Review Essay WALTER GLANNON

RESPONSIBILITY AND CONTROL: FISCHER’S AND RAVIZZA’S THEORY OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY (Accepted January 14 1999)

I. INTRODUCTION

What distinguishes persons from other animals is our capacity for practical and theoretical reasoning and for rational and moral agency. It is because of these capacities that we can be morally responsible for our actions, omissions, and the consequences of our actions and omissions. Being responsible, and being held responsible by others, also entail having the capacity for self-directed reactive attitudes like shame and pride, as well as being an appropriate object of other-directed reactive attitudes like praise, blame, gratitude, resentment, and indignation.1 Moreover, these moral attitudes often are associated with the legal practices of censure, reward, compensation, and punishment. What grounds all of these attitudes and practices is the conviction that we have control over our behavior. We are morally responsible for our behavior insofar as we have the relevant sort of control over it. Since Aristotle’s account of voluntariness in Book III, Chapter V of the Nicomachean Ethics, responsibility has been grounded in the metaphysical condition of freedom from external force and the epistemological condition of knowledge of the circumstances 1

The idea of the capacity for reactive attitudes as the basis of attributions of responsibility to persons was developed and defended by P. F. Strawson in his landmark paper, “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), pp. 187–211. R. Jay Wallace offers an insightful defense of the Strawsonian view in Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Law and Philosophy 18: 187–213, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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in which one acts.2 But the freedom-relevant condition has figured more prominently in discussions of responsibility, and hence control has come to be understood more in metaphysical than epistemological terms. Well-entrenched in this metaphysical framework has been the conviction that an agent must be able to choose and do otherwise than he does in order to be responsible for what he does or fails to do. However, if causal determinism is true, then laws of nature and events in the remote past jointly entail that there can be only one physically possible future course of events. If so, then no alternative possibilities of choice and action can be open to an agent, who cannot choose or do otherwise and therefore cannot be morally responsible. The “regulative” control we need to be responsible is undermined, and thus an essential feature of our personhood is lost. In Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility,3 John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer a comprehensive account of responsibility in arguing that a different sort of control, “guidance control,” is necessary and sufficient to ground attributions of moral responsibility to persons for actions, omissions, and consequences. Briefly, this control consists in the ability to identify with the reasons that lead to our actions, for these reasons to connect with actions in the appropriate way, and for these actions to connect with events in the external world in the appropriate way. What is crucial here is, not that we have the ability to choose and do otherwise, but that we acquire our reasons autonomously and act on them in an uncoerced and uncompelled way. Given that regulative control and the idea of alternative possibilities which it entails have had such a strong hold on our intuitions about free will and responsibility, persuading us to relinquish this conviction is no easy task. But Fischer and Ravizza offer a powerful case for guidance control by demonstrating that what happens in the actual sequence of events leading to action and events in the world, rather than any alternative sequence, is what explains and justifies attributions of responsibility to persons. If this is correct, then their theory has the 2

The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. II, Revised Oxford Translation, Jonathan Barnes, ed. and trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1109b35–1110b4. 3 John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, S.J., Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 277 pp.), Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law.

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significant consequence of dispelling worries about causal determinism. For causal determinism threatens moral responsibility by ruling out alternative possibilities of choice and action. And yet if the sort of control necessary for responsibility does not require these possibilities, then the truth or falsity of causal determinism is of no consequence for moral responsibility. Also significant is the method they employ in developing and defending their position. Rather than begin with a set of formal principles and then construct arguments and derive conclusions from these principles, Fischer and Ravizza present cases to test our intuitions about responsibility. They then formulate principles that both capture these intuitions and serve as curbs and stabilizers on them. In their own words: Our method will then be similar to the Rawlsian method of seeking a “reflective equilibrium” in the relevant domain. Here we shall be identifying and evaluating “considered judgments” about particular cases – actual and hypothetical – in which an agent’s moral responsibility is at issue. We shall explore patterns in these judgments and seek to find the more general principles that systematize and illuminate them (10).4

By focusing more on substantive than formal issues concerning responsibility, their aim is not to do “coercive philosophy” in formulating knockdown arguments. Instead, they offer a plausibility argument, or “philosophical explanation” for their position, but not one that any rational agent would be compelled to accept (11).5 They succeed in not only offering a plausible case for their theory of moral responsibility, but indeed a persuasive one that marks a major advance in the philosophical and legal debate on this topic.

II. GUIDANCE CONTROL I: RESPONSIBILITY FOR ACTIONS

Guidance control of actions consists of two components: (1) the mechanism that issues in action must be responsive to reasons; 4

See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap Press, 1971), pp. 20–21. 5 The distinction between these two philosophical methods is drawn by Robert Nozick in Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap Press, 1981), especially pp. 1–5.

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and (2) the mechanism must be the agent’s own. By ‘mechanism’ Fischer and Ravizza mean the faculty of practical reasoning and the process of practical deliberation leading to action. The mechanism concerns not so much who performs the action but instead how the action comes about. At first blush, there may appear to be something counterintuitive about focusing on the mechanism issuing in action instead of the agent who performs the action. But the distinction they draw between agent-based and mechanism-based approaches to action, as well as the emphasis on the latter, is both well-motivated and intuitively plausible. An example will help to clarify the distinction. Consider a case displaying preemptive causal overdetermination in Harry Frankfurt’s influential paper, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.”6 One agent, Jones, intends to perform a certain action. A second agent, Black, wants to ensure that Jones performs that act and accordingly implants a device in Jones’ brain so that he can manipulate his brain processes and force Jones to act. But Black will intervene in this way only if Jones shows some sign of wavering in his deliberation. Jones is located in the actual sequence leading to action, while Black (the “counterfactual intervener”) is located in the alternative sequence that would play a role in the action if Jones were to alter his intention or fail to execute it by acting on his own. Jones freely deliberates, chooses and acts without any intervention by Black, who plays no causal role in the performance of the action but merely monitors Jones’ brain processes and behavior. Thus Jones is morally responsible for the action, even though he could not have done otherwise. For Black was standing by, ready to activate the device and force Jones to act if the latter had shown any inclination to refrain from acting. In section III, I will say more about how Fischer and Ravizza rely on “Frankfurt-type” cases to motivate their case for guidance control, as against regulative control, which stipulates that alternative possibilities are necessary for responsibility. For present purposes, however, it is important to point out how Frankfurt-type cases illustrate the benefits of the mechanism-based over the agentbased approach to responsibility for actions. On an agent-based 6

Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969), pp. 829–839. Reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 1–10.

