And even if one agrees with Frankfurt (or Watson) on the structural elements required for accountability, one may wonder how an agent`s will arrived at its particular structure. Thus, an important objection to Frankfurt`s view is that the relevant structure may have been created by factors that intuitively undermine responsibility, in which case the existence of the relevant structure itself is not sufficient for liability (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 196-201; Locke, 1975; Slote, 1980). Fischer and Ravizza argue that, according to Thomas Nagel, a person is subject to moral happiness when factors beyond his control influence the moral evaluations to which he is open (Nagel 1976 [1979]; see also Williams 1976 [1981] and the entry on moral happiness). By expecting people to act as moral actors, we hold people accountable for the harm they do to others. When. We consider an individual guilty or praiseworthy, we not only judge the moral quality of the event with which the individual is so closely associated; We judge the moral quality of the individual himself in a more targeted, non-instrumental and apparently serious way. (1990: 41) However, this compatibilist image is subject to serious objections. First, it might be accepted that the ability to act as one pleases is valuable and perhaps related to the type of freedom at stake in the free will debate, but it does not follow that this is all that the possession of free will represents. A person who has certain desires as a result of indoctrination, brainwashing, or psychopathology may act as they please, but their free will and moral responsibility can always be questioned. (For more information on the relevance of such factors, see §3.2 and §3.3.3.) Specifically, conditional analysis is open to the following type of counterexample. It may be true that an officer performing Act A would have omitted A if he had chosen to do so, but it may also be true that the officer in question suffers from an overwhelming compulsion to perform Act A. Conditional analysis suggests that the agent in question retains the ability to do something other than A, but given his compulsion, it seems clear that he does not have this ability (Broad 1934, Chisholm 1964, Lehrer 1968, van Inwagen 1983).
In general, incompatibilists are likely to be dissatisfied with conditional analysis because it does not account for the ability that agents may have, here and now, to perform or refrain from taking an action while correcting everything about the here and now and the past. Compatibilists claim that free will (and/or moral responsibility) is possible even in a deterministic universe. Versions of compatibilism have been defended since ancient times. For example, the Stoics—especially Chryssipus—argued that the truth of determinism does not mean that human actions are entirely explained by factors external to agents; therefore, human actions are not necessarily explained in a way that is incompatible with praise and blame (see Bobzien 1998 and Salles 2005 for stoic views on freedom and determinism). Similarly, modern-day philosophers (such as Hobbes and Hume) have distinguished the general way in which our actions are necessary when determinism is true from the specific cases of necessity that are sometimes imposed on us by the daily restrictions of our behavior (for example, physical obstacles that make it impossible to act as we please). The difference is that the necessity associated with determinism is compatible with agents acting as they want to act: even if the behavior is causally determined by S, it can be behavior that executes it. And perhaps the capacity that counts for free will (and responsibility) is just the ability to act as one pleases, which seems to require only the absence of external constraints (not the absence of determinism). But there is something to be said on the other side of the debate. It may seem obvious that people will only be held appropriately accountable if there are independent facts about their responsibility. But when one thinks about it – and following the influential Strawsonian approach of R.
Jay Wallace (1996) – it may be difficult to “understand the idea of a prior and completely independent domain of the facts of moral responsibility” that is separate from our practices and to which our practices must nevertheless respond (1996:88). For Wallace, abandoning facts of responsibility independent of practice does not mean abandoning facts about liability; Rather, “we must interpret the relevant facts [about responsibility] in such a way that they depend in some way on our practice of holding people accountable” (1996: 89). Such an interpretation requires an examination of our practices, and what emerges most from this survey for Wallace is the extent to which our responsible practices are organized around a fundamental commitment to fairness (1996: 101).