Why soft-liners must be responsibility skeptics or bite the bullet

Abstract Soft-line compatibilism has come to occupy a privileged position in the debate over manipulation arguments against compatibilism. By identifying a responsibility-relevant difference between manipulated and ordinary agents, soft-liners promise to accommodate the intuition that manipulated agents are not responsible while preserving ordinary responsibility judgments. I argue that this promise cannot be kept. Soft-liners face a dilemma. On the one hand, if the conditions they identify as responsibility-undermining fully excuse manipulated agents, they commit themselves to a form of responsibility skepticism, since structurally similar forms of influence pervade ordinary agency as well. If, on the other hand, soft-liners maintain that manipulation merely mitigates rather than eliminates responsibility, they abandon the no responsibility intuition that motivates their view in the first place, and collapse into a hard-line position. Either way, soft-lining loses its dialectical advantage. The upshot is that the most promising compatibilist response to manipulation arguments must engage directly with the hard-line strategy, explaining why the no-responsibility intuition is ultimately to be resisted.