Chris Cho

Can manipulated agents be morally responsible for what they do? Many find the claim that they can philosophically scandalous. In this dissertation, I argue otherwise. As a structuralist, I hold that an agent's moral responsibility is determined solely by their psychological or agential structure at the time of action. And as a hard-liner, I hold that manipulated agents are morally responsible because they satisfy certain structural conditions compatibilists find sufficient for moral responsibility. I therefore defend what I call hard-line structuralism.

Soft-line structuralists hold that there is a morally relevant difference between manipulated and non-manipulated agents that warrants excusing the former but not the latter. In this paper, I argue that soft-line structuralism is untenable, taking Matheson's (2019) account as a representative case. I raise a counterexample to his view and argue that the most plausible response to the counterexample ultimately undermines soft-line structuralism more generally.

Soft-line compatibilism has come to occupy a privileged position in the debate over manipulation arguments against compatibilism. By identifying a responsibility-relevant difference between manipulated and ordinary agents, soft-liners promise to accommodate the intuition that manipulated agents are not responsible while preserving ordinary responsibility judgments. I argue that this promise cannot be kept. Soft-liners face a dilemma. On one hand, if the conditions they identify as responsibility-undermining fully excuse manipulated agents, they commit themselves to a form of responsibility skepticism, since structurally similar forms of influence pervade ordinary agency as well. If, on the other hand, soft-liners maintain that manipulation merely mitigates rather than eliminates responsibility, they abandon the no-responsibility intuition that motivates their view in the first place, and collapse into a hard-line position. Either way, soft-lining loses its dialectical advantage. The upshot is that the most promising compatibilist response to manipulation arguments must engage directly with the hard-line strategy, explaining why the no-responsibility intuition is ultimately to be resisted.

Many find it plausible that acting freely requires a kind of sensitivity to reasons. Modalists define this sensitivity in terms of what S does in the relevant alternative possibilities. Agent modalists take S to be an agent, assessing their reasons-sensitivity by considering what the agent would have done in those possibilities. While intuitive, agent modalists struggle with Frankfurt cases. This has led some to a mechanism-based approach. Here, I raise two objections to this approach and defend agent modalism. I argue that (1) the mechanism approach permits composite mechanisms, leading to an unattractive disjunction, and (2) excluding the agent undermines the original appeal of reasons-sensitivity. I defend agent modalism by arguing it can handle Frankfurt cases if it holds fixed the nonoccurrence of agent-altering events. This requirement also helps address rational blind spots. Thus, I aim to rehabilitate agent modalism as a viable account of reasons-sensitivity in free action.

Can manipulated agents be morally responsible for what they do? According to hard-line structuralism, yes. On this view, manipulated agents are responsible in virtue of satisfying the relevant structural conditions taken to be sufficient for responsibility. Historicists disagree, claiming that responsibility also has a historical dimension. Here, I offer a two-step defense of hard-line structuralism. The first is deflationary: I argue that the kind of manipulation that best serves the historicists entails certain structural properties that already meet the normative demands historicists invoke to justify historical conditions. The second is debunking: I argue that our reluctance to attribute responsibility to manipulated agents stems from an anchoring bias toward their pre-manipulation psychology, a bias that lacks normative justification.