Acting Rightly for the Right Reasons: An Amendment to Wolf's Reason View (Teorema; 2015)

ACTING RIGHTLY FOR THE RIGHT REASONS: AN AMENDMENT TO

WOLF’S REASON VIEW

Abstract: Critics of Wolf’s “asymmetry thesis” argue that it is counterintuitiveto praise agents for performing right actions, even if this is something theseagents were “psychologically determined” to do, while at the same time notblaming such agents for acting wrongly. I defend Wolf by exploring what itmeans “to do the right thing for the right reasons.” Acting rightly for the rightreasons amounts to having subjected oneself to certain deliberative procedures.The right reasons, that one chooses and acts upon, express a capacity forself-determination, the normative features of which are themselvesconstitutive parts of the True and the Good.

Keywords: free will – moral responsibility – acting for reasons – moralrealism – practical reason – Susan Wolf

INTRODUCTION

Critics have argued that Susan Wolf’s Reason View is an

unpersuasive account of free will and moral responsibility.

Wolf’s “asymmetry thesis” is untenable because we can devise

counterexamples to the claim that being psychologically

determined to do the right action is compatible with being fully

responsible (and praiseworthy) for doing so. “Platonic New World”

cases, in which agents get indoctrinated to perform right

actions, are intended to trigger the intuition that

responsibility for good (as well as bad actions) requires more than

just acting in accordance with the True and Good. According to

Wolf’s critics, a further necessary condition for moral

responsibility is that agents have some kind of “ultimate

control” over their normative beliefs, their selves, and their

actions. It is not merely the beliefs’ content but also their

source and genealogical origin that determines whether or not

agents are praise- and blameworthy.

I defend the Reason View against this criticism. Such a

defense is only tenable, however, when Wolf’s account gets

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modified. The aforementioned objection to the Reason View can be

countered by means of fleshing out the notion of acting in

accordance with the True and the Good for the right reasons. I argue

that the citizens of “Platonic New World” are indeed not fully

responsible for their morally good acts because they lack the

ability to critically deliberate about the right moral reasons

for acting rightly. The absence of critical reflection and

endorsement is the reason for our reluctance to praise these

individuals. The requirement of acting for the right reasons is

met only if these very reasons are the end point of a process of

personal development that enables agents to endorse the Good on

the basis of self-directed normative reflection. Such reflection

is itself a normatively constrained capacity and it is

constitutive of the True and the Good in Wolf’s sense. This

normative amendment notwithstanding, I conclude that my proposal

leaves intact Wolf’s framework and its virtues, first and

foremost the avoidance of radical autonomy, on the one hand, and

the reliance on mere de facto selves, on the other.

I. THE REASON VIEW AND ASYMETRICAL FREEDOM

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In Freedom Within Reason Susan Wolf attempts to resolve the

philosophical disputes concerning free will and moral

responsibility. She shifts the attention from two “metaphysical

approaches” towards her normative and moral alternative. The

Reason View is the attempt to overcome the shortcomings of the

two dominant doctrines in the free will debate, i.e., the Real

Self View and the Autonomy View respectively.i

The Real Self View rests on the assumption that ultimate

control and (radical) autonomy with regard to one’s actions are

not necessary conditions for moral responsibility. Wolf agrees

with this negative feature of the Real Self View – the rejection

of ultimate control constitutes a central aspect of her Reason

View. There are, however, problems with the Real Self View and

its central positive claim that a nonautonomous agent is fully

morally responsible as long as “she is at liberty (or able) both

to govern her behavior on the basis of her will and to govern her

will on the basis of her valuational system.” [Wolf (1990), p.

33] Wolf’s complaint follows from her analysis of deprived-i Chapters two and three of Freedom Within Reason respectively are dedicated to a critique of these two views.

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childhood cases. These cases exhibit agents who fully identify

with their values and their normative identities and perform

actions on their basis.

In these cases, and contrary to the Real Self View, we seem

to be justified in withholding blame, when such agents commit

morally wrong acts. The reason for us withholding blame is that

responsible agents do not seem to merely act in accordance with

their endorsed, unalienated, and, in short, their “real” selves.

