Other perspective on Pereboom’s ‘four-case argument’

Tu Cheng-Yu

If one went through the four-case argument carefully, it was not hard to find the
core mechanism, viz., how Pereboom ingeniously constructed the four cases. His
strategy is that between each successive pair of cases there is no divergence at all in
factors that could plausibly make a difference for moral responsibility, and that we are
therefore forced to conclude that all four cases exhibit the same kind and the same
degree of an incompatibilist responsibility-undermining feature (Pereboom, 2001:p.
116). In other words, the manipulation from case 1 to the mere natural causes from
case 4 are all the same, which is beyond Plum’s control, and as a result Plum could
not be moral responsible in all cases commonsensical. Facing this strong and
persuasive argument, many compatibilists try to refute the conclusion in two main
ways, the Hard-Line and the Soft-Line, but all encounter failure or stalemate. My
thesis is that instead of arguing in a fashion of making statement undefeated, one
might have a better view on the argument in a practical fashion. Therefore, I wish to
do two things. First, I will argue, at least prima facia, the Hard and Soft Line reply
underlie some defects. Second, I wish to investigate will, moral responsibility and
manipulation in Pereboom’s four-case argument in an everyday usage and how people
feel when they use these words.

1. M. Mckenna’s Hard-line Reply

The way Mckenna proceeded the argument was by first pointing out how
incompatibilists construct their argument. Incompatibilists generate the argument by
imagining a case in which agent is covertly manipulated in some manner (manner X)
into satisfying all of the conditions sufficient for the Compatibilist-friendly Agential
Structure (CAS)… [that exhaust] the freedom relevant condition for moral
responsibility (Mckenna, 2008). Mckenna indicated the way incompatibilists argued
could be construed as such:
1. If S is manipulated in manner X to A, then S does not A of her own free will
and is therefore not morally responsible for A’ing.
2. An agent manipulated in manner X to A is no different in any relevant respect
from any normally functioning agent determined to do A from CAS.
3. Therefore, if S is a normally functioning agent determined to A from CAS, she
does not A of her own free will and therefore is not morally responsible for
A’ing. (Mckenna, 2008)

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Upon these statements, those who reject premise 1 are hard-line repliers, and those
that reject premise 2 are soft-line repliers. Mckenna thinks the latter leaves an easy
way for incompatibilist to refute via a slight manipulation to the cases so they could
satisfy whatever the compatibilist held. Therefore, instead of resisting case after case
by showing how in each it falls short of CAS, Mckenna construct a four-step reply to
any instance of Manipulation Argument.
1. Step One: Reject all non-starter.
2. Step Two: Help make the manipulation case better.
3. Step Three: Fix attention on salient agential and moral properties.
4. Step Four: Make clear that “manipulation” is not all that uncommon.
(Mckenna, 2008)
Most people consider that Mckenna’s four-step reply is persuasive, but I will argue, at
least prima facie, there are some defects in Mckenna’s four-step reply.
In Step One and Two, Mckenna seems helping incompatibilist in defending query
from compatibilist through making each case reasonable and feasible, but actual I
think Mckenna’s intention is to zoom out the possibility for incompatibilist to fiddle
with each case, and this might be a thoughtful strategy when arguing against opponent.
However, can Mckenna really make each case reasonable and feasible? Haji and
Cuypers consider that the manipulation Pereboom construct in Case 1 and Case 2
couldn’t obtain any consensus based on compatibilists and libertarians view, for there
is no consensus among compatibilists regarding when manipulation is menacing—
when it is freedom or responsibility-subversive—and when it is benign (Haji and
Cuypers, 2006). Haji and Cuypers had a point here, but I think they were
unconvincing, for even if it is a benign manipulation, it still couldn’t avoid the
account of being manipulated and under the condition of no consensus to argue that
case 1 and 2 is benign or menace would lack of standing point and evidence. Later, I
will try to say more about Step One and Two. Right now, I consider where things
started to get a bit skimpy is in Step Three and Four.
In Step Three, Mckenna adds on two more cases in Pereboom’s four-case argument,
calling the original Case 4 Case 6, and in Case 5 he replaces causal determinism by
God, who foreknows each of Plum’s acts and entire life history, whereas, in Case 4
God was replaced by a deity, but unlike God she could just foresee Plum would kill
Ms. White in the future. In addition, Mckenna inspects the process backwardly by
saying since Pereboom cannot begin by presuming that determinism rules out free
will and morally responsibility, whereas he cannot begin by denying that Plum is free
and responsible in Case 6 (Mckenna, 2008). In other words, whether Plum is free and

