MANIPULATION, MORAL RESPONSIBILITY, AND BULLET BITING
Alfred R. Mele, Florida State University

Various stories featuring manipulated agents in deterministic worlds have been used in arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility – that is, for the thesis that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism.1 Of course, a story that falsifies some proposed set of compatibilist sufficient conditions for moral responsibility might not falsify compatibilism itself. The claim that a particular set of conditions that is compatible with determinism is sufficient for moral responsibility may be false even if compatibilism is true. Elsewhere, I have argued that various stories about manipulation that may seem to falsify compatibilism about moral responsibility fail to falsify it (Mele 1995, chs. 9 and 10, 2006, ch. 6). I also have argued that some stories of this kind should motivate compatibilists to take a “history-sensitive” or “externalist” approach to understanding moral responsibility, and I have replied to some objections compatibilists have raised to these arguments or the recommended approach (Mele 1995, 2006, 2008, 2009a, 2009b).
	As I see it, compatibilists who reject even the relatively modest history-sensitive approach I recommend seem to be stuck biting some extremely hard bullets. I lack the space here to rehash the arguments mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Instead, I focus on a related question. It is roughly this: When should compatibilists about moral responsibility bite the bullet in responding to stories used in arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility? To clarify the question, I need to provide some background. That is the business of section 1. In the remainder of this article, I motivate a partial answer.
1. Background
As some philosophers use the expression “morally responsible,” an agent can correctly be said to be morally responsible for performing some good intentional action for which he deserves no moral credit or some bad intentional action for which he deserves no moral blame.2 To forestall potential confusion, I report that, as I use “morally responsible,” an agent’s being morally responsible for performing a good intentional action entails that he deserves some moral credit for it and an agent’s being morally responsible for performing a bad intentional action entails that he deserves some moral blame for it.
	The following two passages from work by Harry Frankfurt help set the stage for my project in this article:

To the extent that a person identifies himself with the springs of his actions, he takes responsibility for those actions and acquires moral responsibility for them; moreover, the questions of how the actions and his identifications with their springs are caused are irrelevant to the questions of whether he performs the actions freely or is morally responsible for performing them. (Frankfurt 1988, p. 54)

If someone does something because he wants to do it, and if he has no reservations about that desire but is wholeheartedly behind it, then – so far as his moral responsibility for doing it is concerned – it really does not matter how he got that way. One further requirement must be added . . . : the person’s desires and attitudes have to be relatively well integrated into his general psychic condition. Otherwise they are not genuinely his . . . . As long as their interrelations imply that they are unequivocally attributable to him . . . it makes no difference – so far as evaluating his moral responsibility is concerned – how he came to have them. (Frankfurt 2002, p. 27)

Here Frankfurt is expressing what is sometimes called an internalist, structuralist, or anti-historicist view of moral responsibility. To test the claims I quoted, one can search for a pair of cases with the following features: in each case, the agent satisfies all the conditions stated above for being morally responsible for an action but, because of a difference in their histories, only one of the agents is morally responsible for the featured action in his story.
	The following pair of stories (based on stories in Mele 1995, pp. 156-63 and 2006, pp. 171-72) were composed with this end in view:3

EVIL CHUCK. Chuck enjoys killing people, and he “is wholeheartedly behind” his murderous desires, which are “well integrated into his general psychic condition” (Frankfurt 2002, p. 27). When he kills, he does so “because he wants to do it” (Frankfurt 2002, p. 27), and “he identifies himself with the springs of his action” (Frankfurt 1988, p. 54). When he was much younger, Chuck enjoyed torturing animals, but he was not wholeheartedly behind this. These activities sometimes caused him to feel guilty, he experienced bouts of squeamishness, and he occasionally considered abandoning animal torture. However, Chuck valued being the sort of person who does as he pleases and who unambivalently rejects conventional morality as a system designed for and by weaklings. He freely set out to ensure that he would be wholeheartedly behind his torturing of animals and related activities, including his merciless bullying of vulnerable people, and he was morally responsible for so doing. One strand of his strategy was to perform cruel actions with increased frequency in order to harden himself against feelings of guilt and squeamishness and eventually to extinguish the source of those feelings. Chuck strove to ensure that his psyche left no room for mercy. His strategy worked.

