In his latest book Mechanical Choices, Michael Moore provides an explication and defence of the idea that responsibility comes in degrees. His account takes as its point of departure the view that free action and free will consist in the holding of certain counterfactuals. In this paper, I argue that Moore’s view faces several familiar counterexamples, all of which serve to motivate Harry Frankfurt’s classic insight that whether and to what extent one is responsible for one’s action has more to do with what actually caused that action than with what one could or couldn’t have done instead. I then go on to sketch an alternative approach to degrees of responsibility that takes seriously this insight. I’ll argue that Moore ought to be sympathetic to this approach, inasmuch as it combines two familiar Moorean ideas: the idea that causal contribution comes in degrees, and the idea that acting freely is compatible with, and indeed entails, the fact that one’s action was caused by prior states of affairs.

迈克尔·摩尔在他的最新著作《机械选择》中对“责任是有程度的”这一观点进行了解释和辩护。他的论述以这样的观点为出发点：自由行动和自由意志在于持有某些反事实。在本文中，我认为摩尔的观点面临着几个熟悉的反例，所有这些都有助于激发哈利·法兰克福的经典见解，即一个人是否以及在多大程度上对自己的行为负责，更多地与实际导致该行为的原因有关，而不是与行为的原因有关。可以或不能代替。然后，我继续勾勒出一种认真对待这一见解的责任程度的替代方法。我认为摩尔应该同情这种方法，因为它结合了两个熟悉的摩尔思想：因果贡献以程度为单位的思想，以及自由行动与一个人的事实相容并确实需要的思想。行动是由先前的事态引起的。