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morally responsible in Case 6 should be agnostic, implying that Pereboom ought not
to take granted of the Spinozistic fashion to hidden causes revealed in Case 1 and
transferring through to Case 4 or the generalization strategy, for compatibilist could
also held an opposite route with the same efficacy and should be weighed on same
scale too.
However, did Mckenna’s strategy really undermined the four-case argument? The
answer could be yes and no. Those who suggest Mckenna wins the argument tend to
accept that compatibilist only need to point out defect in argument which started by
incompatibilist, for they are the ones who “started it ”, and Mckenna’s strategy did
succeed in it . Those who think Mckenna’s argument end in failure tend to think that
Case 1 and 2 could still have the effect of recommending an incompatibilist diagnosis
as regards Case 4 (Mckenna, 2014). To put it more precisely, the transformation from
Case 4 (Case 6) through 1 rests on false assumption that holding initial attitude toward
Case 4 (Case 6) as confirmed agnostic, not that of the open-minded and undecided
neutral inquirer (Mckenna, 2014). What it means is that those undecided neutral
inquirers, holding no specific views on freedom and determinism debate will not
easily accept Mckenna’s backward process, for they will collapse under the intuitive
force of Case 1 and 2. In this sense, I think the strategy Mckenna uses really miss the
target, for looking backwardly didn’t really change anything. Then, what about Step
Four, did it save the situation? Unfortunately, I did not think so.
In Step Four, Mckenna talks about two things, the Ann Case and the extreme case.
In Ann Case, Mckenna developed an argument by saying Ann experience the
prospects of suffering and tragedy in her early age, but she come to see her life as one
that should not be squandered, that should be lived to the to its fullest, with no
promise of a long future or a lovely afterlife and acts upon them as a mature adult,
then Mckenna ask does she do so unfreely and is she not responsible for the conduct
issuing from those values (Mckenna, 2008). The Ann Case do have a point here that
manipulation is quite common to us and it is not that malicious as we usually think.
However, even though there is a positive side of manipulation, still an agent could not
be justified moral responsible under being manipulated, for the evaluative side of
manipulation is irrelevant to its actual function. On the other hand, Mckenna talks
about the extreme case or wildly divergent contexts Pereboom developed, which he
thinks unlike natural manipulated case our intuition will be indecisive and those who
set up the case should hold a higher bar. I think this argument has cast doubt on
incompatibilist position, the main reason is those undecided neutral inquirers rely on
their intuition when viewing these cases, but the extreme case is prone to make our

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intuition vacillate between agreeing and disagreeing and this could be the last thing
Pereboom wanted in his argument. I will come back to this point in section 3.
Therefore, to be frank, Mckenna’s Hard-line reply failed to refute Pereboom’s
argument, for he did not really indicate any defect in the four-case argument, instead
he just knocked on each door and left immediately.

