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Reasons-responsiveness, modality and rational blind spots

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Abstract

Many think it is plausible that agents enjoy freedom and responsibility with respect to their actions in virtue of being reasons-responsive. Extant accounts spell out reasons-responsiveness (RR) as a general modal property. The agent is responsive to reasons for and against ϕ-ing, according to this idea, if they ϕ in accordance with the balance of reasons in a suitable proportion of possible situations. This paper argues that freedom and responsibility are not grounded in such modal properties on the basis of a phenomenon I call ‘rational blind spots’. Agents have highly specific local blockages (or openings) that prevent them from seeing or reacting for a particular type of reason. When these blind spots are triggered, agents fail to be responsive to reasons in the sense relevant to freedom and responsibility. Thus, we judge that they are not free and responsible. But bind spots don’t remove the agent’s possession of general modal RR properties. Thus, extant accounts of reasons-responsiveness render the incorrect result that the agents in these cases remain responsible because they remain responsive to reasons in a general sense.

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Notes

  1. Modal accounts include Fischer and Ravizza (1998), Smith (1997, 2003); Vihvelin (2004, 2013), and many others. Differences within these views are discussed below.

  2. This is of course the structure of a Frankfurt Case, originally from Frankfurt (1969).

  3. This is also how Victor Tadros puts what is essentially the same point in Tadros (ms).

  4. If you think this is linguistically odd, note that we do use “responsive” in exactly such a way in other contexts, such as when paramedics say that a patient is responsive (by which they mean ‘is responding’) or when I say my computer is unresponsive (by which I mean’is not responding’).

  5. You might notice that these descriptions are somewhat vague about whether they express what is called in epistemology a ‘safety condition’ or a ‘sensitivity condition’. This difference isn’t discussed in work on reasons-responsiveness (with some exceptions in the work on moral worth, such as Sorensen (2014), Howard (forthcoming). I don’t have the space here to address this issue, but it won’t have impact on my arguments below anyway.

  6. To my knowledge, Manley and Wasserman (2008) were the first to propose a suitable proportion clause in the literature on dispositions.

  7. Nelkin and Brink (2013) refer to this middle ground as ‘the Goldilocks standard’.

  8. Masks are discussed in Johnston (1992) and Fara (2005), finks are discussed in Martin (1994) and Lewis (1997). Johnston (1992), Martin (1994), Lewis (1997), Bird (1998), Fara (2001) all present versions of mimicking cases.

  9. I take the parlance of auspiciousness from Fisher (2013). Similar ideas are expressed slightly differently in terms of conditions ideal for manifestation (Mumford ,1998, 88–90), in terms of conditions typical of manifestation (Malzkorn, 2000, 456–459), or typical for the trigger circumstances to occur (Fara, 2005). There are also ‘‘normal circumstances’’ (Bird, 1998, pp. 233–4), ‘‘standard conditions’’ (Gundersen, 2002, p. 407), ‘‘background conditions’’ (Cross, 2005, p. 324), and ‘‘ordinary conditions’’ (Choi, 2009, p. 576).

  10. Fara may have been unfairly lumped in with these accounts, but he is mentioned in Clarke (2008) which coined the term New Dispositionalism and is now stuck, for better or worse, with the other names on the list.

  11. The phrase ‘for that reason’ hides an enormous problem for reasons-responsiveness views which I cannot touch on here, but which is related to the discussion in this paper. The problem getting the relation designated by the ‘for’ in the formulation right is crucial to the concept of responding to reasons, which is why I should not appear in the counterfactuals used to analyse that concept. Analyses that do this will appear circular.

  12. See for example Judisch (2005), McKenna (2000, 2001), Shabo (2005), Watson (2001). Fischer (2005, 154n3) and Fischer (2006, 228) seems sympathetic to amendments that change or omit the “all of a piece” clause.

  13. Manley and Wasserman (2008) introduced such cases under the self-explanatory label of Achilles Heels, which they think are exhibited even by low-level dispositional properties like sturdiness.

  14. Todd & Tognazzini (2008) present similar cases of blindness.

  15. See Audi (1990) and Arpaly (2000).

  16. Cohen and Handfield (2007) use a very similar case, which they take to be a version of Frankfurt’s willing addict, to argue that we cannot abstract away from intrinsic interferences.

  17. Fischer & Ravizza (1998, 81) are explicit about such a clause, but their version merely requires that the action count as intentional. This is too weak. The agents in my cases all act intentionally, yet they fail to respond. I will therefore assume that the actual-sequence clause must specify that the relevant action is in fact a response to reasons—which is a stronger requirement than the requirement for intentional action.

  18. Insofar as this strategy is supposed to differentiate state-of-the-art reasons-responsiveness views from traditional accounts, which emphasise the power of the agent to actualise alternative pathways into the future, the New Dispositionalists can agree with Fischer & Ravizza about this. They, too, give an account of dispositional properties present in the actual sequence—the rational abilities and dispositions that agents possess. How exactly Fischer & Ravizza and the New Dispositionalism are in disagreement is a hairy question that goes beyond the scope of this paper (see Heering, 2021 for an attempt to answer it).

  19. For example, we might think that Razvan’s and Milena’s actions reveal their quality of character (Strawson, 1962), or that their relevant actions are still rationally assessable despite their loss of control along the lines of Smith (2005).

  20. The distinction between global and local capacities is labelled and understood slightly differently by different authors. Berofsky (2002) distinguishes between ‘type and token’ abilities, Vihvelin (2013) distinguishes between ‘narrow and wide abilities’. Maier (2014) and Jaster (2020) distinguish between ‘general and specific’ abilities. Austin (1956), 218 famously identifies ‘all in’ abilities. In the context of this paper, it is important that I use the labels ‘general’ and ‘specific’ to denote an orthogonal distinction concerning the specificity of the content of the ability—what it is an ability to do.

  21. For this sort of worry, see also Clarke (2008; Whittle 2010; Franklin 2011).

  22. Choi (2005, 2006, 2012).

  23. Levy and Mckenna (2009) also identify this dialectical move as crucial in the current debate.

  24. We might even specify these differences away, in which case we are left with a set of situations that has only one member: the actual situation.

  25. Fischer (2004, 169) argues that this means his theory does not need to provide clear individuation criteria for mechanisms.

  26. This is basically how Fischer and Ravizza (1998, 74) treat cases similar (but not identical) to my blind spot cases. In these cases, an agent suddenly resists the urge to take a drug because of “more energy and focus”. Fischer and Ravizza conclude that the agent with more energy and focus acts from a different mechanism. The present point is that blind spot cases undermine this proposal.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants of the colloquium at the Centre for Human Abilities Berlin for many insightful comments on the manuscript.

Funding

I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) within the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities “Human Abilities”, Grant Number 409272951.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    David Heering

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Heering, D. Reasons-responsiveness, modality and rational blind spots. Philos Stud 180, 293–316 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01899-y

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