The victim of a deprived, abusive, and violent childhood lacks

the status of a morally responsible agent because she was

subjected to a developmental environment that resulted in a

malformed character and psyche. We will have to come back to the

question of what the value-laden expression “malformed” in this

formulation exactly amounts to. Suffice it for the moment to

summarize Wolf’s central critical line concerning the Real Self

View, viz. that the deprived childhood victim did not get the

chance to recognize and appreciate some of the central,

normative, aspects of the world: her deformed cognitive and

volitional capacities are incapable of tracking objectively valid

facts and norms and it is this deficit that makes us abstain from

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blaming her for her bad actions. In a crucial passage Wolf

summarizes: “A victim of a deprived (or depraved) childhood may

be as smart as a person raised in a more normal environment, but,

because of a regrettably skewed set of experiences, her values

may be distorted. She is able to reason, as it were, but not able

to act in accordance with Reason.”ii [Wolf (1990), pp. 75-76]

The Autonomy View, the other dominant metaphysical position

that Wolf finds wanting, seems to do better with respect to the

case of the victim of a deprived childhood. Whereas the Real Self

View is fine with an agent being determined to act on her

(probably bad) values, as long as these values are part of the

agent’s real self, the Autonomy View requires “ultimate control”

over one’s actions (and one’s self). According to Wolf’s

exposition, the Autonomy View regards agents as morally

responsible only to the extent to which they are undetermined

with regard to the course of action they are taking. Autonomy

requires that morally responsible agents “must be agents who not

only do make choices on no basis when there is no basis on which

ii I thank an anonymous referee for this journal who urged me to summarize Wolf’s account of deprived childhood cases more clearly.

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to make them, but who also can make choices on no basis even when

some basis is available. In other words, they must be agents for

whom no basis for choice is necessitating.” [Wolf (1990), p. 55]

The radical notion of “autonomy,” underlying the Autonomy

View, is an element in the existentialist accounts of freedom

advocated by, for example, Sartre and Heidegger.iii Wolf

identifies this conception of autonomy with the idea of radical

freedom understood as self-creation and libertarian

indeterminism, that is, with some kind of unrestricted power to

perform even actions that one deems badly justified or morally

wrong. Why would anyone regard such a capacity for autonomous

action as valuable, she (sensibly) asks. And why would

existentialist autonomy be a necessary condition for moral

responsibility? Answering these questions in the negative, Wolf

disagrees with the Autonomy View when it comes to accounting for

not holding the victim of a deprived childhood morally

responsible.

iii I am indebted to the audiences at several occasions on which drafts of this paper were discussed. They kept reminding me that Wolf’s interpretation of Sartre’s and Heidegger’s accounts of freedom is a rather controversial one.

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Despite the fact that the two aforementioned views occupy

the two opposites in the debate between libertarian and

compatibilist free will, she rejects them both on the same

grounds. Whereas the Autonomy View and the Real Self View treat

the problem of free will and moral responsibility as a

metaphysical issue, her own Reason View adopts a distinctively

normative perspective. In order to count as responsible, an agent

must have acquired a “distinctive intellectual power, the power

to exercise right Reason and to govern one’s actions

accordingly.” [Wolf (1990), p. 71] The centerpiece of Wolf’s

account is the claim that freedom consists in the ability to act

in accordance with the True and the Good. A succinct summary of

the Reason View is this contrast with the Real Self View:

According to the Real Self View, an individual is responsible if and

only if she is able to form her actions on the basis of her values. The

Reason View insists that responsibility requires something more.

According to the Reason View, an individual is responsible if and only

if she is able to form her actions on the basis of her values and she is

able to form her values on the basis of what is True and Good. [Wolf

(1990), p. 75]

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Moreover, the justification for not holding the victim of a

deprived childhood responsible for her deeds is not, contrary to

the Autonomy View, the fact that she lacks the radical freedom of

choice that would allow her to act either in accordance with the

Good or against it. Rather, this person lacks the ability to do

the right thing because external circumstances have rendered her

incapable of tracking normative facts and, consequently, she

cannot act on any knowledge of that sort. The agent has been

brought up in a way that results in her holding false beliefs

about the normative realm and in having developed a distorted

moral sensitivity (and sensibility).

Closely related to this tenet of the Reason View is the

“asymmetry thesis” about alternative possibilities and moral

responsibility. In contrast to the Autonomy View, the Reason View

holds that being psychologically determined to perform an action

is consistent with being morally responsible for it. Whether or

not being unable to do otherwise is a sufficiently excusing

factor varies according with the action’s objective moral

quality. According to the asymmetry thesis, being psychologically

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determined to do the right thing is compatible with the resulting

action (and its agent) being praiseworthy. Wolf’s example is the

life guard who is so well-conditioned when it comes to responding

to the True and the Good that she does not hesitate for a second,

jumps into the sea, and rescues the drowning child. According to

Wolf’s description of the case this agent could not have acted

otherwise, i.e., she was psychologically determined to rescue the

child. Even so, we praise the agent for what she did (which, of

course, presupposes holding her morally responsible).