2. Soft-line Reply
The way Soft-line responses to Pereboom’s argument diverge in many ways. For
example, Mele argues that it is the manipulation, not the deterministic causation, that
does the intuition-driving work in Pereboom’s case (Mele, 2005). In other words, the
deterministic causation could replace by indeterministic mechanism and still have the
same effect, which means Pereboom’s four-case argument does not warrant the
conclusion that, in case 4, ‘Plum is not morally responsible’ for killing White and that
he lacks moral responsibility for this because the killing was deterministically caused.
Therefore, what really makes the argument persuasive is the manipulation not the
deterministic causation, just like what Mele points out in Scarlet’s car case, it was not
the wetness that damaged the car but the hardness and weight of the falling objects
(Mele, 2005). However, I think the argument Mele holds seem misunderstanding
Pereboom’s premise and conclusion. The premise of four-case argument is about an
action is free in the sense required for moral responsibility only if the decision to
perform it is not an alien-deterministic event, nor a truly random event, nor a partially
random events, on the other hand, the conclusion Pereboom makes is if an agent is
morally responsible for her deciding to perform an action, then the production of this
decision must be something over which the agent has control, and an agent is not
morally responsible for the decision if it is produced by a source over which she has
no control (Pereboom, 2001:p. 126). Mele, by arguing, tries to separate the notions of
determination and manipulation, but in fact these notions are all tied-up with the
concept of control, which the agent is not in control of her action whether in
determinate or manipulate situation. Irrespective of how Pereboom construct the
argument or how each case flow, I think what Mele should argue against is the
vaguely define notion of control that Pereboom hold in his conclusion. Haji and
Cuypers have this intuition too, they consider that the credibility of principle O
(Pereboom’s conclusion, O) should be assessed on independent grounds and advance
three concerns with this principle (Haji and Cuypers, 2006).
First, Haji and Cuypers question the relationship between the sources of an action
and the moral responsibility of the agent. If there was an instantaneous autonomous

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agency, fully equipped with the compilation of elements required for responsible
agent, emerged from a certain moment of the deterministic causal history and produce
an action, intuitively, this first action will be free and the agent will be held
responsible, whereas the whole process ultimately derives from sources over which
the agent has no control, for the agent enters life with her mature psychological
repertoire fully in place ( Haji and Cuypers, 2006). What Haji and Cuypers wanted to
argue against (O) is that ultimate source is not a necessary condition for moral
responsibility. However, the counter argument is based on a compatibilist intuition,
which means an incompatibilist will not wholeheartedly accept it.
Second, Haji and Cuypers argues that (O) could not be assessed independently of
whether it finds favor with incompatibilists or compatibilists, for (O) cannot
discriminate between normal cases and abnormal cases. For example, a child who
grew up in a normal upbringing, intuitively will hold more responsibility than child
who grew up in an indoctrinative upbringing, but (O), in the fashion in which
Pereboom understands it, views them the same because in either case the child’s
springs of action ultimately derive from sources which the child has no control (Haji
and Cuypers, 2006). To be fair with both camps, I want to put this argument further,
namely can we really discern a normal or abnormal environment in actual life. The
answer maybe yes, but it is hard to reach an agreement. For example, can we really
categorize tiger parenting into an abnormal upbringing, the western may acknowledge
this perspective, but for the Asian this is somehow a normal way of growing up.
However, people may bring up good argument and persuasive reasons for tiger
parenting as abnormal upbringing, it still cannot avoid people who enumerating
counterexamples, such as what Amy Chua writes in her book. 1Assuredly, there are
circumstances where we can easily distinguish between normal and abnormal, yet
most of the things that happened in actual life are not the case. Therefore, I think it is
not wise to argue that (O) could not discriminate between normal cases and abnormal
cases, for in ordinary situation a normal case can be an abnormal case in some
population or society, and vice versa.
Third, Haji and Cuypers talk about complete and fractional control in (O) and argue
it is obvious that no one has complete control over anything, thus, difficult to see why
anyone would demand that our having complete control over our decision is a
requirement of responsibility for our decisions; or, alternatively, why anyone would
claim that our lacking control over, for instance, some agent-external condition, such