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approach, the emphasis is on who the agent is and what the agent does. In contrast, on a mechanism-based approach the emphasis is on the process leading to action, or how the action comes about. The example spelled out above shows that the same agent can perform the same action, construed as a bodily movement, and yet, depending on whether Black intervenes or simply monitors Jones’ behavior, the process through which the action issues is different in each case. The point here is that what matters for responsibility is not what occurs in the alternative sequence where Black monitors Jones’ behavior, but what occurs in the actual sequence where Jones freely deliberates, chooses and acts on his own reasons for doing so. These two sequences involve different mechanisms leading to action, and it is the actual-sequence mechanism that determines responsibility. Since the actual-sequence mechanism that has Jones freely deliberating, choosing, and acting is what actually issues in his action, it is on this basis that he is responsible. Jones is morally responsible for the action because it is appropriately responsive to reasons. Focusing on the agent or his bodily movement alone will not determine whether he is responsible. This is the virtue of the mechanism-based approach. It also has significant implications for the incompatibilist claim that causal determinism undermines moral responsibility because it rules out alternative possibilities, as I will explain in the next section. Fischer and Ravizza offer an account of reasons-responsiveness as a necessary condition of responsibility for actions which proceeds in three stages – strong, weak, and moderate. They distinguish strong (SRR) from weak (WRR) versions of reasons-responsiveness: (SRR): Suppose that a certain kind K of mechanism actually issues in an action. Strong reasons-responsiveness obtains under the following conditions: if K were to operate and there were sufficient reason to do otherwise, the agent would recognize the sufficient reason to do otherwise and thus choose to do otherwise and do otherwise. (WRR): As with strong reasons-responsiveness, we hold fixed the operation of the actual kind of mechanism, and then we simply require that there exist some possible scenario (or possible world) – with the same laws as the actual world – in which there is a sufficient reason to do otherwise, the agent recognizes this reason, and the agent does otherwise (63).

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Strong reasons-responsiveness involves the alternative which is most similar to the actual situation in which there is a sufficient reason for the agent to do otherwise. Weak reasons-responsiveness says only that there must exist some possible scenario in which there is a sufficient reason to do otherwise. This possible scenario need not be the one that is most similar to the actual context of action. They employ the following example to clarify the distinction between strong and weak reasons-responsiveness (42). Suppose that a student has a sufficient reason to go to a movie but a stronger reason to remain at home to write a term paper that is due for a class the following day. While staying at home would be a mark of strong reasons-responsiveness, going to the movie would be a mark of weak reasons-responsiveness. The fit between reason and action is tighter in the stronger than in the weaker form, which can be understood as practical deliberation involving the agent’s disposition to weakness of will. The suggestion is that moral responsibility requires only the looser fit between reasons and action, that is, weak reasons-responsiveness. This conclusion follows from the authors’ earlier work.7 Acknowledging that weak reasons-responsiveness is consistent with bizarre patterns of behavior, however, they accordingly refine their theory and articulate and defend what they call “moderate reasons-responsiveness” (62–91). This consists of two components: receptivity, the capacity to recognize reasons for or against certain actions; and reactivity, the capacity to be moved to choose and act in accord with these reasons. They maintain that responsibility for actions requires regular receptivity but only weak reactivity to reasons. Regular receptivity implies a general pattern of recognizing reasons and an understanding of how they fit together. “A person who acts on a regularly receptive mechanism must exhibit 7

See Fischer, “Responsibility and Control,” Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982), pp. 24–40, Introduction to Fischer, ed., Moral Responsibility (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 5–50, “Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility,” in Ferdinand Schoeman, ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 81–106, and The Metaphysics of Free Will (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), and Fischer and Ravizza, “Responsibility and Inevitability,” Ethics 101 (1991), pp. 258–278, and Introduction to Fischer and Ravizza, eds., Perspectives on Moral Responsibility (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 1–41.

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an appropriate pattern of reasons-recognition: he must see how the sufficiency of reasons varies as we adopt different sets of values, beliefs, and desires, and he must show an appropriate understanding of how reasons connect with – and relate to – other reasons” (64). A person acts on a mechanism that is strongly reactive to reasons just in case he chooses and acts in accord with the reasons of regular receptivity. Yet he may recognize these reasons and still act on different reasons that do not reflect the regularity of his values, beliefs, and desires. In this regard, he displays weak reactivity to reasons. But provided that he has the capacity for regular receptivity to certain reasons, an agent may display weak reactivity in choosing and acting on different reasons and still be responsible for his action. This would be the case of the weak-willed student who goes to the movie instead of studying. Moderate reasons-responsiveness is only one component of guidance control and by itself is not sufficient. For a person’s brain could be artificially stimulated or otherwise electronically manipulated and still fit the model of moderate reasons-responsiveness. What is needed is to show that the mechanism leading to action is the agent’s own moderately reasons-responsive mechanism. The second component of guidance control which satisfies this condition is what Fischer and Ravizza call “taking responsibility” (207–239). One takes responsibility for one’s motivational states that issue in one’s actions by having certain dispositional beliefs about oneself and having acquired these beliefs in the appropriate way. More precisely, taking responsibility consists of a process whereby the mechanism that leads to action becomes one’s own. There are three stages to this process. First, the individual must see himself as an agent whose choices and actions are “efficacious in the world” (210). Second, he must see himself as a fair recipient of the reactive attitudes owing to how he exercises his agency in certain contexts. Third, his subjective view of himself, as specified in the first two conditions, must be based in an appropriate way on the evidence. That is, his belief about himself must accord with the way things are in the actual world; he must not be deluded in thinking of himself in a certain way. This involves a process of critical reflection on one’s motivational states over time, which indicates that taking responsibility is a historical phenomenon. We cannot adequately explain or justify attributions

