DEFENDING NONHISTORICAL COMPATIBILISM: A REPLY TO HAJI AND CUYPERS 1. Michael McKenna University of Arizona

Philosophical Issues, 22, Action Theory, 2012 DEFENDING NONHISTORICAL COMPATIBILISM: A REPLY TO HAJI AND CUYPERS 1 Michael McKenna University of Arizona Is moral responsibility an historical or a nonhistorical notion? A growing number of philosophers writing on the topics of free will and moral responsibility have taken up an historical thesis. I have recently defended the nonhistorical position in response to the central criticism that historical theorists have leveled against it (McKenna, 2004). While I remain agnostic as regards the historical/nonhistorical debate, I have argued that the nonhistorical view is more resilient than the historical theorists contend. In an especially insightful article, Ishtiyaque Haji and Stefaan Cuypers (2007) have taken direct aim at my defense of the nonhistorical thesis. In this paper, I argue that their efforts, while illuminating, are nevertheless inconclusive. 2 A nonhistorical approach survives their indictment. 1. The historical/nonhistorical debate is largely, albeit not exclusively, an in-house debate amongst compatibilists. 3 For a long while, it was simply assumed that compatibilists were uniformly committed to a nonhistorical view. The natural thought, perhaps, was just that if historical factors were allowed to enter the conditions for free action and moral responsibility, there would be no principled way to foreclose a deterministic history from having a freedom-and-responsibility-defeating effect. But more recently several philosophers articulating a compatibilist thesis have argued both that there is independently good reasons to embrace an historical thesis, and also that doing so provides especially valuable resources for responding to a distinctive class of arguments for incompatibilism. These arguments,

Defending Nonhistorical Compatibilism 265 manipulation arguments, as I shall explain below, are seemingly less damning to compatibilist theses that have built into them an historical condition. To put what is at issue crisply, the controversy might be framed as follows. Consider two agents just subsequent to performing a putatively free act, A, who are such that, at that time, they are qualitatively identical with respect to their current timeslice or nonhistorical properties. Is it conceptually possible that, due only to differences in their respective histories, when each A-s, only one A-s freely and is morally responsible for doing so? Harry Frankfurt defends the nonhistorical compatibilist thesis, and it is often his compatibilist position that historical compatibilists attack. In response to these sorts of concerns, Frankfurt penned this frequently quoted passage: To the extent that a person identifies himself with the springs of his actions, he takes responsibility for those actions and acquires moral responsibility for them; moreover, the questions of how the actions and his identifications with their springs are caused are irrelevant to the questions of whether he performs his actions freely and is morally responsible for performing them. (1975, as appearing in 1988: 54) Resistance to nonhistorical compatibilism comes for the most part from examples wherein all of the nonhistorical details a compatibilist might demand are in place, but a defective history seems to undermine the agent s status for free action. Mele s cases are especially instructive because of the manner in which he makes use of pairs of cases to bring into relief the relative importance of history. Here is the case of his that I shall discuss below: Ann is a free agent and an exceptionally industrious philosopher. She puts in twelve solid hours a day, seven days a week, and she enjoys almost every minute of it. Beth, an equally talented colleague, values many things above philosophy for reasons that she has refined and endorsed on the basis of careful critical reflection over many years. Beth identifies with and enjoys her own way of life, and she is confident that it has a breadth, depth, and richness that long days in the office would destroy. Their dean wants Beth to be like Ann. Normal modes of persuasion having failed, he decides to circumvent Beth s agency. Without the knowledge of either philosopher, he hires a team of psychologists to determine what makes Ann tick and a team of new-wave brainwashers to make Beth like Ann. The psychologists decide that Ann s peculiar hierarchy of values accounts for her productivity, and the brainwashers instill the same hierarchy in Beth while eradicating all competing values via new-wave brainwashing, of course. Beth is now, in the relevant respect, a psychological twin of Ann. She is an industrious philosopher who thoroughly enjoys and highly values her philosophical work. Largely as a result of Beth s new hierarchy of values, whatever upshot Ann s critical reflection about her own values and priorities would have, the same

