Analysis Advance Access published December 17, 2012

BOOK REVIEW
Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility
By DANA KAY NELKIN Oxford University Press, 2011. xii + 194 pp. 30.00
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What must the world be like, and what must we agents be like, in order to be morally responsible for our actions? In Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility, Dana Nelkin develops and defends what she dubs the rational abilities view (RA) of moral responsibility. On this compatibilist view, an agent is morally responsible for an action, in a sense which makes it appropriate to hold her accountable for that action, if she has the ability to do the right thing for the right reasons, or a good thing for good reasons (7). The most distinctive features of Nelkins view are that (i) the conditions for moral responsibility are asymmetric, (ii) those conditions are compatibilist, that is, consistent with a deterministic world, (iii) in which causal relations hold between substances (rather than events) some of which are agents. An agent exercises her rational abilities when she is determined by her nature to act for certain reasons. The rational abilities view, Nelkin argues, coheres with many of our convictions regarding morally responsible action. Nonetheless, each of these distinctive parts of her thesis requires considerable defence. The asymmetry of her view implies that whereas acting in a praiseworthy way (doing the right thing for the right reasons) does not require the ability to do otherwise, acting in a blameworthy way, when one does not do the right thing for the right reasons, does require that one has the ability to so act. (Readers will note the similarities between this aspect of Nelkins view and that of Susan Wolf (Wolf, 1980, 1990). Nelkins view considerably advances the debate, showing how such a view can be defended against recent strands of argument.) An asymmetrical view of the conditions for moral responsibility is vulnerable to two lines of attack: (i) from those (typically incompatibilists) who argue that all free and morally responsible action praiseworthy, blameworthy and morally neutral requires the ability to do otherwise; (ii) from those (typically compatibilists) who argue that no morally responsible agency requires this ability. One of the central arguments for (i) addressed here is that fairness requires that praiseworthy and blameworthy actions meet the same conditions (3151). Suppose two agents, R and S, who both act well, both exercising their rational abilities, but only S could have done otherwise. What could be unfair about praising R? Nelkin argues that considerations of fairness do not motivate the reservation of praise only for those agents who could have done otherwise, as is the case for blame and other forms of sanction. Further, focusing on moral desert, Nelkin observes that having the ability to do otherwise does not make it harder for S to act well, so the agent who could have done otherwise is not thereby more deserving of praise. And praising R (if

Analysis Reviews Vol 0 | Number 0 | 2012 | pp. 14 doi:10.1093/analys/ans152 The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

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we shift to a concern about distributive fairness) does not deprive S of something she otherwise would have had (praise is not a divisible and finite good). The intuition that alternate possibilities are required for holding an agent to account can be assuaged by noting that compatibilist principles closely aligned with it may in fact be driving such intuitions (such as that the agent must not have done what she did only because she could not do otherwise (6163, cf. Frankfurt 1969)). Having shown that arguments which require the ability to do otherwise for all morally responsible actions do not succeed, Nelkin then considers whether her claims might not establish too much: perhaps the ability to do otherwise is not a necessary condition for blameworthy action either? Persuasive arguments from compatibilists in the past half century have suggested as much. Examples such as the following (paraphrased from Nelkins discussion (65) of Fischer and Ravizzas case (1999: 377)) are intended to incline us to conclude that while the agent lacks the ability to do otherwise, she is nonetheless blameworthy: (E) Two agents, M and J want (for some unknown reason) to kill a child, C. J has decided to do so by pushing C to her death. M has secretly placed a monitoring device in Js brain, so that he can monitor Js decision and intervene were J to decide not to push C. But J does, unwaveringly, so decide, and M, the counterfactual intervener, in fact plays no role in Js decision and action. Such cases would provide troubling counter-examples to Nelkins asymmetrical view: J cannot do otherwise, but is intuitively blameworthy. Nelkin responds to this worry by clarifying the sense of ability to do otherwise that is at issue. We are not concerned with robust metaphysical alternatives (of the sort inconsistent with determinism), which J clearly does not have. These are alternatives in what Nelkin refers to as the inevitability undermining sense (67). The proper sense of ability, Nelkin proposes, is that of ability in the interferencefree capacity sense (66). What is important is that the agent has the capacities, skills and talents necessary for so acting, and is not interfered with or prevented from using them on a particular occasion (66). J does have the ability to do otherwise in this sense, so long as the counterfactual intervener remains purely counterfactual. Nelkin acknowledges that this is a revisionary understanding of ability to do otherwise (70). I think it is also one which causes trouble for her asymmetry thesis a point to which I will return shortly. Does determinism undermine an agents abilities, in this interference-free sense? Nelkins first step in defending a compatibilist rational abilities view is to argue that determinism does not hinder an agents exercise of those abilities to any greater extent than indeterminism a version of the familiar claim that no greater control is afforded an agent simply by introducing indeterminism into the picture (75). Nelkin then tries to establish that, on other counts, a compatibilist account is on stronger ground than an incompatibilist view, as she advances in Chapter 4 what is one of the most novel and interesting arguments of the book. There, Nelkin articulates a conception according to which all causal relations hold between substances, some of which are agents. Agent-causation occurs, on this view, when an agent is determined (by her rational nature) to act for certain reasons. This account avoids various worries that face both event-causal and standard agent-causal views respectively, such as the disappearing agent problem which besets event-causal pictures of the world