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of responsibility to persons simply in terms of a “snapshot” view of the particular situation in which one acts. For how one comes to have the particular motivational states that figure in the etiology of action and which form the basis of our judgments about responsibility is something that develops over time. The attractive feature of the notion of taking responsibility is that it captures the crucial sense of the history behind one’s actions. An agent has guidance control of an action, and can be responsible for it, if and only if the action issues from the agent’s own moderate reasons-responsive mechanism. It will be instructive to compare Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account of guidance control as a necessary and sufficient condition of moral responsibility for actions with recent alternative accounts of responsibility. Harry Frankfurt has defended a hierarchical model of the freedom required for moral responsibility. This model consists of an agent’s desires at one level which have other desires as objects at another level. According to Frankfurt, persons form first-order desires to perform (or refrain from performing) particular actions, and they form second-order desires to have certain first-order desires.8 The will is the effective first-order desire that moves (or will or would move) a person all the way to action. A secondorder volition is a second-order desire to have a particular first-order desire be one’s will. On this model, a person has freedom of the will when he is able to will what he wants to will. Furthermore, a person has freedom of action when he is able to do what he wants to do, that is, when he is able to act according to his will. These two types of freedom – of will and action – presuppose that there is conformity between one’s will and one’s second-order volition. In addition to this conformity, the agent must identify with his will. One identifies with a first-order desire just in case one has an unopposed secondorder volition to act in accord with it, and one judges that any further deliberation about the matter would issue in the same decision. In later work, Frankfurt holds that the agent decisively identifies with his desire insofar as it is “wholehearted and complete.”9 8

“Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), pp. 5–20. Also in The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 11–25. 9 “Three Concepts of Free Action,” and “Identification and Wholeheartedness,” both in Importance, pp. 54, 168.

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Three main criticisms have been leveled at Frankfurt’s hierarchical model.10 First, higher-order volitions may be induced by some alien force, which would undermine the conformity of higher-order volitions to the will. Second, there is nothing in Frankfurt’s theory which could block an infinite regress of increasingly higher- and higher-order volitions. Third, agents who display weakness of will by not acting on their all-things-considered better judgment fail to will in accord with their higher-order volitions. Weak-willed agents could be absolved from responsibility by Frankfurt’s lights, and yet there is no good reason not to hold them responsible if the desires on which they act are autonomously formed and if their actions are neither coerced nor compelled. Alternatively, Gary Watson has proposed a non-hierarchical theory, whereby an agent acts freely, in the manner required for moral responsibility, when there is conformity between the agent’s desires that lead to his actions and his values concerning what is good or right.11 There must be a “mesh” between one’s motivational states and one’s valuational states. However, as we have just seen in the discussion of weakness of will, a person may act on desires that do not accord with his values and nonetheless be morally responsible for what he does. In contrast to the accounts of Frankfurt and Watson, the weak reactivity feature of the moderate reasonsresponsiveness of Fischer and Ravizza does allow for such akratic behavior, and in this respect it is superior to both. Moreover, Frankfurt believes that an analysis of the circumstances of action alone can adequately explain responsibility.12 But Fischer’s and Ravizza’s emphasis on the history of how one comes to recognize and react to reasons for or against certain actions provides a much more plausible understanding of the process through which one becomes responsible, and in this regard as well their account is superior to the 10 See, for example, Irving Thalberg, “Hierarchical Analyses of Unfree Action,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1978), pp. 211–226, Eleonore Stump, “Sanctification, Hardening of the Heart, and Frankfurt’s Concept of Free Will,” Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988), pp. 395–420, and Alfred Mele, “Akrasia, Self-Control, and Second-Order Desires,” Nous 26 (1992), pp. 281–302. 11 “Free Agency,” Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), pp. 205–220. Reprinted in Watson, ed., Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 96–110. 12 “Three Concepts of Free Action,” in Importance, p. 54.

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others. Indeed, Watson independently makes the same point about history in a more recent paper.13 Still another alternative concept of responsibility worth considering is that of Susan Wolf. She considers what she calls the “Real Self View,” or that an action is attributable to one’s real self “only if in performing it one is at liberty to govern one’s actions on the basis of one’s valuational system.”14 She rejects this view as inadequate because the sort of identification it involves fails to account for the broader normative considerations that are an essential part of our practice of holding persons responsible. Wolf maintains that the metaphysical criterion of responsibility is intimately linked with a normative criterion, or, certain rational standards of behavior to which the agent is expected to conform. She calls this the “Reason View,” the view that “the freedom necessary for responsibility consists in the ability (or freedom) to do the right thing for the right reasons . . . to choose and act in accordance with the True and the Good.”15 Wolf’s Reason View does not succumb to the difficulties about weakness of will which beset Frankfurt’s account and Watson’s earlier view. In asserting that freedom consists in the ability to choose and act in accord with the True and the Good, she allows that agents may freely act contrary to these ideas on particular occasions. Nevertheless, Wolf does not specify how reasons lead to actions. She fails to give a precise account of the process through which reasons issue in actions. Nor does she pay sufficient attention to the history of the acquisition, receptivity, and reactivity of these reasons. In these two respects, her account of responsibility for actions is inadequate. The adoption of an actual sequence mechanism-based, instead of an agent-based, model of reasons-responsiveness, the distinction between regular receptivity and weak reactivity, and the ideas of autonomy and history in the notion of taking responsibility which figure in Fischer’s and Ravizza’s theory of guidance control do a much better job of refining our pretheoretical intuitions than the 13 “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme,” in Schoeman, pp. 256–286. 14 Freedom Within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 34. 15 Ibid., p. 94.

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alternative views I have examined. They also do a better job of explaining and justifying our attributions of responsibility to persons for their actions. Still, the most formidable challenge to guidance control comes from more traditional incompatibilist views about the relation between the freedom required for responsibility and causal determinism. These views maintain that a more robust notion of control – regulative control – involving a dual power to act or refrain from acting and thereby bring about or prevent states of affairs from obtaining is required for moral responsibility for actions. If causal determinism is true, then we lack this dual power and therefore cannot be responsible for what we do (or fail to do). Let us now examine this challenge.