1
What Amy Chua wrote in the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was controversy over the western
society, but as an Asian I did not have that kind of radical reaction. These upbringings are normal to
me and they are part of our culture, even though they may seem problematic, but to get rid of
them or label them as abnormal and malicious is taking things too far.
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as being born, that is necessary for our being responsible for our behavior suffice to
undermine responsibility for this behavior (Haji and Cuypers, 2006). I think Haji and
Cuypers are on the right track this time. They push the argument further into how
control might exist, and how responsibility can be maintained by a hybrid theory. An
agent could be the cause of her action by her prior reasons, while also co-produced by
the agent’s agent-causing it, and that the agent can be view as an uncaused cause of
her action, namely the ultimate originator of her action. In this fashion, a compatibilist
theory could survive under the attack of (O), for whether the event produce by the
agent is deterministic or not, the agent still has the control over her action and
inevitably is the sourcehood or ultimate originator of her action. However, I consider
that Pereboom’s manipulation argument could jeopardize the account of hybrid theory,
for being manipulated one could lose control of things one did and being manipulated
in not that uncommon in daily life, which means there is no place for extreme case
argument and the argument previously hold is being push back to square one. Then, is
this the end of the back and forth argument between incompatibilist and compatibilist,
or is this the victory of the hard-incompatibilist? Instead of arguing who wins the
game, I think it is better to inspect the whole argument in an everyday usage and to
eliminate some misconceptions in the popular discourse.

3. Will, Moral Responsibility and Manipulation

There are many ways of talking about these concepts in Pereboom’s four-case
argument, some discussed it scientifically, some discussed it metaphysically, and
some discussed it under the thoughts of compatibilism or incompatibilism (C-I), and
they all have good points. However, I would like to discuss the everyday usage and
feeling of these concepts for three reasons. First, scientific, metaphysic and C-I way
of discussing are easily going to end up in open question, snarl or irrelevant. For
example, Balaguer argues it is possible that certain neural events in our heads are
causally undetermined in a certain specific way, however, there is no good evidence to
proof this statement, the question of human being possess libertarian free will is a
wide-open empirical question (Balaguer, 2010). In addition, the way Kant argued that
beside the phenomenal world, there is the noumenal world where freedom of will
exist and that it could not be studied in scientific terms. This kind of transcendental
argument brings out much more problems than any other argument, for it is hard to
find evidence to justify that the claim must be the case and it usually mistakes a whole
for one or more of its parts, which Peter Hackers calls it ‘the mereological fallacy’
(Baggini, 2016). Furthermore, what I argued previously could indicate that C-I is

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easily end up in stalemate or talk past each other. Second, based on Wittgenstein’s
philosophy, through investigating the uses of these concepts in everyday life, we
might have a chance to disentangle the quagmire from Pereboom’s argument, for the
uses of a word embedded certain prediction and expectation which may shed some
light (Investigation, 116-117). Besides, one could avoid being trapped in technical and
abstruse jargon. Third, by investigating the uses of these concepts in everyday use,
undecided neutral inquirers are much more willing to accept the conclusion and this is
important because I think the four case argument Pereboom developed not only aim at
refuting compatibilist’s position, but also try to convince those undecided neutral
inquirers to accept his argument. However, I must acknowledge that to discuss the
everyday usage of these words will encounter problems of justification, for much of
the discussion is based on personal observation.
Before discussing the everyday uses of will, let us first have a brief look at how
ancient Greek and Chinese use the word will. At the age of Plato and Aristotle, the
idea of being responsible for what we are doing include to choose or decide on one’s
own is common fact. Nevertheless, Plato and Aristotle did not have a notion of will,
what they do have is a closely related notion, namely, the notion of somebody is
willing or wanting something, but in a rather specific form where reason desires
something. In Aristotle’s view, the soul divides into different parts, and there are
different forms of desire correspond to different forms of motivation, such as appetite
(epithymia) is a nonrational desire, whereas willing, desire of reason, is a rational
desire. However, when rational or nonrational desire involved in conflict, whether it
gets resolved is a matter of what happened in the past (Frede, 2012). Therefore, it is
obvious in Aristotle’s theory that causal determination is part of the mechanism and
bringing out a virtuous deed relies on human nature (a unified soul) and good
upbringing (what happened in the past).
The idea of will really came as a notion is when the Stoic introduced within their
theory. They refute the idea that there is a part of soul to generate nonrational desire
which would sometime even overpower reason and make people act against their
beliefs. Instead, they had the idea of continuity in human development from having
nonrational desire to desires are reason, a metamorphosis, and the ingredient of this
development is the ability of willing, namely, to assent when things are appropriate
and refusing to give assent when they are inappropriate (Frede, 2012). Furthermore,
Stoic had the idea that the course of the world outside is predetermined, but different
to Aristotle, they had the notion of will and a sense of freedom. This idea is developed
by Epictetus, he talked about “use of impressions” (chresis ton phantasion), how we

