportunity to asses, endorse, and sustain the attitude at some point or other.
This change will not cause problems with the case of Pat, the unmanipulated father. However, it is not fully clear whether Matt and Paul meet it. This will depend on what it takes to have the relevant opportunity.
McKenna suggests that developing this notion will be a complicated matter McKenna, For the moment, let us suppose that, whatever the relevant opportunity is, Paul did not have it prior to deciding to take out the loan. If this is true, then it would seem that Matt did not have it either.
Matt did not have more time between the manipulation and the decision to assess or endorse his B-attitudes; nor did he have better capacities for control over his mental life. Thus, Matt would seem to fail to meet PHO as well. With these revisions in place, we can now consider how bypassing views compare in a broader context, as well as some potential difficulties that one will face when further developing positive views.
To illustrate an advantage held by PHO , consider another case. Jim is a talented athlete, and the star player of his high school basketball team. Some basketball players from his rival high school, unhappy with the fact that they have to face him on the court, hatched a plan to get him to play soccer instead.
They pooled all of their money together to hire a neuroscientist, but given their limited budget, they can only afford to have the neuroscientist implant a single value, of moderate strength, for playing soccer.
When Jim wakes up, he finds that he has a desire to play soccer, and decides to join his friends that afternoon. He enjoys this game, begins to play frequently, and after a while, decides to quit basketball and join the soccer team instead.
He eventually ends up playing professionally. Jim decides to sign the contract, and his value for playing soccer, which is unsheddable during the deliberation, plays a role. In the case of Jim, there are two decisions of interest. First, there is his decision to play soccer with his friends the day after the manipulation. The manipulation in this case is much more modest than that found in the cases of Matt and Paul; and as Mele has suggested, this case would seem to pose a problem for current positive views Mele, , pp.
Nothing in this case would seem to bar the possibility that his value for playing soccer with his friends is unsheddable at the time of deliberation. PHO , on the other hand, may avoid this conclusion, if it turns out that Jim had the relevant opportunity prior to the decision.
Most, I presume, would doubt that the origins of the value get Jim off the hook for deciding to sign the contract. However, this value is a B-attitude and unsheddable at the time of deliberation. According to PHO , on the other hand, Jim can be directly responsible for this decision, since he seems to have had ample opportunity to critically assess, endorse, and sustain the value. Whichever way one develops an account of the relevant opportunity, it is implausible that Jim has not had it prior to deciding to sign the contract.
This advantage speaks in favor of PHO Footnote 17 ; however, developing an adequate account of the relevant opportunity will face some challenges, which I mention here. First, Matt had a similar opportunity with regard to his selfish values prior to the manipulation. Thus, PHO needs to be modified in a way that ensures that an agent who meets it had the opportunity after its relative strength has been changed via bypassing.
Footnote 19 Further, any attempt to develop an account of the relevant opportunity will not only need to meet two further desiderata, it will also need to avoid a potential tension between them. We also need to assess whether he had the relevant opportunity with respect to the attitude at some point after the change. Now recall that, after waking up, Paul is surprised by his new desire to help his daughter. Because of this, he undergoes careful reflection on his parental values, and ends up wholeheartedly embracing them, before deciding to take out the loan.
This suggests that Paul both had, and exercised, some sort of opportunity to assess, endorse, and sustain his implanted parental values. If PHO is to explain why agents like Paul are not responsible for the actions at issue, then the fact that Paul was able to undergo this reflection better not be sufficient for him having had the relevant opportunity. A similar complication can arise in the case of Matt, were he to reflect on his selfish values prior to deciding.
Call this the problem of initial reflection ; a desideratum of views like PHO is that they avoid this problem. Since agents like Paul can have capacities to assess, endorse, and sustain their values to a similar extent as Pat, the unmanipulated father, the account of the relevant opportunity will need to be somewhat substantial.
On a view like PHO , the agent needs to have had the relevant sort of opportunity with regard to any unsheddable values playing a role in the production of her first free action. Yet as McKenna points out, positive historical views cannot require, for free action, that the agent have performed some free action in the past; this would lead to a problematic regress McKenna, , pp. These views need to be formulated in a way that gives us an account of how an agent can come to perform their first free action, while avoiding this regress.
Call this the problem of first action. A potential tension may arise between the solutions to these two problems. Suppose that, as is often suggested, human agents perform their first free actions and are morally responsible for some of their actions before they become mature adults. The potential tension between solutions to the problem of first action and the problem of initial reflection arises from the fact that the relevant opportunity will need to be substantial enough to avoid the problem of initial reflection, while thin enough to allow younger agents to have had it by the time they perform their first free action.
Footnote 21 This is not to suggest that the tension is irresolvable; this is simply to point out a challenge in developing the account. Since it is a negative historical condition, it does not invite the infinite regress that gave rise to the problem of first action.
