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NEAL JUDISCH
REASONS-RESPONSIVE COMPATIBILISM AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF BELIEF
(Received 19 February 2004; accepted in revised form 1 November 2004)
ABSTRACT. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza oer a theory of moral responsibility which makes responsibility dependent upon the way in which moral agents view themselves. According to the theory, agents are responsible for their actions only if they think of themselves as apt candidates for praise and blame; if they come to believe they are not apt candidates for praise and blame, they are ipso facto not morally responsible. In what follows, I show that Fischer and Ravizzas account of responsibility for consequences is inconsistent with this subjective element of their theory, and that the subjective element may be retained only if they are willing to implausibly restrict their account of responsibility for consequences. I end by discussing the broad signicance of the failure of the subjective element for their overall approach to moral responsibility.
KEY WORDS: causal determinism, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, moral responsibility, reasons-responsive compatibilism, responsibility for consequences
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In a series of articles and an important recent book,1 John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza have constructed a mechanism-based rather than an agent-based approach to moral responsibility. Their account does not require that agents be free to do otherwise in the sense that there are alternate possibilities genuinely accessible to them
1 John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
The Journal of Ethics (2007) Springer 2007 DOI 10.1007/s10892-005-7988-6
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given the actual causal antecedents, but requires instead that the mechanism2 (or the actual sequence of neurological/mental events) issuing in a given action be moderately reasons-responsive, or such as to allow the agent to recognize and react to reasons in an appropriate way. Since moderate reasons-responsiveness is, according to Fischer and Ravizza, compatible with causal determinism, moral responsibility is (so far forth) compatible with causal determinism.
A salient feature of their account is the further requirement that agents view themselves in a certain way: agents must (1) think of themselves as agents as sources of certain causal upshots in the world and (2) consider themselves appropriate targets of praise and blame in their social context....