The Limited Compatibilism of Epiphenomenalism with Responsibility
The second response to the epiphenomenal challenge is to deny that epiphenomenalism has any implications that are skeptical of responsibility. Such a compatibilist response is seemingly ruled out by adopting the classical compatibilist response to the challenge of hard determinism. Whether this is in fact so is explored in this chapter, the thesis being that in a certain range of cases we are responsible for effects that we do not cause so long as those effects are on one horn of an epiphenomenal fork the existence of which we know and the other horn of which we can control. Because such responsibility across the horns of an epiphenomenal fork can involve control of the past, and because a general control of the past to the extent that we can control the future is implausible, some care is taken to limit the scope of what in the past we can control by our present decisions. These limits are cast in terms of there being a strong necessitation of a past event by a present decision which necessitation is known to the actor as he acts to make it have been the case that such past event occurred.