BRAINWASHED BETH. When Beth crawled into bed last night she was an exceptionally sweet person, as she always had been. Beth’s character was such that intentionally doing anyone serious bodily harm definitely was not an option for her: her character – or collection of values – left no place for a desire to do such a thing to take root. Moreover, she was morally responsible, at least to a significant extent, for having the character she had. But Beth awakes with a desire to stalk and kill a neighbor, George. Although she had always found George unpleasant, she is very surprised by this desire. What happened is that, while Beth slept, a team of psychologists that had discovered the system of values that make Chuck tick implanted those values in Beth after erasing hers. They did this while leaving her memory intact, which helps account for her surprise. Beth reflects on her new desire. Among other things, she judges, rightly, that it is utterly in line with her system of values. She also judges that she finally sees the light about morality – that it is a system designed for and by weaklings. Upon reflection, Beth “has no reservations about” her desire to kill George and “is wholeheartedly behind it” (Frankfurt 2002, p. 27). Furthermore, the desire is “well integrated into [her] general psychic condition” (Frankfurt 2002, p. 27). Seeing absolutely no reason not to stalk and kill George, provided that she can get away with it, Beth devises a plan for killing him, and she executes it – and him – that afternoon. That she sees no reason not to do this is utterly predictable, given the content of the values that ultimately ground her reflection. Beth “identifies [herself] with the springs of her action” (Frankfurt 1988, p. 54), and she kills George “because [she] wants to do it” (Frankfurt 2002, p. 27). If Beth was able to do otherwise in the circumstances than attempt to kill George only if she was able to show mercy, then, because her new system of values left no room for mercy, she was not able to do otherwise than attempt to kill George.4

	Compare Beth’s killing George with an arbitrarily selected premeditated killing by Chuck after he completes his heart-hardening project – his killing Don.5 Each of these two killings satisfies conditions that Frankfurt, a compatibilist, deems sufficient for its agent’s being morally responsible for it. If it is assumed that moral responsibility for actions is common in Chuck’s and Beth’s world, then in the absence of further details of the story that would get Chuck off the hook, I see Chuck as morally responsible for killing Don. However, I cannot help but see Beth as not being morally responsible for killing George. For some support for my assessment of the two cases, see Mele 1995, ch. 9 and 2006, ch. 7. At this point, I simply ask readers to consult their intuitions about these cases. Readers who have no intuitions about the responsibility or nonresponsibility of one or both agents may make a note of that.
	The next item on the agenda is bullet biting. Suppose Ed sincerely claims that Beth is morally responsible for killing George and I reply that, in sincerely making that claim, Ed is biting the bullet. What am I saying? Three things: first, Ed’s claim is counterintuitive; second, Ed himself finds it counterintuitive; third, Ed is sincerely making the claim because he believes that something else he believes commits him to making it. (I recognize that there are other ways to use “bite the bullet” in philosophical discussions. For example, some people use the expression in a way that does not require the second element.)
	The issue of sincerity merits a brief comment. For a variety of reasons, Ed may insincerely claim that Beth is morally responsible for killing George. For example, perhaps Ed has published alleged sufficient conditions for moral responsibility for actions that commit him to saying that Beth is morally responsible for the killing, and he may be strongly adverse to admitting that he was wrong even though he is inclined to believe that he was wrong. Another possibility features the following facts, in addition to his lacking the belief that Beth is morally responsible for the killing: it is very important to Ed to offer a compatibilist analysis of being morally responsible for an action, he believes that he lacks the patience to figure out how to do that in a way that lets Beth off the hook, and he wants to avoid seeming to shirk his philosophical responsibilities. When the claim about Beth at issue is insincere, there is at most the appearance of bullet biting.