266 Michael McKenna is true of critical reflection by Beth. Her critical reflection, like Ann s, fully supports her new style of life. Naturally, Beth is surprised by the change in her. What, she wonders, accounts for her remarkable zest for philosophy? Why is her philosophical work now so much more enjoyable? Why are her social activities now so much less satisfying and rewarding than her work? Beth s hypothesis is that she simply has grown tired of her previous mode of life, that her life had become stale without her recognizing it, and that she finally has come fully to appreciate the value of philosophical work. When she carefully reflects on her values, Beth finds that they fully support a life dedicated to philosophical work, and she wholeheartedly embraces such a life and the collection of values that supports it. Ann, by hypothesis, freely does her philosophical work; but what about Beth? In important respects, she is a clone of Ann and by design, not accident. Her own considered values were erased and replaced in the brainwashing process. Beth did not consent to the process. Nor was she even aware of it; she had no opportunity to resist. By instilling new values in Beth and eliminating old ones, the brainwashers gave her life a new direction, one that clashes with the considered principles and values she had before she was manipulated. Beth s autonomy was violated. And it is difficult not to see her now, in light of all this, as heteronomous and unfree to a significant extent in an important sphere of her life. If that perception is correct, then given the psychological similarities between the two agents, the difference in their current status regarding freedom would seem to lie in how they came to have certain of their psychological features, hence in something external to their present psychological constitutions. That is, the crucial difference is historical; free agency is in some way history-bound. (2006: 164 6) I find the case of Ann and Beth to be an especially useful one for thinking about the historical/nonhistorical debate. Beth s case seems to me to weigh heavily in favor of an historical conclusion. However, in my estimation, this case and other cases like it do not provide decisive reason to go the historical route. Hence, I have taken issue with philosophers like Alfred Mele, who, on the basis of cases such as his Ann and Beth case, has remarked that if compatibilists were to have nothing more attractive to offer than Frankfurt s or any other ahistorical view of moral responsibility and freedom, compatibilism would be in dire straits (2006: 172). Nonhistorical compatibilism might be wrong, but I do not think it is clearly wrong. It s not in dire straits. It does, however, face a serious challenge. Can it be met? 2. Before proceeding, I pause to offer three points of clarification. First, it is best to understand the historical/nonhistorical debate as limited to the conditions for directly free actions for which an agent is directly morally

Defending Nonhistorical Compatibilism 267 responsible. Some acts are such that an agent is free with respect to them and is morally responsible for them solely as a result of earlier directly free acts. These are cases of derivative freedom and derivative moral responsibility. A simple example is the case of someone who freely chooses to execute the plan of getting roaring drunk and then seeing if she can drive home without wrecking. Later, when driving she might be plastered completely out of control. But she can still be regarded as having engaged in this activity freely and being morally responsible for it. In short, her freedom in driving drunk is derivative; it traces back to earlier directly free choices. This is what accounts for her moral responsibility and blameworthiness for driving drunk. As should be clear, the distinction between direct and derivative freedom and responsibility is itself an historical thesis. If all theorists should acknowledge this distinction, as I believe they should, does it follow that there is nothing to the historical/nonhistorical distinction? No. It can still be asked whether, for directly free action, is there an historical requirement for them? With respect to this question, as I shall understand the debate, nonhistorical compatibilists say no ; historical compatibilists say yes. In considering Mele s case of Ann and Beth, I ask readers to understand Ann s acts as ones that are such that she is directly free with respect to them, and is also directly morally responsible for them. 4 The challenge, then, to the nonhistorical compatibilist can be put as follows: When Beth acts just as Ann does, Beth s acts are not directly free and she is not directly morally responsible for them, and this difference is due exclusively to a difference in her history as in comparison with Ann s. Second, it is reasonable to assume that most people on most occasions act from their own values in such a way that those values play some (nondeviant) causal role in the production of their actions. At a minimum, if a person values something, she believes it to be good, and she has some desire for it. It is equally reasonable to assume that most people are such that their values are practically unsheddable for them. 5 That is, their relation to their values at a time is such that, at that time, in ordinary practical contexts of deliberation and action, they are not able either to extinguish them or significantly attenuate them by, say, drastically diminishing the strength of pertinent desires. It is, for example, in no way up to me now that I value my son Coen s life as I do, nor is it up to me how strongly I do so. For me, these are givens of my current psychic configuration. At least they are in ordinary practical contexts. 6 When reflecting upon the case of Ann and Beth, readers are to understand the case in such a way that the values from which Ann acts are such that they are unsheddable for her, and when Beth is brought to be a qualitative duplicate of Ann, she comes to acquire through a process of manipulation the same configuration of values, which are equally unsheddable. Nevertheless and this is absolutely crucial it is not the case that the mere possession of these values for Ann is such that they render her unable to do otherwise, or in some other manner render her actions free