7
deal with our impulsive impressions or prohairesis (choice), which is something that
is “up to us” (eph’ hemin) and the ability to make choice. And the ability of choosing
is formed and developed in different way, for we have different minds. But to be free,
one should not only make choice but also liberated herself from her false beliefs and
inappropriate attachment. However, this process is rigorous and difficult to obtain, for
Stoics think the will should be absolutely pure and we should have a sufficient
understanding of the good and the world God created. Therefore, a sense of freedom
emerges from how we choose to response to how things are, which is not be distorted
by false beliefs or being enslaved by the things that presented to us. On further
reflection, the notion of will in ancient Greek is like our everyday uses, but the notion
of free will is quite different, they set the bar high and freedom comes from doing the
right things which is uncommon to us.
On the other hand, in ancient Chinese, people do not have a word for will or free
will, but they do have some kind of ideas about freedom and will. For example, in The
Analects of Confucius, there are many paragraphs talking about the power of choosing
the right things but not about a single notion of will. However, Confucius consider
that if a person has humanity (仁心), she would do the right things at the right
moment with suitable etiquette (禮) and live a tranquility life in spite of life (命) is
being determined by the universe. 2 In other words, there is a positive sense of
freedom in Confucius thinking which is freedom that come from internal constraint
and the constraint is accomplish by willing to be humanity in action by oneself. This
means that the idea of will in Confucius is something of to do or not to do, to be
humanity or not to be humanity, which is different from the Stoics that they think will
is in people’s decision or making choice. Therefore, it might be plausible to say that
the idea of will in Confucius is something practical, whereas it is something epistemic
for the Stoics and it is obvious to me that the former is more similar to everyday uses.
Besides Confucius, Laozi have dissimilar ideas about will, he emphasis more on
acting accord with itself (自然) and merge with the flow of Tao (道), which is much
more on the side of not doing something and a flexible way of living life. 3However, I
think it is hard to contend that there is some kind of will in Laozi theory, for he does
not talk much about it, and he emphasis more on what Tao is and how we act accord
with it.
The uses of will and free will in ancient differ in themself and differ from
nowadays uses, and if one look deeper into, one finds there are many things being