2. Why Bite the Bullet on Beth?
Why might someone bite the bullet on Beth (if, indeed, the claim that Beth is morally responsible for killing George is counterintuitive)? One possibility is that the bullet biter believes that it follows from compatibilism itself (about moral responsibility for actions) that if Chuck is morally responsible for killing Don, then Beth is morally responsible for killing George. A claim by Richard Double is interesting in this connection. Double contends that “the internalistic view is implicit in compatibilism” and that “compatibilism has not a chance of plausibility without [internalism], since otherwise the incompatibilist abhorrence of determinism will destroy it” (1991, pp. 56-57). The apparent problem is that once agents’ histories are allowed to have a relevance of the sort I claim to find in Beth’s story, their having deterministic histories is relevant, as well, and relevant in a way that undermines compatibilism. This formulation of the problem is pretty open ended. But there are ways of making the worry more precise. For example, it may be thought that if the brainwashing involved in Beth’s story gets her off the hook for killing George, it does so only if it deterministically causes crucial psychological events or states and that determinism consequently is in danger of being identified as the real culprit.
	This more precise worry is misguided. Suppose that the stories I told about Chuck and Beth in section 1are set in a deterministic world. And consider the claim that if Beth is off the hook, what gets her off the hook is the fact that the brainwashing deterministically caused various effects. To test the claim, I introduce indeterminism into Beth’s story. In the modified version of the story, there was a tiny chance that the brainwashing would produce new values that fell short of the full strength of Chuck’s values, and there was a tiny chance that even if the brainwashing did not fall short in value production, Beth would not act on her new values. In both connections, the only open alternative was Beth’s suffering a breakdown that would prevent her from acting. As it happens, full-strength Chuck-like values were indeterministically produced in Beth, and those values were involved in the indeterministic causation of Beth’s intentionally killing George. I submit that most readers who judge that Beth is not responsible for the killing in the original case will make the same judgment in the modified case.6 If these judgments are correct, it is false that the brainwashing’s getting Beth off the hook depends on its deterministically causing crucial psychological states or events.
	It should also be mentioned (see Mele 1995, pp. 158-73) that compatibilists are in a position to distinguish among different causal routes to the collections of values possessed by agents at a time and to provide principled grounds for holding that distinct routes to two type-identical collections of values may be such that one and only one of those routes blocks moral responsibility for a pertinent action. Consider the familiar compatibilist distinction between caused and compelled (or constrained) behavior.7 An ordinary agent’s washing his hands at noon in a deterministic world, for example, seems significantly different from a compulsive handwasher’s doing the same in the same world. Both actions are caused, but (other things being equal) only one of the hand-washings is compelled. An analogue of this distinction is applicable to value possession. Perhaps in engineering Beth’s values as they did, her brainwashers compelled her to have Chuck-like attitudes and to retain them for some time. Even so, a true and complete causal story about Chuck’s having the values he has might involve no compulsion. If Beth was compelled to have and retain her Chuck-like values whereas Chuck was not, there are some apparent grounds, at least, for taking the latter alone to be responsible for having certain values and, perhaps, for certain actions that stand in certain relations to those values.
	In this connection, I argued in Mele 1995 (pp. 166-72, 183-84) for the relevance of a notion of agents’ capacities for control over their mental lives being bypassed. By “control,” I do not mean “complete control”; nor do I have anything metaphysically deep in mind. Examples of what I do have in mind include our capacities to rationally assess at least some of our values and principles, to identify with at least some of our values and principles on the basis of informed, critical reflection, and to modify at least some of our values and principles should we judge that to be in order. Typical readers of this article have each of these capacities in some measure. All such capacities are bypassed in my story about Beth. Her new values are not generated via an exercise or an activation of her capacities for control over her mental life; rather, they are generated in a way that bypasses these capacities.
	As I have pointed out elsewhere (Mele 1995, ch. 9), bypassing of the kind I described would not be particularly threatening if agents in the manipulation stories at issue were able quickly to undo the effects of their manipulation. But they are not. Notice also that any process of critical reflection is conducted from some perspective or other; and, in my stories about Chuck and Beth, the corrupt values at issue are supposed to dominate the perspective from which they would reflect on those values in such a way that continued identification with these values is ensured (Mele 1995, pp. 158-59).
	Frankfurt may reply that “We are inevitably fashioned and sustained, after all, by circumstances over which we have no control” (2002, p. 28), thinking, perhaps, that having one’s deepest values fashioned and sustained by brainwashers is not significantly different from their ultimately being deterministically caused products of circumstances over which one had no control. But the quoted assertion does not entail that we “have no control” at all regarding any of our “circumstances.” (Frankfurt says “by,” not “by and only by.”) And whereas Beth exercised no control in the process that gave rise to her Chuck-like system of values and identifications, Chuck apparently exercised significant control in fashioning his system of values and identifications.
	As far as I can see, there is no need for compatibilists (qua compatibilists) to bite the bullet on Beth. Of course, some people who claim that Beth is morally responsible for killing George might not see themselves as biting the bullet. They may have the intuition that Beth is morally responsible for this or they may at least lack the intuition that she is not morally responsible for this. People who differ in their intuitions (or lack thereof) about Beth’s killing George may try to persuade each other that they are making an error. One strategy features exploring additional cases. Another is to use the methods of experimental philosophy. If it were to turn out that a great majority of lay folk strongly agree with the assertion that Beth does not – or does – deserve to be blamed for killing George, that might sway the other side to some degree. But these are topics for another occasion.

