Abstract

In their rich and impressive book Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer an account of moral responsibility in terms of guidance control. On their view, an agent has guidance control in virtue of acting on a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism which is his own, and guidance control is “the freedom-relevant condition necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility.” It is an advantage of this account, they think, that it is compatible with both the truth and the falsity of causal determinism. All of these claims raise questions which are worth pursuing. In this very brief paper, I can consider just one aspect of their account, namely, their rejection of incompatibilism.