John Martin Fischer

Responsibility and Control: Acknowledgments

Acknowledgements 1. Moral responsibility: the concepts and challenges 2. Moral responsibility for actions: weak reasons-responsiveness 3. Moral responsibility for actions: moderate reasons-responsiveness 4. Responsibility for consequences 5. Responsibility for omissions 6. The direct argument for incompatibilism 7. Responsibility and history 8. Taking responsibility 9. Conclusion Bibliography.

Responsibility and Manipulation

I address various critiques of the approach to moral responsibility sketched in previous work by Ravizza and Fischer. I especially focus on the key issues pertaining to manipulation.

Deep control : essays on free will and value

Contents I. Introduction Deep Control: The Middle Way Part One: An Actual-Sequence Approach to Moral Responsibility 2. The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories 3. Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt: A Reply to Vihvelin 4. The Importance of Frankfurt-Style Argument 5. Blame and Avoidability: a Reply to Otsuka (with Neal A. Tognazzini) 6. Indeterminism and Control: An Approach to the Problem of Luck Part Two: The Middle Path: Guidance Control 7. The Direct Argument: You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello 8. Conditional Freedom and the Normative Approach to Moral Responsibility 9. Judgment-Sensitivity and the Value of Freedom 10. Sourcehood: Playing the Cards that Are Dealt You 11. Guidance Control 12. The Triumph of Tracing (with Neal A. Tognazzini

Responsibility and Inevitability

Persons can be held morally responsible for their actions, omissions, and the consequences of those actions (and omissions). We propose to present a sketch of a theory of moral responsibility which shows how the conditions for moral responsibility for consequences are connected to the conditions for moral responsibility for actions and omissions. A major aim of this paper is to employ a principle (defended elsewhere) which associates moral responsibility for actions and omissions with control in order to generate an account of moral responsibility for consequences.

The Frankfurt Cases: The Moral of the Stories

Harry Frankfurt’s article, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” triggered a huge literature discussing whether Frankfurt presents a case (or perhaps a template for a case) in which an individual is morally responsible for behavior that he or she could not have avoided.1 In his seminal article (which in a sense goes back to an example originally presented by John Locke in An Essay concerning Human Understanding), Frankfurt seeks to impugn the Principle of Alternate Possibilities

Responsibility and Self-Expression

I present two different “models” of moral responsibility -- two different accounts of what we value in behavior for which the agent can legitimately be held morally responsible. On the first model, what we value is making a certain sort of difference to the world. On the second model, which I favor, we value a certain kind of self-expression. I argue that if one adopts the self-expression view, then one will be inclined to accept that moral responsibility need not require alternative possibilities.

Free Will, Death, and Immortality: The Role of Narrative

Abstract In this paper I explore in a preliminary way the interconnections among narrative explanation, narrative value, free will, an immortality. I build on the fascinating an suggestive work of David Velleman. I offer the hypothesis that our acting freely is what gives our lives a istinctive kin of value—narrative value. Free Will, then, is connected to the capacity to lead a meaningful life in a quite specific way: it is the ingredient which, when aded to others, enows us with a meaning over an above the cumulative value erived from ading together levels of momentary welfare. In acting freely, we are writing a sentence in the story of our lives, and the value of acting freely is thus a species of the value of artistic creativity or self-expression (understood appropriately). Finally, I contend that the fact that our lives are stories need not entail that they have endings, or that immortality would necessarily be unimaginable or essentially different from ordinary, finite human life. Yes, a certain sort of narrative understanding of our lives as a whole would be impossible in the context of immortality; but much of what we care about, and value, in our stories might remain.

Death, Badness, and the Impossibility of Experience

Some have argued (following Epicurus) that death cannot be a bad thing for an individual who dies. They contend that nothing can be a bad for an individual unless the individual is able to experience it as bad. I argue against this “Epicurean” view, offering examples of things that an individual cannot experience as bad but are nevertheless bad for the individual. Further, I argue that death is relevantly similar.

The Truth about Freedom: A Reply to Merricks

In “Truth and Freedom,” Trenton Merricks articulates a truism: “a claim or statement or belief or proposition is true because things are how that claim (or statement . . . ) represents things as being—and not the other way around.” Merricks argues that this truism—that truth depends on the world—can help us to see that various arguments for “fatalism” (by which he means to include incompatibilism about God’s foreknowledge and human freedom) are problematic. Indeed, he contends that a proper application of the truism shows that the most plausible arguments for fatalism are question-begging. In this reply, we argue that mere invocation of the truism, even together with other considerations, does not show that the arguments under consideration are question-begging. At most, the truism helps us to see—what we should in any case have seen before—that the arguments, as regimented by Merricks, are incomplete . But the truism in no way establishes or even suggests that the relevant arguments cannot be supplemented by additional resources that render the arguments at least plausible. Supplemented suitably, the arguments are not questionbegging, although they are admittedly controversial in various ways.

The Truth about Freedom

In “Truth and Freedom,” Trenton Merricks articulates a truism: “a claim or statement or belief or proposition is true because things are how that claim (or statement . . . ) represents things as being—and not the other way around.” Merricks argues that this truism—that truth depends on the world—can help us to see that various arguments for “fatalism” (by which he means to include incompatibilism about God’s foreknowledge and human freedom) are problematic. Indeed, he contends that a proper application of the truism shows that the most plausible arguments for fatalism are question-begging. In this reply, we argue that mere invocation of the truism, even together with other considerations, does not show that the arguments under consideration are question-begging. At most, the truism helps us to see—what we should in any case have seen before—that the arguments, as regimented by Merricks, are incomplete . But the truism in no way establishes or even suggests that the relevant arguments cannot be supplemented by additional resources that render the arguments at least plausible. Supplemented suitably, the arguments are not questionbegging, although they are admittedly controversial in various ways.