Abstract
This paper focuses on a non-volitional account that has received a good deal of attention recently, Angela Smith's rational relations view. I argue that without historical conditions on blameworthiness for the non-voluntary non-volitionist accounts like Smith’s are (i) vulnerable to manipulation cases and (ii) fail to make sufficient room for the distinction between badness and blameworthiness. Towards the end of the paper I propose conditions aimed to supplement these deficiencies. The conditions that I propose are tailored to suit non-volitional accounts of blameworthiness. Unlike some volitional historical conditions on blameworthiness, the conditions that I propose do not require that the person have exercised voluntary control (e.g., via choices or decisions) over the acquisition of her attitudes or values.
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Notes
This claim is controversial. Watson 1996 draws a distinction between two “faces” of responsibility: attributability and accountability. Roughly, the distinction is as follows: an agent is responsible for something in the first sense when it is attributable to her as a basis of moral appraisal, and an agent is responsible for something in the second sense when she is an appropriate target of responses meant to reward or penalize on the basis of it. Many philosophers have followed Watson in making this distinction, including Darwall 2006 and Fischer and Tognazzini 2011. Shoemaker 2011 acknowledges this distinction and recognizes Smith’s notion of answerability as a third conception of responsibility. I will remain non-committal on this issue in this paper.
Smith uses the term “culpable”, but it is clear that she uses it interchangeably with “blameworthy.” Shoemaker 2011 also characterizes Smith’s view about blameworthiness in this way.
Smith 2005 explicitly distinguishes her account from volitionist accounts of responsibility.
The phrase “give them up” may be misleading here. I do not intend it to mean that agents have direct voluntary control over what they value or what attitudes they have. An alternative way of putting this point is that no amount of reflection could cause Kate to cease to have that judgment.
In a personal correspondence Smith confirmed that this adequately characterizes her view on this matter, with a caveat: Smith wants to leave room for cases in which an agent may have a conscious belief that some consideration is a sufficient reason to give up a certain evaluative judgment V, but at the same time subconsciously judge that she has sufficient reason to retain V. In such cases, Smith maintains that the evaluative judgment may still be open, in principle, to revision upon rational reflection. This is because it may still be the case that, if the subconscious judgment about her reasons were to change, so would V. A more adequate characterization of Smith’s view would involve the following somewhat more complicated conditional about the conditions on in-principle revisability for evaluative judgments:
(2’) If S judged that some reason R was a sufficient reason to give up V, and if S did not hold any other judgments (conscious or subconscious) that conflicted with R, S would cease to have V because of R.
I use the simpler conditional above, since what I have to say in this paper should not hinge on the difference between the two conditionals.
To “shed” some attitude or value, according to Mele, is to eradicate or significantly attenuate it.
Scanlon 1998 takes a similar line with respect to manipulation cases:
“What distinguishes cases like hypnosis and brain stimulation is thus not that they involve causal influences but rather the fact that these causal influences are of a kind that sever the connection between the action or attitude and the agent’s judgments and character. . . This category of excuses might be called ‘innocent agent’ cases, since in these cases it is claimed that some agent. . .cannot be judged on the basis of the action in question, since it does not reflect that person’s judgment-sensitive attitudes” (p. 278).
This third condition is admittedly vague, but it does seem to capture something of what Smith is concerned about in the above passage. I take it that (a)–(c) are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for blameworthiness, on Smith’s view.
The case I present is closely modeled after manipulation cases presented in Mele 2006, but carefully adapted to apply to the rational relations view.
Some of Jason’s values will remain unchanged. For example, it may be that Jason’s love of such things as french fries and film carry over after the manipulation (of course, what types of film Jason values may change quite drastically).
Clearly, the sort of “social evolution” that Jason values may differ in content from what others may think “social evolution” consists in (e.g., the furthering of global humanitarian efforts, etc.).
