On the manipulator-focused response to manipulation cases

Philosophical Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02218-3 On the manipulator‑focused response to manipulation cases Gabriel De Marco1 · Taylor W. Cyr2 Accepted: 3 September 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract In this paper, we identify a class of responses to cases of manipulation that we label manipulator-focused views. The key insight of such views is that being subject to the will of another agent significantly affects our freedom and moral responsibility. Though different authors take this key insight in different directions, and the mechanics of their views are quite different, these views turn out to share many key components, and this allows us to discuss several authors’ views at the same time, highlighting a variety of challenges for such views and helping to identify pitfalls to avoid in further developments of views of this type. Moreover, as we survey manipulator-focused views and the challenges that plague them, we go beyond the typical problem cases for such views—natural force variations of manipulation cases—and introduce several new manipulation cases. We conclude by comparing the prospects for this family of views with its main rival, namely bypassing views. Keywords Moral responsiblity · Free action · Manipulation argument · Soft-line replies · Manipulator-focused 1 Introduction 1.1 Chuck and Sally Consider a pair of cases from Alfred Mele: Chuck Chuck enjoys killing people…When he was much younger, Chuck enjoyed torturing animals, but he was not wholeheartedly behind this….He * Gabriel De Marco Taylor W. Cyr 1 Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK 2 Department of Classics and Philosophy, Samford University, Birmingham, USA Vol.:(0123456789) G. De Marco, T. W. Cyr freely set out to ensure that he would be wholeheartedly behind his torturing of animals and related activities, including his merciless bullying of vulnerable people, and he was morally responsible for so doing…His strategy worked. Today, he stalked and killed a homeless man, Don. (2019: 19–20) Sweet Sally When [Sweet] Sally crawled into bed last night, she was one of the kindest, gentlest people on Earth…Sally’s character was such that intentionally doing anyone serious bodily harm definitely was not an option for her: Her character—or collection of values—left no place for a desire to do such a thing to take root…But Sally awakes with a desire to stalk and kill a neighbor, George. Although she had always found George unpleasant, she is very surprised by this desire. What happened is that, while Sally slept, a team of psychologists that had discovered the system of values that make Chuck tick implanted those values in Sally after erasing her competing values. They did this while leaving her memory intact, which helps account for her surprise. Sally reflects on her new desire. Among other things, she judges, rightly, that it is utterly in line with her system of values…Seeing nothing that she regards as a good reason to refrain from stalking and killing George, provided that she can get away with it, Sally devises a plan for killing him; and she executes it— and him—that afternoon… (2019: 20–21) Although Sweet Sally and Chuck have similar motivations and values relevant to the decision at the time of their respective killings, and although they may have similar abilities or capacities to recognize and respond to reasons, or to deliberate on the basis of informed deliberation, many will judge that, while Chuck is morally responsible for killing Don, Sally is not morally responsible for murdering George.1 Given the similarities between Chuck and Sally at, and just before, the time of their killings, various philosophers have argued that an agent’s moral responsibility depends on more than simply facts about features internal to the agent at, or shortly before, the time of action.2 There are, roughly, two main families of views that incorporate this insight, which we will call bypassing views, and manipulatorfocused views. Our goal in this paper is to evaluate the latter, and we do this by focusing on particular versions of manipulator-focused views. But first, we introduce both types of views and the current dialectic in more detail. 1.2 Bypassing views On bypassing views, the relevant difference between agents like Chuck and Sally is, in part, that unlike Chuck, the attitudes leading to Sally’s decision were acquired or modified in a way that bypassed her capacities for control over her mental life (De Marco 2023a; Fischer, 2012: Chapter 11; Haji & Cuypers, 2008; McKenna, 1 Cases like these are often set in deterministic universes and employed against the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. We omit discussion of this part of the debate. At least for cases like that of Sally, there are similarly problematic variations in indeterministic settings (Clarke 2012; Cyr 2016, 2020a; Haji and Cuypers 2001; King 2013; McKenna 2016; Mele 2019: 124–6). 2 Hereafter we shorten “morally responsible” to simply “responsible.”. On the manipulator‑focused response to manipulation cases 2016; Mele, 1995, 2006, 2019). The relevant capacities are, for instance, the capacity to critically assess, endorse, and sustain one’s values (Fischer, 2012: 198; Haji & Cuypers, 2008: 30; McKenna, 2016: 97; Mele, 1995: 118–20). Bypassing theorists are not committed to the claim that an action’s issuing from an attitude that was acquired via bypassing is sufficient to eliminate an agent’s responsibility for that action.3 As many have pointed out, we are subject to a variety of influences in our daily lives, and it is quite possible that many of these influence our attitudes via bypassing.4 Consider, for example, Mele’s mild manipulation case. Carl has made a commitment to refrain from eating snacks for six months, yet daily experiences a few medium-strength desires to eat a snack. Although the urge is always resistible, he occasionally acts on it. Suppose now that a manipulator induces in Carl such an urge about once a day, at times during which Carl would not acquire these urges in the normal way, and Carl succumbs to it about 5% of the time. As Mele suggests, whether Carl is morally responsible for eating snacks in response to these urges “is implausibly regarded as turning on whether the urges are produced, on the one hand, in the ‘normal’ way or…, on the other, by a manipulator who flashes subliminal ‘snack’ messages at him” (2019: 37). In order to avoid these problems, bypassing theorists offer more nuanced accounts. We return below to cases of mild manipulation. Importantly, bypassing views make no reference to the presence of a manipulator in explaining why agents like Sally lack responsibility for their deeds, since bypassing can occur as a result of natural forces. Consider a natural force case: Natalie Natalie was just as sweet as Sally was before her transformation. However, due to a strange electro-mag (...truncated)