compatibilists could have done otherwise: responsibility and negative agency

Philosophical Review

Compatibilists Could Have Done Otherwise: Responsibility and Negative AgencyAuthor(s): Alison McIntyreSource: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 103, No. 3 (Jul., 1994), pp. 453-488Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185789 .

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The Philosophical Review, Vol. 103, No. 3 (July 1994)

Compatibilists Could Have Done Otherwise: Responsibility and Negative Agency*

Alison McIntyre

One is morally responsible for what one has done only if one could have done otherwise. Those who believe that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism often invoke this principle, known as the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, to show that their position has a foothold in ordinary ways of thinking about the conditions of moral responsibility.' The incompatibilist assumes that whether an agent could have done otherwise in some situation depends on whether that agent could have acted differently in circumstances exactly the same as those that actually existed, and so infers that if determinism is true, this condition of moral responsibility is never satisfied. Interpreted in this way, the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (henceforth "PAP") states a metaphysical rather than a psychological condition of responsibility; one cannot ascertain whether it is satisfied by examining the agent's views, attitudes, and assumptions. Nevertheless, incompatibilists often support this principle by arguing that it is presupposed in our ordinary conception of ourselves as deliberators and agents.2 If determinism is true, then an important element in our self-conception as agents is simply a delusion, according to the incompatibilist, and the practice of holding people responsible for their actions that rests upon it is ungrounded-or at least not as well grounded as we ordinarily suppose.

*I am indebted to John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Ruth Anna Putnam, Adrian Piper, Ken Winkler, Owen Flanagan, and the editors of the Philo- sophical Review for helpful advice and comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to acknowledge support from a Faculty Research Award provided by Wellesley College.

'See Peter Van Inwagen, "Ability and Responsibility," Philosophical Review 87 (1978): 201-24, and Carl Ginet, On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1990), chap. 5.

2Thomas Nagel maintains in The View from Nowhere that we have an ap- parently incompatibilist conception of our own autonomy as agents, though he suggests that it is typically quite inchoate, and if made less inchoate, threatens to be incoherent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) (113-20).

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Some compatibilists have argued that the ability condition that PAP claims to formulate is vague and indeterminate in ordinary thought, and that it could be captured by something weaker than PAP that is compatible with causal determinism. For example, it has been proposed that the kind of ability to do otherwise that is relevant to moral responsibility could be analyzed with a counterfactual conditional: One is morally responsible for what one has done only if one would have done otherwise if one had chosen.3 To respond to the objection that this condition will be satisfied even when the agent could not have chosen to do otherwise, a compatibilist might add another counterfactual conditional, one that attempts to characterize the kind of rational control involved in responsible choice: One is morally responsible for what one has done only if one would have chosen to do otherwise if one had believed that one had reason to do so.4 Since these two conditions explicitly ask us to consider what the agent would have done in circumstances different from the actual ones, they constitute a direct challenge to the incompatibilist interpretation of PAP.

In an influential paper written more than twenty years ago, Harry Frankfurt inspired many compatibilists to adopt a bolder approach. He presented a series of counterexamples to PAP and suggested that compatibilists should reject rather than reinterpret the "could have done otherwise" condition and should deny outright the incompatibilists' claim that our ordinary grounds for attributing responsibility presuppose that agents had the abil-

3Such a condition has been widely discussed as the conditional analysis of 'could have done otherwise'. See defenses of it in G.E. Moore, Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), chap. 6; Bruce Aune, "Hypoth- eticals and 'Can': Another Look," in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 36-41. Objections are raised by Keith Leh- rer in "Cans Without Ifs," in Watson, 41-45; Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), chap. 6; and Susan Wolf, Freedom within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 97-100.

4For the objection see, for example, Roderick Chisholm, "Human Free- dom and the Self," in Watson, 24-35. This response resembles Susan Wolf's proposal in "Asymmetrical Freedom," Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 151- 66, reprinted in Moral Responsibility, ed. J.M. Fischer (Ithaca: Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1986), 225-40, as well as the approach defended in Patricia Greenspan's "Unfreedom and Responsibility," in Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1987), 74-75.

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ity to do or to choose otherwise.5 Frankfurt's counterexamples to PAP involve actions that are performed in circumstances that make it inevitable that the agent will perform a certain action, but do not bring it about that the action is performed. There might, for example, be a super-skilled neurologist with the ability to control an agent's thoughts and actions, who stood by, monitoring the agent's deliberations, ready to interfere should the agent show signs of deciding not to perform a particular kind of action. But as things turned out, the agent never considered not performing this kind of action, there was no intervention by the neurologist, and the action was produced in the ordinary way by a process of ordinary deliberation. Since the factor that made it impossible for the agent to do otherwise played no role in producing the action that was actually performed, it seems right to say that the agent could be held morally responsible for the action. As Frankfurt explained: "The circumstances that made it impossible for him to do otherwise could have been subtracted from the situation without affecting what happened or why it happened in any way." He suggested the following as a replacement for PAP: An agent is not morally responsible for what he does if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise.6

We view the agents in these Frankfurt-style examples with dramatic irony: they think that they could have chosen otherwise and done otherwise, but their belief is false. They are deluded in believing that they possess a kind of control that they actually lack. This is just the kind of dramatic irony that the incompatibilist invokes when he invites us to consider the possibility that determinism is true. If determinism is true, he might say, then we are deluded about our capacities as agents, and since we must possess these very capacities in order to be morally responsible agents, our practice of holding ourselves and others morally responsible will be unjustified. Frankfurt's examples pose an ef-

5"Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 828-39.

6Ibid., 837-39. "It is therefore of no particular significance," Frankfurt observed in a later article, "so far as ascriptions of moral responsibility are concerned, whether determinism is true or false, or whether it is compatible or incompatible with free will as PAP construes it." See "What We Are Morally Responsible For," in The Importance of What We Care About (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 95.

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fective challenge to this because they show that one could concede the first point, the possibility that we are deluded in some way, without drawing the incompatibilist conclusion. That is, even if PAP characterizes the deliberative perspectives of ordinary agents, and even if ordinary agents are deluded in believing that it is satisfied, this may nevertheless be irrelevant to the question of moral responsibility (though it may be relevant to the question of freedom), because moral responsibility does not require the kind of freedom that PAP describes.

Even the conditional analyses of "could have done otherwise" mentioned above can be shown to be too stringent as conditions of moral responsibility when they are applied to Frankfurt's examples. The agents in these examples could not have done otherwise if they had chosen. Nor could they have chosen to do otherwise if they had believed that they had reason to do so. Yet it seems that they could nevertheless be morally responsible for what they have done.7 Thus, Frankfurt's discussion seems to sug- gest that moral responsibility requires self-determination of some sort, and once that has been shown to exist, counterfactual conditions describing alternate possibilities-whether conditional or categorical-have no independent significance. But if compatibilists accept this suggestion they will make themselves vul- nerable to a powerful line of objection from incompatibilists. Even if the ability to do otherwise is not a necessary condition of moral responsibility for actions, the incompatibilist might point out, it is clearly a necessary condition of moral responsibility for omissions. If somebody could not have performed an action that she failed to perform, she could not be morally responsible for her failure to act, even if her decision was not influenced in any way by her lack of ability. Com- patibilists might feel tempted to retort that incompatibilism

7Frankfurt's examples do not support compatibilism directly; nor do Franfurt's arguments show that replacements for PAP won't need to be supplemented by the proviso that the action in question is not causally determined. See, for example, critical discussions by John M. Fischer, in "Responsibility and Control," in Fischer, Moral Responsibility, 174-90, and "Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility," in Schoeman, Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, 86-90; Robert Heinaman, "Incompatibilism without the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (1986): 266-76; and David Blumenfeld, "The Principle of Alternate Possibilities," Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 339-45. I will take up such objections below.

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can't be defended successfully if the arguments for it rest on special features of negative agency. But of course a defense of compatibilism that is plausible only for cases of positive agency is equally flawed, and incompatibilists are entitled to raise a similar objection: if the compatibilist's arguments depend on the special characteristics of actions, then they have also failed to give an adequate account of the conditions of responsible agency.