Things are different in the case of an agent performing a

morally wrong action, that is, an action that does not track the

True and the Good. Holding an agent responsible for a wrong

action is not justified if the agent is psychologically

determined to choose and perform the wrong act in question. When

the question of whether this agent is justifiably blamed arises,

one must ask if she could have done otherwise in these

circumstances (in the “actual sequence”). [Fischer (2006), p.

198] Consider the example of a person viciously pushing a child

over a pier’s edge. [Fischer and Ravizza (1992), pp. 376-7] One

must suppress one’s blame if this person is psychologically

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incapable of recognizing and/or acting upon the recognition of

the normative fact requiring her not to push the child. On the

other hand, if the person exhibits a psychological condition,

suggesting that she is capable of tracking the True and the Good,

then we are justified in claiming that she could have abstained

from pushing the child. Blaming this agent is a fitting response.

II. A CRITICISM OF THE REASON VIEW

The Reason View’s justification for not holding the victim of a

deprived childhood responsible is that her choices and actions do

not track the True and the Good. Wolf’s account suggests that it

is neither the disturbing nature of the personality-development

per se nor the lack of ultimate control over one’s personality and

values that the Reason View identifies as the justification for

not blaming this person for morally wrong actions. Wolf does not

seem to care (qua philosopher interested in the preconditions of

moral responsibility) about the details of how an agent comes to

suffer from the inability to recognize (and to act in accordance

with) the True and the Good. Similarly to the Real-Self View, the

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object of evaluation is the agent’s constitution as it is at the

time when she performs the action. It is this apparent neglect of

factors related to an agent’s personality-development and

identity-formation that critics exploit in their attacks on the

Reason View.iv

According to Carlos Moya, for example, the apparent

persuasiveness of the asymmetry thesis rests on Wolf’s choice of

examples. As discussed above, victims of a deprived childhood

are, according to Wolf, not to be held morally responsible

because their maltreatment has resulted in them holding a set of

objectively wrong values. What is doing the work in Wolf’s

example is not necessarily the subjection to parental

maltreatment and bad educational practices but the substantive

outcome (i.e., the deformed self) that normally ensues from such

a process; it is the inability to form one’s values on the basis

of what is True and Good. Implicit in Wolf’s account is the

assumption that exposure to manipulation, indoctrination, and iv In addition to Moya’s version of this criticism, discussed in the text, John Martin Fischer pursues this line of attack when hecomplains that the Reason View “appear(s) to entail that thoroughgoing manipulation, brainwashing, or hypnosis is completely compatible with moral responsibility, (…).” [Fischer (2006), p. 34 fn.]

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coercion usually results in individuals who fail to track the True

and the Good. The critics’ point is that this connection is a

contingent one. Platonic New World cases show that Wolf’s Reason

View fails to account for a second, necessary, condition for not

holding the victims of a deprived childhood responsible. It is

not merely their being incapable to track the True and the Good

that singles them out as improper targets of blame:

The apparent plausibility of Wolf’s proposed explanation [for not

blaming victims of a deprived childhood; C. H.] has to do with the fact

that certain sorts of origins (deprived childhood, mental illness,

psychological conditioning) of an agent’s values usually result in a

wrong or distorted system of values. But this is not necessarily so. It

is conceivable that an agent forms her values through psychological

conditioning and that these values are correct and not distorted at all.

[Moya (2006), p. 113]

According to this criticism, the additional feature that

underlies our intuition to withhold blame in such cases is the

victim’s lack of transparency and control concerning the sources

of her values and normative conceptions.

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In order to present his counterexample, Moya introduces a

collectivized version of Wolf’s argument from a deprived

childhood. In totalitarian societies, such as the one depicted in

Orwell’s 1984, people are indoctrinated to adhere to a

totalitarian world view. According to the Reason View, we do not

hold these agents fully responsible for their morally wrong

actions because 1984-style regimes instill morally repugnant

traits in their subjects (unconditional obedience to authorities,

xenophobic attitudes, militaristic convictions, etc.). On Wolf’s

view, such totalitarian regimes (similar to abusive and

dictatorial parents) produce individuals who hold valuational

systems, the content of which is out of touch with the True and

the Good.

However, this does not necessarily have to be the case:

“[C]ases of psychological conditioning (Brave New World cases,

more generally), though Wolf groups them together with those of

deprived childhood, are resistant to this treatment.” [Moya

(2006), p. 113] In “Platonic New World” benevolent philosopher-

kings use similar “educational” methods as do their counterparts

in Orwell’s 1984. However, in the case of Platonic New World,

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indoctrination and manipulation are used to condition the

citizens into acting in accordance with the True and the Good.

