We expect them to be courteous and responsive, reasoned and responsible.
Making the mechanism too responsive to reasons (via strong reasons-responsiveness) sets the bar too high.
One well known account of control, employed by Levy, holds that a person is responsible just in case she acts on a mechanism that is moderately responsive to reasons (including moral reasons), such that were she to possess such reasons this same mechanism would act upon those reasons in at least one possible world (Fischer and Ravizza 1999).
In virtue of their natural capacities, creatures like us are potentially dialogical, that is, responsive to reason.
McDowell aims to conceive of persons as biologically embodied temporal creatures immersed in a shared world, yet capable by nature of being responsive to reason and thus of becoming free subjects.
Another measure of the distance between them is the difference between Rorty's avowedly ethnocentric defense of liberal ideals, and Gadamer's notion of the appropriation of tradition as a way of being responsive to reason.
The view is not merely that an agent would display herself in some counterfactual situations to be responsive to reasons, but rather that her responsiveness to reasons in some counterfactual situations is evidence that her actual conduct itself — the causes giving rise to it — is also in response to rational considerations.
They require, more strongly, that the mechanism be the person's own mechanism (ruling out external manipulation) and that it be 'moderately' responsive to reasons: one that is "regularly receptive to reasons, some of which are moral reasons, and at least weakly reactive to reason" (82, emphasis added).
In other words, we must accept the incompatibilist thesis that if a person's character is the product of forces over which he never had any control, and if his character traits determine his choices, then even if his motives are responsive to reasons, he is not responsible for their motivating force.
In order to operate within "the logical space of reasons," one must be at home with normative discourse, responsive to reasons as such, sensitive to standards of correctness and appropriateness.
We know people are responsive to reasons.
