Abstract
There is much of interest in Cassam’s ground-breaking Vices of the Mind (2019). This discussion focuses exclusively on one aspect of his view, namely, his account of what it takes to be properly criticisable or blameworthy for one’s epistemic vices. This critical discussion consists of two sections. The first provides an overview of Cassam’s account of responsibility and criticisability for intellectual vices. The second raises a problem for that account whose formulation is due to Battaly (2019) and proposes a solution which, at least in part, could also be adopted by Cassam himself if he were prepared to make some small changes to his view. This solution generates a highly disjunctive account of criticisability and responsibility for possessing an epistemic vice. Although such heterogeneity might seem wholly unsatisfactory, it receives a plausible explanation when the account is put within the context of a Strawsonian approach to the practice of holding people responsible for their epistemic vices.
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Notes
In addition, these psychological features must themselves be in some sense epistemic.
I presume here that being a certain kind of thinker is part of the sort of person one is. I do not supply arguments here for this assumption that, in my view, I share with Cassam. I base my interpretation on passages where he explicitly commits to it. For instance, he writes that someone can be criticised for his gullibility and foolishness because these “traits are not separate from him; they are a part of him and who is” (p. 134). Earlier on the same page Cassam contrast what contributes to making one the kind of thinker one is with what makes one the kind of person one is. I take it that the point of the contrast is to draw attention to the fact that the first set of factors is a proper subset of the latter, so that some features make one the person one is without contributing to making one the kind of thinker one is.
I rely on Shoemaker’s rather than on other views of the deep self as a basis for attributions of responsibility primarily for two reasons. Firstly, his account includes authoritative judgments and authentic cares within the deep self. Other existing theories usually focus on one aspect only. It is plausible to think, with Cassam, that epistemic vices include character traits that manifest the person’s evaluative judgments but also attitudes with which the person identifies. Shoemaker’s account would thus be best placed to accommodate all aspects of epistemic vices. Secondly, Shoemaker offers an account of responsibility based on the study of responsibility-responses. This is the approach I endorse in this article.
In some cases, however, one might endorse an impairment as a matter of identity. In such cases, the impairment becomes part of who one is but is usually also not seen as a shortcoming.
Battaly suspects that this would be Cassam’s favourite option. This is indeed his favourite option (private communication). He denies however that cognitive impairments are part of the thinker one is. For this reason, whilst implicit biases reflect badly on agents, cognitive impairments do not. In my view a defence of these conclusions requires a clearer account of the deep self than Cassam supplies.
These would be examples of what Cassam thinks as vicious thinking in the absence of thinking vices proper (2019, p. 79).
On this point see n. 2 above.
Cassam’s conceptions of agency and self-knowledge might give him further reasons to resist the approach I am inviting him to accept. Thanks to the reviewer for raising this possibility.
I thus agree with the reviewer’s comment that option one might only seem closed if one adopts a folk understanding of blameworthiness and reprehensibility where these interchangeably indicate that a person is criticisable because of their badness. This is tantamount to forgetting that ‘reprehensibility’ has a narrow technical definition in this context.
For a defence see Ch. 8 of my forthcoming The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice Epistemology. In some regard my view is radically different from Cassam’s since I propose to sidestep the issue of control that is the central feature of Cassam’s account of responsibility.
I set aside the question whether fitting responsibility responses constitute responsibility or whether they track the independent properties whose possession is necessary and sufficient for responsibility.
I owe this tripartite definition and the characterisation of each face of responsibility to Shoemaker (2015).
On negative exemplars and their presentation to elicit avoidance see Sullivan and Alfano (2019).
My thanks to Quassim Cassam and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments.
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Tanesini, A. Blaming the Intellectually Vicious: a Critical Discussion of Cassam’s Account of Blameworthiness and Reprehensibility for Epistemic Vice. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 23, 851–859 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10092-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10092-1