Concerning the content of the agents’ selves and values, there

seems to be no problem with praising these agents for exhibiting

morally correct conduct based on their drilled personalities.

That is what the Reason View and its exclusive concern with

agents’ actually held values and their contents (as opposed to

its sources) implies, according to Moya’s argument. The citizens

of Platonic New World are psychologically determined to do the

right thing and the fact that the source of this determination is

a process of deception and manipulation does not seem to matter

to the Reason View: “These agents would seem to match Wolf’s

necessary and sufficient conditions of moral responsibility

perfectly, and therefore they should be deemed fully morally

responsible agents.” [Moya (2006), p. 113]

Critics such as Moya find this result highly implausible.

They suggest that praising citizens of Platonic New World for

their good actions shows that acting in accordance with the True

and the Good cannot be a sufficient condition for holding agents

morally responsible and for praising them. This is especially the

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case when we remember that the asymmetry thesis requires agents

to be able to do otherwise in the case of holding them

responsible for acting morally wrongly. Many critics, therefore,

reject the asymmetry thesis and call into question the claim that

the aforementioned requirement (of not being psychologically

determined, that is) is not equally applicable in the case of

agents acting rightly.

III. ARRIVING IN THE RIGHT WAY AT THE RIGHT REASONS (FOR ACTING

RIGHTLY) AS CONSTITUTIVE OF THE TRUE AND THE GOOD

Given his reading of Wolf Moya’s criticism has some initial

plausibility. Praising the citizens of Platonic New World for

their morally right actions, while at the same time refusing to

blame those in Orwell’s 1984 for their bad ones, seems to neglect

a crucial dimension of why we hold people responsible. Moya

points out that Wolf’s dominating concern with the moral content

of agents’ normative belief systems leads her to ignore the

intuitive reluctance to praise drilled “moral saints”: “[W]hat

stands in the way of our accepting it [praising citizens of

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Platonic New World] seems to be closely related to the

requirement of autonomy and ultimate control.” [Moya (2006), p.

113] Wolf’s goal of differentiating the Reason View as sharply as

possible from the Real Self View and, more importantly in the

present context, from the Autonomy View is responsible for her

not being able to fully employ the sensible aspects of these two

doctrines. In the following I remedy this shortcoming of Wolf’s

approach.

Moya’s exposition of the Reason View remains suspiciously

silent concerning another aspect of Wolf’s theory. Wolf’s

asymmetry thesis does not merely require good agents to do the

right thing in order to be justifiably held responsible for doing

so. Rather, a psychologically determined, but nevertheless

praiseworthy moral agent, is responsible for performing a morally

right action in so far as she performs it for the right reasons. [Wolf

(1990), pp. 82-83] In order to respond to Moya’s criticism, we

need to present a more detailed account of what it means for an

agent to be determined to do the right thing for the right

reasons. Revisiting the life guard example prepares the grounds

for this more persuasive account. It does so by, first, drawing

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our attention to some problematic features of Wolf’s presentation

of the example.

The rescuer who cannot help but jump into the sea and save

the drowning child is psychologically determined to perform the

right act. The agent has such a clear grasp of the normative

facts involved in this situation that she does not engage in any

deliberation about the rescue. “[S]he lacks the ability to do

otherwise simply because her understanding of the situation is so

good and her moral commitment so strong.” [Wolf (1990), p. 82] We

can plausibly ask, however, whether it makes any difference to

our praise whether the rescuer has been brain-washed in order to

do the right thing or whether the determination of her will has

its origin in something more authentic, namely her own reflective

endorsement of the rightness of the action. I think the answer to

this question has to be yes, it makes a difference.

We need to get clearer about what it means for the rescuer

to be “determined” to do the right thing. A more satisfying

answer has to address the biographical questions of why (and by

whom) the agent is determined and of how she has arrived at her

current state of being necessitated to do the right thing. Taking

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care of these questions in a sensible manner is possible for a

revised Reason View in so far as Wolf’s notion of “psychological

determinism” is supplemented by additional normative

considerations which are themselves part of the True and the

Good. The resulting conception of necessitation is best labeled

as a kind of “moral (self-) determinism” and as such incorporates

a moral extension of the requirements for responsibility

presented by Wolf. Only an agent subject to a specific kind of

personality-development and moral education can be fully

praiseworthy for performing her right actions. When this agent

acts for the right reasons then this implies, according to the

amendment proposed here, that she has undergone such a process of

personality-development and identity-formation, the moral core of

which is to enable a developing self to embrace the Good on her

own at some point. In everyday parlance we call this point in a

person’s development “maturity.”