In what follows I will map out a compatibilist response to this objection that will distinguish sharply between the conditions of moral responsibility for actions and for omissions. Separate conditions are needed not because the grounds of moral responsibility are different in each case, but rather because the same kind of ground has to be adjusted to fit the differing contours of positive and negative agency. This segregated approach supports compatibilism by contesting the incompatibilists' claims to have secured certain territory-the responsibility conditions for negative agency-for themselves. At the same time, it calls into question the assumption, widespread among compatibilists, that an agent's inability to do otherwise is relevant to our responsibility attributions only when it somehow impairs the agent's autonomy, either by lim- iting his or her actual decision making or by affecting the way in which a decision is expressed in action.

1. Negative Agency: A Refuge for Incompatibilism?

Let us look more closely at the incompatibilist's challenge and the intuitive judgment about moral responsibility upon which it relies. The Principle of Possible Action (henceforth "PPA") is a counterpart to PAP that applies to omissions: One is morally responsible for failing to perform a given act only if one could have performed it. Some who accept that Frankfurt's examples undermine PAP would nevertheless defend PPA on the grounds that attributions of moral responsibility for omissions presuppose the ability to do otherwise in a way that attributions of moral responsibility for actions do not. The strongest support for PPA comes from examples in which an agent voluntarily omits to perform some action, thinking that she could have performed it, although unbeknownst to her, she could not have performed the action if she had tried.8 Consider this example:

8Peter van Inwagen seems to have introduced this strategy to defend

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You are a forest ranger and a large forest fire is approaching from the north. You believe that you could start a backfire heading north which would burn the timber in the fire's path and thereby prevent the forest fire from continuing southward. More specifi- cally, you believe that you could use the gasoline in your truck's fuel tank and some dry matches in your kitchen to do this. But you decide not to start a backfire, the forest fire sweeps onward, and a large area of forest to the south is destroyed. Unbeknownst to you, the truck's fuel tank has sprung a leak and is now empty, and your matches are sitting in a puddle of water. You couldn't have started a backfire if you had tried. If we suppose that there was no other method of stopping the fire available to you, it follows that you could not have prevented the fire from continuing southward if you had tried.

Case 1. It is your duty as a forest ranger to start a backfire and you believe that you should do so, but out of laziness rationalized with the vain hope that the fire will burn itself out, you do nothing to stop the fire. When you come to be aware of what you believe to be the full consequences of your omission you feel terrible.

Case 2. It has been decided by your superiors that rangers should not start backfires and use other such techniques to contain forest fires because they interfere with the natural cycle of burning and regrowth, a process that is beneficial to the forest ecosystem over the long term. You accept this policy and comply with it, though you feel some residual regret about your role in this particular case when you think about the beauty of the areas that were destroyed and the many animals that perished in the fire.

Your decision not to start a backfire is made voluntarily in both cases. However, just as the agents in Frankfurt's examples do not realize that they lack a kind of control that they assume they have, you lack the ability to start a backfire that your deliberations and

PPA with an example involving someone who refrained from telephoning the police to prevent a crime while, unbeknownst to him, the telephone system for the whole city was out of order at the time (see "Ability and Responsibility," 204-5, and An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1983), 165-66). John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza adopt a similar approach to defend PPA in "Responsibility and Inevitability," Ethics 101 (1991): 258-78. Fischer had also defended this principle in "Responsibility and Failure," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society n.s. 86 (1985-86): 251-70.

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your later regrets seem to presuppose. Can you be held morally responsible for allowing the forest fire to continue in cases 1 and 2? And in general in such cases, which I will call cases of delusory negative agency, can the agents be morally responsible for what they think that they allow?

Many compatibilist analyses would imply that the agents in such cases could be morally responsible for what they allowed, despite their lack of control, provided that the agents are self-determining or autonomous. For example, according to Susan Wolf's asymmetrical account of the conditions of moral responsibility, the ability to do otherwise is required only in situations in which there actually was good and sufficient reason for the agent to do otherwise.9 Of the examples mentioned above, Case 2 would satisfy this condition of moral responsibility while Case 1 would not; yet there seems to be no reason to distinguish the two cases in our answer to this question. The fact that you had good reason to act as you did in Case 2 does not, all by itself, show that the fact that you could not have done otherwise is irrelevant. In Elbow Room, Daniel Dennett argues that "it is seldom that we even seem to care whether or not a person could have done otherwise." Citing Martin Luth- er's famous dictum, Dennett suggests that when we do care "it is often because we wish to draw the opposite conclusion from the one the tradition endorses" (133). Taken as a claim about the conditions of moral responsibility for actions, this may well be true. But it is implausible when applied to cases of delusory negative agency. Similarly, Frankfurt's replacement for PAP-An agent is not morally responsible for what he does if he did it only because he could not have done otherwise-would not rule out moral responsibility in cases of delusory negative agency, because the agents act voluntarily, unaware of their diminished abilities.'0

A compatibilist might argue that the agents are morally responsible for what they allow in cases of delusory negative agency, because they are morally responsible for their choices, and their agency in such situations simply consists in making the choice not to act. It is true that when we praise or blame people for allowing

9See "Asymmetrical Freedom." 10About a similar example introduced by Peter van Inwagen, Frankfurt

comments: "I believe that P may be morally responsible for failing to call the police even though he could not have avoided the failure" ("What We Are Morally Responsible For," 99-103).

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some consequence by omitting to prevent it, if we focus on the traits of character that the agents' decisions express-for example, their admirable tolerance and forbearance, or their criticizable laziness or inattention-it may not seem relevant to know whether they could have prevented the consequence. It is enough that they allowed it by deciding not to try to prevent it. So there is an atten- uated sense of "allow" according to which one allows what one assents to or foresees as the consequences of an omission. Hence, there is a sense in which agents can be said to "allow" the alleged consequences of their delusory negative agency.

However, because the responsibility conditions for what agents fail to do provide the basis for responsibility conditions for the consequences which agents allow by failing to act, the compatibilist must say more than this about cases of delusory negative agency. Negative agency is generally thought to have an additional dimen- sion that involves responsibility for the consequences of one's conduct, and when we praise or blame people for allowing some consequence and describe them as responsible for that consequence, it is more difficult to accept the verdict that their ability to prevent the consequence is not required. For example, if you believe that you could have stopped the forest fire by doing a rain dance that (you believe) would have brought on torrential rains, and if you had deliberately refrained from doing your rain dance, then we would not normally say that you are responsible for the consequences of the fire's southward progress." At most, we would hold you responsible for your decision not to act. In fact, we would not normally say that you allowed these states of affairs to obtain even if you had foreseen them in making your decision. For the rest of this essay I will use the term 'allowing' to refer to the kind of allowing that involves negative agency with respect to some consequence. Hence, the dilemma that the compatibilist must face is this: on the one hand, the judgment that agents can be morally responsible for what they think they allow in cases of delusory negative agency is implausible; on the other hand, if autonomous, self-determining agents in cases of delusory negative agency cannot be morally responsible for the consequences they think they allow, then what condition on responsible negative agency do they fail to satisfy?

"1Fischer and Ravizza cite Carl Ginet as the source of a similar example in "Responsibility and Inevitability," 261.

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It would be too large a concession for a compatibilist to evade this question by maintaining that moral responsibility concerns only the evaluation of an agent's judgments and character as expressed in her intention and decision, and that responsibility for consequences belongs to some more practical, legal or jurisprudential realm in which determinations about compensation for damages or retribution for harm must be made. After all, the problem of moral luck arises because what is properly called moral responsibility involves responsibility for the consequences of one's actions and omissions.'2 We hold the negligent driver who has caused an accident morally responsible for what he causes, even though his decisions and character may be just like those of a more fortunate driver who harms no one. Those who attempt murder and fail are held morally responsible for less than are those whose attempts suc- ceed. Furthermore, the phenomenon of agent regret seems to presuppose a conception of moral agency that links agents to the states of affairs that they cause or allow. For example, you, the forest ranger in Case 2 above, might feel some residual regret that your omission allowed the forest fire to continue southward. If you discovered only the next day that, through no fault of your own, you could not have started the backfire, you would not be relieved of responsibility for your choice, but you would no longer feel responsible for the consequence of your failure to act. Therefore, a concern with consequences and agency carries over from theories of moral responsibility to theories of punishment and of civil and criminal liability, and it includes concerns about negative as well as positive agency.

