Taking Responsibility and the Manipulation Problem
Taking Responsibility and the Manipulation Problem

Summary/Abstract: The main objective of this paper is to raise an objection against the analysis of the notion of ‘taking responsibility’ offered by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza while developing their complex and attractive theory of moral responsibility. In this theory, there are two main requirements an agent must meet in order to be morally responsible for an action performed by her: first, the action must issue from a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism; second, the mechanism that leads to the action must be the agent’s own. This second requirement is explicitly intended to address some problems for the attribution of responsibility that arise in the context of certain cases of manipulation—what I will refer to as ‘the manipulation problem’. Fischer and Ravizza argue that this requirement(mechanism ownership) is satisfied when the agent has undergone the process of taking responsibility for that mechanism, and they spell out three conditions which, according to them, are jointly sufficient for taking responsibility. I will ultimately argue that this set of conditions fails to adequately address the manipulation problem because it either rules out certain cases of manipulation by mere stipulation or fiat (on one of two possible interpretations of these conditions), or is simply too weak to effectively rule out those same cases (on the alternative interpretation).

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