2
For further discussion see 南懷瑾（1976）
。論語別裁。台北市：老古；錢穆（1988）
。論語新
解。台北市：東大。
3
For further discussion see 王雲五，陳鼓應（2017）。老子今註今譯及評介。台北市：商務。
8
omitted, but not in a negative sense. For example, if one uses will as a verb, it could
mean you try to make something happen by your own power, such as she willed
herself to finish running the Marathon, or he willed himself to ask Marry out for a
walk, even though his friend think he will not succeed. In addition, people also use
will to represent one’s desire, such as you can stay or go as you will, or will you
marry me, which could be replaced with do you have a desire to marry me. On the
other hand, when will uses as a noun, mostly it means mental power that give one
strength in action and there is a degree in it per se. For example, she has a strong will
in doing everything, or he usually give up hard work because there is a weakness in
his will. By observing these simple examples, it is obvious that people do not think of
agent making free choice or some previous causal history or to obey God’s will when
they use will in everyday conversation. What they do think about is how will motivate
the doing, whether it is strong or weak, as will is a congenial human power or a tool
that fulfill one’s desire, statement, and task. And when put this into extreme, having
full or absolute control, people might then have a connection with free will. However,
to my observation, people seldom use free will in daily conversation, they use will
instead, the reason might be that in social use will already had an implication for
freedom and free will seems to be a technical term which people think that it will be
more suitable in an academic discourse.
At this juncture, we could reconsider Pereboom’s four-case argument and do not
focus on Plum having free will or not this time, but rather focus on do Plum have a
will to kill Ms. White and this is what we will do: First, we scrutinize the word
Pereboom uses in each case to search for the word will; Second, we search for
description of Plum having a tendency of strong will or weak will in each case; third,
we assess previous discoveries under the intuition of the everyday uses. We find that
Pereboom does not mention will in all cases, but there is a strong will lies in Plum, for
Pereboom writes a lot of what happened before Plum killed Ms. White in each case,
which indicate the killing might be intentionally, such as Plum had a consistency in
first and second-order, went through a reasoning process, does not act because of an
irresistible desire, etc. Consequently, in an everyday usage sense, we could tell that
Plum had a will in killing Ms. White in each case and the will is strong, for the
description made it obvious and somehow we can say it isn’t an unconscious
decisions leaving no room for a conscious to will. However, to hold Plum moral
responsible for his killings is another matter, for we have not yet investigate the use of
moral responsible (MR) and there is more to consider in each case.
In an everyday conversation, using MR in a statement is not something uncommon.

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For example, when parent talk to their children, they often mention we should be
moral responsible for what we had done, or you have grown up, you should start to
take responsibility and the same things happened in school, workplace, court, and
even in friendship and marriage. But what does it really mean to take MR for
something. Is there a difference between when asking a young child to take MR and
asking a juvenile or an adult? Can it be possible that being MR in friendship the same
in marriage? Can the standard of MR in court the same as in school? I think there is
no specific answer to any of this question, for the answer depends on the circumstance
and custom that we lived. People lived in Asian might tend to think MR in marriage
should be hold more serious and rigid than in friendship, whereas, in American or
Europe people might tend to think there isn’t any big difference between marriage and
friendship, thus they shall had the same MR standard. The everyday use of MR differ
much, but MR is something a society could not easily discard, it has something to do
with ‘Diversity character’. People have divergent character, when they autonomously
represent them, we seek to make people take moral responsibility for their action. If
one assume that people are the same in character like the Alpha in Brave New World, 4
then, the society does not change very much or even stagnate in some sense, thus to
hold people MR seems nonsense, and by speculation MR might not appear in a daily
conversation or not even appear as a word. Besides, if people do not represent their
action autonomously like those who lived in Walden Two, 5 which went through a
program of "behavioral engineering" begun at birth, then, to hold them MR does not
really have any practical meaning, for they are not the owner of their action. In other
words, the everyday use of MR has a premise that human diverse in character, and
with a further extend, if one represents them autonomously, one should more or less
undertake one action for one uniqueness. This led us to think that maybe Plum should
be MR for his bad deeds, because in each case Plum could always be view as a unique
human being, for he is not a clone or an inanimate object, and in some sense he
represent his action autonomously. Pereboom, nevertheless, would still insist that
Plum is not MR for his doing. Simply put, in Case 1 and 2, Plum’s action is directly
and indirectly manipulated by some neuroscientists, in Case 3, Plum’s action is
manipulated by a malign upbringing, and in Case 4, Plum action is being determined
since the big bang, thus there is a problem for Plum to be the source of his action.
However, does this mean Plum could not be a unique person in each case? To answer
the question, it is better investigating how manipulation is used in daily conversation
and the idea of making decision first.