As some have suggested, one might think that manipulated agents like Paul and Matt can eventually come to be morally responsible for actions issuing from their problematic attitudes Cyr, , p. Footnote 22 If this is possible, then it may be in virtue of their having had a certain sort of opportunity to exercise their capacities for control over their mental lives with regard to the problematic attitudes, and how they relate to other, presently or previously held, attitudes.
Of course, developing this account will still need to accommodate the problem of initial reflection. The suggestion was to revise the historical component of 1b in the following way:. The case of Jim shows that this revision was too heavy-handed, at least if one wants a sufficient condition which would yield the result that he acted freely the day after the manipulation. Footnote 23 Thus, I suggest a further revision:. Bypassing views are similar in that, in order to account for the difference between typical agents like Pat and manipulated agents like Paul, they single out attitudes acquired through bypassing.
While still focusing on bypassing, this paper has argued that the relevant attitudes to be singled out are rather the broader category of B-attitudes. None of these views, however, suggest that the fact that an action issued from a B-attitude is sufficient to undermine direct responsibility for that action.
Bypassing views differ on what further features they incorporate into their account; features picking out other facts of the case that, in combination with the fact that the action issues from attitudes acquired through bypassing, undermine direct responsibly. The revisions suggested in this paper shift the focus to B-attitudes, while accommodating these other features of the original accounts. As suggested, some work still needs to be done, and which challenges one faces will depend on which route one decides to take.
One might reasonably wonder, at this point, what implications these revisions have. I offer some brief concluding thoughts in response. Although discussion of these views tends to revolve around cases involving extreme changes, it is plausible that were the changes to be less extreme, yet still significant, the agent may be less responsible for some actions, and for related reasons. Footnote 25 A bypassing view can provide us with a framework for assessing such cases, and the revisions suggested here can help to accommodate a broader set of cases.
Answering this question will be a complicated matter Footnote 26 ; but the lower one sets this threshold, the more likely that actual agents undergo such changes. Footnote 27 If actual agents undergo changes of the relevant sort, then the framework that bypassing views provide will be of use for assessing the responsibility of such agents, and these revisions will help to account for a much broader set of cases involving actual agents.
These sorts of cases are often employed against compatibilism—the view that moral responsibility is compatible with the truth of determinism—and often involve the additional feature that the agents are in a deterministic universe. I omit discussion of this part of the debate. Further, Waller suggests that the effective intention is relevant to the degree of responsibility. This paper, however, will just focus on bypassing views.
Mele also offers a sufficient condition that an incompatibilist can accept. The historical component of this view is identical to that in 1b , p. An example sometimes used to contrast direct with indirect responsibility is that of a driver who, given his intoxicated state, does not have control over his action of hitting a pedestrian.
If he is responsible for hitting the pedestrian, it is likely in virtue of a previous choice he made over which he had control. DMR is intended to be about overt actions Mele, , p.
Because of this, I talk about the action of taking out the loan, rather than the decision to do so. Conjunct 2 refers to a property specified in 1. Mele adopts a negative view in order to leave open the possibility of instant agents who are responsible for their first actions. Instant agents are full-fledged agents who come into being just moments before acting Mele, , Chapter 3. Their view is a hybrid; it is negative for the first actions that an agent is responsible for, and positive for later actions.
Fischer is one of the initial proponents of historical views of responsibility Fischer , Chapter 8; Fischer and Ravizza , Chapters 7—8.
Here I discuss the most recent development of the view. This term was introduced by Mele , p. Mele and McKenna seem to use the term in different ways, and Mele has opted to continue without it , p. However, the criticism applies to the positive historical views under consideration in this paper as well. In responding to a different case, McKenna suggests that manipulation cases involving only a small change will not have much dialectical force , pp. It is not clear, however, what part of PH would capture this.
It is worthwhile to note that this advantage may turn out to be fairly significant. If this is right, then, as mentioned above, PH fails with regard to the cases of Paul and Pat.
For discussion of further complications in developing this account of opportunity, see McKenna, , pp. One further consideration to keep in mind when doing so is the possibility of multiple changes via bypassing over time. If Jim is manipulated again , after he signs the contract, and this affects the relative strength of his value for playing soccer, then we might need to modify PHO to ensure that he has had the opportunity after the most recent such change. I intend to remain vague on when exactly this happens; perhaps it happens during adolescence for most agents, perhaps it happens before then.
It may be worth noting, as others have, that agents performing their first free actions may be free and responsible to a lesser extent than typical adult agents.
In a recent paper, Taylor Cyr presents a related challenge, focusing on constitutive luck, and intended to apply to all bypassing views My challenge is aimed specifically at positive historical views, since only these invite the worry of an infinite regress.
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