Action, Ethics, and Responsibility

8. Selective Hard Compatibilism

8 Compatibilism, Implantation, and Covert Control Recent work in compatibilist theory has focused a considerable amount of attention on the question of the nature of the capacities required for freedom and moral responsibility. Compatibilists, obviously, reject the suggestion that these capacities involve an ability to act otherwise in the same circumstances. That is, these capacities do not provide for any sort of libertarian, categorical free will. The difficulty, therefore, is to describe some plausible alternative theory that is richer and more satisfying than the classical compatibilist view that freedom is simply a matter of being able to do as one pleases or act according to the determination of one’s own will. Many of the most influential contemporary compatibilist theorists have placed emphasis on developing some account of “rational selfcontrol ” or “reasons-responsiveness.”1 The basic idea in theories of this kind is that free and responsible agents are capable of acting according to available reasons. Responsibility agency, therefore, is a function of a general ability to be guided by reasons or practical rationality. This is a view that has considerable attraction since it is able to account for intuitive and fundamental distinctions between humans and animals, adults and children , the sane and the insane, in respect of the issue of freedom and responsibility. This an area where the classical account plainly fails. In general terms, rational self-control or reasons-responsive views have two key components. The first is that a rational agent must be able to recognize the reasons that are available or present to her situation. The second is that an agent must be able to “translate” those (recognized) reasons into decisions and choices that guide her conduct. In other words, the agent must not only be aware of what reasons there are, she must also be capable of being moved by them. This leaves, of course, a number of significant problems to be solved. For example, any adequate theory of this Selective Hard Compatibilism Paul Russell 150 P. Russell kind needs to be able to explain just how strict and demanding this standard of practical rationality is supposed to be. On the one hand, it is clearly too demanding to insist that agents must always be able to be guided by available reasons—otherwise an agent could never be held responsible for failing to be guided by the available reasons. On the other hand, more is required than that the agent is occasionally or intermittently guided by her reasons. An agent of this kind is not reliably and regularly rational to qualify as a free and responsible agent. So some set of conditions needs to be found that avoids both these extremes. This is not, however, the problem that I am now concerned with.2 Let us assume, with the proponents of compatibilist theories of rational self-control, that there is some account of these capacities that satisfies these various demands. We may call these the agent’s RA capacities, as they provide for rational agency. This account still faces another important set of problems as presented by incompatibilist critics. One famous problem with classical compatibilist accounts of moral freedom (“doing as we please”) is that agents of this kind could be manipulated and covertly controlled by other agents and yet, given the classical compatibilist account, still be judged free and responsible. This is, as the critics argue, plainly counterintuitive. Agents of this kind would be mere “puppets,” “robots,” or “zombies” who are “compelled” to obey the will of their covert controllers . Agents of this kind have no will of their own. They are not real or genuine agents. They only have the facade of being autonomous agents. When we discover the origins of their desires and willings—located with some other controlling agent—then our view of these (apparent) agents must change. The deeper problem with these (pseudo) agents, incompatibilists argue, is that although they may be “doing as they please” they have no control over their own will (i.e., they cannot shape or determine their own will). It is, therefore, an especially important question whether compatibilist accounts of rational self-control can deal effectively with objections of this kind.3 Rational self-control theories have two ways of approaching this problem. The first is to argue that what troubles us in situations of this kind, where manipulation and covert control is taking place, is that the agent’s capacity for rational self-control is in some way being impaired...