III. THE INCOMPATIBILIST CHALLENGE AND REGULATIVE CONTROL

Fischer and Ravizza address what they call “Indirect” and “Direct” Arguments for the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility (17–25, 151–154). These Arguments challenge the plausibility of guidance control and the compatibilism on which it rests. Recall that causal determinism is the thesis that natural laws and the past jointly entail a unique future, which means that we are not able to choose and act otherwise than we in fact do. The Indirect Argument rests on a modal claim of necessity and says that if p obtains and a person S cannot so act that p would be false, and S cannot so act that it would be false that if p then q, then q obtains and S cannot so act that q would be false.16 It instantiates the Principle of the Transfer of Powerlessness (PTP), which says that if a person is powerless over one thing, and powerless over that thing’s leading to another, then the person is powerless over the second thing.17 16

The most noteworthy presentations of this argument are given by Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 55–105, and Carl Ginet, On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Ch. 5. 17 See especially Ginet, Ch. 5, and Timothy O’Connor, “On the Transfer of Necessity,” Nous 27 (1993), pp. 204–218, and Introduction to O’Connor, ed., Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–10.

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They offer the following example to illustrate PTP. Suppose that lightning hits my house today, and nobody has any control today over the fact that lightning hits my house today. Suppose further that there is nothing I or anyone else can do to prevent my house from catching fire, if it is hit by lightning. It follows that my house catches fire today, and there is nothing anyone can do to prevent my house from catching fire today (18–19). This leads to the Direct Argument (“Direct” in the sense that it does not rely strictly on a modal rule of inference). This says that if p obtains and no one is even partly morally responsible for p, and if p obtains, then q obtains and no one is even partly morally responsible for the fact that if p obtains, then q obtains, then q obtains and no one is even partly morally responsible for q. The upshot of the two Arguments is that if causal determinism is true, then I cannot do otherwise than I in fact do. And if I cannot do otherwise, then I cannot be (causally or) morally responsible for any fact. This is the thrust of the incompatibilist challenge to the core claim of Fischer and Ravizza that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise. The insistence on alternative possibilities is an essential feature of regulative control, which requires that an agent have the dual power to act in such a way as to render a proposition p either true or false. The agent “regulates” which of two alternative and mutually incompatible states of affairs comes about. This is distinct from guidance control, which does not require alternative possibilities but only that a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism the agent identifies as his own is “guided” by the agent in the way he acquires and acts on these reasons. What Fischer and Ravizza defend by making a case for this sort of control is semicompatibilism, the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism, even if causal determinism rules out the ability to do otherwise. Still, the incompatibilist Indirect and Direct Arguments, as well as the corresponding PTP, present a formidable challenge to semicompatibilism which cannot be refuted so easily. To refute PTP and thereby defuse the challenge, the authors employ a Frankfurt-type counterexample, “Assassin” (29–30). Sam tells his friend Jack that he plans to murder the mayor of the town in which they live. Although Sam’s reasons for killing the mayor are bad ones, they are his reasons; he has not acquired them through

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brainwashing, hypnosis, or manipulation. Because Jack worries that Sam might waver in his deliberation, Jack has secretly installed a device in Sam’s brain which allows him to monitor Sam’s brain activity and intervene in it if he so decides. Jack can employ the device to ensure that Sam decides to kill the mayor and that he acts on this decision. Sam carries out his intention and kills the mayor on his own. Jack does not activate the device and therefore plays no causal role in the decision and action. It seems that Sam is morally responsible for killing the mayor, even though he could not have done otherwise, given Jack’s power to intervene. But he does not in fact intervene, and this fact makes all the difference. Significantly, Jack’s use of the device, which would have been a responsibility-undermining factor, operates only in the alternative sequence, not the actual sequence that issues in action. And whether the agent is responsible depends only on what happens in the actual sequence. If there is no responsibility-undermining factor in this sequence, and Jack identifies with the mechanism that operates in this actual sequence, then he is morally responsible for his action, even though the alternative possibility of refraining from acting was not genuinely open to him. Like the Frankfurt case I presented and examined earlier, “Assassin” shows that alternative possibilities of choice and action are not necessary for a person to be morally responsible for an action. In other words, the agent does not need the dual power of regulative control to be responsible. All that he needs is guidance control of the actual-sequence mechanism of reasons which issues in his action. From the description of the case, Sam indeed has and exercises this control. Fischer and Ravizza draw the following conclusion from their discussion of “Assassin:” The Frankfurt-type cases, unusual as they are, may well point us to something as significant as it is commonplace. When we are morally responsible for our actions, we do possess a kind of control. So the traditional assumption of the association of moral responsibility with control is quite correct. But the relevant sort of control need not involve alternative possibilities. The suggestion, derived from the Frankfurt-type cases, is that the sort of control necessarily associated with moral responsibility for action is guidance control (32–33).

If this is correct, then Fischer and Ravizza have defused the threat posed by causal determinism for moral responsibility for actions.

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For presumably causal determinism threatens moral responsibility by ruling out alternative possibilities and thereby regulative control. But if all the control we need to be responsible consists in acting on a mechanism that is suitably responsive to reasons and which we identify with as our own, then there is no additional need for the dual power consisting in the ability to do otherwise. I believe that they have made a persuasive case for guidance control as a necessary and sufficient condition of moral responsibility for actions, and as a consequence have decisively refuted PTP and the Indirect and Direct Arguments. Two objections can be raised at this point, however. First, insofar as the mechanism leading to action is moderately reasonsresponsive and the agent can react to different reasons from those to which he actually reacts, it seems that alternative possibilities of some sort must be open to the agent. If so, then guidance control does presuppose alternative possibilities after all, namely, reasons to do otherwise. But Fischer and Ravizza point out that, while there may be dispositional or modal properties in the pathway leading to action, and thus an appeal to other possible worlds, these worlds are “not relevant in virtue of bearing on the question of whether some alternative sequence is genuinely accessible to the agent” (53). Dispositional or modal properties help us to understand the relevant features of the actual sequence leading to action by helping to explain why the agent acted on some reasons rather than others. But this does not imply that some alternative sequence is genuinely accessible to the agent, or that it is in the agent’s power to actualize such scenarios (53). This is crucial, because when incompatibilists, as proponents of regulative control, maintain that responsibility requires that the ability to choose and do otherwise must be open to the agent, they insist that this entails the ability to bring about a different state of affairs from the one the agent in fact brings about. Even if compatibilist proponents of guidance control conceded that weaker or stronger reasons than the reasons on which one acts constitute alternative possibilities, they still could maintain that, by themselves and independently of choices and bodily movements, these reasons are not causally robust enough to render true or falsify propositions or bring about states of affairs in the external world.

