Three Source Incompatibilist Arguments 167are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of [those
causes]. (Spinoza, 1677, v. 1, 440)Seeing that being causally determined (Case 4) really is just like, in all relevant
respects, being manipulated moment by moment by a team of neuroscientists
(Case 1) helps crystallize the incompatibilist intuition that determinism destroys
free and responsible agency.
Several critics have opted for a softline reply to Pereboom. Worries about his
first two cases have led some to think that the manipulated agents in them fall far
short of satisfying anything like CAS*. For instance, some have worried that in
Case 1, with Plum manipulated moment by moment, Plum’s agency is bypassed
altogether. There just is no unified agent acting at all (Baker, 2006; Demetriou,
2010: 601–5; Fischer, 2004: 156; Haji, 1998: 24; Mele, 2005a: 78).
In resisting these softline critics, McKenna (2008a: 148–52) has argued that
further embellishments to Pereboom’s Case 1 can be innocently added to it with
the result that we can with confidence believe that there is a Plum as a unified
agent who acts. It is just that Plum in Case 1 so acts as a result of numerous
“micro” interventions that “steer” Plum in certain directions rather than others
while leaving Plum’s identity and agency intact—eventually resulting in the
killing of White.^20
More recently, Pereboom has proposed a different tactic as a way of answer-
ing these softline replies to his argument. Bear in mind that the basis for the
critics’ objections all had to do with the pervasiveness of the actual moment- to-
moment manipulation of Plum, which led these critics to think that there was no
agent Plum at all, or instead that the agent Plum was not acting at all (e.g.,
Baker, 2006; Demetriou, 2010). In reply, in his more recent formulation of his
argument (2014: 76), in Case 1 Pereboom gives the team of neuroscientists the
same ability to manipulate moment by moment, but he now arranges the example
so that the team only exercise that ability very sparingly, allowing it to be that
Plum acts mostly on his own without any intervention from the neuroscientists
at all. Indeed, in his most recently revised version of Case 1, Pereboom has it
that the team only intervenes at one crucial juncture, thereby affecting the result
that Plum chooses to kill White for egoistic reasons. As Pereboom puts it:
In this particular case, they [the team of neuroscientists] do so by pressing a
particular button just before he begins to reason about his situation, which
they know will produce in him a neural state that realizes a strongly egoistic
reasoning process, which the neuroscientists know will deterministically
result in his decision to kill White. (2014: 76)This revision, assuming it is still successful in eliciting a judgment of unfreedom
and nonresponsibility, sidesteps the preceding softline objection.
Either of the proposals for defending Pereboom’s Case 1, McKenna’s or Per-
eboom’s, is an illustration of the point we made just above: As a general overall
strategy, a softline compatibilist reply is unstable, since it leaves a compatibilist