268 Michael McKenna in only a derivative way. While she is not directly free with respect to her current possession of these values, she is free with respect to whether she acts upon them, and she is free in such a way that when she does act, her act is a directly free one. When Beth is brought to be like Ann, the role and force of the values she comes to acquire are just like the role and force of Ann s. Third, manipulation arguments for incompatibilism are arguments that feature manipulation cases in which intuition indicates that the agents in them do not act freely and are not morally responsible, and yet the agent is manipulated in such a way that she seems to satisfy some targeted set of compatibilist minimally sufficient conditions for free action. With this example in place, the argument works from two premises. The first is just that, due to the manipulation, the agent is not free, nor is she responsible. The second is that determinism is no different in any relevant respect from causing the agent to so act by way of manipulation. Hence, it is concluded that the targeted compatibilist sufficient conditions are inadequate. As I have explained elsewhere (2008), compatibilists who resist the first premise in such an argument take a hard-line reply. Compatibilists who resist the second take a soft-line reply. What makes the former hard is that the compatibilist is forced to resist what appears to be an intuitively plausible judgment. So the hard-line comes at the apparent cost of bullet-biting. The former is comparatively soft, as the compatibilist who adopts this line needs only to claim that the mode of manipulation involves features that are relevantly different from a mere deterministic history. As I have recently explained (forthcoming), one reason why compatibilists take there to be something significant at stake in the historical/nonhistorical debate is that if the historical theorist is correct, in many troubling manipulation cases that could be used in a manipulation argument, some historical condition is violated. And this allows the historical compatibilist to adopt a soft-line to such an argument. A nonhistorical compatibilist, by contrast, cannot fall back on considerations of history, and so in such cases is forced to take a hard-line reply. For example, were the case of Beth to be used in a manipulation argument, a nonhistorical compatibilist might very well have to take on the contention that Beth acts freely and is morally responsible for what she does, despite the way she was manipulated to be as she is. An historical compatibilist would not be saddled with this dialectically onerous burden. Thus, in assessing the historical/nonhistorical debate, readers should keep in mind what is at stake: historical compatibilists have added resources for replying to certain manipulation arguments. Of course, this kind of consideration one having to do with dialectical advantages that might be gained over one s philosophical opponent is not a reason of the right sort for concluding that the notions of free action and moral responsibility are historical. So, the question remains, are they?

Defending Nonhistorical Compatibilism 269 3. As I have granted (sec. 1), I find the case of Ann and Beth to be a powerful one that pulls in the direction of drawing an historical conclusion. In light of all of this, what can be said on behalf of the nonhistorical compatibilist? In order to lend support, in an earlier piece (2004), I called upon the aid of a magical agent, Suzie Instant. 7 Suzie Instant is created by a god at an instant and is placed in a determined world. She is created to be a psychologically healthy woman indistinguishable from any other normally functioning thirty-year-old person whom any of us might encounter. To get this result, she is given a huge set of beliefs according to which she has lived a normal human life for thirty years. For instance, she believes (falsely) that she had a twelfth birthday and that her daddy bought her a pony. Furthermore, Suzie has some range of unsheddable values. She also has a set of false beliefs about how she came to acquire those values. She thinks that she acquired them through a process of sustained effort over the years leading up to what she thinks is her thirtieth. She takes pride in this fact and believes that she is responsible for this process and that she engaged in it freely. (On this point, clearly she is mistaken.) She is, also, a richly self-controlled person who is able to resist the inclination to act with weakness of will. Often when she acts, the desires issuing in her actions are the ones she wants to act upon, and when she does, she is sensitive to a wide range of reasons for action. Hence, Suzie satisfies an impressive set of features of the sort that, when she acts, varying compatibilists would regard those features as adequate for satisfying all of the nonhistorical conditions highlighted in their respective accounts of CAS. 8 Now suppose that Suzie is presented with the option to do one of two things, A or B. One option, B, involves a violation of a value that is unsheddable for her. The other option, A, involves acting from one of her unsheddable values. Suzie A-s, acting as her unsheddable value counsels, but in doing so, she could have done otherwise that is, she could have B-ed (in a respectable compatibilist sense of able to do otherwise ). If, in the context of this debate, we are already operating under the assumption that compatibilism is true, it is not clear to me that Suzie did not act freely and that she is not responsible for what she does. It is difficult to see how a causal history that zeroed in on Suzie Instant all in an instant renders her unfree in a way that she would not be if instead some causal history or other unfolded over the course of thirty years. Note that when Suzie A-ed from her unsheddable value, she was not compelled to do so. Her doing so was nothing like acting upon an irresistible desire. It would be natural to say that she A-ed freely in at least some non-question begging, restricted sense of freely, say freely. 9 To press the point, imagine that every now and then this same god who created Suzie Instant visits another possible world and there creates another

