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Reasons-Responsiveness and the Challenge of Irrelevance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2022

JINGBO HU Open the ORCID record for JINGBO HU [Opens in a new window]
JINGBO HU*
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FUDAN UNIVERSITY [email protected]
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Abstract

Carolina Sartorio has criticized the reasons-responsiveness theory of freedom for being inconsistent with the actual-sequence view motivated by the Frankfurt-style cases. Specifically, reasons-responsiveness conceived as a modal property does not pertain to the actual sequence of the agent's action and thereby it is irrelevant to the agent's freedom and moral responsibility. Call this the challenge of irrelevance. In this article, I present this challenge in a new way that overcomes certain limitations of Sartorio's argument. I argue that the root of the challenge is that reasons-responsiveness as an unmanifested modal property seems to be nonexplanatory for the agent's action. I show that reasons-responsiveness theorists will confront this challenge even if they do not endorse the actual-sequence view. Finally, I deflate this challenge with David Lewis's model of causal explanation, showing that reasons-responsiveness is explanatory in virtue of providing information about the causal history of the agent's action.

Keywords

free willmoral responsibilityreasons-responsivenessactual sequencesHarry Frankfurt
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , December 2023 , pp. 762 - 778
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

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Footnotes

Special thanks to Jules Holroyd, James Lenman, Helen Beebee, T. Ryan Byerly, Carolina Sartorio, David Heering, William Hornett, Mu Liu, Yajun Chen, Yingfeng Chen, and several anonymous referees for helpful comments on drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the audiences of the philosophy postgraduate seminar at University of Sheffield in 2017, the Explanation conference at Wuhan University in 2019, and the Free Will and Causality conference at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in 2019.

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