3. Why Bite the Bullet on One Good Day?
Not all internalist or internalist-leaning positions on moral responsibility are as extreme as Frankfurt’s. Manuel Vargas highlights “the basic agential structure of responsibility (BASR)” (2006, p. 363), which he describes as “a thin account of responsible agency” (p. 368). BASR includes “at least minimal rationality, sensitivity to justified moral norms, responsiveness to moral reasons, and the presence and normal operation of basic psychological features, including beliefs, pro-attitudes, and intentions” (p. 363). Vargas contends that “if BASR is present in a Brave New World [covert manipulation] case, the agent ought to be counted as a responsible agent because she has the capacities we are justified in fostering through moral influence” (pp. 366-67).
	Vargas’s position does not commit him to disagreeing with me about Chuck and Beth. Holding that exhibiting BASR in an action is a sufficient condition for being morally responsible for that action does not commit one to holding that it is also a necessary condition for this, and Vargas maintains that some agents who lack BASR at the time of an action are nevertheless morally responsible for the action (see 2006, pp. 356-57 on drunk drivers). Because Chuck lacks “sensitivity to justified moral norms” and “responsiveness to moral reasons” when he kills Don, he lacks BASR at the time. But Vargas can take the same kind of history-sensitive stand on Chuck that he takes on drunk drivers. (Chuck had BASR when he embarked on his heart-hardening project.) And it is open to him to judge that Chuck is morally responsible for killing Don while also judging that brainwashed Beth – who lacks BASR when she kills George – is not morally responsible for killing George.
	Vargas’s position and mine come into conflict over some other pairs of stories. Here is a quick way to generate one such pair (see Mele 2009a, p. 173). First, add to my story about pre-transformation Beth the detail that she is an extremely generous person who for many years has devoted a great deal of time and energy to helping needy people in her community and the local girl scouts. Her system of values plays a major role in generating her generous behavior, of course. Second, add to my story about Chuck the detail that in hardening his heart as he did, he ensured that he had no values at all that could motivate a charitable deed. (He might buy some girl scout cookies to lure an innocent child away for evil purposes; but a cookie-buying motivated in that way is not a charitable deed.) Third, haul in the manipulators. Over night, without Chuck’s consent, they erase his bad values and replace them with good ones that match Beth’s. Shortly after he awakes, he starts working with a local Habitat for Humanity crew in his neighborhood. When the work day ends, he drives around town for an hour and buys several boxes of girl scout cookies from every girl scout he sees – about fifty boxes in all. Then he delivers the cookies to a local homeless shelter. His motives are pure, as Beth’s are when she does her charitable deeds. I call this story about bad-to-good Chuck One Good Day (Mele 2009b, p. 471; for a similar story, see Mele 1995, pp. 164-65.)
	Chuck has BASR on the day at issue. So, given the claim about Brave New World cases that I quoted earlier, Vargas presumably would count Chuck as morally responsible for his charitable deeds in One Good Day. I have argued, however, that Chuck is not morally responsible for those deeds (Mele 1995, pp. 164-65). And as I have reported elsewhere (Mele 2009a, p. 173), I find that I have no inclination at all to believe that Chuck deserves moral credit for the good deeds I described. Most people who see him in action and know nothing of his history would take him to be morally responsible both for his good deeds and for his character. But knowing what I do about his history, I take a very different view of Chuck’s deeds and character.
	Different people sometimes have opposing intuitions about the same case. I ask readers to reflect on whether Chuck is morally responsible for the good deeds I have described. Some readers may be inclined to believe that he is. I ask such readers to add the following detail to Chuck’s story and to ask themselves whether it makes a difference: when Chuck falls asleep that night, the brainwashing will be undone and Chuck will be back to normal (for him); the manipulators are conducting a one-day experiment. This further detail is now an official part of One Good Day. (The same detail can be added to the story of brainwashed Beth, if that makes a difference for some readers [see Mele 2009b, p. 465].)
	I have discussed Vargas’s view in some detail elsewhere (2009b, pp. 470-74). The issue I want to take up now is a general one about cases like One Good Day. Suppose I am right in thinking that it is counterintuitive that Chuck is morally responsible for his good behavior in that story. Are compatibilists who agree with me about this committed to biting the bullet on Chuck simply in virtue of being compatibilists?
	In Mele 2009a, I motivate the following claim:

E*. No matter what internal condition an agent who has the greatest self-transforming powers that actual human beings have is in during t and no matter how that condition internally accounts for a purposeful action A of his performed during t, he is not morally responsible for A if the following is true: (1) for years and until manipulators got their hands on him, his system of values was such as to preclude his acquiring even a desire to perform an action of type A, much less an intention to perform an action of that type; (2) he was morally responsible for having a long-standing system of values with that property and he was as morally responsible for that as any actual human agent ever is for this sort of thing; (3) by means of very recent manipulation to which he did not consent, his system of values was suddenly and radically transformed in such a way as to render A-ing attractive to him during t; and (4) the transformation ensures either (a) that although he is able during t intentionally to do otherwise than A during t, the only values in which that ability is rooted are products of the very recent manipulation and are radically unlike any of his erased values (in content or in strength) or (b) that he is unable during t intentionally to do otherwise than A during t.8

If E* is true, Chuck is not morally responsible for his good deeds in One Good Day even if Beth is morally responsible for similar good deeds she performs. Does this upshot falsify compatibilism about moral responsibility? If a compatibilist were to offer a convincing argument for the following claim, compatibilists would be right to worry about the upshot:

ND. The differences in Chuck’s and Beth’s causal histories are irrelevant to whether either agent is morally responsible for his or her good deeds.

If, regarding Chuck’s and Beth’s moral responsibility for their good actions, there are any important differences between the two agents, those differences lie in their histories. So if the historical differences make no difference and Chuck is not morally responsible for his good deeds, the same is true of Beth. And if Beth is not morally responsible for her good deeds in her deterministic world, why would any agent in a deterministic world be morally responsible for anything he or she does? What’s the problem with Beth? Now, an incompatibilist can claim that ND is true on the grounds that a certain similarity between Chuck’s and Beth’s causal histories – that they are both deterministic – entails that neither is morally responsible for anything: the differences do not matter. But, of course, no compatibilist would take this line. A compatibilist argument for ND may take its lead from Frankfurt’s remark, quoted earlier, that “We are inevitably fashioned and sustained, after all, by circumstances over which we have no control” (2002, p. 28). But I have already replied to that thought. In the absence of a convincing compatibilist argument for ND, compatibilists who find it intuitive that Chuck is not morally responsible for his good deeds in One Good Day have little reason to bite the bullet on Chuck. They can endorse their intuition and remain compatibilists.