270 Michael McKenna thirty-year-old Suzie, Suzie Normal, in the normal zygote manner. In this latter scenario, the god arranges things so that, after zygote-creation, little itsy-bitsy developing Suzie Normal is left alone to develop in the normal manner for a full thirty years (and nine months). As it turns out, Suzie Normal at the age of thirty arrives at the precise point where she comes to be a nonhistorical qualitative duplicate of Suzie Instant. Suzie Normal faces the exact same choice between options A and B as Suzie Instant faces. Just like Suzie Instant, Suzie Normal opts to do A. In the case of Suzie Normal, it seems that the compatibilist any compatibilist will be hard pressed to deny that Suzie Normal A-s freely and is morally responsible for doing so. 10 But if so, how is it that Suzie Instant is rendered not free and not morally responsible when she A s at the relevant time merely by virtue of the fact that the causal history giving rise to her action came compressed in a momentary package where Suzie Normal s history chugged along over the course of thirty years? A difference here seems arbitrary. While the case of Beth lends support to the historical compatibilist, I believe that the case of Suzie Instant lends support to the nonhistorical compatibilists. If so, how are we to proceed? To help bring the conflict into focus, I arranged it so that the Ann and Beth cases converged on the Suzie Normal and Suzie Instant cases (2004: 181 2). To this end, imagine that merely by cosmic accident, not even by design, the god who created Suzie Instant and Suzie Normal happened to bring Suzie Normal into existence in such a way as to live out a duplicate life to the one lived by Ann, the only difference being that Ann s parents generated the initial zygote-later-to become-ann in the typical and, dare I say, more pleasurable fashion. And suppose that Ann, after thirty years, comes upon the same choice that Suzie Normal and Suzie Instant faced between A and B, with the same unsheddable values held fixed, and so on. Imagine, for instance, that the options A and B are between continuing to work on an article through the weekend (A) and instead attending a beloved sister s wedding (B). In this case, as I see it, we should treat the case of Ann and Suzie Normal in the same way. Both A rather than B, and it is plausible to think, granting that compatibilism is true, that both A freely and are morally responsible for doing so. Now inject Suzie Instant into the case. If indeed we should treat her no differently than we treat Suzie Normal, then we should treat Suzie Instant no differently than we treat Ann. But, we may suppose, when Ann A-s rather than B-s, she can be treated as a nonhistorical qualitative duplicate of Beth in a context in which Beth also A-s rather than B-s. And so, finally, we can ask whether we should treat the case of Beth when she A-s no differently than we treat the case of Suzie Instant when she A-s. Note that I have not claimed that we should treat the case of Beth and Suzie Instant in the same way, nor did I in my earlier formulation (2004: 182). Nevertheless, it seemed to me then, and it still seems to me now, to be useful to consider how we ought to proceed under the initially

Defending Nonhistorical Compatibilism 271 plausible assumption that we should treat the cases symmetrically. Given this background assumption, should we use the leverage established with our reaction to Suzie Instant to force a similar treatment of Beth? Or should we instead use the leverage established with our reaction to Beth to force a similar treatment of Suzie Instant? For those interested in what reason there might be for treating the cases of Beth and Suzie Instant in the same way, an argument to that effect might go as follows: Suzie Instant is alleged to be free and morally responsible on compatibilist grounds. 11 Assume she is. If so, it appears that, solely by virtue of nonhistorical properties just subsequent to her A-ing, she satisfies sufficient conditions for A-ing freely and being responsible for it. But, by hypothesis, Beth satisfies the same nonhistorical properties as does Suzie Instant when Beth A-s. Hence, if Suzie Instant A-s freely and is morally responsible for doing so, then Beth A-s freely and is also morally responsible for doing so. If, on the other hand, Beth does not A freely and is not morally responsible, it seems that the same ruling applies to Suzie Instant, since the case of Beth shows that the nonhistorical properties both satisfy are insufficient for acting freely. 4. Suppose we should treat the cases symmetrically. Under this assumption, I have offered three considerations nonhistorical compatibilists might offer in order to explain away the intuitive force of the Beth case (McKenna, 2004: 182 4): First, Ann, we can stipulate, freely acquired her unsheddable values and thus is morally responsible for the acquisition of the moral personality from which she deliberates. The same point applies to Suzie Normal. This is not the case for either Beth or Suzie Instant. Perhaps part of the intuitive unease in holding that Beth is just as responsible for A-ing as Ann is, can be accounted for by attending to the legitimate concern that there should be some difference in judgments about Ann and Beth. But this much the nonhistorical compatibilist can accommodate, since the difference needn t be explained in terms of one being free and morally responsible for A-ing and the other not, but rather in terms of one being morally responsible for more than the other (McKenna, 2004: 183). Second, as Nomy Arpaly has pointed out (2003: 128), Beth s autonomy has been violated in one sense of that term. She s been done wrong in a way that has robbed her of the moral personality that she fashioned for herself prior to the manipulation that was forced upon her. Perhaps part of our reluctance to treat Beth as freely A-ing and morally responsible for doing so is that we wrongly think that in making such a judgment, we are not recognizing the clear violations of Beth s rights as a person. But we can

