Why causal facts matter: a critique of Jeppsson’s hard-line reply to four-case manipulation arguments

ABSTRACT

This paper poses a series of objections to Sofia Jeppsson’s hard-line reply to Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. According to Jeppsson, the compatibilist can resist Pereboom’s argument by disregarding facts about what caused an agent to act (the ‘causal perspective’) and focusing primarily on the agent’s own perspective of their action (the ‘agential perspective’). Jeppsson argues that we have an obligation to disregard the causal perspective. This is for two reasons: (I) we must disregard the causal facts of the agent’s action, including whether they have been manipulated, since the agent has reason to disregard them; and (II) the causal perspective is not obviously relevant to judgments of moral responsibility. In this paper, I show that both (I) and (II) can be undermined because the causal perspective provides information that is necessary for moral deliberations. This is because it would seem that at least one necessary condition for an agent to be considered morally responsible is that the agent’s actions are not fully controlled by someone else. Since this is information that we can only obtain via the causal perspective, we do not have an obligation to disregard this perspective and so need not accept the compatibilist’s hard-line account.

KEYWORDS:

• compatibilism
• the four-case manipulation argument
• incompatibilism
• moral responsibility

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Michael Bergmann, Hannah Tierney, and an anonymous reviewer for formative comments on earlier versions of this work. Thank you also to Troy Seagraves and Jashiel Quinones Resto for helping rescue this manuscript from the digital dust bin. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2021 Eastern Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Baltimore, MD.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is a very brief summary. For Pereboom’s more detailed explication, see Pereboom (2014, 76–79).

2 Pickard’s clinical stance of Responsibility without Blame is an influential example of this approach. Pickard suggests that in cases like these ‘it is essential to maintain responsibility and accountability in order to enable learning and change, while it is essential to avoid blame’ (Pickard 2014, 10, emphasis original). For more on Pickard’s blameless accountability, see also: Brandenburg (2018).

3 Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

4 Jeppsson (2020, 1948). The ‘Ann Case’ first appeared in Michael McKenna (2008, 156).