Abstract
One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome’s obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory of responsibility.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
My use of ‘responsibility’ refers to moral responsibility as opposed to causal, legal, or other forms of responsibility. The sense of moral responsibility at issue here is the accountability sense rather than the attributability and answerability senses of responsibility (cf. Shoemaker 2015). A culpability-imputing form of blame, then, is central to the sense of moral responsibility discussed here. I focus on moral blameworthiness (as opposed to praiseworthiness or creditworthiness), where moral blameworthiness picks out a range of judgments and attitudes bound up in non-trivial ways to the Strawsonian reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and guilt (Strawson 1962). Lastly, I look only at retrospective moral responsibility, or responsibility for what one has done.
Many theorists rely implicitly or explicitly on some notion of tracing: Vargas (2013); Smith (1983); Ekstrom (2000); van Inwagen (1989); Fischer and Ravizza (1998: 50); Dennett (1984: 13); Kane (1996: 39); Ginet (2000); Fischer and Tognazzini (2009); Timpe (2011); Audi (1991). Notable exceptions to this trend include Harry Frankfurt’s (1998) later work on responsibility, Mason (2015), Scanlon (1998, 2008), and Angela Smith (2005, 2008, 2015). This is only a sample of the relevant literature.
The explanatory relation between some tracing anchor and the tracing terminus does not need to be causal.
This case is adapted from Sher (2009: 24).
A state is intrinsically involuntary only if the agent that is the subject of that state cannot directly control whether the state obtains.
And, insofar as possession of these sorts of attitudes is sometimes morally objectionable, tracing seems unable to furnish an explanation for the appropriateness of this sort of moral assessment. See Smith (2015: 118–20).
Theorists generally appeal to tracing in the context of blameworthiness, though the concept can also be utilized to explain distinctive kinds of praiseworthiness. In this paper, I confine myself to discussing tracing as it applies to blameworthiness, though I note this extra dimension of tracing as an important (if underappreciated) aspect of the concept. For some discussion of this other dimension of tracing, see Fischer and Ravizza (1992); McDowell (1978, 1979); van Inwagen (1989, 1994).
The skeptic can pursue one of two lines here. Either we might be skeptical that our judgments that some individual (like the drunk driver) is responsible are never justified or we might be skeptical that some individual is actually responsible. In the former case, the drunk driver might be responsible though we could never have a justified belief that this is the case. In the latter case, the drunk driver might not be responsible at all. None of this, however, directly threatens the system of legal sanctions and punishments mentioned at the outset. One could imagine a society where people adopt widespread epistemic or metaphysical skepticism about moral responsibility that does not extend to the legal responsibility of wrongdoers.
See note 2 for references.
King (2014).
King (2014: 465–66).
This characterization is, admittedly, rough. For instance, negligence generally presupposes that the potential risks are such that the agent should have known about the risks or that there is some reasonable expectation that the agent be aware of the associated risks.
Cf. Vargas (2013: 203). Here, responsible agency just is the possession of capacities constitutive of effective and rational self-governance.
Vargas (2013: 200). Some of my terminology diverges from that of Vargas.
In what follows, I will focus exclusively on behavior that seems to merit distinctively negative moral reactions. This is because King focuses on these kinds of cases and others in the literature do the same. As I noted before, however, there are interesting questions about the way in which advocates of control-based theories can utilize tracing to explain distinctive forms of praiseworthy behavior.
See Sher (2009: 73–75).
King (2014: 474).
King (2014: 474).
King thinks it is not possible to explain responsibility for negligence in terms of control (see King 2009). The point of the futility argument against tracing is that, per impossible, were someone to formulate a tracing explanation of responsibility for negligence, there would no longer be any need to invoke tracing.
King (2014: 475).
There are a number of ways to analyze what substandard awareness consists in. For example, it could be that Pete has, in some sense, all of the information necessary to correctly infer that he should stop drinking and he fails to perform the crucial inference. Or it could be that he is simply unaware of some fact that he needs to draw the appropriate conclusion about what ought to be done in the circumstances. Or Pete might only be aware of potential risks of his current conduct at a level of granularity that is too coarse-grained. In any case, the crucial point here is that when Pete possesses substandard awareness, he has the ability to correctly evaluate the circumstances but fails to exercise this ability.