272 Michael McKenna recognize that Beth freely and responsibly A-ed and still draw appropriate moral judgments about the moral wrongs done to Beth and how she deserves to be treated in light of that history. What, we might ask, could count as a proper moral response to Beth for her having suffered from someone deciding for her what kind of person she should be? This question can be given a rich answer even if, now that she is this different (sort of) person, we are warranted in thinking that she is a person who acts freely and responsibly for what she now does (McKenna, 2004: 183 4). Ishtiyaque Haji and Stefaan Cuypers have denied that the two preceding points can do much to aid the nonhistorical compatibilist here (Haji and Cuypers, 2007: 364 5). All parties to the dispute, they rightly observe, may agree that Ann is responsible for further things neither Beth nor Suzie Instant is, and that Beth is wronged in ways that neither Ann nor Suzie Instant is. Hence it would only be methodologically appropriate, as they put it, to guard against the truism that extraneous factors, such as certain moral assessments other than the ones having to do with responsibility [for the pertinent act of A-ing], may differentially apply (2007 [my braces]: 365). Their dismissal, however, seems to me to misrepresent the relationship between the intuitions elicited from the cases up for consideration and the theoretical commitments varying philosophically invested parties bring to the debate. Of course, committed historical and nonhistorical compatibilists should guard against the influence of extraneous factors of the sort I have brought into focus. But the examples these competing parties consider are supposed to be ones which, aside from one s theoretical orientation, bring forth judgments that reveal some basic pre-theoretical intuitions not intuitions filtered through distinctions about, say, responsibility for character traits leading to action as distinct from responsibility for the actions themselves. They are supposed to come, then, as package deal to the argument. And so it is only fair game to allow contestants to the debate to cast about for plausible ways of accounting for results that do not fit with the commitments of their respective theories. Third, consider how you would think of and respond to Beth or Suzie Instant were you to have a morally charged transaction with one of them (McKenna, 2004: 182 3). Imagine it so that you were aware of their unusual causal histories. Would you find it genuinely misplaced to make moral demands of them, to think it unfitting to respond with indignation or resentment were one of them to, say, insult your child or cunningly take illegitimate financial advantage of you? Perhaps at first blush it would seem misplaced. But think through the case as vividly as you might be able. Hold clearly in mind the point central to the nonhistorical compatibilist that, at the time coincident with the (putatively) free act, Beth is a nonhistorical duplicate of Ann. She has just as many resources for moral reasoning and deliberation as Ann does. She is just as able to do otherwise as Ann is (that is, she is able to do otherwise in terms a compatibilist would accept). She

Defending Nonhistorical Compatibilism 273 adopts the same attitudinal stance toward her own convictions about her unsheddable values as Ann does (she s proud of how she believes herself to have acquire them, and so on). In such a case, I remarked, when vividly imagined, it can seem credible to claim that the right way to think of either Beth or Suzie Instant, and the right way to respond to either would be to treat either as a real person, one who is a fully competent moral agent and a legitimate target of our blaming responses. This is in the spirit of Frankfurt s remark that: We are the sorts of persons we are; and it is what we are, rather than the history of our development, that counts. The fact that someone is a pig warrants treating him like a pig, unless there is reason to believe that in some important way he is a pig against his will and is not acting as he would really prefer (Frankfurt, 2002: 27 8). According to Haji and Cuypers, this third point cuts no ice at all: If one were cognizant of Beth s history or Suzie Instant s peculiar origin, it is not in the least obvious that one would respond to these agents in the manner in which McKenna proposed one probably would (2007: 364). In response, all I am trying to do is cut a little ice, to chip away at it a bit. I am willing to agree that it is not obvious that we would respond to these agents by treating them as free and responsible persons. But equally to the point, it is not obvious that one would not. Reasonable minds can differ, and all I hope to establish is that much for the cases under consideration. My point is of a piece with the Strawsonian approach to theorizing about exemptions wherein the standard has to do with whether a person is incapacitated for adult interpersonal relationships (1962). This is a question suited for what Strawson called the participant rather than the objective perspective. Hence, I invite the reader to imagine a case not merely as one reported to us from a third-personal vantage point, as we have it in the story of Ann and Beth or Suzie Normal and Suzie Instant, but as one in which we are invested in an unfolding event as participants. This, I have suggested, invites one to consider how one might come to regard Beth or Suzie Instant as a perfectly good candidate for free and responsible agency. After all, given that Beth is, at the time of action, no different than Ann, and Suzie Instant is likewise no different than Suzie Normal, both Beth and Suzie Instant, are no less capable of participation in adult interpersonal life than are Ann or Suzie Normal when acting as they do. To these three points previously developed, I would here add a fourth. Judgments of blameworthiness can be clouded by the delicate relationship between blameworthiness and the propriety or fittingness of blame, where the blame at issue is meant to be overt blame directed at the blameworthy party. On my view (forthcoming, 2011), when this sort of blame is fitting, in the sense of being deserved, it provides one who has standing to blame with a pro tanto reason to do so. But that reason can be checked in the sense that it will not warrant an all-out reason in the face of certain defeaters. If, for instance, blaming someone for a minor peccadillo would cause her massive

