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47 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2013)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi47 and id is 1 raw text is: J Value Inquiry (2013) 47:1-15 DOI 10.1007/s10790-013-9376-y Manipulation, Responsibility and Rights David Alm Published online: 13 June 2013 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Are persons responsible for their actions even if these are the result of manipulation perpetrated by another agent? This question plagues compatibilist views of moral responsibility, and in particular those accounts sometimes known as internalist. According to these views, a person's responsibility for an action of his depends solely on facts about his mental states. In this paper the best-known internalist view, that of H. G. Frankfurt, stands in for the whole class. It will appear in its original version, without later refinements, and indeed even the original will be simplified. Little hinges on this choice, as the manipulation problem affects all internalist views equally. On Frankfurt's original view an agent is morally responsible for an action he performs just in case he identifies with it and performed it at least in part for that reason. Furthermore, an agent identifies with an action just in case his first-order desire for it is endorsed by a second-order desire that that first-order desire be effective in action.' The manipulation problem arises for this view because identification with an action could be due to the manipulation of another agent, no less than to natural causes. The term 'manipulation' will be used here, as is common in the literature, somewhat technically to refer to any process through which another person makes the agent act in a way that satisfies whatever internalist criteria of moral responsibility are supposed to apply (Frankfurt's, we have assumed), and does this through a process that works without the agent's knowledge, and without engaging his rational capacities.2 If manipulation in that sense obtains, Frankfurt's H. G. Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 24-25. 2 See D. Blumenfeld, Freedom and Mind Control, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 25 (1988). For a similar account, see A. Mele, Autonomous Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 167. The proposal in the text ignores certain complications. Note that manipulation in the sense defined perhaps occurs but rarely in real life. Perhaps it requires brain washing or neurosurgery or the like. Yet the D. Alm (E) Department of Philosophy, University of Lund, Kungshuset, 222 22 Lund, Sweden e-mail: David.Alm@fil.lu.se I Springer