Incompatibilists point to cases of delusory negative agency and argue that they provide independent support for their claim that PPA is true. The agent who could not have performed the action that he omitted to perform cannot be morally responsible for this omission, it would be maintained, because the agent lacks the relevant kind of control: the ability to do otherwise in the actual circumstances. If this is right, and if the ability to do otherwise in the actual circumstances is ever relevant to responsibility, then the

120n moral luck, see Bernard Williams, "Moral Luck," in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 50 (1976): 115-35, and Thomas Nagel, "Moral Luck," in Mortal Questions. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24-38.

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compatibilist position is untenable. For this reason, PPA might ap- pear to provide a fairly secure refuge to those who believe that causal determinism and moral responsibility are incompatible, even if they have conceded that PAP is undermined by Frankfurt's examples.

2. The Asymmetry Thesis and Reductionism about Negative Agency

Some who think that Frankfurt's examples effectively undermine PAP would nevertheless defend PPA on the grounds that attributions of moral responsibility for omissions presuppose the ability to do otherwise in a way that attributions of moral responsibility for actions do not. I will call their position (the view that PPA is true while PAP is false) the asymmetry thesis.'3 PPA would seem to imply the following principle concerning the consequences of omissions (which I will call "PPA-C"): One is morally responsible for a consequence of one's omission to perform a given act only if one could have performed that act and would thereby have prevented the consequence. A defender of the asymmetry thesis could make the following argument in support of PPA-C: This principle expresses our ordinary intuitive standards for attributing moral responsibility for the consequences of omissions, because negative agency is irreducibly counterfactual. What you allow is what you could have prevented. Positive agency, by contrast, depends on the causal relations that hold between the agent's decision, action, and the consequence of the action; so moral responsibility for the consequences of actions depends on causal rather than counterfactual claims. An agent could be responsible for a consequence of his action even if he could not have avoided the action (as in one of Frankfurt's examples) and so could not have avoided causing that consequence. But attributions of responsibility for the consequences of omissions, or "negative agency" have heftier metaphysical com-

13The asymmetry thesis is defended by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza in "Responsibility and Inevitability." Fischer had also defended this claim in "Responsibility and Failure." That both PAP and PPA can be undermined by Frankfurt-style examples is claimed by Frankfurt himself in "What We Are Morally Responsible For," 101-3; and by Robert Heinaman in "Incompatibilism without the Principle of Alternative Possibilities," 266-76.

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mitments: the agent must have had the ability to perform the omitted action if he is to be held responsible for the omission or its consequences.

Are PPA and PPA-C needed to explain why agents are not morally responsible for the consequences of their omissions in cases of delusory negative agency? These examples do draw attention to an important difference between negative and positive agency. If by omitting to perform some act A you have allowed some event E to occur, then it must be true that your doing A would have prevented E. However, if an action of yours has caused some event E, it need not be true that an alternative course of action by you would have prevented E. Thus, if you shoot Sam you can be morally responsible for causing him to be shot even if it is true that if you had refrained from shooting him, he still would have been shot by someone else who stood waiting nearby. In contrast, you can be morally responsible for allowing Sam to drown by refusing to toss him a life preserver only if tossing him a life preserver would have prevented him from drowning.

However, this contrast alone does not vindicate PPA-C. We need only assert that one is morally responsible for allowing some circumstance C by omitting to perform some act A only if one's doing A would have prevented C (henceforth, "the counterfactual condition on negative agency") to explain why agents cannot be held morally responsible for the "consequences" of delusory negative agency in the examples discussed so far. PPA-C makes an additional claim as well: One is morally responsible for allowing some circumstance C by omitting to perform some act A only if one could have done A. Therefore, one can accept that the agents cannot be morally responsible for the consequences that they believe that they allow in cases of delusory negative agency and avoid committing oneself to PPA or PPA-C.

Accepting the counterfactual condition on negative agency sharpens this debate in two ways. First, it shows that a compatibilist replacement for PPA-C must somehow incorporate the counterfactual condition on negative agency. It follows, then, that a compatibilist who wants to account for responsibility ascriptions based on omissions can't afford to be dismissive of the very idea that responsibility might have some sort of counterfactual "could have done otherwise" condition associated with it.

Drawing attention to the counterfactual condition on negative agency helps to sharpen the debate about PPA in another impor-

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tant way as well. It closes off what might look like a tempting escape route for compatibilists who are inclined to hold the metaphysically lopsided asymmetry thesis for the reasons given here, but see the difficulties it raises for compatibilism. It is sometimes suggested that omissions can somehow be reduced to positive actions.'4 Often left implicit is the further claim that an agent's relation to the consequences of an omission can somehow be explained in terms of causal relationships between actually occurring events or states of affairs and the absence of such causal relationships.

This approach is implausible as a general account of acts of omission because many omissions do not happen (or rather, fail to happen) on any particular occasion and so do not seem to be constituted by any particular positive action. More significantly, this reductionist approach could never justify holding an agent responsible for the consequence of an omission. For example, to have allowed one's neighbor's house to burn down is not simply (a) to have performed an alternative action, playing the piano let us say, which (b) constituted the non-causing of an action (calling the fire department) and so (c) constituted the non-causing of the alternative consequence (the fire is put out). This is because the relations described in (a), (b), and (c) can all hold even when calling the fire department would not have summoned the fire trucks (for example, because their phones were not working), or would not have summoned them in time (for example, because they were attending to another fire far across town). In those cases, the counterfactual condition on negative agency is not satisfied; calling the fire department would not have prevented the neighbor's house from burning down. As a result, one cannot be morally responsible for allowing the neighbor's house to burn. Therefore, it is necessary to establish what one could have done had one acted in order

14For example, Fischer and Ravizza are compatibilists (about determinism and moral responsibility) who accept the asymmetry thesis. They pro- pose a reductionist strategy, suggesting that "in any case of apparent moral responsibility for an omission, there is some action, consequence-particular, or consequence-universal for which the agent is morally responsible (and to which there need be no alternative possibility)" ("Responsibility and Inevitability," 277). They also analyze an omission as a case of not- causing a bodily movement. Bruce Vermazen also offers a reductionist account of omissions in "Negative Agency," in Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events, ed. Vermazen and Hintikka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 93-104.

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to attribute responsibility for what one allowed by failing to act. Because the nature of negative agency rests on what an agent could have caused, and is, as a result, irreducibly counterfactual, the reductionist approach cannot elucidate the conditions of moral responsibility for negative agency. Yet compatibilism will be plausible only if it is able to justify our practice of (at least sometimes) holding a person responsible for allowing some consequence by failing to prevent it. A compatibilist with suitably broad ambitions must therefore develop an account that acknowledges this fact about negative agency but stops short of embracing PPA.

3. Compatibilist Replacements for PAP and PPA

So far, I have identified a middle course for a compatibilist to nav- igate with respect to the responsibility conditions for negative agency. The compatibilist must avoid the metaphysical commitments of PPA and PPA-C while also avoiding the error of modeling responsibility conditions for negative agency on those for positive agency and thereby leaving out the counterfactual condition on negative agency. Such a strategy, successfully pursued, should convert proponents of the asymmetry thesis to a more resolute form of compatibilism. In addition, there is a more direct, positive argument available against PPA. It would rule out moral responsibility for omissions that share the pertinent characteristics of Frankfurt's counterexamples to PAP. Yet the line of reasoning that is usually applied to Frankfurt examples involving actions applies equally well to similar examples that involve failures to act. For example, consider a variant of the forest ranger example given above that would make it into a Frankfurt case.

You, the forest ranger, decide not to start a backfire to prevent the forest fire from advancing southward. A group of fanatical en- vironmentalists who are zealous opponents of forest fire prevention efforts have hired a super-skilled neurologist to monitor your deliberations. If you had shown any sign of seriously considering the option of starting a backfire, the neurologist would have inter- vened and caused you to decide not to take any preventive action. As things turned out, you decided "under your own steam" not to act, but because of the neurologist's monitoring, you could not have decided to start a backfire if you had believed that there was

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reason to do so, and because of this fact, you could not have started a backfire. However, in this case, you could have started a backfire if you had decided to do so and had tried: sufficient materials were at hand. And if you had started a backfire, you would have kept the forest fire from advancing southward.

In this case, as in Frankfurt's cases, it seems right to say that you can be morally responsible for your omission, despite the fact that you could not have performed the corresponding action and so could not have done otherwise. Yet this is just what the proponents of PPA and PPA-C must deny.

