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The Manipulationist Threat to moral responsibility

Today's post is by Kristoffer Moody (University of Edinburgh) on his recent paper, "The Manipulationist Threat to moral responsibility" (Synthese 2024).

Kristoffer Moody

We all have that one relative, let’s call him Antonio, who, at family gatherings, irritates us by expounding on how vaccines cause autism, that the election was stolen, or other strange, problematic, or offensive beliefs. While it’s tendentious whether or not we can hold Antonio responsible for holding those beliefs, it may seem clear that we can hold him responsible for acting on the basis of those beliefs.

However, I claim using evidence from psychology that Antonio may have been manipulated in the formation of his belief. I claim, on the basis of evidence of our propensity towards choice-blindness, the ‘truth effect’, and confirmation bias, that we are far more susceptible to manipulation than we might pre-theoretically think, and that we appear to be particularly so susceptible via social media. This is a problem, because intuitively one might suppose that if we’ve been manipulated into holding a belief, we are not responsible for acting on its basis. Thus, it might appear as though Antonio is not responsible for acting on the basis of his belief. I call this worry the Manipulationist Threat.

The Manipulationist Threat, I claim, is not just a problem for the aptness of our blame as directed against Antonio, but a fundamental theoretical problem for standard compatibilist accounts adjudicating blameworthy action. The problem is that, I argue, this kind of manipulation—I call it valuational manipulation—appears as though it is a form of manipulation which bypasses our rational control and targets our valuational structure itself. Our valuational structure consists in the preferences, beliefs, and desires that together inform our practical reason. This is an issue because standard compatibilist accounts adjudicate responsibility for action either directly or indirectly by means of the correspondence between our actions and our valuational structure. Thus, the Manipulationist Threat targets the roots of standard compatibilist accounts of responsible agency.

Because the Manipulationist Threat targets the roots of such accounts, I will illustrate that they—I consider several Deep Self and reasons-responsiveness accounts—have limited resources to respond to the Manipulationist Threat. I claim that they fail at either explaining why agents subject to it maintain responsibility despite valuational manipulation, or are excused because of valuational manipulation.

Note, too, that the Manipulationist Threat differs in kind from the classical worry from manipulation for standard compatibilist accounts. That worry is that agents suffering from poor constitutive luck look similar to agents who have been manipulated, and thus we should not hold those unlucky agents responsible. This worry is typically responded to by claiming that we may become responsible for the selves that we are on the basis of our capacity for appropriate self-regulation. But the Manipulationist Threat targets these appropriate self-regulatory capacities: it suggests that sometimes, despite being apparently responsible adults, our values may be directly the product of manipulation.

I ultimately claim that the Manipulationist Threat should motivate us towards adopting instrumentalist accounts of moral responsibility, according to which blame is justified on the basis of its effects. This is because instrumentalist accounts are not vulnerable to the Manipulationist Threat, and suggest that it may be appropriate to blame agents like Antonio anyway because of the effects of doing so.

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