216 Mesh, Reasons-Responsive, Leeway Theories
answer is that it will bind the agent’s activities across time with the same threads
that bind her identity across time (243–9).
How does Bratman’s proposal fare in response to the objections put to Frank-
furt’s and Watson’s accounts? He can respond differently to relevant cases of
manipulation. Bratman’s theory is transparently historical. Along with other
historical compatibilists, he can say that agents manipulated as, for example,
Mele’s Beth is, are not free or responsible. Is Bratman able to account for an
agent’s freely acting contrary to her identification- conferring higher- order pol-
icies, that is, in the context of an unharmonious Bratmanian mesh? Or is he
forced to conclude that in such cases the agent never acts freely and is never
morally responsible? It is unclear. We’ll not pursue the matter, but note
that Bratman, like Frankfurt and Watson, faces the burden of addressing this
charge.
What of the criticism that identification is left unaccounted for? On this point,
it appears that Bratman has made progress. By linking the conditions of identifi-
cation to conditions of agency, we get what he calls a nonhomuncular account of
the agent’s playing a role in her agency. One might contend that the advantage
by which Bratman is able to make progress also gives rise to an objection. His
view relies on a particular formulation of a Lockean account of personal identity,
one in which certain higher- order self- governing policies are crucial to constitut-
ing an agent’s identity. An agent who would reject relevant policies and act con-
trary to them would appear to do so only at the expense of suffering an
identity- destroying change.^11
9.6. Reasons- Responsive Theories: An Initial
Characterization
Recall the problem facing classical compatibilist accounts of freedom noted
above—they had inadequate resources to explain how freedom can be under-
mined from within an agent’s own mental life (Section 9.1). As we’ve seen,
mesh theories aim to correct for this deficiency by the complexity of psychologi-
cal structure internal to the agent. A distinct strategy that also attempts to
account for freedom in terms of the unimpaired functioning of normal human
agency instead asks whether the relationship between agent and action involves
a sufficiently rational link. Is the agent, by way of the motivational states and
deliberative processes leading to action, sufficiently sensitive to rational con-
siderations? An agent acting on compulsive disorders, phobias, addictions, or
psychotic episodes (all problems for the classical compatibilist) might not be
suitably sensitive to rational considerations, to the reasons she has to act. The
compulsive hand- washer washes her hands when she has a good reason to do so,
but also when she has no good reason to do so, and even when she has an over-
whelmingly good reason not to do so. Her behavior is disjointed from a spec-
trum of reasons that would otherwise lead to the free, unimpaired exercise of her
deliberative agency. Views that account for free will and moral responsibility by
sensitivity to reasons are called reasons- responsive theories.