Returning to the life guard example illustrates these

abstract considerations. If the life guard is rescuing the child

then, according to my version of the Reason View, being able to

justify and give one’s own reasons for one’s actions is a

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requirement that has to be satisfied in order to count as acting

for the right reasons. Wolf’s description of the example tends to

obscure this critical point. As so often happens in moral

philosophical thought experiments, the rescuer is under extreme

time constraints and the scenario hardly allows for any moral

deliberation worth that name. However, we can easily imagine

altering the example in a way that allows exactly that. If we

were able to interrupt the course of dramatic events and

interrogated the potential rescuer we would expect her to come up

with some justification for her attempt to rescue the child.

Again, and similar to Moya’s Platonic New World citizens, we

would hesitate to praise the agent in question if we found out

that she rescues the child solelyv because of, for example, some

instilled fear of eternal damnation that has its causal origins

in irrational threats and corporal punishment, repeatedly

inflicted on her in the past. In other words, the agent in

question would not count as doing the right thing for the right

reasons, namely reasons that emerge in a self-guided deliberate

process, the normative features of which are, in turn,

constitutive elements of the True and the Good. Consequently, in

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so far as the agent in question is not capable of deliberating in

a self-guided manner that is oriented towards the objectively

valid normative realm (because of, for example, her peculiar

upbringing) she cannot be held morally responsible, let alone be

praised, for the rescue. While the resulting end state, brought

about by her behavior is good, the way she arrives at generating

this state of affairs disqualifies the scenario in question from

partaking in the True and Good.

The determination to do the right thing, then, must be the

result of a process of self-determination that itself has been

acquired and cultivated in a suitable normative environment.

Contrary to the libertarian versions of the autonomy-view

attacked by Wolf, being determined to do the right thing for the

right reasons is not per se the problematic aspect of Wolf’s

approach. This element of the Reason View and, hence, the

asymmetry thesis are plausible. We indeed want a responsible

agent’s real self to be the ultimate source of her actions – the

Real Self View got that one right. However, this self must be of

a certain kind, namely a self that accepts the True and the Good

for reasons she is capable of endorsing as her own. This self too

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will be determined, namely “morally determined,” so to speak, to

act rightly. “Determined” here refers to a process of setting

oneself ends (thereby also restricting one’s freedom) for the

right, i.e., reflected upon, reasons.vi

As mentioned above, Wolf takes advantage of the fact that

the life guard is faced with an emergency that does not leave any

time to deliberate about whether or not to rescue the child. In

the slowed-down version, on the other hand, the agent is able to

step back, allowing her some time to answer questions such as:

“Is there really no way out of this situation for you? Is it

really true that you cannot turn away from the child and continue

minding your own business?” If “psychologically determined” meant

v The qualification “solely” is necessary to forestall the complaint that my revision of the Reason View makes it impossibleto praise religious believers for performing right acts. My revision does in fact exclude agents from praise who save the child exclusively because of an irrational fear of eternal damnation. However, as spelled out in the text, my revised version is compatible with religious belief if the latter is reflectively endorsed at some point in the agents’ personal development (which does, of course, imply critical engagement with the religious doctrine in question). I take it that Moya thinks both, Platonic New World and Orwell’s 1984, are actively preventing citizens from engaging in this process of critical reflection and self-examination. In so far as these societies aresuccessful in this respect, they indeed render their citizens inadequate objects of praise and blame.

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that the agent answers this question negatively or does not even

find intelligible the question at all, then this would suggest

that she cannot even conceive of herself as ignoring the child’s

demand. Wolf would then have headed too far into the

deterministic direction, thereby strengthening Moya’s criticism.

She would describe a mere “reflex” rather than a reason-based

action, when describing the case of the rescuer. On the other

hand, the agent in question is more likely to reply, “Yes, sure I

know that I am not coerced by anybody (not even by myself) to

rescue the child, and I know that I can abstain from jumping into

the sea when you confront me with sufficient countervailing

reasons to do so (e.g. there are two children in danger of

drowning further down the beach). However, I am morally determined

(“resolved”) to save this child because I have this obligation

for reasons x, y, zvii.”

In order to further develop this amendment to Wolf’s Reason

View and the notion of being morally (self-)determined I discuss vi It is certainly true that the revised version of the Reason View presented in the text makes becoming a responsible agent a matter of luck to a certain degree. An autonomous self is not a de-contextualized one and a good deal of social and parental fortune is involved concerning a developing person finding herself in autonomy-enabling conditions.

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in more detail how the idea of doing right actions for the right

reasons can be fleshed out. Let us introduce another example.

