Many thanks to all for your thoughtful comments on the first
post! It was encouraging to see so much interest in these topics, and the
discussion has been very helpful to me as I continue to develop my view. As I
anticipated in my first post, in this second post I’ll discuss some potential
challenges to the supervenience claim S, the claim that I take to be central to
actual-sequence views.
As most readers of this blog will recall, van Inwagen
offered two kinds of examples in support of the alternative-possibilities view—examples
that involve omissions and consequences instead of actions. His example involving
omissions has the same structure as the Sharks scenario we discussed in the
first post, so I’ll just use the Sharks example instead. Van Inwagen’s claim is
that examples like Sharks suggest that responsibility is grounded in
alternative possibilities. When there are no sharks, and thus the agent is able
to save the child, his responsibility for failing to save him is grounded in
that ability. This is suggested by the fact that, if there had been sharks, he wouldn’t
have been responsible for his failure to save the child. (Call the two cases Sharks and No-Sharks.)
Van Inwagen’s second example, the one involving consequences,
is this:
Ryder loses control of his horse,
Dobbin, when he approaches a crossroads. He can’t stop Dobbin, but he can steer
him in different directions. He has reason to believe that only one path leads
to Rome. Since he despises Romans and wants them to get hurt, he steers the
horse in that direction (knowing that they’ll be harmed by the runaway horse).
Imagine that Ryder was right and only that path led to Rome;
then he’s responsible for the Romans being harmed. Again, van Inwagen claims
that Ryder’s responsibility is grounded in his ability to bring about a
different consequence. For imagine that, unbeknownst to Ryder, all paths led to Rome and thus the harm
to the Romans was inevitable. In that case, van Inwagen claims, Ryder isn’t
responsible for the harm. (Call the two cases One Path and Many Paths.)
Besides providing some support for the
alternative-possibilities view, van Inwagen’s examples work as potential
counterexamples to the supervenience claim S—the claim that freedom supervenes
on actual sequences. (This is not a coincidence. Rather, this is because van
Inwagen’s examples suggest that factors external
to the actual sequence, those in virtue
of which the agent lacks the ability to do otherwise, can get the agent off
the hook.) Consider, first, Sharks and No-Sharks: the agent’s freedom and
responsibility for failing to save the child is different in each case, but it
is very natural to think that the actual sequence is the same, since the sharks
never intervene when they are present. Similarly for One Path and Many Paths:
Ryder is free and responsible for the harm in One Path but not in Many Paths.
However, since he steers Dobbin in the same direction in both cases, and
everything is exactly the same from that point on, it is very natural to regard
the actual sequence as one and the same in both cases.
As I explained in the comments thread of my first post, my
strategy to rescue supervenience from these apparent counterexamples is to
argue that, despite initial appearances, the causal histories are not the same in these cases. My failure
to jump into the water doesn’t result in my failure to save the child (or in
the child’s death) in Sharks, but it does in No-Sharks. Similarly, I suggest
that Ryder’s steering the horse in the relevant direction doesn’t causally
result in the harm in Many Paths, but it does in One Path.
Now, there are two different strategies one could use to support
these claims. First, one could use a direct
strategy: one could directly appeal to some causal intuitions, or to some theory
of causation, or to some specific features of the causal relation, in support
of those claims. (This is the type of strategy I used in my “Actuality and
Responsibility” paper.) Second, one could use an indirect strategy. This is the strategy I’d like to explore here.
The indirect strategy seeks to establish the same causal
results by appeal to certain claims about the connection between causation and responsibility, instead of by
appeal to causal considerations per se. Here’s how I implement this strategy:
Note, first, that in all these scenarios we can safely
assume that the agent is responsible for something
(in Sharks: the failure to try to save the child, or the failure to jump into
the water; in Many Paths: the attempt to cause harm, or the steering of the
horse in the relevant direction). Next, note that the following is a well-established
principle about the relation between causation and responsibility (one that
offers sufficient conditions for “derivative” or “inherited” responsibility):
Derivative Responsibility: If an agent is responsible for X, X
causes Y, and all the relevant epistemic conditions obtain, then the agent is
also responsible for Y.
(Perhaps a non-deviance condition should be added, or perhaps
the non-deviance requirement should be regarded as included in the epistemic
conditions, as the claim that the agent could foresee that Y would come about
in roughly the way it did.) In what follows, I will work with blameworthiness,
since this is the kind of responsibility at issue in these cases.
A defense of supervenience can be built on the basis of this
principle. Consider, for example, Many Paths. Imagine, for reductio, the following:
(1) Ryder’s
steering Dobbin in the relevant direction caused the harm to the Romans.
Now, given that:
(2) Ryder
is blameworthy for steering the horse in that direction.
And given that the relevant
epistemic conditions obtain, it would follow that:
(3) Ryder
is blameworthy for the harm to the Romans.
Which, we are assuming, is false. Hence the reductio is
complete: (1) is false. In contrast, Ryder’s steering the horse in One Path is
clearly a cause of the harm. Thus there is a difference in the causal history,
and supervenience is safe.
In other words: our concept of causation (or, if there is
more than one, the one that is relevant in these debates) must be such that
Ryder doesn’t cause the harm in Many
Paths. Otherwise, given that we think that he’s responsible for attempting to
cause the harm, we would also think that he’s responsible for the harm.
My first set of questions for you, readers (if anyone got
this far!), is: Does this strike you as a good strategy? Is it more or less
successful than the direct strategy (or are they both equally
successful/unsuccessful)? Why?
(And for those of you who want to keep reading…) Some further
comments:
There are other cases where our intuitions about
responsibility are (presumably) less clear. Imagine, for example, that the
sharks are not yet in the water but, had I jumped in to save the child, an evil
man would have put them there. Or imagine that only one path was open when
Ryder steered Dobbin in that direction, but another evil man would have opened
the other paths if Ryder had steered Dobbin toward them. I imagine some people
would want to say that it’s not so obvious that the agent is not responsible in
those cases. (What do people think of these examples? Can you think of other
examples of this kind?) In any event, assuming this, I would argue that the
underlying causal intuitions are unclear to a similar extent, and that’s why
our responsibility intuitions are unclear. What’s clear (drawing, again, on the
principle of derivative responsibility) is that, if the relevant causal relation obtains in those cases, the agent
is responsible for the relevant outcomes, and otherwise he is not. But this
means that these cases are never a
threat to supervenience.
A more general lesson can presumably be drawn from all this:
There is no good argument against
supervenience, or against actual-sequence views and in support of
alternative-possibilities views, that appeals to cases where the agent’s responsibility,
if it exists, is derivative in this way. For the principle of derivative
responsibility guarantees that supervenience is met in all those cases.
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