4
Huxley. A. 1932: Brave New World, London: Vintage.
5
Skinner, B.F. 1948: Walden Two, London: Hackett.
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 It is obvious that different kinds of manipulation happened in our daily life. For
example, we all truly know that the media have manipulated the society in great
proportion, and it is common to hear people saying the media is manipulate by the
government or some business tycoons and that media should be responsible for what
they had reported. This means most people have the intuition that sometime being
manipulated does not mean one should not be MR, and even in some extreme case,
such as people who had psychotic disorder or an abusive childhood being demand to
undertake MR when they commit a crime. 6 In other words, it seems most people
have a rather optimistic view about manipulation and the reasons might be: (1) being
manipulate is a common thing to most people; (2) most people acknowledge that MR
is something deontological, for one is unique and should be more or less MR for one
uniqueness; (3) most people lived in a normal life, meaning it is difficult to put
themselves in others shoes, particularly those who had an abnormal life. However,
this does not mean that manipulation and MR is irrelevant. Take Mele’s Ann and Beth
case for example, Beth being manipulated or brainwashed by a team of psychologists
to make Beth like Ann in all sort of ways and she is unaware of it, Mele then consider
that Beth is not free and responsible of her action after this manipulation, due to two
things: first, Beth own considered values were erased and replaced by psychologists
and she had no opportunity to resist, which means Beth’s autonomy was violated;
second, a free agency is in some way history-bound, for after the manipulation, it is
difficult not to see her now, in light of all this, as—and unfree—to a significant extent
in an important sphere of her life (Mele, 2006). What Mele points out in Ann and Beth
case is similar to what I had said in previous that holding someone MR has a close
connection with the agent’s uniqueness. As we can see, Beth being brainwashed imply
that Beth is not Beth anymore, Beth is somehow a clone of Ann and it is obvious that
to hold a clone MR for her doing seems nonsense. And what lies behind an agent’s
uniqueness is the historical development of the agent. However, one may question,
how can an agent be unique if being manipulated is common to us? My answer is it
all depends on the usage of manipulation.
Most of the time, People use the word manipulate in a negative sense, for example,
the DPP or KMT try to manipulate voters perspective about opposing party, the recall
referendum had been manipulated by official, or the customer had been manipulate by
the glaring advertisement. And the person who used the word manipulate tend to have

6
Recently, a Taiwanese railway police had been killed by a mental illness patient with a paring knife.
The perpetrator was given a five-year involuntary medical treatment. Most people could not accept
the result, thinking this is unreasonable and unfair and even cursing the judges as bastard or
jerkhead. This indignant reaction from the mass indicate that even one being manipulated, a sense
of MR for one is doing could not entirely be wiped off.
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a feeling that the manipulator is malign and the one being manipulated is pitiful.
Nevertheless, the sense of an agent not being unique does not appear, one still views
them as a unique agent and should more or less be MR for their uniqueness. Why was
this the case? Simply put, when people use manipulate in daily conversation and the
above cases, they all presupposed that being manipulated is bad or sad, but one still
has the chance to resist, even in dire situation. And accompany with this way of using
manipulate, we would normally have the intuition that Plum had a chance to resist the
manipulation that happened in each case, even in dire situation like Case 1 and 2, and
however extreme Pereboom made the case be, this intuition may still exist. But if
Plum after killing Ms. White and knowing that he himself is being manipulated, will
he think that he shouldn’t be MR for his doing, exclude the fear of being sentenced or
punished? I think Plum’s reaction might have the following performance: he will be
very astonishing, then, he might start to regret for what he had done and even beat his
chest saying I could have restrain the egoistic character. After this, Plum might swear
to take MR for his bad deed, despite he knows more or less that one could not have
done otherwise under the manipulation. Plum’s reaction signifies that one’s behavior
might be constrained when being manipulated, but the feeling for what one had done

4. Conclusion

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