Assume that the citizens of Platonic New World are honest people.

After all they have been indoctrinated to be persons of that

kind, i.e., their educators used deception, manipulation, and

coercive means in order to make them exhibit honest conduct.

Hence, when they are asked to tell the truth they do the right

thing and respond truthfully instantaneously and without pausing

for deliberation. Let us call this kind of honesty, “honesty*.”

Compare the citizens of Platonic New World with agents we

normally consider morally fully responsible, that is, agents

whose agency is not the result of an indoctrinating and deceptive

educational process (even so, it is the result of an educational

and therefore always also other-determined interpersonal

process!).viii These agents have been educated to critically

reflect upon the normative beliefs they find themselves with.

These agents morally determine themselves to be honest agents

because they have been fortunate enough to getting exposed to an

autonomy-enabling environment. They are “honest.”

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What is the difference between Platonic New World citizens

being honest* and us being honest? The two conceptions of

“honesty” are similar in that two agents exhibiting honesty* and

honesty respectively, show the same patterns of outward behavior

and/or linguistic utterances that bring about a state of affairs

that qualifies as “Right.” Both do the right thing and if that

were all to it then Moya would certainly be justified in

criticizing Wolf for declaring both agents equally responsible

and praiseworthy. However, only we, the Free World citizens, so

to speak, are honest for the right reasons and, according to the

amendment, thereby partake in the True and the Good together with

our actions.

At this point the manifestation of how right reasons for

action affect agency and the overall assessment of a member of vii I keep the specification of the more particular aspects of “right reasons” deliberately vague here. It is perfectly fine (and actually congenial with Wolf’s thesis of “normative pluralism”) to substitute any developed secular and/or religious moral framework for the variables. The more crucial point in the text is that “psychologically determined” cannot mean “psychological programmed and conditioned to act rightly” for theagent to be praiseworthy. In order to be praiseworthy the agent must be “morally determined” to do the right thing for the right reasons, which in turn is only realized when the agent, at some point in her development, is in a position to endorse these reasons as the right ones.

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the free moral community enter the picture. We can conceive of

the exclusive right-making feature of Free World citizens’

“honesty” (the feature that indoctrinated agents cannot share) as

an additional property that their actions exhibit, i.e., a

property on top of the set of reasons that identifies being

honest as the right thing to do.ix In the case of the honest Free

World citizens, this approach suggests that one is honest for a

number of reasons that are peculiar to honesty and honest action.

These reasons may differ: some are honest on grounds of

utilitarian reasons, others believe in the justificatory adequacy

of divine commands. However, all these reasons and justificatory

stories might well be parroted by the citizens of Platonic New

World. This is the case in so far as holding the various moral

reasons for being honest (and for being honest*) can, but need

not, be the result of a process of manipulative drilling.

Nevertheless, and this is the crucial point, there is one right-

making action feature that only we as the offspring of a free

moral community can bring about, namely that honesty (not

honesty*) is the result of us deliberatively determining the

basis of our conduct. Consequently, for a morally right action to

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be performed for the right reasons one does not merely have to

have some right reasons for action, but one must have one’s own

right reasons for choosing the morally right action and the latter

fact constitutes an additional, procedure-based, moral reason for

being honest that is part of the True and the Good in Wolf’s

sense. Being determined by the True and the Good is therefore

something different from Moya’s Platonic New World citizens, who

necessarily fail to fully partake in it due to their lack of

being able to practically think for themselves – something they

were never taught to do.

Before concluding let us briefly employ this result and the

recommended amendment to an influential objection to Wolf’s

Reason View, which too rests on the often-overlooked strongly

viii One might protest that the notion of an autonomy-enabling education is hopelessly vague. Is not the liberal parent equally indoctrinating a fetishism of freedom and critical mindedness in one’s child, the religious fundamentalist may (and actually) doesask? I define “indoctrination” and “manipulation” in relation to the True and the Good for my purposes. That means, whether or nota child is subject to these forms of “education” is dependent on whether or not her parents use tricks and strategies that are themselves contrary to the True and the Good, e.g. lying and deceiving. Sure, this is not at all a satisfying conceptual analysis of “indoctrination” (just think of talking one’s little child into believing in Santa Claus) but it should do its instrumental job in assisting the argument in the text.

