Infinitely Harry

I’m grading papers, and wanting distraction, I thought of this puzzle:

Jones voted for Bush. Black was ready to intervene and ensure, had the ensurance been necessary, that Jones so vote, but it wasn’t necessary. It may seem that Jones could not have refrained from voting for Bush.

But, in fact, White was ready to intervene and ensure, had the ensurance been necessary, that Black not intervene with Jones, but it wasn’t necessary. Now it may seem that Jones could have refrained from voting for Bush.

But, in fact, Gray was ready to intervene and ensure, had the ensurance been necessary, that White not intervene with Black, but it wasn’t necessary. Now it may seem that Jones could not have refrained from voting for Bush.

But, in fact, the sequence of would-be interveners is infinite. Could Jones have refrained from voting for Bush?

Deny or Deflate?

A friend of mine has long thought that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. He recently became convinced that indeterminism is no more hospitable. Now he's not sure what to think.

Not surprisingly, my friend is loath to accept that he was wrong all along about responsibility and determinism. But he says he finds it hard to believe that no one's responsible for anything. At least, he says, he can't give up responding to people as though they're responsible--sometimes getting mad at someone, sometimes becoming indignant, sometimes thinking that someone's punishment is deserved.

My friend has heard of a philosophical approach according to which, to determine what, say, responsibility is, we collect the truisms about responsibility and then find the item in the world that best fits them (provided, of course, that something fits well enough). In this way, he's been told, we sometimes learn that things aren't what, in our armchair theorizing, we thought they were. My friend wonders whether, taking this approach, he ought to say that we are, after all, responsible, though perhaps responsibility isn't quite (maybe not even close to) what we thought it was. And he wonders whether, if this is what he should say, he should then say he's now a compatibilist, or instead say that his incompatibilism was, in a way, correct after all, or perhaps say neither of these things.

He's asked me for advise, but, frankly, I don't know what to tell him.