An Appraisal of the Semi-Direct Manipulation Argument and McKenna’s Reply to it

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Author

Assistant professor, Department of Moral Philosophy, Islamic Philosophy and Theology Research Center, Islamic Sciences and Culture Academy, Qom, Iran.

Abstract

Freedom of action and free will of the moral agent are the most challenging requirements of moral responsibility. Incompatibilist philosophers implicitly argue, in an indirect way and with the help of elements such as the constancy of the past or non-changeability of laws of nature, that previous causal determinations make any alternative actions unavailable to the moral agent, and sometimes drawing on the modal principle of the transition of lack of responsibility, they directly assert that causal necessity results in the negation of human moral responsibility. In addition to these standard arguments, however, there are other semi-direct arguments that do not rely on this principle. A major semi-direct argument considered by incompatibilists is the manipulation argument, which draws upon our intuitive conceptions of the reverse relation between the responsibility of moral agents and their non-ordinary manipulations. A well-known version of the semi-direct manipulation argument is the four-case argument by Pereboom, which begins with a particularly unordinary case and then adds conditions to it, finally reaching an ordinary agent in the determinate world. In this way, he shows that such an agent lacks moral responsibility. Against this argument, McKenna adds other cases to those introduced by Pereboom, concluding that even in a determinate world as envisioned by Pereboom, we cannot decisively say that agents are not free and morally responsible. In another argument, Pereboom rejects McKenna’s agnostic approach, asserting that this approach leaves it unclear whether an ordinarily determined agent is morally responsible or not responsible. In this article, I appraise these two views, showing that for the manipulation argument by incompatibilists, including Pereboom’s four-case argument, to work, it needs to establish its first two premises, but it fails to do.

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References

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