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normative nature of her conception of moral responsibility. This,

so to speak, all-the-way-down normative character of the Reason

View provides the basis for showing why Fischer’s supposed

“Frankfurt-type counterexamples” to Wolf’s view turn out to be

innocuous on closer inspection. [Fischer (2006), pp. 57-58] In

this example we are supposed to imagine Mary, who helps a

motorist fixing a flat tire; a good deed for which she deserves

praise. In Fischer’s rendering of the example a counterfactual

intervener is present and ensures that Mary would fix the tire

even if a morally even better deed presented itself to Mary (e.g.,

rushing a sick child to the hospital). In this case Mary could

not have done otherwise than fixing the tire because had she,

contrary to what actually happened, considered the option of

engaging in the morally superior action, the intervener would

have jumped in and prevented her from doing so. However, Fischer

concludes, we continue to praise Mary for having chosen, despite

the presence of the intervener, to fix the tire.

Fischer is right that Mary could not have chosen the morally

superior action in this scenario and that this seems to conflict

with Wolf’s criterion for right action, according to which “an

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action is morally praiseworthy [in Mary’s case, fixing the tire;

C.H.] only if there are no good and sufficient reasons to do

something else.”x [Wolf (1980), p. 159] Fischer interprets

passages like this one as saying that for an action to be

praiseworthy it has to be performed by an agent who,

metaphysically speaking, could have chosen, in case this

presented itself as an actual option, the even better (actually

the morally best available) action.

However, what Fischer ignores in his discussion of Mary is

that for the Reason View the central issue is not one in terms of

“could” but rather one in terms of “would have done otherwise” –

the latter being applicable to Mary even when the counterfactual

intervener is present. Mary would have been normatively

(self-)determined and would have rushed the kid to the hospital

if that had become necessary, even if the counterfactual

intervener had actually interfered and prevented her from

ix Steven Darwall has developed a model with regard to the wrong-making features of actions that parallels my idea to some extent.Darwall asks whether the fact that an action is wrong gives one an additional reason for not performing it; additional in the sense of the property of the action’s wrongness joining the otherwrong-making features specific to the action in question. [Darwall (2010), 135-157]

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choosing the morally superior action. And that this normative

property characterizes her now, that is, at the moment of

helping the stranded motorist (viz., that this normative principle

of choosing the hospital ride over fixing the tire is a feature of

her actual normative self-conception) is the ground for declaring

her to be determined (for the right reasons) by the True and the

Good. The Reason View replaces the metaphysical “could have” with

a normative “would have” in the Frankfurt-style cases that

Fischer considers. Mary, the presence of the counterfactual

intervener notwithstanding, therefore remains morally responsible

(and praiseworthy) for the right action of fixing the tire. She

would have done otherwise in changed circumstances that exhibited

the opportunity of choosing a morally superior course of action. x This is a quite extreme and problematic formulation that Wolf’searly works indeed seem to adhere to. After all, is it true that my action is right and praiseworthy (as opposed to optimific) only if I had abstained from performing it in case an even better action would have become available? Sure, I might be maximally praiseworthy, had I actually chosen the latter; but some (maybe significant) degree of praise seems to be indicated even if I choose and perform second-best, third-best,… actions. Fischer is right about this observation; but wrong in uncharitably exploiting these unhappy formulations in his criticism of Wolf’s overall project. Part of what I do in the text is to render more consistent Wolf’s view by shifting more explicitly than she does the language from the metaphysical “could have done otherwise” tothe normative “would have done otherwise.”

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That this is so reconciles the scenario presented by Fischer with

Wolf’s account of responsibility for right actions. The example

of Mary and the counterfactual intervener does not undermine the

Reason View’s asymmetry thesis as stated by Wolf and as suggested

by the amendment defended above. Being determined to doing the

right thing for the right reasons always includes the property of

the right thing being chosen in the right manner, itself

constitutive of the freestanding and objective notion of the True

and the Good introduced by Wolf.

CONCLUSION

The Reason View can avoid Platonic New World cases and

successfully accounts for our intuition that such a society’s

well-behaved subjects are not praiseworthy to the same degree as

Free World citizens are. Wolf’s normative conception of free will

harbors the resources to reply to the aforementioned criticism by

spelling out more fully what it means to act in accordance with

the True and the Good for the right reasons. Platonic New World

inhabitants do in fact act in accordance with the True and the

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Good – at least their actions generate good (lower case!)

outcomes and results. They do so, however, as a result of

engaging in forms of practical deliberation and choice that are

“insufficient” for praising them. The insufficiency in play here

has itself a distinctively normative, non-metaphysical,

dimension: Practical reflection and deliberation that aims at

action that lives up to the True and the Good is itself a

constitutive feature of the True and the Good.xi Its formal and

procedural natures notwithstanding these elements of the True and

the Good are necessary for the right reasons to be the end point

of an agent’s vindicating – right making – deliberative

endeavors. I cannot pursue this point here but this feature of

the amendment promises to help bridging the gap between realist

and constructivist accounts of practical reasons: The True and

the Good, as Wolf conceives it, provide a robust and objective

standard of normativity; however, that standard is itself partly

concerned with those very constraints that guide a mature and

morally well-developed practical reasoner’s deliberative

activities that in turn construct the right reasons on the basis

of which she chooses her right actions.