What follows is an alternative set of conditions of moral responsibility for negative agency that would yield the intuitively correct verdicts about both kinds of examples-cases of delusory negative agency and Frankfurt cases involving omissions.'5

An agent is morally responsible for omitting to perform an action A only if

(a) the agent decided not to do A through a process of ordinary deliberation,

(b) in some situation in which the agent believed that there was reason to do A, the agent would have decided to do A through a process of ordinary deliberation,'6 and

15Robert Heinaman argues that Frankfurt-style cases involving omissions do in fact disprove PPA ("Incompatibilism without the Principle of Alter- native Possibilities," 269-70). But he doesn't show how to rule out cases of delusory negative agency, and if no way to do so has been provided, PPA has not been successfully undermined.

16Condition (b) is similar to a condition of moral responsibility proposed by Fischer and Ravizza to explain why agents in Frankfurt cases involving actions can be morally responsible for their conduct. They pro- pose that an agent S can be morally responsible for some consequence C of his action provided that the sequence leading from a mechanism M to his action A, and from A to C via a process P, is a responsive one: "the sequence leading to C is responsive if and only if there exists some action A* (other than A) such that: (i) there exists some possible scenario in which an M-type mechanism operates, the agent has reason to do A*, and the agent does A*, and (ii) if S were to do A*, others' behavior were held fixed, and a P-type process were to occur, then C would not occur ("Re- sponsibility and Inevitability," 273). They require that the agent could have done otherwise in some possible situation in which he had reason to do so. Condition (c) in the text requires that the agent could have done otherwise in the actual circumstances if he had decided to do so. Fischer and Ravizza use a counterfactual condition to characterize a causal sequence

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(c) the agent could have done A if he or she had decided to do so in the actual circumstances.

An agent is, in addition, morally responsible for allowing some consequence C of this omission only if

(d) the agent would have prevented C by performing A in the actual circumstances.

"Ordinary deliberation" is mentioned in conditions (a) and (b); by this I mean a process of deliberation that was not controlled by some external factor (like the intervening neurologist or hypnotic suggestion), or by some internal factor like panic or mania that involves a loss of rational control.

The agent's actual circumstances are considered in order to ascertain whether the agent could have performed the omitted action if he had decided to (condition (c)) and to ascertain whether performing the omitted action would have prevented the consequence (condition (d)). The conditions taken together do not, however, require that the agent could have decided to perform the omitted action in the actual circumstances. What mat- ters is that the agent would have decided to do otherwise through a process of ordinary deliberation in some possible situation in which the agent believed that there was reason to do so (condition (b)).

Note that condition (b) does not require that the agent would have decided to do A in every situation in which the agent believed that there was reason to do so, but only that there is some situation in which this occurs. Nor does this condition require that the agent would decide to perform A in the possible situations most similar to the actual world in which the agent has reason to do so. It requires only that there is at least one possible situation of this type.'7 Therefore, this condition is considerably weaker than

leading from an action to one of its consequences in (ii). Condition (d) in the text characterizes a relation of counterfactual dependence between performing the omitted action and preventing some consequence. Other departures from their approach will be discussed later in the text when a condition of moral responsibility for actions is put forward.

17The condition of moral responsibility for actions proposed by Fischer and Ravizza is similar in this respect. They point out that if the condition required that the agent would have done otherwise in any situation in which he had sufficient reason to do so, then even an unexercised dispo-

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PPA, since PPA would require that the agent could have performed the omitted action in the actual circumstances.

Although condition (b) allows us to vary the circumstances in which the agent believes that there is reason to do otherwise in order to see if there is one in which the agent would decide to do so, it doesn't license us to vary the agent's capacities or beliefs in order to identify a possible situation in which the agent decides to do otherwise. If an agent is so constituted that she would never in any possible situation decide to do otherwise, then condition (b) is not satisfied. Nevertheless, it might be objected that these conditions are still too permissive. For example, would they imply that an agent who has a phobia that prevents him from picking up a snake could be morally responsible for his failure?'8 Well, condition (b) requires that the agent could have decided to pick up the snake in some possible situation. The agent's phobia might not prevent him from deciding to pick up a snake in some situation in which the stakes are high enough; so condition (b) might very well be satisfied. Condition (c) is relativized, however, to the actual circumstances; for it to be satisfied, the agent, as he is now constituted, must be able to carry out a decision to pick up the snake in the circumstances, as they now are. So it seems that condition (c) probably would not be satisfied if the agent were genuinely phobic about snakes.

Of course, nobody believes that we are morally responsible for all of the states of affairs that we allow in this extremely broad sense. My aim here is to give only a necessary condition of moral responsibility for negative agency in order to develop a compatibilist alternative to PPA and PPA-C. The additional legal, moral, epistemic, and psychological conditions that would be needed to produce a sufficient condition of moral responsibility for actions or omissions will not be considered here. This modest goal explains my use of the idiom 'can be morally responsible' in giving my verdicts about various examples. It would be premature to say that the agent is morally responsible in these cases without dem-

sition to weak-willed action would rule out moral responsibility (269-70). See also Fischer's "Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility," 86-90.

181 thank John Fischer for bringing this kind of objection to my attention.

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onstrating that other necessary conditions of responsibility have been met.

We can now apply this condition to the Frankfurt-style variant of the forest ranger example. Since the neurologist did not in fact interfere with your deliberations, condition (a) is satisfied. Though you could not have decided to start a backfire in the actual circumstances, there is a possible situation in which you would have made this decision if you had believed that there was reason to do so. A situation in which the scientist does not exist and you believe that you have reason to start a backfire (but which is otherwise similar to what you believe your circumstances to be) would satisfy condition (b). Since you could have started a backfire if you had decided to in the actual circumstances, condition (c) is satisfied, and since you would have succeeded if you had tried to stop the forest fire with a backfire in the actual circumstances, condition (d) is satisfied.

Condition (d) incorporates the counterfactual condition on negative agency. But that condition alone would not be enough to rule out all cases of delusory negative agency. To see why this is so, consider yet another version of the forest fire example: suppose that you, the forest ranger, had decided not to start a backfire after hearing on the radio about the approaching forest fire. You decided to stay in your cabin and take a nap. Unbeknownst to you, the cabin door was locked and you could not have left the cabin (though the supplies needed to start a backfire were all at hand). In this situation, you could have started a backfire if you had tried-if you had spread gasoline and ignited it with your matches-but you could not have made these efforts. This shows why condition (c) is needed as well: we must ask whether the agent could have performed the action in question if he had tried to do so in the actual circumstances.'9

19Frankfurt claims that a person cannot be morally responsible for failing to do something that he could not have done if his failure is impersonal: a failure that occurs "because of events or states of affairs that are bound to occur or to obtain no matter what the person himself does" ("What We Are Morally Responsible For," 101-2, emphasis added). In "Responsibility and Failure" Fischer raises a similar objection to Frankfurt's distinction: according to Frankfurt's account, a swimmer who was prevented from saving a child because he was eaten by a shark en route would have experienced a personal rather than an impersonal failure: it would not have occurred if he had moved his body differently-if he had in fact swum to the child (260).

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A set of conditions of moral responsibility for actions could be developed on this model:

An agent is morally responsible for performing an action A only if

(a') the agent's doing A was brought about through a process of ordinary deliberation,

(b') in some situation in which the agent believed that there was reason to do something other than A, the agent would have decided to do so through a process of ordinary deliberation and would have done so.20

The agent is, in addition, morally responsible for causing some consequence C of A only if

(c') the agent would not have caused C if he had not performed A in the actual circumstances.

Three features of this analysis distinguish it from the more tradi- tional conditional analyses compatibilists have put forward. First, regarding the ability to do otherwise, the agent need only have the ability to do otherwise in some situation in which the agent believed that there was reason to do so (condition (b')). This condition is weaker than one that requires that the agent could have done otherwise in the actual circumstances if he had chosen to do so. (I will defend this weakening of the condition in the next section.) Second, condition (b') requires that there be some possible situation in which the agent would decide to do otherwise. In contrast, the claim that an agent would have done otherwise if he had chosen can be true even if there is no possible situation in which the agent would have decided to do otherwise. (I will defend this condition further in section 6 below.) Third, it might be suggested that an agent is morally responsible for a consequence of action only if the consequence would not have occurred if the agent had not performed the action in question.2' But this rules out responsibility for con-

20Condition (b') here is similar to condition (i) proposed by Fischer and Ravizza: "there exists some possible scenario in which an M-type mechanism operates, the agent has reason to do A*, and the agent does A*" ("Responsibility and Inevitability," 273). I will discuss their account of "mechanisms" below in section 6.