4. What About Ernie?
My guiding question in this article, as I have said, is about when, if ever, compatibilists should bite the bullet in responding to stories used in arguments for incompatibilism about moral responsibility. The manipulation stories retold above feature radical reversals in agents’ values. In this section, I take up a story of another kind.

ERNIE. Diana creates a zygote Z in Mary. She combines Z’s atoms as she does because she wants a certain event E to occur thirty years later. From her knowledge of the state of the universe just prior to her creating Z and the laws of nature of her deterministic universe, she deduces that a zygote with precisely Z’s constitution located in Mary will develop into an ideally self-controlled agent who, in thirty years, will judge, on the basis of rational deliberation, that it is best to A and will A on the basis of that judgment, thereby bringing about E. If this agent, Ernie, has any unsheddable values at the time, they play no role in motivating his A-ing. Thirty years later, Ernie is a mentally healthy, ideally self-controlled person who regularly exercises his powers of self-control and has no relevant compelled or coercively produced attitudes. Furthermore, his beliefs are conducive to informed deliberation about all matters that concern him, and he is a reliable deliberator. (Mele 2006, p. 188)9

	Diana assembles Z as she does in Mary so that E will happen. Of course, in doing this, thereby ensuring that Ernie will bring about E by A-ing thirty years later, Diana ensures much more. A complete description of the state of the universe just after Diana creates Z – including Z’s constitution, of course – together with a complete statement of the laws of nature entails a true statement of everything Ernie will ever do. In a version of this story, Diana does what she does in order to ensure everything that Ernie does (Mele 2006, pp. 189-90). Also, to block the claim that Ernie is not morally responsible for what he does only because another agent – Diana – is morally responsible for all of Ernie’s actions, it may be supposed that Diana is not morally responsible for anything because she is stark raving mad and has no grasp of morality (Mele 2006, p. 198, n. 6). These additional details are now official parts of Ernie’s story.
	Consider the following argument. I call it ZAM.

1. Ernie is not morally responsible for anything he does.
2. Concerning moral responsibility of the beings into whom the zygotes develop, there is no significant difference between the way Ernie’s zygote comes to exist and the way any normal human zygote comes to exist in a deterministic universe.
3. So determinism precludes moral responsibility – at least for human beings who develop from normal human zygotes.

