Direct Versus Indirect: Control, Moral Responsibility, and Free Action

Abstract This article has two primary aims. The first is to identify relationships among direct control, direct moral responsibility for an action, and directly free action. The second is to provide a partial map depicting the bearing of some familiar competing views about moral responsibility and free action – traditional compatibilism, semicompatibilism, and event‐causal libertarianism – on differences in conceptions of direct and indirect species of moral responsibility and free action.