21Fischer and Ravizza require that a consequence of action be prevent-

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sequences in cases of preemptive causation or causal overdetermination in which some other factor would have caused a consequence if the actual cause had not occurred. To allow for the preemptive causation or causal overdetermination of some consequence by an action, condition (c') requires only that the agent would not have caused C if he had not performed A. If one required that C would not have occurred at all if the agent had not performed A, then either this condition will not be satisfied in cases of preemption or overdetermination, or special conditions of event in- dividuation must be stipulated according to which C, an event particular, would not have occurred if it had been differently caused.22

These conditions of moral responsibility for positive and negative agency can be satisfied even if causal determinism is true. Nei- ther asks whether the agent could have decided to do otherwise and could have done otherwise in the circumstances that actually existed. Therefore, compatibilist alternatives to PAP and PPA have been proposed that meet three conditions: (1) They treat Frank- furt examples involving actions and omissions symmetrically. One liability of the asymmetry thesis (the view that PAP is false, but PPA is true) is that it fails to satisfy this condition. (2) In section 1, it was shown that compatibilist replacements for PAP did not rule out responsibility for the alleged consequences of delusory negative agency. The condition of moral responsibility for negative agency is not satisfied in cases of delusory negative agency. (3) Since the condition of moral responsibility for negative agency is compatible with causal determinism, it shows that a compatibilist need not be driven to adopt a reductionist account of negative agency. For all of these reasons, the compatibilist can justly claim to have shifted the burden of proof back to the incompatibilist. The examples of delusory negative agency do not give us any reason to think that we must accept PPA. In addition, since PPA rules out responsibility in cases involving negative agency that share the

able; they require: "(ii) if S were to do A*, others' behavior were held fixed, and a P-type process were to occur, then C would not occur" (ibid.). Below, in section 4, I present an example (the Princess example) that would not satisfy this condition, but in which, I argue, the agent can be responsible for the consequence in question.

22Peter Van Inwagen takes the second approach in "Ability and Re- sponsibility."

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pertinent features of Frankfurt's examples, the incompatibilist who accepts PPA must explain and defend this judgment.

4. Overdetermination: A New Asymmetry

An incompatibilist need not object to the conditions of responsibility suggested above in themselves, as mere necessary conditions of moral responsibility. Moreover, an incompatibilist could concede that PPA is too strong a condition of moral responsibility because it rules out moral responsibility for omissions in Frankfurt-style cases. After all, the incompatibilist is entitled to say about Frankfurt cases involving omissions just what he might consistently say about Frankfurt cases involving actions: that the agent can be morally responsible for his conduct provided that, as things actually turned out, the agent's decision was not causally determined and the agent's conduct was not causally determined independently of the agent's decision. That is, the agents in Frankfurt cases can be morally responsible for their actions or omissions only if they live in "libertarian worlds": indeterministic worlds in which their conduct is not causally determined by factors that exist independently of, or prior to, their decisions.

In fact, an incompatibilist who took this view of the matter might develop an entirely different sort of objection to the compatibilist position outlined above. It could be maintained that only the incompatibilist view can explain what is behind our ordinary, pretheoretical judgment that cases of delusory negative agency block moral responsibility. It is because the agents' omissions were causally determined by factors that existed independently of their decisions, the incompatibilist might say, that we believe that they are not morally responsible.23

The incompatibilist could develop this argument by drawing a distinction between the ways in which Frankfurt examples and cases of delusory negative agency involve the overdetermination of conduct.24 In the Frankfurt cases, if the agent lives in a libertarian

23Fischer outlines a similar claim, on the incompatibilist's behalf, about all cases of delusory negative agency in "Responsibility and Control," 185- 89.

24Frankfurt's original argument had drawn upon an analogy between the compatibility of moral responsibility with overdetermination and the compatibility of moral responsibility with causal determination. "The dis-

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world, her conduct may be determined or even overdetermined in a certain sense, but it is not causally determined, and is therefore not causally overdetermined. The actual decision-making process of a libertarian agent in a Frankfurt case is not causally determined, and though her conduct may be causally determined by her decision, it is not causally determined by factors that exist prior to or independently of her decision. Given the circumstances, it is what we could call "logically determined" that she will make the decision that she actually makes, one way or the other, under her own steam or through the neurologist's intervention. But if she does not consider the alternative decision and the neurologist does not intervene, then since she lives in a libertarian world, her decision is not causally determined. If she had considered doing otherwise and had thereby caused the neurologist to intervene, then the alternative causal condition for the agent's decision would have been complete and would have constituted a sufficient causal condition of the agent's making that decision. That is, a set of conditions would have been realized that, taken together with the laws of nature, would have entailed that she would decide in that way. And because that is so, the incompatibilist would claim, she would not be morally responsible for her decision and action. But as things actually turn out in a Frankfurt example, no sufficient causal condition of the agent's decision is actually realized, and it is because this is so, according to the incompatibilist, that she can be morally responsible for her conduct.

For example, in the Frankfurt-style variant of the forest fire example, if things had gone differently, if you, the forest ranger, had considered starting a backfire, you would have been compelled by the neurologist (acting for the ecological zealots, remember) to decide not to start a backfire. If that had occurred, then there would have been a sufficient causal condition of your decision, even if you lived in a libertarian world. But as things actually turned out, the neurologist did not intervene because you did not consider starting a backfire. Though it was logically determined before

tinctively potent element in this sort of counter-example to PAP is a certain kind of overdetermination, which involves a sequential fail-safe arrange- ment such that one causally sufficient factor functions exclusively as backup for another. ... Thus the backup factor may contribute nothing whatever to bringing about the effect whose occurrence it guarantees" ("What We Are Responsible For," 96).

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you deliberated that you would decide not to start a backfire, it was not determined (if you live in a libertarian world) which causal route leading to that decision (the deterministic one or the non- deterministic one) would be operative. You can be morally responsible for your conduct, the incompatibilist would argue, because there is in fact, no actually realized sufficient causal condition of your conduct that does not involve your decision.

But in contrast, the incompatibilist could point out, in cases of delusory negative agency, there is a sufficient causal condition of the agent's conduct that exists independently of the agent's decision, and this fact explains why the agents in such cases are not morally responsible for their omissions: their omissions are causally determined by factors other than their decisions. Even if these agents exist in a libertarian world, it is causally determined that they will not perform the omitted action. How can a compatibilist explain the judgment that these agents are not morally responsible for what they think they allow, the incompatibilist could ask, if the compatibilist cannot point to the causal determination of their conduct by factors other than their (undetermined) decisions as the feature that prevents them from being responsible? In general, the incompatibilist would maintain, cases of causal determination preclude responsibility because in these cases, there is a sufficient causal condition for the agent's conduct that exists independently of the agent's decision. And, the incompatibilist would add, if causal determinism is true, then all of our actions have sufficient causal conditions that exist prior to and independently of our decisions.

To defeat this new line of argument the compatibilist needs to show that it is not because their omissions are causally determined that the agents in cases of delusory negative agency cannot be morally responsible for them. To discredit the incompatibilist's explanation of our ordinary pretheoretical judgments about delusory negative agency, I will argue that the causal determination of actions by factors that exist independently of the agent's choice does not, in the same intuitive way, lead us to deny that the agent can be morally responsible for them. Because this is so, the incompatibilist has not accurately explained what lies behind our judgments about delusory negative agency.

Consider this case of overdetermined positive agency: The Princess is attending the opera. During the intermission,

she rises and stands in her box, and while she stands, she is pho-

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tographed and her subjects turn to watch her. She knows that if she sits down after the customary period of one minute, she will no longer be photographed, her subjects will turn away, and the opera will resume. The Princess is eager to make use of the photo opportunity, so, defying conventional royal etiquette, she stands for four minutes instead of the customary one minute. Unbeknownst to her, a super-skilled scientist who is employed by the photogra- pher for a London tabloid has created a magnetic field around the Princess in order to ensure that she would remain standing for an additional three minutes after the customary one minute of standing is over. This magnetic field would have prevented her from changing her pose by more than an inch of two if she had tried to do so. But she doesn't try to move and the magnetic field has no special causal influence: everything happens just as it would have if the magnetic field did not exist, and nothing about her action can be causally explained only by reference to the causal field. Having stood for a total of four minutes she sits down just after the magnetic field disappears, totally unaware of its existence.

