California, born 1952

John Martin Fischer

Responsibility needs control, but not the kind that keeps other roads open. It needs the control a good helmsman has over his own course: steering by reasons, through a mechanism that is his own.

The view

Fischer, long at the University of California, Riverside, took Harry Frankfurt's examples and built a full theory on them. If an agent can be responsible even though a hidden device would have stopped him doing otherwise, then responsibility does not need what Fischer calls regulative control: the power to choose between genuinely open alternatives. It needs only guidance control: the actual sequence that led to the act must run through the agent in the right way.

He called the resulting position semicompatibilism. Determinism may well rule out regulative control, and so rule out one kind of freedom. But responsibility does not depend on that kind, so it is compatible with determinism either way. The worry that physics might one day prove determinism true need not keep moralists awake.

The argument

An agent is responsible for an action when it issues from his own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism. After Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control (1998)

Two conditions make up guidance control. The first is reasons-responsiveness. The process that produced the act must be one that would have recognised and reacted to good reasons to do otherwise, across a sensible range of situations, even if in this case there were none. A compulsion that would carry on whatever the reasons is not responsive. The second is ownership: the agent must have come to see this way of deciding as their own, as the source of actions they answer for. A brainwashed agent fails this test, however reasonable his new mechanism.

The figure is in the spirit of Fischer's examples. When the learner turns right on their own, the instructor's controls are never used. The learner lacked regulative control, since the left turn was never really available, but had full guidance control of the turn they made, and is responsible for it. When the instructor takes over, the learner has neither.

Where he meets Dennett

Both are compatibilists who think the ability to do otherwise in the deep sense is not needed. Reasons-responsiveness is close to Dennett's idea of an agent who can be reached by reasons, and whose behaviour changes when the reasons change. Like Dennett, Fischer thinks what matters is a real property of the agent, which can be present or missing in degrees and can be tested.

Where they part

Fischer concedes more to the incompatibilist than Dennett would. He grants that determinism may well rule out regulative control, and argues only that we do not need it. Dennett thought that the ordinary, practical ability to do otherwise, assessed across nearby cases as in Austin's putt, survives determinism untouched. Fischer's ownership condition, which looks at how the agent came to take responsibility, is also more individualist than Dennett's social picture, where it is partly other people who make us responsible by treating us as members of the club.

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Further reading

• John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge, 1998).
• John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas, Four Views on Free Will (Blackwell, 2007): a debate between four positions.
• Compatibilism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.