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(on which events cause events, and agents dont seem to bring about anything); and the disappearing reasons worry, which besets indeterministic agent-causal views, seemingly unable to explain not only how reasons figured in an agents action (such that she did A, rather than something else), but why she acted when she did (9094). Nelkin then supplements her defence of the asymmetrical, compatibilist, rational abilities view, by arguing that attention to the ought-implies-can principle provides a clear rationale for this view: this deontic principle explains why it is important that blameworthy action requires the ability to do otherwise (such that one can fulfil ones obligation). But its corollary, that ought-implies can-do-otherwise (can do wrong, in the case of praiseworthy action) cannot be established, and so does not entail that alternatives must be available to the agent who acts well (103). In the remaining two chapters, Nelkin turns her attention to an account of deliberation. Understandings of deliberation might appear to suppose that we must conceive of ourselves as choosing between undetermined options, thus motivating a libertarian understanding of responsibility. Nelkin provides more robust support for her compatibilist view, on which the best understanding of deliberation is as requiring the commitment that we see our decisions as the difference-maker in bringing about an action (142). This is entirely consistent with a deterministic picture of the world. Likewise, the sense of freedom to which we must be rationally committed as deliberators, Nelkin argues, is not a libertarian sense, but simply that of our actions being up to us (our decisions being difference makers) such that we are accountable for them (150) a sense entirely consistent with compatibilism (contra the libertarian) and motivated by our strong and unshakeable sense of freedom (a burden for the skeptic to explain). Nelkins arguments are rich and lucid, as she engages with the recent challenges to compatibilism and to an asymmetrical view of responsibility. However, I remain unconvinced that Nelkin has succeeded in establishing the asymmetry at the heart of her view. This is because I think there is equivocal use of the notion of ability to do otherwise. The two senses that Nelkin introduces are what we can refer to as (i) robust metaphysical alternatives (RMA): the ability to do otherwise in the inevitability-undermining sense; and (ii) compatibilist abilities alternatives (CAA): the ability to act in the interference-free sense. This distinction is introduced after Nelkin has argued that the ability to do otherwise is not required for praiseworthy action. The sense of ability to do otherwise rejected here seems to be RMA, and it remains unclear that CAA is not also required: simply put, doing a good thing for good reasons just is to exercise ones rational abilities without interference with or prevention of the exercise of those capacities. The ability in this sense is required for both praiseworthy and blameworthy actions. Suppose that in example (E) above, all else remains the same but Js act is that of saving a child, and M would intervene to ensure that this action is performed. If Ms role remains counterfactual, then again J can surely be held accountable and praised for her action. But if Js capacities are interfered with, such that M does intervene to ensure she acts well, it is not at all clear to me that J is praiseworthy because it is not at all clear that we can properly consider the action as Js own, manifesting an exercise of her rational abilities. Rather, she is a conduit for Ms agency. So surely praiseworthy action does require that an agent have the ability in the interference-free sense

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(CAA) and the asymmetry is lost. A further confounding factor is that we in fact find two different statements of the interference-free sense of ability: (2a) the absence of actual interference with or prevention of the exercise of those capacities [rational abilities] (66). 2(b) that nothing is actually preventing you from acting otherwise (though it would under different circumstances) (67) These are not equivalent: (2a) is consistent with determinism (insofar as it does not interfere with, or prevent the use of ones rational abilities). But (2b) is not: a deterministic world does actually prevent an agent from acting otherwise. So Nelkin surely cannot commit to (2b) as the correct understanding of CAA. But if (2a) is taken as the correct interpretation that nothing actually interferes with or prevents the exercise of an individuals rational capacities then it seems to me that the absence of such interference is as much a requirement for praiseworthy action as it is for blameworthy action, as my modification of the example makes plausible. This worry does not damage Nelkins compatibilism, for we can accept her argument for the claim that determinism does not hinder the exercise of an individuals rational abilities thus construed. Nor does it undermine her claim that, were praise and blame to be asymmetrical, there would be no unfairness there. Nelkins development of a compatibilist agent-causal view will surely cause compatibilists to reconsider carefully their rejection of such a metaphysical picture. But I do not think that, on this revisionary understanding of ability to do otherwise, we should accept Nelkins claim that the conditions for moral responsibility are asymmetric. Acting well and acting badly both require that the agent act on the basis of her own rational abilities, and that there is no actual interference with or prevention of their exercise. JULES HOLROYD University of Nottingham University Park, NG7 2RD, UK jules.holroyd@nottingham.ac.uk

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References
Fischer, J.M. and M. Ravizza. 1999. Responsibility and Control, A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, F. 1969. Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. Journal of Philosophy 66: 82939. Wolf, S. 1980. Asymmetrical freedom. Journal of Philosophy 77: 15166. Wolf, S. 1990. Freedom Within Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.