This is most naturally described as either a case of causal preemption or a case of causal overdetermination involving two jointly operating redundant causes.25 If the former, one could say that the Princess's decision to stand preempts the magnetic field from in- fluencing the position of her body in any way. Therefore, her decision actually does cause her action, while the preempted condition, which was a causally sufficient condition of her standing, does not actually "operate" to produce the result that it guarantees. Alternatively, this could be described as a case of causal overdetermination. The Princess's decision to stand and the magnetic field jointly caused her to maintain her position, even though each factor in the absence of the other would have been enough to cause her to maintain her position. Either way, it is true that if the Prin- cess had decided to sit down after the first minute, the magnetic field would have prevented her from doing so, and her position would have been maintained by the magnetic field. In that case, her standing would not count as an action, but if we describe it

25See David Lewis, "Causation" and "Postscripts to 'Causation'," Philo- sophical Papers, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 159-213, for a more complete account of preemption and other species of causal overdetermination.

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neutrally as her physical behavior, we can say that the same physical behavior would have occurred.26

As things actually were, the Princess could not have sat down during the last three minutes: if she had tried to sit down she would have remained standing, compelled by the magnetic field. Can she, despite this fact, be morally responsible not only for deciding to stand but also for standing for the last three minutes? According to PAP, she cannot. And even according to the compatibilist's conditional analysis of 'could have done otherwise', she could not be morally responsible because she could not have done otherwise if she had chosen to do so. Yet on intuitive grounds, it seems right to say that she can be morally responsible for standing. This makes the example unlike the earlier examples of delusory negative agency involving the forest ranger. In those cases the agents are deluded in thinking that they allowed some circumstance (in the strong sense of "allow" that implies negative agency) because they are deluded in thinking that they could have prevented it. In this case, there is something delusory about the Princess's agency, but it is not that she was deluded in thinking that by standing up, she allowed herself to be photographed for four minutes. She did do that. She is deluded only in thinking that she could have sat down.

The Princess's act of standing meets the conditions of moral responsibility for actions set out in section 3. Her standing was brought about by a process of ordinary deliberation. And there is no difficulty in imagining some situation quite different from the

261 thank the editors of the Philosophical Review for drawing my attention to the fact that, properly speaking, this is not a case in which an action was causally determined or overdetermined, but rather a case in which certain physical behavior, standing, was causally determined or overdetermined. This is all that is needed to demonstrate a parallel between this case and cases of delusory negative agency. In the latter, it would also be appropriate to note that if the agent had tried and failed to perform the action that she chose not to perform, in that case also her failure would not have been a full-fledged act of omission because it would not have been an intentional omission. Presumably her attempt to perform the act in question would have involved some kind of action on her part, intentional under a description of the form "trying to do A," but there is no reason to identify that action with her act of omission, her failure to do A. Or at least, without relying upon the reductionist approach to negative agency, there would be no reason to do so. I will say more about negative and positive descriptions of the same conduct and disparities in the relevant conditions of responsibility in section 5.

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actual one in which there is no magnetic field, the Princess has sufficient reason to sit after two minutes, and she does so. And furthermore, if the Princess had sat down after two minutes, then she would not have caused whatever she caused or allowed by standing for the third and fourth minutes. Although these conditions of responsibility are satisfied by the actual course of events, they would not have been satisfied if the Princess had tried to sit down after two minutes. She would have discovered that she was unable to do so, and in that case her standing would not have been brought about through a process of ordinary deliberation. It would have been brought about by the magnetic field, against her wishes. For this reason, the condition of moral responsibility would not be satisfied if she had tried to sit down but had remained standing against her will.

Even if the Princess does not live in an entirely deterministic world, and even if her decision to stand for four minutes is not causally determined, it is nevertheless causally determined, once she has stood for a minute, that she will stand for three more minutes. To grant that the Princess can be morally responsible for standing for the last three minutes is ipso facto to grant that an agent can be morally responsible for behavior that is causally determined. Since there is a causally sufficient condition of her re- maining standing for the last three minutes that exists independently of her decision to stand for the last three minutes, to grant that the Princess can be morally responsible for standing for the last three minutes is ipso facto to grant that an agent can be morally responsible for conduct that is determined independently of her decision.

This gives us reason to reject the explanation the incompatibilist proffers of the intuitive verdict about cases of delusory negative agency. That the agents cannot be morally responsible for what they believe they allow should not be explained, as the incompatibilist would want to explain it, as a consequence of the fact that their omissions were causally determined or causally determined independently of the agents' decisions not to act. Instead, I would maintain, it is because a counterfactual condition on negative agency is not satisfied in these cases. To be morally responsible for their omissions, agents must have been able to perform the omitted act if they had tried to do so in the actual circumstances. Pos- itive agency has no corresponding counterfactual condition be-

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cause a causal condition suffices: the corresponding condition requires only that the behavior constituting an action be produced by the agent's choice through an ordinary process of deliberation.

5. Complications for Consequences

When these examples of positive and negative agency are juxta- posed, two differences between omissions and actions are apparent. First, if we think of voluntary behavior as what is directly up to an agent and immediately subject to her will, then we can say that the extent of voluntary behavior is wider for actions than for omissions. This is because what is voluntary (in this sense) in action involves both a decision and its execution in action, while, typically, the only part of an omission that is immediately subject to the agent's will is the decision not to act. Second, when we consider positive and negative agency with respect to consequences, positive agency is constituted by a causal sequence, while negative agency is constituted by a relation of counterfactual dependence. That difference implies that the ability to prevent a consequence will be a necessary condition of moral responsibility for the consequences of omissions but not for the consequences of actions. The Princess need not have the ability to prevent the extra photographs from being taken in order to be morally responsible for their having been taken. It is enough that her decision caused her action and her action was a cause of this consequence. The forest ranger, in contrast, must have the ability to start a backfire and thereby to stop the forest fire in order to be morally responsible for allowing the forest fire to spread southward.

If we characterize the Princess's conduct as an omission, however, as a failure to sit down, then we would get a different answer if we asked whether she can be morally responsible for allowing the additional photographs to be taken. Since she could not have sat down if she had tried in the actual circumstances, the account that I have defended implies that she cannot be morally responsible for failing to sit down, or for any of the consequences of failing to sit down! But isn't it incoherent to assert that (1) the Princess was morally responsible for standing up for the additional three minutes, and (2) the Princess was not morally responsible for failing to sit down during the additional three minutes? What

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is worse, there seems to be an outright contradiction as well: (3) she is morally responsible for allowing the extra photographs to be taken (by standing) and (4) she is not morally responsible for allowing the extra photographs to be taken (by not sitting down).27 It might be suggested that in such situations positive agency

"trumps" negative agency and that the Princess is morally responsible for allowing the extra photographs in virtue of the fact that she is morally responsible for allowing them by standing. In general, it might be suggested, when an omission is constituted by some bodily movement (and holding still should count, for these purposes, as a bodily movement since it involves muscular control), negative agency collapses into positive agency and the appropriate conditions of moral responsibility are those for actions. This is another version of the reductionist strategy: it counsels us to reduce omissions to actions whenever there is a bodily movement present that constitutes the omission. But it is not clear that this kind of constitution relation, when it exists, justifies the claim that positive agency has some conceptual or ontological priority over negative agency.

Consider another example. You are running a marathon and exhaustion is setting in. As you slow down in order to grab a cup of water, you consider slackening your pace for a while longer in order to rest and possibly avoid a total collapse. Stoically, you decide to resume your ordinary pace. As you attempt to do so, you stumble and fall to the ground. Let us suppose that if you had continued at the slower pace, you would not have stumbled and fallen. It seems that you could not be morally responsible for stumbling and falling, since these were not voluntary, while you could be morally responsible for not continuing at the slower pace. You could have

27This problem cannot be solved by pointing to the fact that responsibility attributions provide intensional contexts for action descriptions, that is, by acknowledging that if one does B by doing A and is morally responsible for doing A, it doesn't follow that one is morally responsible for doing B. First of all, the Princess could not stand and sit at the same time, hence it follows from the fact that she is standing that she is not sitting down. The action descriptions in this case are too closely related to make the appeal to the intensionality of the context compelling. Furthermore, it begs an important question to assume that both descriptions are corefer- ential and pick out the same event. It is quite implausible to claim, in general, that the description of an omission is a description of the positive conduct that occurs instead of the omitted action.