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The role of dispositional properties in the actual sequence that leads to action provides an answer to the question of how one can deliberate about what to do if causal determinism rules out the existence of alternative courses of action. Deliberation requires only dispositional properties about weaker or stronger reasons for different courses of action, not the power to actualize a different state of affairs from the one we actualize by acting. What Fischer and Ravizza rightly emphasize is that what matters in determining responsibility for actions is not so much the ontology of propositions or states of affairs external to the agent which he renders true or false or causes to obtain by acting, but rather the causal role that reasons and other dispositional properties internal to the mechanism with which the agent identifies play in leading to action. This serves as a sound recommendation for the direction the debate on free will and responsibility should take.18 A second objection is that even if guidance control can dispel worries about causal determinism, it may not be able to dispel worries about a different sort of determinism, namely the influences from one’s heredity, upbringing, or social environment. The argument for this view can be formulated more precisely as follows. In order to be responsible for one’s present character, choices, and actions, one must be responsible for the way one is. But the way one is derives from previously formed character and motives. And yet if the agent’s prior character and motives are formed completely by factors such as heredity, upbringing, or social environment, then the agent cannot be responsible precisely because he does not have the requisite control over the causal ancestry of his actions.19 But we need not trace particular actions back to character, since agents 18

The focus on propositions being true or states of affairs obtaining independently of individual human agents in the debate on free will is traceable to Aristotle’s discussion of the future sea battle in Book IX of the De Interpretatione. While this work is more about fatalism than causal determinism, incompatibilists like van Inwagen emphasize the external abstract objects just mentioned rather than the internal connection between agents’ motivational states and their actions in formulating their arguments for free will and responsibility. 19 This argument has been made by Galen Strawson in Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Ch. 1, and “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies 75 (1994), pp. 5–24. Similar arguments have been offered by Martha Klein in Determinism, Blameworthiness, and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 49–51, and Robert Kane in

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sometimes act freely out of character owing to weakness of will. We need not appeal to character or previously formed motives to explain why an agent freely performs a particular action, but only the particular mental states that issue in that action at that particular time. The condition of weak reactivity in the moderate reasons-responsive mechanism can accommodate this type of action. Furthermore, insofar as the agent has the capacity to take responsibility for his motivational states and thereby come to identify with the mechanism leading to action as his own, he can act autonomously despite external past influences. To be sure, in some cases, these influences will be so strong that they will in effect be coercive and undermine the ability to take responsibility and act autonomously. A severely abusive upbringing that precludes one from having a moral sensibility would be a case in point. In most cases, however, enough of the rational and moral capacity for reflective self-control which taking responsibility presupposes will remain intact for agents’ motivational states and actions to be truly their own. So Fischer and Ravizza need not be unduly concerned about the alleged threat from this sort of determinism. In sum, Fischer and Ravizza offer an account of moral responsibility for actions which is superior to other accounts because their emphasis on a mechanism-based rather than agent-based approach to agency more adequately captures the relevant causal and moral factors in the actual sequence leading to action. By focusing on an actual-sequence mechanism that is moderately responsive to reasons, rather than an alternative-sequence mechanism, they demonstrate that guidance control offers a more plausible explanation of action and a better justification of the practice of holding persons responsible for their actions than does regulative control. Moreover, they decisively show that, since guidance control provides us with all the control we need to be morally responsible for actions, we do not need regulative control and alternative possibilities of action to be responsible. This effectively defeats the incompatibilist challenge (in the form of the Indirect and Direct Arguments) to moral responsibility. For if we do not need alternative possibilities to be morally responsible, and if causal “Free Will: The Elusive Ideal,” Philosophical Studies 75 (1994), pp. 25–60, and The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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determinism threatens moral responsibility only by ruling out alternative possibilities, then causal determinism does not threaten moral responsibility. Fischer and Ravizza apply their theory of guidance control to consequences and omissions to establish conditions of our responsibility for them. While one may question why an analysis of consequences should come before an analysis of omissions, the rationale for proceeding in this order will emerge shortly. IV. GUIDANCE CONTROL II: RESPONSIBILITY FOR CONSEQUENCES AND OMISSIONS

The authors’ account of guidance control of and moral responsibility for consequences builds on their account of responsibility for actions and consists of two components. To be responsible for a consequence, a person’s own actual-sequence mechanism leading to action must be appropriately responsive to reasons, and the consequence that obtains in the world must be sensitive to the person’s action (identified with a bodily movement). They differentiate consequence-particulars from consequence-universals, stipulating that “the actual causal pathway to a consequence-particular is an essential feature of it, so that if a different causal pathway were to occur, then a different consequence-particular would occur” (96). In contrast, with consequence-universals the same state of affairs can be brought about via different causal antecedents.20 Recall “Assassin.” Because of Jack’s power to intervene, the consequence that the mayor is shot in some way or other can be brought about either by Jack’s action or Sam’s, and in this sense it is a consequence-universal. Furthermore, because Sam could not have prevented this consequence from obtaining (owing to Jack’s presence and power to intervene), the consequence is inevitable for him. Nevertheless, Sam is responsible for the consequence because it was sensitive to his action, which in turn was moderately responsive to reasons. Once again, Fischer and Ravizza offer a persuasive explanation for rejecting the incompatibilist’s dual power in regulative control, since one need not have the power to prevent a consequence 20

See also the authors’ “The Inevitable,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (1992), pp. 388–404, and van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will, Ch. 5.