Some people who endorse premise 1will sincerely report that the premise expresses an intuition they have about Ernie’s story. Consider Agnes, an arbitrarily selected agnostic about compatibilism who reports this.10 Intuitions about stories are caused. Their causes include features of the stories and features of the people who have the intuitions. What feature of the story might be doing the most work for Agnes? Perhaps the fact that just by assembling the atoms of Ernie’s zygote as she does and implanting them in Mary when she does, Diana intentionally brings it about and intentionally ensures that Ernie will do A1 . . . An, where that is a complete, ordered list of Ernie’s actions. Let that be a working hypothesis.
	Now, this fact – fact F – distinguishes Ernie from normal human agents in deterministic universes. But is this difference between Ernie and the others relevant to moral responsibility for actions? This brings us to premise 2. As I observed in Mele 2006 (p. 190), a defense of that premise might begin with the question how it can matter for the purposes of moral responsibility whether, in a deterministic world, a zygote with Z’s exact constitution was produced by a supremely intelligent agent with Diana’s effective intentions or instead in the way zygotes are normally produced. Imagine a deterministic world W* that is a lot like the one at issue, W, but in which Z comes into being in Mary in the normal way and at the same time. It is conceivable that, in W*, throughout his life, Mary’s child, Ernie, does exactly what he does in W, down to the smallest detail. Suppose that this is so. Then, a proponent of ZAM might contend that, given the additional facts that, in both worlds, Ernie has no say about what causes Z, no say about the rest of the universe at that time, and no say about what the laws of nature are, the cross-world difference in what caused Z does not support any cross-world difference in moral responsibility.11
	Recall the claim, discussed in section 2, that if the brainwashing involved in Beth’s story gets her off the hook for killing George, it does so only if it deterministically causes crucial psychological events or states. I argued that this claim is unwarranted, using an indeterminitic scenario in which the open alternatives were Beth’s doing what the brainwashers wanted her to do and Beth’s breaking down instead. Suppose that Agnes is inclined to believe that fact F justifies premise 1 and that she asserts that premise 2 is true. Should a similar move here persuade her that her inclination ought to be abandoned or that she should take back her claim about the second premise?
	Imagine, if you can, an indeterministic version of Ernie’s story in which F is false because, on some occasions, there was a chance that instead of performing an action on the list, Ernie would break down and not act at all (see Kearns n.d. <p.??>). When Agnes hears the story, she says that here too she has the intuition that Ernie is not morally responsible for anything he does. This is compatible with fact F being among the causes of her intuition about Ernie in the original story and with fact F justifying her belief that Ernie is not morally responsible for anything he does in that story. Furthermore, Agnes does not claim that what Diana does in the original story gets Ernie off the hook only if it deterministically causes what it causes. She believes the deterministic nature of the causation is dispensable – at least, after she contemplates the modified story about Ernie. But she does not budge on premise 2. Her reason for assenting to that premise is that she cannot see how the difference between Ernie’s origin (in W) and the origin of a normal human zygote like the one that grew into Ernie in deterministic world W* can make a difference regarding their moral responsibility for what they do. That she regards Ernie as nonresponsible in the indeterministic story too has no bearing on this reason.
	John Fischer spins a collection of stories in which Ernie is not designed but his parents have various intentions before a momentous sex act (2011, pp. 267-68). In one story, they intend to avoid pregnancy but fail to do so; in another, they intend to have a baby; in a third, they intend their intercourse to “lead to Ernie’s performing A and bringing about E 30 years hence” (p. 268); and so on. Each story is set in a deterministic world, and in each Ernie satisfies conditions many compatibilists deem sufficient for moral responsibility. Fischer contends that “if we start with” his scenarios, “we get the conclusion that the mental states and intentions of the distal creators of the zygote are irrelevant to Ernie’s subsequent moral responsibility,” but if we start with my story about Ernie “we can come to quite the opposite conclusion” (p. 269).
	If we believe that the intentions of Ernie’s parents are irrelevant to Ernie’s moral responsibility in Fischer’s stories, should we also believe that Diana’s intentions are irrelevant to his moral responsibility in my story? Agnes is still on stage. Let us ask her.
	Agnes invites us to recall fact F: Just by assembling the atoms of Ernie’s zygote as she does and implanting them in Mary when she does, Diana intentionally brings it about and intentionally ensures that Ernie does A1 . . . An, where that is a complete, ordered list of Ernie’s actions. She then makes two points. First, Diana’s guiding intention is relevant to her intentionally bringing it about and intentionally ensuring that Ernie does A1 . . . An. Second, in none of Fischer’s stories do the parents seem to have the power to intentionally bring it about and intentionally ensure that Ernie performs all the actions he ends up performing.
	Obviously, we are in no position to deduce the irrelevance (to Ernie’s moral responsibility) of Diana’s master intention from the irrelevance (to this) of Ernie’s parents’ intentions in Fischer’s stories. If there is an argument from the irrelevance of the latter to the irrelevance of the former, it is inductive. But the two points Agnes makes cast doubt on the induction. In any case, Agnes is not moved at all by Fischer’s worry. As she sees things, fact F justifies the judgment that Ernie is not morally responsible for anything he does in my story; and there is no counterpart fact in Fischer’s stories. (That is, the following is false: Just by X-ing [fill in X as you please], Ernie’s parents intentionally bring it about and intentionally ensure that Ernie does A1 . . . An, where that is a complete, ordered list of Ernie’s actions.)
	John Fischer reported in correspondence that he meant one of his Ernie stories to be much more similar to my Ernie story than it seems to be. A good way to generate such a story starts by bestowing on Fischer’s John and Mary knowledge like Diana’s. They will achieve certain of their goals if they have a child who lives a long and active life and does A1 . . . An, where that is a complete, ordered list of that person’s actions. And they deduce from their perfect knowledge of the present condition of their deterministic universe and the laws of nature that if they have sex at a certain time a few months later, arrange to have the child adopted at birth, and never interfere with him, he will do A1 . . . An. They execute their plan, and things happen exactly as they knew they world. The child is named Ernie, of course, and his actions perfectly match those of my Ernie. (Like Diana, John and Mary may be stipulated to be insane and to have no grasp of morality.)12