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continued at the slower pace, and if you had decided to and tried to, you would have succeeded and would not have stumbled and fallen. It follows, then, that even though you could not be morally responsible for your stumbling and falling, you could be morally responsible for failing to continue at the slower pace, and, since you allowed yourself to stumble and fall by failing to slacken your pace, you could be morally responsible for allowing yourself to stumble and fall.

If what I have said about this example is correct, then this shows that we often have good reason to keep apart, rather than collapse, the conditions of moral responsibility for positive and negative agency. You can be morally responsible for your omission, even if you are not morally responsible for the positive act that "constituted" it. This also suggests that we should interpret the claim that an agent is morally responsible for some consequence as an ellip- tical version of the full claim that the agent is morally responsible for his or her agency (for example, causing, enabling, allowing) with respect to a particular consequence. Not spelling out the agency relation in question can lead to unnecessary confusion. Since you could be morally responsible for allowing yourself to stumble and fall (in virtue of the fact that you could have prevented this by slackening your pace), but not for your action of stumbling and falling, it is ambiguous to ask whether you are morally responsible for stumbling and falling.

If we are explicit about the kind of agency that links a person and a consequence, the apparent contradiction discussed earlier can be eliminated. The Princess is morally responsible for enabling the extra photographs to be taken by standing, but not morally responsible for allowing them to be taken by failing to sit down. It follows that we must distinguish between allowing-by-enabling, which involves a causal contribution, and allowing-by-failing-to-prevent, which does not. This is a distinction worth attending to in a variety of evaluative contexts. Allowing the fund drive to reach its goal by contributing $1,000 is different from allowing the fund drive to reach its goal by refraining from stealing from its bank account. Allowing an army to defeat its enemy by keeping it sup- plied with sophisticated weapons is different from allowing the army to prevail by failing to fight on the enemy's side. It is a difficult and important question in moral philosophy whether these two kinds of allowing must always differ in their moral signifi-

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cance.28 It is not at all obvious what the answer to this question should be, but the existence of controversy on that issue only con- firms the point being made here: simply posing the question requires us to draw in some way the distinction between allowing- through-positive-agency and allowing-through-negative-agency.

I conclude that since positive and negative agency are subject to different constraints, neither should "trump" the other and neither should collapse into the other. Negative agency will be harder to prove and establish when we are uncertain about what the agent could or would have done under relevantly different circumstances, so we might prefer to talk about positive agency. But then the priority of positive agency over negative agency will be based upon epistemic and evidential considerations rather than spurious claims to metaphysical priority.

6. Has the Compatibilist Conceded Too Much?

I have argued for a kind of symmetry in the responsibility conditions for actions and omissions. In both cases, it must be true that in some situation in which the agent believed that there was reason to do otherwise, the agent would have decided to do otherwise through a process of ordinary deliberation. And despite the fact that I have argued against the asymmetry thesis that rejects PAP but accepts PPA, I have defended a different kind of asymmetry in the responsibility conditions for actions and omissions. For omissions, condition (c) requires that the agent could have performed the omitted action if he or she had decided to do so in the actual circumstances. For actions, condition (b') requires that in some

28See Philippa Foot, "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect," reprinted in her Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 19-32; Jonathan Bennett, "Morality and Conse- quences" in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. S. McMurrin (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Judith Jarvis Thomson, "The Trolley Problem," reprinted in Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory, ed. W. Parent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 78- 116. Warren Quinn defends an unusual approach to drawing the distinction between negative and positive agency in "Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing," Philosophical Review 98 (1989): 287-312; see criticisms raised byJohn Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza in "Quinn on Doing and Allowing," Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 343-52.

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situation in which the agent believed that there was reason to do otherwise, the agent would have done otherwise. Thus, you, the forest ranger, cannot be morally responsible for failing to start a backfire if you could not have started one if you had decided to in the actual circumstances. But the Princess can be morally responsible for standing for the extra three minutes because even though she could not have sat down in the actual circumstances if she had decided to do so, there is some possible situation in which she could have sat down if she had decided to do so.

A compatibilist might wonder whether these responsibility conditions for positive as well as negative agency cohere well with the underlying commitments that motivate one to adopt a compatibilist perspective. In particular, it might be asked, Why must the agent, as he or she actually is constituted, have been able to decide to do otherwise in some possible situation in order to be morally responsible for an action or omission? Two possible grounds for this objection could be given. The first rests on the claim that the ability to decide to do otherwise is not a condition of responsibility for praiseworthy actions or omissions.

1. Why should it be necessary, an objector might inquire, to show that you would have decided to perform some morally impermissible action in some possible situation in order to show that you are morally responsible for not performing it? If you had declined an invitation to torture kittens just for fun, or if you had been informed that if you didn't kill an innocent person, somebody else would kill five innocent persons, and you refused to comply and kill the innocent person, would we really want to know whether you could have acted reprehensibly in order to find out whether you are morally responsible for acting rightly? What grounds could there be for requiring that agents have the ability to be morally perverse as a condition of their being eligible for moral praise? Indeed, it might be said, when we refrain from doing something heinous, it may well be that we could not even imagine a situation in which there would be good and sufficient reason to perform the heinous action. And in such a case, condition (b) will not be satisfied: there will not be a possible situation in which the agent has reason to do A and decides to do A. But why, it could be asked, should a person's moral reliability disqualify her from being morally responsible for an omission?29

29An objection of this kind might be raised by Susan Wolf, who has

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This is an implication of the view that I have defended, but I believe that it is not objectionable. If you omit to perform an act so heinous that there couldn't be a situation in which you would believe that you have reason to perform such an act, then condition (b) will not be satisfied: there is no possible situation in which you believe that you have reason to perform this act and decide to perform it, so you cannot be morally responsible for omitting to perform the heinous act. But we can hold you morally responsible for-and can therefore praise- your decision not to act, and this is all that we should want to hold the agent responsible for in such a case. If someone has chosen rightly in refusing to perform some heinous action, then we don't typically hold that person responsible for what she allowed-for what she could have prevented only by doing something impermissible.30 We don't ascribe those consequences to the agent; so we should feel no need to ascribe the omission to her either. In such a case it is the agent's decision and not her negative agency that is the proper object of moral evaluation.

In cases of positive agency, however, similar conditions yield different results. If you choose to act in some situation in which it would have been unthinkable for you to do otherwise, and if you perform an action which it would have been horrific for you to have omitted in the circumstances, and which you, because of your good character and your awareness of this fact, could not have refrained from performing, then you can be morally responsible for your action, according to the account that I have defended, provided only that there exists some possible situation in which you could have avoided performing it. Even if you could not have refrained in the actual circumstances, and even if you could not have refrained if you had decided to in the actual circumstances, you can be morally responsible if you could have refrained in some possible situation in which you believed that you had reason to

argued that the ability to do otherwise is a condition of moral responsibility only in cases in which the agent actually had good and sufficient reason to do otherwise (see "Asymmetrical Freedom"). Dennett also raises this kind of objection in Elbow Room, chap. 6.

30Elizabeth Anscombe's interpretation of the doctrine of double effect relies on such a point. See, for example, "War and Murder," in her Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1981), 58-59.

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refrain. But it is not difficult, when one is thinking of actions, to imagine a situation in which one would have reason to avoid an action that it would be horrific to avoid in the actual circumstances. This is because it is, no doubt, the circumstances that explain why it would be horrific not to act. It would be horrific to refrain from acting because of what the agent could have done or prevented by acting instead, and these are relatively extrinsic properties of the agent's conduct. An omission to do something heinous which one could not have had reason to do will be different in just this respect. Its heinousness will be a relatively intrinsic property of the action: it would be wrong to perform such an action in any con- ceivable circumstance.