274 Michael McKenna harm, or harm to innocent others, that could count as a defeater. Equally, if it would be too much of a strain on the one blaming, that too could count as a defeater. Furthermore, reasons can bear on mitigating blame or qualifying it. The child who lies might deserve blame, but the bullies harassing him into a state of extreme anxiety might give one reason to focus more on a response of concern and go easy on any blaming. With this point in mind, revisit the point above about the kind of response Beth deserves as one whose previous moral personality had been hijacked. The legitimate response to her for the wrong done to her could give one good reason to go light on blaming her. Or it could give one good reason not to blame her at all. But it would not follow from this that she would not be blameworthy for her act of A-ing. The four preceding points have not been offered as decisive grounds for a nonhistorical conclusion. All I have sought to establish thus far, and all that the points enlisted above are designed to show, is that the nonhistorical compatibilist is not impotent in the face of the challenges at issue. A plausible case can be made for the view. But, having gone to some lengths to show what resources the nonhistorical compatibilist might have available to her, I continue to find the case of Beth to be a powerful one tugging in the other direction, and so offering compelling reason in favor of an historical thesis. 5. One way to escape this conundrum would be to find a principled way to allow for asymmetrical treatments of the case of Beth and Suzie Instant. 12 This way we could conclude that Beth is not free and responsible, and that Suzie Instant is free and responsible. Here we come to the most intriguing point in Haji and Cuypers s article. They distinguish between evolved agents, such as most normally functioning adult persons, and initial agents, such as children first emerging with their own moral personalities. While Beth is an evolved agent, Suzie Instant, they contend, is an initial agent. According to Haji and Cuypers, amongst the conditions for morally responsible agency, it is not a necessary condition of initial agents that they have a particular sort of history. All that matters is that, whatever kind of initial evaluative scheme is instilled in such agents, it does not involve features that impair an agent s ability to evolve in certain acceptable ways (351 5). But as for evolved agents, what is required is that the evaluative schemes from which they operate sprang originally from acceptable initial evaluative schemes, and then evolved only from permissible revisions that did not subvert their free agency at later times (356 7). As Haji and Cuypers see it, because Beth is an evolved agent, a history condition applies to her, and so the offending intervention can rightly be regarded as freedom-and-responsibility-destroying as it bears on

Defending Nonhistorical Compatibilism 275 Beth s act of A-ing (359). Prior to the intervention, Beth operated from an evaluative scheme that had evolved from the one which she was initially given, and the changes she had made to it, it can be assumed, were all ones that involved permissible alterations as she fashioned for herself her own normative outlook. Intervention short-circuited that causal chain and re-routed it through means over which Beth had no control, resulting in her A-ing unfreely. But Suzie Instant, they argue, is like a child whose evaluative system has been initially installed (359). So long as Suzie Instant s initial scheme is not one that impedes her from being able to evolve over time, she is able to act freely on the basis of it. The preceding compressed formulation of Haji and Cuyper s proposal does not do justice to the subtle and promising historical theory they propose, but with a few further details, I hope it will be adequate for me to speak directly to their criticism of my nonhistorical defense. Four salient points help set the stage: First, according to Haji and Cuypers, there are two general ways that an emerging agent s initial evaluative scheme can be, as they put it, inauthentic where this just means, such as to subvert responsibility by not being one s own (2007: 351). One is by way of instilling objects of certain sorts, such as a distorted conception of morality (353 4). Suppose, for instance, a young child is taught that people of a certain race are all sinister. Another is by way of the methods of instillment (354 5). Suppose that a child is taught to treat people of all races with equal worth, but is so taught by beating it into him or instead by convincing him that if he does not agree, he ll burn in hell for all eternity. Such methods are liable to thwart an agent s ability to make modifications to her initial scheme by means that allow her to function as a normatively competent agent. Second, Haji and Cuypers characterize the authenticity of an initial evaluative scheme in terms of its being relationally authentic, while an evolved evaluative scheme is just characterized as being plain authentic, or just authentic, fully stop (352). One feature of relational authenticity is that its success conditions are a function of whether it undermines an agent s ability to evolve at later times in permissible ways. It is, as they put it, forward-looking (352). The importance, they write, of this forward-looking view of initial scheme authenticity cannot be overstressed (352). Third, the function of the relational authenticity of an initial evaluative scheme in children is to permit for their emergence as full-fledged morally responsible agents at some later time, since, Haji and Cuypers contend, at the time in which children are provided with their initial evaluative schemes, they are not morally responsible agents at all (351). Fourth, evolved schemes which are plain authentic must be causally related to initial schemes through alterations that can only occur through an agent s exercise of her own deliberative control (357). Holding in mind the four points adumbrated in the preceding paragraph, I do not think that Haji and Cuypers have offered convincing reasons to think