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(-universal) from obtaining to be responsible for it. What matters in determining responsibility for consequences is not whether one was able to both cause it to obtain and prevent it from obtaining, but instead whether it was appropriately sensitive to a bodily movement that was sensitive to reasons. In other words, one only needs guidance control of a consequence to be responsible for it. Still, more needs to be said about the sensitivity of a consequence to an action. The test for sensitivity in the process leading from the action to the consequence, or event, in the world is to hold fixed all “triggering” events other than the agent’s action which might have occurred and thereby initiated a different causal sequence leading to the same consequence. The point is to determine whether there would have been a different outcome if the agent had not acted and all non-occurring triggering events were not to occur. Fischer and Ravizza are interested primarily in establishing responsibility for consequences that could have been brought about by different causal antecedents and which are inevitable for the agent. That is, they want to determine how an agent can be responsible for a state of affairs (consequence-universal) that will obtain regardless of whether the agent acts or refrains from acting. They present three different versions of the same example to motivate their view of the conditions of responsibility for consequences. The details of the first two versions are not crucial to their argument and conclusion, and so I will confine my attention to the third. In “Missile 3,” Joan knows that Elizabeth already has launched a missile toward Washington D.C. and that it will cause extensive destruction and personal harm if it hits the center of the city (116–117). But Joan has a weapon that she could use to deflect the missile in such a way that it would hit a less populous area. Unfortunately, Joan is located very close to the city and because of this fact, the bomb’s trajectory, and the nature of her weapon, she knows that, although she can deflect the bomb onto a different part of the city, she cannot prevent the bomb from hitting the city at all. The fact that Joan’s action issues from her own reasons-responsive mechanism makes her responsible for deflecting the bomb to one part of the city or other. But she is not responsible for the consequence that the city is bombed because the sequence leading to it is not responsive. For “the second component – the

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outer path leading from Joan’s bodily movements to Washington’s being bombed – is not sensitive to Joan’s bodily movements. That is, the world is such that, no matter how Joan moves her body, the bomb will hit Washington, D.C.” (116). But suppose that the trajectory of the missile fired by Elizabeth is such that it cannot be deflected but only destroyed completely before hitting ground zero. Suppose further that Joan and a different colleague, Mary, wield similar weapons and are situated in different parts of the city. But only one of these two agents is in a position to destroy the incoming missile. Because of her expertise in these matters, Joan has the authority to overrule Mary, should she deem it necessary. Moreover, Joan’s weapon is equipped with a remote control device that automatically will disarm Mary’s weapon once Joan fires her own. As the missile approaches the city, Joan records data on the speed and trajectory of the missile and concludes that she, not Mary, is in the proper position to destroy it. Accordingly, Joan fires her weapon and thereby precludes Mary from firing hers. Unfortunately, Joan miscalculated. She negligently overlooked important data that would have led her to revise her beliefs and realize that she was not in a position to prevent the consequence of the city being bombed. If Joan had not overlooked the information and had not made an incorrect inference from her action to its likely consequence, then she rightly would have refrained from firing her own weapon and would have deferred to her colleague, who was in the proper position to destroy the missile and thus prevent the city from being bombed. The consequence is not sensitive to Joan’s act of firing her weapon. Nevertheless, Joan is morally responsible for the consequence. By acting as she did, she precluded another agent from preventing that consequence. Joan was cognitively able to realize that Mary alone was physically able to perform the preventive act and to foresee what the likely outcome would be of firing her (Joan’s) weapon. For an agent to be responsible for a consequence, that consequence must be sensitive to her mental states concerning the foreseeable outcome of a freely performed action. But it need not also be directly sensitive to that action. By acting negligently, the agent made her physical inability come to play a causally and morally significant role in the production of a harmful outcome.

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The crucial sort of sensitivity here is cognitive (or more precisely, epistemic), not physical.21 The importance of the agent’s beliefs about the foreseeable consequences of actions and omissions underscores the need for a more thorough analysis of the knowledge component of responsibility, which early in the book Fischer and Ravizza explicitly state they will not do (12, n19). The metaphysical condition of responsibility, which requires that agents perform uncoerced and uncompelled actions that are responsive to reasons, is necessary for responsibility for actions, omissions, and consequences, but surely not sufficient, as the example just examined illustrates. Yet elsewhere in the book they acknowledge the importance of epistemic factors for responsibility in their discussion of tracing (49–51). They introduce the example of a man, “Max,” who drinks at a party and who later, while driving in a state of intoxication, runs over a child who is walking in a crosswalk. Even though his intoxication makes him unresponsive to reasons for exercising caution while he is driving, he is responsible for hitting the child because at the earlier time he could reasonably be expected to have known that his getting drunk would lead to his driving “in a condition in which he would be unresponsive” (50).22 This case of tracing responsibility from later acts to earlier negligent states of mind clearly illustrates the importance of the knowledge condition of responsibility, as Fischer and Ravizza note. Still, they should have applied this same principle to their discussion of responsibility for consequence-universals. The authors draw upon their account of responsibility for consequence-universals to account for responsibility for omissions, which they explain in terms of negative consequence-universals. This is a refinement of earlier work, where they maintained that attributions of responsibility were asymmetrical between actions and 21

I offer this example and line of reasoning in “Sensitivity and Responsibility for Consequences,” Philosophical Studies 87 (1997), pp. 223–233. 22 The idea of tracing goes back to Aristotle’s discussion of the drunken man and the difference between acting in and through ignorance in Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics. Van Inwagen formulates his version of the tracing principle as follows: “An agent cannot be blamed for a state of affairs unless there was a time at which he could have arranged matters such that that state of affairs not obtain.” From “When Is the Will Free?”, in James Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives III (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1989), p. 419.