I want to be careful about what I’m saying the neuroscientists are doing. Recall (i) and (ii) from my above discussion of Mele’s usage of unsheddability. The neuroscientists ensure that (i) is satisfied. That (ii) is also satisfied is a stipulation of the case. One might want a more detailed story that explains how neuroscientists ensure that (i) is satisfied. Here is one way to tell such a story. The neuroscientists eradicate any of Jason’s original evaluative judgments that might conflict with the new set of implanted evaluative judgments. That being the case, Jason can only reflect on and assess his evaluative judgments by assessing them in the light of other evaluative judgments that he holds. All of the other evaluative judgments that he holds support each other. More specifically, the new network of evaluative judgments includes one central evaluative judgment from which all of the others flow and with respect to which they rationally relate to each other: the judgment that the world would be better without “weak” people (the poor, the sick, the elderly, etc.). This central judgment has such weight that the only way for Jason to give up any of his evaluative judgments is by way of giving up the central judgment, and given the strength of the central judgment (we may assume that the neuroscientists can induce values of varying strengths), no competing reason can be seen by Jason as a sufficient reason for giving up his central evaluative judgment during the stipulated temporal interval.
I say this to contrast it with some of Smith’s remarks on manipulation that I quote above. My case can also be contrasted with her claim that, in manipulation cases, the implanted attitudes “do not really ‘belong’ to [the person] in a way that would make it possible to draw an inference about the evaluative judgments she accepts”. For, in my case it is not attitudes that are implanted, but evaluative judgments. The attitudes, of course, result from the implanted values. Such attitudes do belong to Jason in a way that allows us to draw an inference about the evaluative judgments that he accepts.
I am working with a conception of blameworthiness according to which a person is blameworthy only if it would be pro tanto appropriate for someone to blame her, where blaming involves having negative reactive attitudes such as anger, resentment, indignation, and, in cases of self-blame, guilt. According to Smith 2007, “active blame”, (which goes beyond the mere judgment that an agent is blameworthy) involves these reactive attitudes (pp. 476–7). Following Smith 2007, I hold that “one can actively blame a person simply by feeling resentment, indignation, or anger toward her, without ever expressing these emotions in any way” (p. 477). As I mentioned in footnote 4, Smith 2007 uses “culpable” instead of “blameworthy.”
It should be noted that Smith’s view of blame has evolved in recent years. Smith 2013 understands blame as moral protest. In addition to judging that an agent is blameworthy, to blame another on this view is “to modify one’s own attitudes, intentions, and expectations as a way of protesting (i.e., registering and challenging) the moral claim implicit in her conduct…” (p. 43). In this way, Smith’s view of blame has become more encompassing.
Smith holds that “the reactive attitudes are not necessary for blame, though they may well capture better than any other reaction the sort of moral protest I think is the crucial element of blame” (p. 41). Though the evolution of Smith’s account of blame is both significant and interesting, it should not affect my project here. For, even on Smith’s current view, an agent’s blameworthiness for his attitudes and actions can still make resentment and indignation appropriate. On Smith’s current view, if Jason is blameworthy for his values and attitudes, then it would be appropriate for at least someone to be resentful or indignant towards him on the basis of them. Smith’s view implies that Jason is blameworthy, but as I argue here, it would not be appropriate for anyone to have these attitudes towards Jason.
Because the appropriateness I have in mind is pro tanto in nature, I hold that a person’s being blameworthy or culpable for something may be a moral reason for blaming her without its being all-things-considered appropriate to do so, for there may be other moral considerations that count against blaming her. For more on this, see Smith 2007.
A further question here concerns how appropriateness (or lack thereof) should be analyzed. We might understand appropriateness in terms of fairness, such that saying it would be inappropriate to hold such attitudes towards Jason means that it would be unfair to hold them. We might also understand appropriateness in terms of desert, or some other notion. While I will leave the notion of appropriateness unanalyzed here, it does seems right to me to say both that it would be unfair to hold these attitudes towards Jason and that such attitudes are undeserved. The plausibility of both of these claims serve to support the claim that it would be inappropriate for anyone to have these attitudes towards Jason, even if this claim is not reducible to either of the other two. For more on how to understand the appropriateness of certain reactive attitudes, see Wallace 1994, pp. 92–109.
