162 Three Source Incompatibilist Arguments
ignorance that are common ground between compatibilists and incompatibilists,
and all that is needed is a principle of this sort to explain a nonresponsibility
judgment for the officer’s reprimanding of the innocent Jones.^17
What is needed as a way of providing confirming instances of TNR is a kind
of case in which all of the familiar compatibilist- friendly conditions for moral
responsibility (and let us also assume, blameworthiness) are in place, and yet,
prior facts of nonresponsibility transfer through to facts about how the agent
exercises her well- functioning agency. In the process of opposing the Direct
Argument, McKenna (2008c: 380) actually suggested a promising strategy for
the incompatibilist to pursue. She could invoke a case in which an agent is
manipulated into being in a state that is qualitatively identical to the state a nor-
mally functioning agent might be in at a determined world when she acts in such
a way that, by compatibilist standards, she would be regarded as free and morally
responsible (even blameworthy) for acting as she does. In such a case, many
would claim that an agent so manipulated does not act freely and is not morally
responsible. Such examples could be used as a source of support, confirming the
validity of an inference such as TNR. But this suggests that the argumentative
work of the Direct Argument would in effect really be carried by a distinct way
to reach a source- incompatibilist conclusion, a manipulation argument. We will
now turn to an examination of this type of argument.
7.4. The Manipulation Argument for Incompatibilism
Manipulation arguments for incompatibilism begin with an example in which an
agent is covertly manipulated into acquiring a psychic structure on the basis of
which she performs an action. The proponent of the argument contends that the
featured agent thereby satisfies what might be called a Compatibilist- Friendly
Agential Structure (CAS), which provides minimal conditions a compatibilist
would take to be sufficient for acting freely. Such an example is meant to elicit
the intuition that, due to the nature of the manipulation, the agent does not act
freely and is not morally responsible for what she does. It is then argued that any
agent’s coming to be in the same psychic state through a deterministic process is
no different in any responsibility- relevant respect from the pertinent manner of
manipulation. The conclusion is that CAS is inadequate. The claim is that no
candidate CAS will turn the trick; free will and moral responsibility are incom-
patible with determinism.
To illustrate, consider Richard Taylor’s formulation of a manipulation argu-
ment. Taylor targeted a classical compatibilist account of freedom according to
which one is free so long as her volitions are not impeded in acting as she wants
to act. About such a view, he wrote:
But if the fulfillment of these conditions renders my behavior free—that is to
say, if my behavior satisfies the conditions of free action set forth in the theory
of soft determinism—then my behavior will be no less free if we assume
further conditions that are perfectly consistent with those already satisfied.