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omissions.23 That is, they held that while alternative possibilities (and thus regulative control) were not necessary to be responsible for actions, they were necessary to be responsible for omissions. In “Sharks” (125), John is walking along a beach and sees a child struggling in the water. John believes that he can save the child at little or no risk to himself, but does not want to expend the energy necessary to save the child and continues to walk. Unbeknownst to John, a school of sharks was swimming in the water between the beach and the child and would have eaten John if he had tried to save the child. The upshot in this case was that John was not responsible for failing to save the child, given that he could not have done otherwise than what he did, as the sharks would have eaten him. He is responsible only for failing to try to save the child. This example was intended to illustrate how responsibility for omissions requires alternative possibilities. But a series of papers in the philosophical literature showed that omissions did not require alternative possibilities, which in turn moved Fischer and Ravizza in this book to modify their position.24 Here they take omissions, like consequences, to be complex in the sense that the failure in question is not simply a failure to perform a certain bodily movement, but also something that involves a failure of cooperation with the external world, or how the event in the external world is linked with the failure to act. Complex omissions involve an agent’s bringing about relatively finely specified negative consequence-universals (134). To illustrate this point, they use the example of “Good Fortune” (134), which is a variant of “Sharks,” but with a different causal explanation. Again, John walks along the beach, sees the child drowning, and simply continues walking, not bothering to save the child. Here it seems that John brings about the negative conse23

See “Responsibility and Inevitability.” Fischer first lays out the idea of omissions as negative consequence-universals and a symmetry thesis regarding actions and omissions in “Responsibility, Control, and Omissions,” Journal of Ethics 1 (1997), pp. 45–64. 24 For example, Randolph Clarke, “Ability and Responsibility for Omissions,” Philosophical Studies 73 (1994), pp. 195–208, Ishtiyaque Haji, “A Riddle Regarding Omissions,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1992), pp. 485–502, and Walter Glannon, “Responsibility and the Principle of Possible Action,” Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995), pp. 261–274.

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quence-universal, that the child is not saved (from drowning). But suppose that the child floats to a nearby island within seconds of John’s decision. In this case, John does not bring about the negative consequence-universal mentioned above, but what he does bring about is that the child is not saved by him. John is not morally responsible for failing to save the child because the relevant consequence-universal is not sensitive to John’s bodily movements. For, no matter how John moved his body at the relevant time, the same consequence-universal would have obtained. This example, and the fine-grained analysis of the relation between John’s failure to act and the consequence, show that alternative possibilities are not required for responsibility for omissions, which affirms the symmetry of responsibility between actions and omissions. Nevertheless, one might ask whether the only way to establish that responsibility for omissions does not require the ability to do otherwise is by construing omissions as negative consequenceuniversals. Does the same reasoning apply to omissions that are negative consequence-particulars? Consider now “Lifeguard.”25 Suppose a man impersonates a lifeguard who is solely responsible for the safety of swimmers on the beach he patrols. As soon as he sits in the observation chair, a swimmer finds himself in trouble. But the imposter can only look on, since he cannot swim, and the child drowns. Here the man is responsible for the consequence that the child drowns, even though at no time was he able to prevent that consequence from obtaining. There are no counterfactual interveners or other unknown conditions that would make this a consequence-universal. It is, rather, a consequence-particular. By focusing on a subclass of consequences – consequence-universals – Fischer and Ravizza leave it unclear whether attributions of responsibility between actions and omissions are symmetrical regardless of whether omissions are construed as complex negative consequence-universals or simply as negative consequence-particulars.

25

I use this example in “Responsibility and the Principle of Possible Action.”

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V. LEGAL IMPLICATIONS

Fischer’s and Ravizza’s analysis of the conditions and content of moral responsibility is supported by, and in turn throws some light on, standard analyses of causation and liability in tort and criminal law. The condition of sensitivity of action to event in the external world which they articulate in their account of responsibility for consequences elucidates some of the conundrums of causation in instances of tort liability, especially cases involving multiple causation.26 It will be helpful to review the paradigm case of Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. in this regard.27 The plaintiff, Mrs. Helen Palsgraf, was standing on the defendant’s railroad platform waiting for a train. A man carrying a package jumped aboard a train bound for a different destination. Seeing that the man was unsteady and about to fall from the train, a guard on the platform pushed him from behind. But this act dislodged the package, which then fell upon the rails and exploded, since it contained fireworks. The explosion threw down some scales at the other end of the platform, many feet away, which then struck the plaintiff and caused injuries, for which she sued. Initially, a Brooklyn jury found that the railroad guard had been negligent, and that this negligence was the proximate cause of Mrs. Palsgraf’s injuries. They awarded her substantial damages. But the railroad appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, which finally found in favor of the railroad on the ground that what happened to the plaintiff was too remotely connected to the guard’s act. Applying Fischer’s and Ravizza’s notion of causal sensitivity to this case, the Court’s judgment is supported by the fact that Mrs. Palsgraf’s injuries were causally sensitive to events beyond the guard’s control. They were not sensitive enough to the guard’s action to say that his action alone caused her injuries, precisely because there were other actually occurring triggering events in the causal sequence which could not be held fixed and which meant that 26

This issue has been addressed by, among others, H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), Hart and Tony Honore, Causation in the Law, Second Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), Leo Katz, Bad Acts and Guilty Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and R. A. Duff, Intention, Agency, and Criminal Liability (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990). 27 Palsgraf v. Long Island R. Co., 162 N. E. 99, N. Y. Ct. of App., 1928.

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the guard’s action did not provide a sufficient causal explanation of why Mrs. Palsgraf was injured. In addition, the fine-grained account of causal sensitivity and the difference between consequence-universals and consequenceparticulars, especially as these are exemplified and analyzed in “Assassin,” elucidate the distinction between criminal responsibility for murder and attempted murder. Here the difference of degree in attributing responsibility and of punishment between attempting and successfully carrying out a murderous act can be taken as a function of one or both components of guidance control. That is, in an attempted murder, assuming the agent is not cognitively, emotionally, or volitionally impaired, the act of trying to kill the mayor is responsive to reasons; but the state of affairs that the mayor is killed is not sensitive to action. Still, more needs to be said about the agent’s mental states, specifically intention and foreseeability, and how they figure in attributing degrees of criminal responsibility. David Lewis has proposed that we take the successful attempt to reflect a greater degree of wholeheartedness in the agent’s intent to kill.28 The agent’s success can be explained by more careful planning about the action, and his failure can be attributed to insufficient planning. Presumably, a wholehearted attempt is likely to succeed. Even with careful planning, though, the realization of the agent’s intention can be thwarted by events in the causal pathway leading to the desired state of affairs which are not causally sensitive to his beliefs or action. Acknowledging the problem of “causal luck” in such cases, Lewis proposes a penal lottery, or a punishment that leaves something to chance. According to Lewis, a penal lottery is a system of punishment in which the convicted criminal is subject to a risk of punitive harm. If he wins the lottery, he escapes the harm; if he loses, he does not. The upshot is that we should punish for attempts regardless of success. Lewis’ analysis underscores the point that sensitivity of consequences to mental states like beliefs and intentions is just as important as sensitivity of consequences to bodily movements in attributing responsibility for the outcomes of our actions.