	How might an agnostic like Agnes respond to this story? In this story, John and Mary have and successfully exercise the power to intentionally bring it about and intentionally ensure that Ernie does A1 . . . An. This fact may incline Agnes to see Ernie as John and Mary’s tool for bringing about what they intend him to bring about and as lacking, for that reason, moral responsibility for his actions. And that inclination may understandably be strengthened by filling in details. Suppose, for example, that Ernie’s behavior is a lot like that of Bernie Madoff and that John and Mary’s purpose in producing Ernie was to ensure that a certain large collection of people would suffer a great deal of hardship.
	It would not be surprising if Agnes’s intuition about Ernie’s moral responsibility in this new John and Mary story were very similar to her intuition about this in my Diana story. Indeed, the new John and Mary story is similar to a story in which they learn that they are incapable of producing exactly the agent they want by means of sexual intercourse with each other and therefore hire Diana to build just the right zygote for them and implant it in Mary at just the right time. The zygote develops into Ernie, who does A1 . . . An. He is given up for adoption at birth, and Diana, John, and Mary never interfere with him after that. Presumably, Agnes would have the same intuition about Ernie’s moral responsibility in this story as she does in the story involved in ZAM.
	It is time to leave Agnes behind – along with all the Ernies except the one at issue in ZAM. If it is assumed that premise 2 of ZAM is true, what should compatibilists say about premise 1? They should say that it is false, as I observed in Mele 2006 (p. 193). Compatibilists believe that there are morally responsible human agents in some deterministic worlds and that the zygotes of many of them, at least, come to be in the normal way. Given their compatibilism, Ernie’s properties as an agent, and the assumption that premise 2 is true, they should claim that Ernie is morally responsible for at least some of what he does. Many compatibilists may regard this claim as plausible and not see themselves as biting the bullet on Ernie.
	Sometimes authors craft arguments with the intention or hope of persuading every reasonable person who reads them. I certainly do not have that hope for ZAM. As I mentioned in Mele 2006 (pp. 193-94), I myself am not persuaded by the zygote argument, a close cousin of ZAM that includes similar premises about Ernie. I am not convinced that Ernie is not morally responsible for anything he does. (But I also am not convinced that he is.) So why did I spin Ernie’s story and offer the zygote argument for consideration? Because they seem to me to help crystallize an incompatibilist worry about compatibilism (see McKenna 2009, pp. 25-26), because I hoped to prompt instructive compatibilist responses to that worry, and because the story and argument might shed some light on why someone might be agnostic about compatibilism, as I am.
	Fischer reports that “it is often said that the Zygote Argument and similar arguments display the ‘price’ of compatibilism – they indicate what a compatibilist must be prepared to accept, where this is somehow more ‘philosophically expensive’ than compatibilism was antecedently thought to be” (2011, p. 271). He does not see these arguments as raising the price of compatibilism; and he asks, rhetorically, “How could it increase the cost of compatibilism to show that a compatibilist must accept that an agent is morally responsible in a scenario that is no different than an ordinary situation in which there is no special reason to call into question the agent’s moral responsibility?” But Fischer grants that his opponent can claim that “the Zygote Argument . . . shows that an ordinary situation is just as worrisome as a scenario that is indeed prima facie problematic (the Diana scenario),” and he says that at this point a “dialectical stalemate” has been reached.
	I mention these remarks by Fischer because of their connection with the topic of bullet biting. Seasoned compatibilists like Fischer may not see themselves as biting the bullet at all in claiming that my Ernie is morally responsible for some of what he does; they may not see their claim as at all counterintuitive. Indeed, they may find it highly plausible and even intuitive. Even so, many of their opponents may regard the claim as highly counterintuitive (see Todd n.d.).
	What might account for this difference in attitudes? Might it be that significantly different conceptions of moral responsibility (for actions) are at work here? If so, each side might try to explain to the other why the other side’s conception is actually a misconception. Fischer refers to arguments for compatibilism in his discussion of my zygote argument (2011, pp. 267-68). One tack for a compatibilist to take is to argue that the power of his or her arguments for compatibilism is such that any rational person who gives those arguments a fair hearing will see that, even if the claim that Ernie is morally responsible for some of what he does strikes one as very counterintuitive, it is nevertheless true.
	Imagine, if you can, a rational person, Rahel, who finds ZAM more persuasive than the collection of arguments for compatibilism. How might she proceed? One thing she might notice is that Ernie’s story may be viewed as an attempted counterexample to compatibilism about moral responsibility in ordinary human beings. Ernie – at least with explicit additions that are in line with the spirit of my story (for example, he often “identifies himself with the springs of his actions” [Frankfurt 1988, p. 54]) – can easily satisfy any compatibilist set of proposed sufficient conditions for moral responsibility that Rahel or I have seen. And even so, he strikes Rahel as lacking moral responsibility. Taking her lead from Patrick Todd (n.d., pp. 6-7, 11, 13), Rahel reports that it is obvious to her that a being like Ernie whose every action is “predetermined” by a powerful designer is not morally responsible for what he does and even so, she says, many of Ernie’s actions satisfy conditions compatibilists claim to be sufficient for moral responsibility. She also claims that compatibilists have no resources for avoiding the counterexample in the case of beings like us, because, when it comes to moral responsibility, there is no significant difference between the way Ernie’s zygote comes to exist and the way any normal human zygote comes to exist in a deterministic universe (see ZAM, premise 2).
	Rahel may strike you as naive. She seems not to recognize that even though it seems obvious to her that Ernie is not morally responsible for anything, there are people who confidently assert that Ernie is morally responsible for some of his actions and are quite willing to try to persuade her that this is so. But, despite her naivete, Rahel is relevant to the issue about cost that Fischer raised. Seasoned compatibilists should not be expected to be stunned – or even budged – by my story about Diana and Ernie. The cost lies elsewhere. Naturally, typical compatibilists sometimes try to persuade their non-compatibilist readers (including incompatibilists, agnostics, and people who have never heard of compatibilism) that compatibilism is true. Ernie’s story and ZAM may make this harder to do than it would otherwise be in the case of at least some readers who had never contemplated stories like Ernie’s (see McKenna 2009, p. 26). I return to this point shortly.