2. A second objection might question the compatibilist creden- tials of the requirement that the agent, as he or she is actually constituted, could have decided to do otherwise. Compatibilists who believe that the voluntariness of the agent's actual conduct is what determines whether an agent can be morally responsible might object to the conditions of moral responsibility that I have presented on the grounds that they are too stringent. For example, John Fischer and Mark Ravizza have defended a weaker set of conditions of moral responsibility for actions than the one I presented in section 3 above. They require only that there be some possible situation in which (i) the agent has reason to do otherwise, (ii) only the mechanism that actually produced the agent's action operates, and (iii) the agent does otherwise. The actual mechanism of action can be responsive to the reason to do otherwise, they maintain, even in situations in which the agent, as he or she was actually disposed and constituted was not. They illustrate this condition by discussing a naturalized version of the kind of example that Frankfurt introduced:

Matthew is walking along a beach, looking at the water. He sees a child struggling in the water and he quickly deliberates about the matter, jumps into the water, and rescues the child. We can imagine that Mat- thew does not give any thought to not trying to rescue the child, but that if he had considered not trying to save the child, he would have been overwhelmed by literally irresistible guilt feelings which would have caused him to jump into the water and save the child anyway. ("Responsibility and Inevitability," 259)

Fischer and Ravizza argue that to decide whether an agent can be

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morally responsible for performing an action that he could not have avoided performing, "one asks whether there exists some possible scenario in which that type of mechanism operates, the agent has reason to do otherwise, and the agent does otherwise (for that reason)" (ibid., 268-69). Their verdict is that Matthew is morally responsible for his action, even though he could not have done otherwise because he "acts freely in saving the child; he acts exactly as he would have acted if he had lacked the propensity toward strong feelings of guilt" (ibid., 259). The "mechanism" that operates in the actual sequence is Matthew's unimpaired faculty of practical reasoning and it is, they claim, intuitively different from the "mechanism" that would have operated in the alternative sequence in which Matthew saves the child because he is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt.3' To see whether Matthew can be morally responsible for saving the child despite his inability to do otherwise, they recommend that we ask whether there is a possible situation in which Matthew makes up his mind without having (or without activating) his propensity to feel guilt about failing to save drowning victims, decides to do otherwise, and does otherwise.

If a similar propensity to guilt (or to squeamishness or laziness or culturally induced revulsion) would have prevented you from performing an action, then Fischer and Ravizza's approach would imply that if the propensity played no role in producing the agent's decision not to perform the action in question, it need not block responsibility. Although Fischer and Ravizza do not apply their view to omissions (because they defend PPA), someone who accepted their view about actions might find it to be as plausible (or perhaps even more plausible) when applied to omissions. Consider the following example:

A meeting of the New York Entomological Society features an international array of dishes prepared using insects.32 You, a guest, are invited to sample a tempura dish made of fried crickets. You don't find the prospect of eating insects appealing, though you don't find it disgusting either, and you decline the offer. Suppose

31 "Responsibility and Inevitability," 270. The remainder of their discussion does not improve upon this rough, intuitive account of how to deter- mine whether the actual mechanism is the same as the one that would have operated in the alternative sequence.

32See Marialisa Calta, "Bug Seasoning: When Insect Experts Go in Search of Six-Legged Hors d'oeuvres," Eating Well 3 (1992): 22-24.

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that in order to have decided to accept the offer, you would have had to look more closely at the fried crickets. But if you had looked more closely you would have been overwhelmed with revulsion and would have been incapable of deciding to eat some. Since you never do look more closely at the crickets, you decide not to have any without experiencing any feelings of revulsion, and without even suspecting that you would feel revulsion if you examined the dish more closely.

You couldn't have eaten any crickets as things actually were: if you had even considered the matter and taken a closer look, you would have been prevented from eating any crickets by your feel- ing of revulsion. But in rejecting PPA, we have rejected that fact as a ground for denying moral responsibility for such an omission.

It could be suggested that because revulsion played no role in producing your decision not to eat the crickets, you can be morally responsible for not eating the crickets provided that the mechanism that actually guided your conduct could have produced, in some other possible situation, a decision to eat some crickets. That is, it might be argued that the approach defended by Fischer and Ravizza would apply equally well to this kind of case. According to that approach, even if you could not have decided to eat some crickets because of your propensity to revulsion, the mechanism that actually produced your decision could have done so, and, as a result, you can be morally responsible for your omission. Of course, if we can stipulate that you do not have, or are not affected by, your propensity to feel revulsion, then there would be no obstacle to identifying some possible situation in which you eat some crickets. But what justifies this stipulation? It seems that one could quite reasonably object that this is suspi- ciously similar to inferring that you could have done otherwise from the fact that you could have done otherwise if what would have prevented you from doing otherwise hadn't existed! Furthermore, this approach, when applied to omissions, would yield too liberal a condition of moral responsibility.33 It will turn out that you are

33The stipulation regarding mechanisms is also superfluous when deal- ing with cases of action. As long as there is some circumstance in which Matthew could have decided not to save the child if he had believed that he had reason not to save it, the condition of moral responsibility for actions that I have presented would be satisfied even without the stipulative restriction of the mechanism. Thus, we need only imagine that a stronger swimmer was already en route; in that situation, Matthew could have de-

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morally responsible for omitting to eat the crickets even if there is no possible situation in which you, as you actually are disposed and constituted, could have eaten them.

The condition of responsibility that I have defended would imply that your responsibility should depend on whether your revulsion was susceptible to reason. If having reason to eat the crickets would have enabled you to eat some, then perhaps you can be morally responsible for failing to eat some crickets, and not just for your decision not to try some. Suppose that this event had been part of a widespread effort to promote the eating of insects (rich in protein, iron, zinc, thiamine, riboflavin and other nutri- ents lacking in many Third-World countries) as a solution to prob- lems of malnutrition, and that it had been impressed upon you how much good you could do by helping to break down popular stereotypes about insect-based foods. If you could have decided to eat some crickets in that situation, and if you could have eaten some crickets if you had tried to do so, in the actual circumstances, then (according to the account defended here) you can be morally responsible for your omission. On the other hand, if you couldn't have eaten any crickets even with a weighty reason to do so, then you can't be morally responsible for not eating any, though you can, of course, be responsible for deciding not to eat any.

The condition that I have presented is more demanding regarding omissions than actions, but this asymmetry corresponds to a genuine difference between the kinds of abilities displayed in acting and in omitting to act. The fact that someone has performed an action ordinarily provides evidence that the person has the ability to avoid it in some situation in which there is reason to avoid it. If you actually eat some crickets tempura, then we have good reason to believe that you could have avoided doing so if you had chosen. This is because actions involve the exercise of a physical ability that is under the agent's deliberate control. In contrast, omitting to perform an action is omitting to exercise

cided to save the child with complete self-possession, despite his propensity to feel overwhelming guilt when he considered wrongdoing. (In Frankfurt- style cases involving agents who actually intervene from outside-for ex- maple, the demonic neurologist-the mechanism in question is not the ordinary deliberative mechanism, so these cases would not satisfy condition (a').)

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such an ability, and the decision to omit provides no evidence that the agent has the ability to perform the action in question. In fact, an agent can decide not to perform an act that she knows that she could not perform: you can omit to sample crickets tempura even if you are certain that you could not have eaten some.

The conditions of moral responsibility for positive and negative agency presented above constitute a compatibilist interpretation of the significance (though not necessarily the ordinary meaning) of the "could have done otherwise condition" as it appears in our ordinary beliefs about responsibility and agency. They are not meant to provide a complete or sufficient condition of moral responsibility.34 Rather, these conditions should be thought of as an account of one component of moral responsibility: the part that concerns agents' control of their behavior and, through their behavior, of external consequences. This kind of control is analyzed in terms of the counterfactual sensitivity of deliberation and behavior to an agent's acknowledged reasons to act and the causal or counterfactual sensitivity of consequences to that behavior. This is not the deepest aspect of moral agency-the deliberative and reflective capacities involved in discovering, assessing, and getting ourselves to act on our reasons are at least equally important- but it is the aspect of moral agency that has been most at issue between compatibilists and incompatibilists. It is hard to see why we should want anything more in the way of control than what these conditions require, and the truth of causal determinism would not show us to have anything less.

Wellesley College

34lmagine a deranged mugger who would have shown mercy to his victim if only the victim had been wearing a Red Sox cap. The mugger could have decided to do otherwise in some possible situation, but that is not enough to show that his conduct was under the control of his moral capacities. (A similar objection is attributed to Ferdinand Schoeman in Fis- cher's "Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility," 90 n. 11.) The kind of account I have provided suggests a natural line of response: it could be argued that it is necessary to show that an agent could have refrained from an action in response to moral reasons for doing otherwise to show that he is morally responsible, in a sufficiently deep sense, for what he has done. (Such a requirement is discussed by Peter Arenella in "Character, Choice, and Moral Agency," in Crime, Culpability, and Remedy, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul et al. (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 59-83, especially 82.)

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compatibilists could have done otherwise: responsibility and negative agency

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