Presumably Jason’s new values could be altered, but only by bypassing his rational capacities. The work of neuroscientists or of a supernatural being (e.g., God) would do the trick.
I may be misinterpreting Scanlon here. Scanlon may be setting out a condition on being rational that can hold even in cases of manipulation. That is, a person is rational only if, assuming we hold fixed their psychological structure, there is “the right kind of stable and coherent connections between what one says, does, and how things seem to one at one time, and what one says, does, and how things seem to one at later times”. If this is true, then it may still be true of Jason that he meets this condition. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer from Philosophia for pointing this out. The diachronic condition as I present it, though, does have some intuitive pull; some may think that the reason why massively manipulated agents like Jason are not blameworthy is because the manipulation causes there to be a sharp break from their previous character. For this reason, I think it is worth exploring this idea whether it belongs to Scanlon or not.
I say “shortly after the brain manipulation” because I assume it that it might take some time for the relevant attitudes to result from the implanted values.
This discussion lends plausibility to the claim that Scanlon’s diachronic condition collapses into a synchronic coherence condition. I am not entirely sure how to assess this claim.
If the post-manipulation person is not personally identical to the pre-manipulation person, then my case is similar to creation or original-design cases, e.g., Cases 1 and 2 of Pereboom’s Four-Case Argument (2007, pp. 94–96).
In using the term “non-volitional” towards the beginning of the paper, I mean to refer to the same sort of accounts that Levy calls “attributionist.”
It should be noted that the case of Harris is contested. Although some theorists find the view that Harris was blameworthy counterintuitive (e.g., Levy 2005; Wolf 2011), plenty of theorists accept this claim (e.g., Smith 2008; Scanlon 2008). Watson 1987, who originally drew attention to the case of Harris, says that, while we do not suspend our reactive attitudes when we hear of Harris’s past, we are ambivalent about how to react to him in light of it (243).
There seems to have been a misunderstanding here. As far as Smith is concerned, all responsibility is answerability. When Levy denies that Harris is responsible, then, Smith takes this to amount to a denial that Harris is answerable. It is important to note, though, that Levy argues that answerability is not an adequate notion of responsibility. Levy’s view is that moral responsibility requires a kind of control that answerability does not require, and thus that being answerable for something is not sufficient for being morally responsible for it. So while it might be true that Levy’s view would commit him to the claim that Harris is not responsible for what he thinks, Levy’s view does not commit him to the claim that Harris is not answerable for what he thinks (Levy 2005, p. 5).
In this section I offer various conditions on blameworthiness for attitudes and values. A non-volitionist might rather use them as conditions on responsibility, or more specifically, answerability. In doing so, one might just as well avoid the sorts of criticisms I offer in this paper. If so, one could substitute “responsibility” or “answerability” in place of “blameworthiness.”
Indeed, this is what both Smith 2005 (p. 261) and Scanlon 1998 (pp. 278–9) seem to suggest. If the psychological item (attitude or value) is not unsheddable, the person has the opportunity to, as Smith puts it, “reject or revise [it] in the light of her other beliefs and commitments.” If the item persists over some time, it is reasonable to think that the person has allowed it to become incorporated into her psychology in a way that reflects her own rational activity.
Mele 2006 (p. 171) suggests a condition much like this one. It should be added (as Mele himself does) that the bypassing of the person’s rational capacities cannot have been set up by the person. Mele also suggests that there may be cases in which a person acquires an unsheddable attitude in a way that bypasses his or her rational reflection and yet still be autonomous with respect to it, owing to the fact that the person has some preexisting attitude or value that supports the induced one. I’m not quite sure what to say about this in relation to my proposal. One reason for this is that it seems there may be different conditions between autonomous possession of an attitude and blameworthiness for an attitude.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on this paper, I would like to thank to Randy Clarke, Alfred Mele, Kyle Fritz, Justin Capes, Mirja Perez de Calleja, and an anonymous reviewer from Philosophia. I owe a special thanks to Angela Smith both for a very beneficial correspondence and for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Miller, D. Answerability, Blameworthiness, and History. Philosophia 42, 469–486 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9510-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9510-x