	Elsewhere, I have suggested that incompatibilist believers in moral responsibility for action should try to do more than they have to explain how human agents in indeterministic worlds can be morally responsible for some of their actions (Mele n.d.). In this connection, I highlighted an analogy with defenses and theodicies in the philosophy of religion. Defenses are critiques of arguments designed to show that the pain and suffering in the world are incompatible with the existence of a perfect God; theodicies are attempts to explain why a perfect God would allow all the bad stuff. Incompatibilist believers in moral responsibility tend to concentrate on rebutting arguments against their position. This is understandable. But the more difficult project of explaining how moral responsibility is possible when typical specifically incompatibilist requirements for it are satisfied is an important one. A similar observation applies to compatibilist believers in human moral responsibility. They too tend to concentrate, understandably, on rebutting arguments against their position. But convincing arguments for such things as compatibilism itself (about moral responsibility) or the truth of the claim that Ernie is morally responsible for some of his actions would certainly be desirable, and that ambitious project would seem to merit more attention than it has received. I, for one, would love to see an argument that convinces me that Ernie is morally responsible for some of what he does and moves me to abandon my agnosticism in favor of compatibilism.
	If I have strayed from the topic of bullet biting, it is time to get back on track. Even if some compatibilists do not find the claim that Ernie sometimes does things for which he is morally responsible at all counterintuitive, I know two compatibilists who do. Because they do, they are searching for grounds for rejecting premise 2. Their work on this is in progress at this point; so I will not say anything more about it. After all, if they cannot find a way to make it plausible that premise 2 is false, their intuition that Ernie is not a morally responsible agent may fade away.
	Biting the bullet on a case, according to the account I offered in section 1, has three elements: sincerely making a counterintuitive claim about the case; finding that claim counterintuitive oneself; and sincerely making the claim because one believes that something else one believes commits one to making it. My description of the first element should prompt a question: Controversial to whom? Possible answers include the following: everyone, all people capable of having intuitions about the matter, most people, and some people. This list of possible answers is far from complete, of course. The following answer would allow me to get by with a two-element account of bullet biting: counterintuitive to the person making the claim. The resulting account is attractive in some ways. But it leaves us with a question raised by the second element in my three-element account. How are we to know whether a person making a claim regards it as counterintuitive? I suppose that we can just take his or her word for it. But entertaining that option should make us wonder how much it matters whether some individual or other has or lacks a certain intuition about a case.
	Some readers may not be familiar with the malady known as intuition deficit disorder (IDD). In one of its manifestations, the person who suffers from it is blind to counterexamples to his theories about things, except when the counterexamples are widely recognized to be real-world events, states, or beings. Philosophers have been known to test their tentative analyses of things by attempting to invent counterexamples to those analyses, and they have been known to adjust their provisional analyses in light of their intuitions about cases. Sometimes, after years spent considering a wide range of cases and refining their analyses in light of their intuitions, they wind up with IDD. If someone has this malady, the fact that he or she lacks certain intuitions does not count for much.
	It is possible that I myself have IDD in the sphere of moral responsibility (not to mention other spheres). I have strong intuitions that Beth is not morally responsible for killing George in my story about her and that Chuck is not morally responsible for his good deeds in One Good Day; but I have neither the intuition that Ernie is not morally responsible for anything he does nor the intuition that he is morally responsible for some of what he does. When I take a third-person, diagnostic stance toward myself and ask why that is, a certain observation quickly comes to mind. As I have indicated, I see no good reason to believe that compatibilism about moral responsibility yields the verdict that either Beth or Chuck is morally responsible for their 
pertinent deeds, but I do believe that the combination of compatibilism and a popular view of laws of nature yields the verdict Ernie is morally responsible for some of his actions.13 Although I have never endorsed compatibilism, I have expressed my agnosticism about it. So things are falling into place for me from my third-person, diagnostic perspective. Perhaps I lack the nonresponsibility intuition about Ernie because I am biased by my avowal of agnosticism about compatibilism.
	When philosophers tell me that they lack an intuition that p that seemingly conflicts with a philosophical position in which they are heavily invested, I am not terribly surprised. If I succeed in showing them that the deepest parts of their position are compatible with the truth of p, then if lots of people claim to have strong intuitions that p, these philosophers might be inclined to tweak their position in such a way as to accommodate p or leave p open. Both here and elsewhere, I have tried to do this favor for compatibilists who have endorsed theses that commit them to holding that Beth is morally responsible for killing George or that Chuck is morally responsible for his good deeds on One Good Day.
	Regarding Ernie’s story, I have less to offer compatibilists. As I said in Mele 2006 and repeated here, I certainly do not expect the story to move seasoned compatibilists to reject compatibilism, and I myself lack the intuition that Ernie is not morally responsible for anything he does. Fischer argues that the zygote argument is “not decisive” (2011, p. 272), and I certainly agree. But to return to Fischer’s “price” metaphor, I believe that many compatibilists who take it to be important to persuade non-compatibilists that compatibilism is true do have a price to pay. For compatibilists who accept or are open to a view of laws of nature in light of which Ernie’s story is coherent (see n. <??>) and who accept premise 2 of ZAM, the price is whatever it costs to produce arguments for the truth of compatibilism powerful enough to persuade many potential recruits from the non-compatibilist ranks that Ernie is morally responsible for some of what he does. And how is this price to be measured? In terms of time and energy, of course.14

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NOTES