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Professor Margolis rightly pinpoints the nub of my critique of psychotherapy in my principle of heredity of nonresponsibility along causal chains. I proposed that if an agent is not responsible for a cause, he or she is not responsible for its effect. (For brevity, I shall refer to this principle as H-R.) I then argued that any determinist account of the nature of psychotherapy, when conjoined with H-R, entails that (since every causal chain extends backward indefinitely in time) no one ever initiates such a chain and therefore no one is ever morally responsible for anything.
Margolis rejects H-R as “plainly false,” on the grounds that one person may sometimes be held “criminally liable or legally responsible” for what another person initiated. He offers, as counterexamples to H-R, the responsibility of parents for their children's misdeeds, the liability of descendants for their progenitor's debts, and the strict liability of employers for the negligence of their employees. He concludes from these examples that I have “conflated being responsible, in the sense of being the causal agency of, with being responsible, in the sense of being legally or morally held responsible.…”