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All this might make it seem as if my amendment turns Wolf’s

conception of moral responsibility (back) into the autonomy view,

one of the two conceptions that she objects to.xii This impression

dissolves, however, once we keep in mind that the amendment draws

significant attention to the external, i.e., social and

developmental, dimensions of the possibility of self-

determination in accordance with the True and the Good. My

version of Wolf’s Reason View does not fall back into the old

metaphysical patterns, let alone does it require agents to

exhibit the “radical autonomy” and “ultimate control”

characteristic of the traditional autonomy view. That the

amendment identifies the Reasons View’s central capacity to lead

a life that incorporates the True and the Good as being at least

partly dependent on externally and interpersonally shared

preconditions, that the agent has no initial and full control

over, is itself enough to make the autonomy view’s defender part

company with us (heteronomy!). I haven’t been able to spell out

the details of this interplay between internal and external

normative preconditions of responsible agency here but I do so

elsewhere. [Author (2013)] The True and the Good that Wolf

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plausibly introduces as a standard for ascribing moral

responsibility to free agents has many more dimensions than Wolf

addresses in her impressive work. Two of these additional

dimensions have been presented above in the form of the claims

that the True and the Good extends into the procedural realm of

individual practical reasoning, on the one hand, and it answers

to the need of social beings like us to develop and exercise

practical reason in shared normative structures that themselves

co-facilitate and co-constitute the True and the Good to

different degrees, on the other.xiii

The objection from Platonic New World cases exploits the

unfortunate fact that Wolf’s initial presentation of the Reason

View too narrowly focused on agents’ relationship to a seemingly

agency-independent realm of normative Truth and Goodness; a realm

detached from the nature of both individual deliberative

procedures and social practices that, as I tried to show, are

themselves constitutive normative features of the possibility of xi It is therefore absolutely adequate, when a reviewer of an early draft insisted that “what is at issue is how this ability to recognize the True and the Good is constituted.” The amendmentagrees with this formulation and adds that Korsgaard’s recent work on the “constitution of agency” is a relative to the view presented in the text. [Korsgaard (2009)]

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free and responsible agency under the reign of the True and the

Good. Whether an agent acts in accordance with the True and the

Good cannot be reduced to the question of whether or not she

holds the right set of values. A true and good life qua agent,

i.e., a life that consists of right action done for the right

reasons, can only take place in a normative context within which

deliberating in the Right way allows the choice and performance

of these Right actions.xiv, xv

xii I am indebted to an anonymous referee for this journal for raising this objection to the proposed amendment.xiii It is noteworthy that Carlos Moya’s positive proposal for rescuing the idea of moral responsibility from skepticism too assigns “against a profoundly individualistic view of human beings” a significant role to human beings’ “social nature and their participation in normative systems as enabling conditions for their freedom and moral responsibility.” I agree with this view that further suggests that individual freedom and responsibility are, to some extent, a contingent achievement, dependent on social and historical circumstances. [Moya (2006), p. 191]xiv At this point many a reader will detect a resemblance between my account of responsible agency and Hegel’s. I do not object to this impression but, obviously, do not have the space to pursue this complex issue here. [Pippin (2008) and Author (2014)]xv Acknowledgments! ERC…

REFERENCES

DARWALL, S. (2010), ‘But It Would Be Wrong’, Social Philosophy & Policy, vol. 27, pp. 135-157.

FISCHER, J. M. and RAVIZZA, M. (1992), ‘Responsibility, Freedom, and Reason’, Ethics, vol. 102, pp. 368-389.

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NOTES

FISCHER, J. M. (2006), My Way. Essays on Moral Responsibility, New York, NY, Oxford University Press.

KOORSGAARD, C. (2009), Self-Constitution. Agency, Identity, and Integrity, New York, NY, Oxford University Press.

MOYA, C. J. (2006), Moral Responsibility – The Ways of Scepticism, New York, NY, Routledge.

PIPPIN, R. B. (2008), Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life, New York, NY, Cambridge University Press.

WOLF, S. (1980), ‘Asymmetrical Freedom’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 77, pp. 151-66.

WOLF, S. (1990), Freedom Within Reason, New York, NY, Oxford University Press.

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