28

“The Punishment that Leaves Something to Chance,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 18 (1989), pp. 53–67.

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The idea of tracing responsibility from earlier physically and cognitively unimpaired states to later impaired ones which the authors discuss also clarifies the justification for holding people liable for actions performed in an impaired state of mind but which are traceable to earlier negligent acts. Fischer and Ravizza are concerned with tracing responsibility to epistemic facts involving beliefs in the past about states of affairs likely to obtain as a result of one’s earlier actions or omissions in a negligent state of mind (195). In the example of the intoxicated driver mentioned earlier, the driver could be held criminally liable because at the earlier time, when he was drinking and prior to getting into his car to drive, he was cognitively able to know that he could reasonably be expected to foresee a tragic consequence of driving in such a state, and that he could be held liable on grounds of negligence. As they cite in a footnote (195, n 49) the 1956 case of People v. Decina serves as a precedent.29 In this case, an epileptic who crashed into a group of children after becoming unconscious owing to an epileptic fit, went to trial for negligent driving on the ground that he had driven that day despite his awareness that he was subject to epileptic fits that rendered him unconscious. Cases such as this, and the idea of tracing responsibility which they involve, demonstrate the importance of the epistemic component of responsibility, though at times I think that the authors understate this point. On the other hand, the metaphysical component of responsibility in their theory of guidance control involves cognitive and volitional capacities that are crucial to the Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI) defense, the legal device for excusing a defendant on the basis of a mental illness. The two aspects of this defense are spelled out in the Model Penal Code version of the rule.30 First, according to the cognitive leg of that defense, a person is NGRI if and only if he is suffering from a mental illness which causes him to be ignorant of what he is doing. Second, according to the volitional leg, a person is NGRI if and only if he is suffering from mental illness which causes him to lose control of his impulses.31 29

People v. Decina, 2 N. Y. 2d 133, 138 N. E. 2d 799 (1956). Model Penal Code, Official Draft and Revised Commentaries (Philadelphia: American Law Institute, 1985), sec. 4. 01. 31 See the discussions by Herbert Fingarette, The Meaning of Criminal Insanity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), Robert Schopp, 30

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Fischer’s and Ravizza’s discussion of psychopathy (76–81) is pertinent to the NGRI defense and excuses in the criminal law. They rightly point out that the psychopath’s problem is not in recognizing reasons for or against certain actions, but instead in not reacting to, or not being motivated to act on, these reasons. This suggests that, while the psychopath does not lack the requisite cognitive and volitional capacities altogether, he seems to possess them to a reduced degree, which would justify at most holding him only partly morally responsible and criminally liable for his actions that harm others. Still, I do not believe that Fischer and Ravizza go far enough on this matter. More precisely, they fail to consider the role that emotions play in this and other psychopathologies, as well as why being deficient in the capacity for these emotions and acting on them constitute excuses from moral responsibility and criminal liability. Empirical research in neurobiology and psychobiology indicates that psychopaths, like patients with certain brain injuries, have dysfunctional frontal lobes of the brain, such that they cannot process emotions normally.32 This brain dysfunction manifests itself in individuals exhibiting a flat emotional profile, with diminished affective and volitional responses to social situations which correlate with defective prudential and moral planning and decision-making. The point here is that the affective capacity for emotions like empathy, joy, fear, and anxiety plays a causal role in practical deliberation, choice, and action, and should be addressed on a par with cognitive and volitional capacities in discussions of the insanity defense in particular and of moral and legal excuses from responsibility in general.

Automatism, Insanity, and the Psychology of Criminal Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially Ch. 6, and Lawrie Reznek, Evil or Ill?: Justifying the Insanity Defense (London: Routledge, 1997), especially pp. 1– 14. 32 See Robert Hare, “Performance of Psychopaths on Cognitive Tasks Related to Frontal Lobe Function,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 93 (1984), pp. 133– 140, Antonio Damasio et al., “Individuals with Sociopathic Behavior Caused by Frontal Damage Fail to Respond Automatically to Social Stimuli,” Behavioral Brain Research 41 (1990), pp. 81–94, and Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Reason. Emotion, and the Human Brain (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1994), Ch. 3.

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VI. CONCLUSION

The subtlety and sophistication in the way that Fischer and Ravizza integrate examples, principles, and arguments yield important insights into our practices of holding persons morally responsible and legally liable and provide a convincing explanation and justification for these practices. The book is engagingly written and avoids unnecessary technical details. Responsibility and Control is the most comprehensive, systematic, and perspicuous account of the conditions and content of responsibility to date in the philosophical literature, and in these respects it sets the standard for future discussion of the subject. I would like to close by elaborating on a point I made earlier about methodology. The authors’ aim to offer a plausibility argument for their theory, rather than a knockdown argument that one would be compelled to accept, is refreshingly modest and positive. This is especially significant at a time when much of academic philosophy is adversarial and all too often the overriding aim is to refute the arguments of others while pronouncing the force of one’s own – coercive philosophy at its worst. In contrast, Fischer and Ravizza present philosophical discussion as a constructive enterprise, encouraging dialectical give-and-take between conflicting views to achieve a deeper understanding of responsibility and associated normative and legal practices and institutions. In this regard, they have made an important contribution to the method of doing philosophy, as well as to the debate on responsibility. Philosophers and legal theorists are very much in their debt for both. Institute for Ethics American Medical Association 515 North State Street Chicago, Illinois 60610 U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected]