Moderate Reasons-Responsiveness, Moral Responsibility, and Manipulation

Frankfurt-type examples have proven to be quite helpful in our thinking about the relation between freedom and moral responsibility. Harry Frankfurt designed his own examples to show that an agent can be morally responsible even if that agent could not have done otherwise. Following Frankfurt’s lead, many philosophers have developed their own Frankfurt-type examples to extend our understanding and sometimes to exercise our intuitions about the limits of moral responsibility and freedom. In this essay, I join this enterprise by providing a novel Frankfurt-type example designed to reveal the limits of moral responsibility, given a new theory of responsibility developed by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza. Although I am sympathetic to the mechanism-based theory of moral responsibility that Fischer and Ravizza (hereafter, “F&R”) argue for in Responsibility and Control, I believe there is trouble for the way in which they apply their theory to Frankfurt-type examples. I will show that F&R’s theory handles my test cases appropriately, but accepting my conclusion requires us (and them) to deny the seemingly plausible intuition that certain cases of rather severe external manipulation rule out moral responsibility.