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Moral responsibility for actions and omissions: a new challenge to the asymmetry thesis

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Abstract

This paper presents a new challenge to the thesis that moral responsibility for an omission requires the ability to do the omitted action, whereas moral responsibility for an action does not require the ability to do otherwise than that action. Call this the asymmetry thesis. The challenge arises from the possibility of cases in which an omission is identical to an action. In certain of such cases, the asymmetry thesis leads to a contradiction. The challenge is then extended to recent variations of the asymmetry thesis defended by John Martin Fischer and Carolina Sartorio. Finally, a possible objection to the challenge is addressed.

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Notes

  1. It is nearly universally accepted that John is not morally responsible for this omission, though he is clearly morally responsible for omitting to try to save the child. Swenson (2015) presents a challenge to certain compatibilists (namely those who think that FSC shows that PAP is false) by arguing that there is no principled difference (concerning Jones’s and John’s moral responsibility) between FSC and Sharks.

  2. Mele (1997: 232) introduces this example in a different context, and Clarke (2014: 22) references it to give an example of an omission that is identical to an action.

  3. Fischer (1985–1986) and Fischer and Ravizza (1991) defend AT, but Fischer has been convinced—partly because of Frankfurt’s (1994) reply—that the simple version of AT is false.

  4. As Clarke puts it, “My refraining from refraining seems just to be my action of calling my brother” (Clarke 2014: 28). One way to object to my argument against FNAT would be to put pressure on the claim that omitting to refrain is genuinely an omission, but it seems much more plausible to me that there can be such cases.

  5. Aristotle introduces these conditions for voluntary action in Nicomachean Ethics 1109b30-1111b5. For more on the “Aristotelian” conditions, as they are often called, see Fischer and Ravizza (1998: 12–14).

  6. In addition, unlike the arm-raising case of action-action identity, the cases of action-omission identity that I’ve been discussing are cases in which the identical things are described at the same level of generality. The child’s omitting to move, for example, is described just as generally as is her holding perfectly still.

  7. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this way of putting my response to the objection. Even if one had doubts about this case (perhaps because one denies that children are morally responsible for anything), clearly there can be cases of action-omission identity in which agents possess the same amount of knowledge and control with respect to both the action and the omission to which the action is identical. (Indeed, the case of Ben, discussed above, appears to be just such a case.).

References

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the members of the Agency Workshop at the University of California, Riverside, Zac Bachman, Dave Beglin, Andrew Law, Meredith McFadden, Debbie Nelson, Jeremy Pober, and Jared Smith, for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks to John Fischer for several discussions of the topic of this paper.

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  1. University of California, Riverside, HMNSS Building, Room 1604, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA

    Taylor W. Cyr

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Cyr, T.W. Moral responsibility for actions and omissions: a new challenge to the asymmetry thesis. Philos Stud 174, 3153–3161 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0851-8

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