276 Michael McKenna that the cases of Beth and Suzie Instant should be treated asymmetrically. They allow that, unlike Beth, Suzie Instant freely A-s and is morally responsible for doing so because, they contend, Suzie Instant is like a child in that she is operating from an initial evaluative scheme that is only relationally authentic (359). The problem with their reasoning here is that the comparison applies in certain respects but, crucially, breaks down in another. No doubt, there are two respects in which the comparison applies. One, related to the first of Haji and Cuypers s points, is that none of the instilled objects of Suzie Instant s evaluative scheme are responsibility-subversive, nor is the means of instillment such as to impair her so that she cannot think critically about her own values (even if at the time they are practically unsheddable for her). She is a current-timeslice duplicate of Suzie Normal after all, and there is no reason to think Suzie Normal is impaired in any of these ways. Another, related to the second of Haji and Cuypers s points, is that Suzie Instant s initial evaluative scheme is, with respect to forward-looking considerations, unproblematic. It poses no problems for later modifications to it; it is relationally authentic. Suzie Instant is able to evolve at future times, just so long as we stipulate that Suzie Normal is and there is no bar to doing that. But despite these similarities, there is a glaring difference between the case of Suzie Instant and that of children with respect to their initial evaluative schemes, and this has to do with the third of Haji and Cuypers s points. As Haji and Cuypers themselves understand the situation, ex hypothesi, children with initial evaluative schemes are not (yet) morally responsible agents; they re at best quasi-morally responsible for their conduct. And their relational authenticity, or as Haji and Cuypers also put it, their authenticity-with-an-eye-toward-moral-responsibility (352), is simply not the same as that of the fully functional competent adult, like Ann or Suzie Normal. Insofar as Haji and Cuypers grant that Suzie Instant is genuinely morally responsible for her act of A-ing rather than just quasi-responsible (and they do), then in one especially important respect, Suzie Instant is very different from a child with respect to her initial evaluative scheme. Furthermore, being a current-timeslice duplicate of Suzie Normal, we can safely assume that the full complement of Suzie Instant s moral personality is just as complex and contains just as much flexibility and sensitivity to the contingencies of life as any psychologically healthy mature person one might meet. Indeed, we can suppose that the phenomenology of Suzie Instant s moral deliberations in, say, fretting over whether to A rather than B, can include reflection on her (false) memories of how she came to mature into the person who now sees what is best to do, how when she was younger and impetuous, she did not weigh things properly, and so on. In this way, Suzie Instant is not very much at all like a child, and is very much like Ann or Suzie Normal. So, when we come to the fourth of Haji and Cuypers s points set out above, we can ask the following question: Does the case of Suzie

Defending Nonhistorical Compatibilism 277 Instant cast into doubt the contention that evolved authentic schemes must be causally related to initial schemes through alterations that can only occur through an agent s exercise of her own deliberative control? Of course, it can be granted that, as a contingent matter, the evolved authentic schemes of actual persons have indeed been the product of a causal history of the sort Haji and Cuypers favor. But the case of Suzie Instant can be taken as a thought experiment meant to challenge the contention that plain authentic evaluative schemes simply must have such a history. And if not, then this gives the nonhistorical compatibilist some resources to resist the contention that Beth is not free and morally responsible when she A-s. 13 6. If my reply to Haji and Cuypers is sound, then we are left with the puzzle set out above: Should our intuitions about the case of Beth, which counsel a freedom-and-responsibility defeating judgment, lead us to treat Suzie Instant in a similar way? Or should our intuitions about Suzie Instant, which counsel a freedom-and-responsibility conferring judgment, lead us to treat Beth in a similar way? While in my estimation Haji and Cuypers are wrong to hold that we can get away with an asymmetrical treatment of these cases, this is not to say that I think that their historical theory is demonstrably refuted. Quite to the contrary, as I have clearly granted, a case like that of Beth offers powerful evidence on behalf of an historical thesis, and the historical thesis Haji and Cuypers offer is really a very attractive one, one that tends thoughtfully to the emergence of persons from childhood and is sensitive to the ways an agent as she evolves can be impaired for future exercises of agency. Holding all of this in mind, it seems perfectly reasonable for the historical compatibilist to contend that Suzie Instant is like post-manipulation Beth in that she did not go through an appropriate process of coming to acquire her system of values under her own steam. Perhaps in the end this is reason to force upon the nonhistorical compatibilist the claim that Suzie Instant is, despite what seems intuitively appealing, not free in acting as she does, nor is she morally responsible. I confess to finding this an attractive conclusion precisely because I see the force of the thoughtful historical thesis that Haji and Cuypers have fashioned, a thesis which gains support from cases like the case of Ann and Beth. Nevertheless, these considerations do not strike me as so forceful that the nonhistorical theorists should be sent packing. The nonhistorical position remains a credible one. As far as I can tell, it remains an open question whether the notions of free action and moral responsibility are historical or instead nonhistorical.

