Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s central question: What can we learn about the nature of moral responsibility from thought experiments involving manipulation and related thought experiments featuring designed agents? Various alternative positions on that question are described, and some of the key terms of the discussion are defined, including compatibilism, determinism, incompatibilism, and libertarianism. Guidance is offered on how the author uses some other key terms, including free will, intuition, and moral responsibility. The technical terms internalism and externalism are introduced, and various kinds of internalism and externalism are distinguished. Work by Harry Frankfurt and Robert Kane is discussed to help set the stage for subsequent chapters.

Kane and Double on the Principle of Rational Explanation

Using Jaegwon Kim’s framework of explanatory realism versus explanatory irrealism, in addition to some observations about the metaphysics and epistemology of explanation, I re-examine the disagreement between Robert Kane and Richard Double over the principle of rational explanation. I defend Kane’s account of dual rationality and argue that Double’s principle has a narrower range of application than he claims. I also show that, contrary to what Double assumes, Kane’s approach to action explanation does not lapse into a form of explanatory irrealism.