278 Michael McKenna Notes 1. For helpful comments on the ideas contained in this paper, I would like to thank E.J. Coffman, David Palmer, and Derk Pereboom. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ishtiyaque Haji for his insightful and fair-minded comments. 2. In a distinct paper (McKenna, forthcoming), I respond to other critics (especially Mele 2008; and 2009). 3. Historical compatibilists include Fischer and Ravizza, 1998; and Haji, 1998. Mele advises compatibilists to adopt an historical view, but remains agnostic about compatibilism; see Mele, 1995, and 2006. Nonhistorical compatibilists include Arpaly, 2006; Berofsky 2006; Double 1991; Dworkin, 1988; Frankfurt, 1975; Vargas, 2006; Watson, 1999; and Wolf 1987. 4. Note that Mele himself does not think of his Ann and Beth case in this way (2008: 269, n13; and 2009: 464 5, and 466, n7). So, on this point, I mean for my use of his example to depart from his way of thinking about it. For a discussion of this difference between us see McKenna (forthcoming). 5. This notion of value is from Mele, as is the further notion of unsheddable values (Mele, 1995: 116 and 153). 6. Suppose I learned that my son is a lizard-demon sent to destroy all mankind. That could change the way that I now value his life. Fortunately for me, this is not within the ambit of an ordinary context of practical deliberation. 7. In the remained of this paragraph and in the next two, I draw from McKenna (2004: 180 1). In doing so, I have revised slightly the case of Suzie Instant so as to fit it for the points developed in this paper. 8. For an excellent treatment of agents like Suzie Instant, see David Zimmerman s paper, Born Yesterday: Personal Autonomy for Agents without a Past (1999). 9. One potential source of concern about this example is that when Suzie Instant A-s, she does so while non-culpably believing about herself many things that are false. Given reasonable epistemic constraints on moral responsibility, this might excuse or exempt her. But has Haji and Cuypers have pointed out (2007: 349 50), all that is required to avoid this pitfall is that Suzie s act of A-ing be one that does not implicate any objectionably false beliefs. 10. The case of Suzie Normal is very much like the case of Mele s Ernie, who was created by the God Diana in zygote form and then set free to live out a normal human life (2006: 188 9). According to Mele, and I agree, a compatibilist is committed to denying that when Ernie performs some act that Diana intended for him, he does not do so freely and is not morally responsible (193). 11. In this paragraph I borrow from McKenna (forthcoming). I do so again in the next section just in the paragraphs devoted to summarizing my earlier (2004) work. The critical discussion of Haji and Cuypers is original. 12. Mele (2008) also advocates an asymmetrical treatment of these cases. I reply to Mele in McKenna (forthcoming). 13. There is one deeper concern with Haji and Cuypers s view that I will not explore here, but I fear creates serious problems. On their view, an element, E, of an initial scheme counts as inauthentic if it subverts responsibility at a later time within the framework of an agent s evolved scheme. If not, then it seems that it is not a candidate for an inauthentic element. But then the sole basis for whether

Defending Nonhistorical Compatibilism 279 a candidate element E is in fact inauthentic just depends upon whether it does in fact cause a later state, S, which is a responsibility-defeating one. If either it does not cause any state S, or if instead S winds up not being responsibility-defeating, then it is not inauthentic. But if this is the correct rendering of their view, it appears that it is vacuous. E s status as authentic or inauthentic just turns on whether, if and when it causes state S, S winds up being responsibility-defeating. What ends up mattering is just the nature of the later state, S, and this looks to be friendly to a nonhistorical rather than an historical thesis. Haji and Cuypers take up the charge that their proposal is vacuous (2007: 355 6). But their reply is directed at a different way of formulating the charge as in comparison with the one I have set out here. So far as I can tell, Haji and Cuypers have only one way to avoid my charge. In their formulation of initial inauthentic schemes, candidates for E have to be so specified that they count as freedom-and-responsibility-defeating, or at least impeding, for the initial schemes insofar as they contribute elements that tend to defeat authentic evolved schemes. Hence, they ought to be thought of as causal factors that impede responsibility acquisition in such a way that, if at a later time an agent does evolve into one with an authentic evaluative scheme, the E factor at issue counts as a despite factor rather than a counterfactual dependence but-for factor. As one can plainly see, this proposal will not help Haji and Cuypers in advancing their historical line. This is because it is consistent with an agent s acquiring an initially inauthentic evaluative scheme that she nevertheless come to have an evolved authentic evaluative theme. In such cases, obviously the history does not matter. References Arpaly, Nomy. 2003. Unprincipled Virtue. New York: Oxford. Berofsky, Bernard. 2006. Global Control and Freedom. Philosophical Studies 131, No.2: 419 45. Buss, Sarah, and Lee Overton, eds. 2002. Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Double, Richard. 1991. The Non-Reality of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. Dworkin, Gerald. 1988. The Theory and Practice of Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. 1998. Responsibility and Control: An Essay on Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, Harry. 2002. Reply to John Martin Fischer. In Buss and Overton, eds., 2002: 27 31. 1988. The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1975. Three Concepts of Free Action II. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society supp. vol. IL: 113 25. Haji, Ishtiyaque. 1998. Moral Appraisability. New York: Oxford University Press. Haji, Ishtiyaque, and Stefaan Cuypers. 2007. Magical Agents, Global Induction, and the Internalism/Externalism Debate. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85, No.3, 343 71. McKenna, Michael. (forthcoming). Moral Responsibility, Manipulation Arguments, and History: Assessing the Resilience of Nonhistorical Compatibilism. Journal of Ethics.

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