Someone might think that Pete, even when he possesses this coarse-grained awareness, is still reckless. Awareness is awareness, and if it’s present, then the agent is reckless. This objection, however, leads to a problem. If we think that substandard awareness (as I’ve characterized it above) is not negligence-constituting, then we might eliminate negligence as an interesting category of action. Every minimally conscientious person has, at some point, had the thought that something bad will likely come about through future exercises of one’s own agency. If we think of awareness, no matter how coarse-grained, as recklessness-constituting, does this awareness distribute pervasively, such that almost all future acts of wrongdoing are reckless? If not, in what way do we block the distribution of this substandard awareness in a principled way? This problem suggests that we take substandard awareness as negligence-constituting (of course, there is a further issue of what the standards of content granularity are, but that’s a familiar debate from action theory and substantive disputes about the nature of foresight).
Of course, it’s entirely possible that the negligence derives from motivational deficits. The point here is that not all negligence reflects lack of motivation.
The notion of scattered agency derives from the notion of a temporally scattered event (see Sorensen 1985). This is distinct from a spatially scattered event (e.g., the broadcasting of Welles’ War of the Worlds performance), where the parts of the event occur simultaneously over a large region (Lewis 1983). An action counts as a temporally scattered event when the time of the action has parts that exist at different times and these times do not necessarily overlap with the time of the action. Scattered agents, then, are capable of acting in ways that consist in temporally scattered events.
References
Anderson, J.R., and R. Milson. 1989. Human memory: An adaptive perspective. Psychological Review 96 (4): 703–719.
Audi, R. 1991. Responsible action and virtuous character. Ethics 101 (2): 304–321.
Botvinick, M., and J. Cohen. 2014. The computational and neural basis of cognitive control: Charted territory and new frontiers. Cognitive Science 38 (6): 1249–1285.
Braver, T. 2012. The variable nature of cognitive control: A dual mechanisms framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (2): 106–113.
Bundesen, C. 1990. A theory of visual attention. Psychological Review 97: 523–547.
Burgess, G.C., and T.S. Braver. 2010. Neural mechanisms of interference control in working memory: Effects of interference expectancy and fluid intelligence. PLoS ONE 5: e12861.
Clarke, R. 2014. Omissions: Responsibility, agency, and metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cohen, J.D. 2017. Cognitive control: Core constructs and current considerations. In Wiley handbook of cognitive control, ed. T. Egner, 3–28. London: Wiley.
Dennett, D.C. 1984. Elbow room. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ekstrom, L. 2000. Free will: A philosophical study. Boulder: Westview Press.
Fischer, J.M., and M. Ravizza. 1998. Responsibility and control: A theory of moral responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fischer, J.M., and M. Ravizza. 1992. When the will is free. Philosophical Perspectives 6:423–451.
Fischer, J.M., and N. Tognazzini. 2009. The truth about tracing. Noûs 43 (3): 531–556.
Frankfurt, Harry. 1998. Necessity, volition, and love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ginet, C. 2000. The epistemic requirements for moral responsibility. Philosophical Perspectives 14: 267–277.
Inzlicht, M., A. Shenhav, and C. Olivola. 2018. The effort paradox: Effort is both costly and valued. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 22 (4): 337–349.
Jacoby, L.L., C.M. Kelley, and B.D. McElree. 1999. The role of cognitive control: Early selection versus late correction. In Dual-process theories in social psychology, ed. S. Chaiken and Y. Trope, 383–400. New York: Guilford Press.
Kane, R. 1996. The significance of free will. New York: Oxford University Press.
King, M. 2009. The problem with negligence. Social Theory and Practice 35 (4): 577–595.
King, M. 2014. Traction without tracing: A (partial) solution for control-based accounts of moral responsibility. European Journal of Philosophy 22 (3): 463–482.
Kool, W., S.J. Gershman, and F.A. Cushman. 2017. Cost-benefit arbitration between multiple reinforcement-learning systems. Psychological Science 28: 1321–1333.
Kurzban, R., A. Duckworth, J.W. Kable, and J. Myers. 2013. An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36: 661–679.
Levy, N. 2009. Culpable ignorance and moral responsibility: A reply to FitzPatrick. Ethics 119: 729–741.
Lewis, D. 1983. New work for a theory of universals. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (4): 343–377.
Mason, E. 2015. Moral ignorance and blameworthiness. Philosophical Studies 172: 3037–3057.
McDowell, J. 1978. Are moral requirements hypothetical imperatives? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 52: 13–29.
McDowell, J. 1979. Virtue and reason. The Monist 62 (3): 331–350.
McKenna, M. 2008. Putting the lie on the control condition for moral responsibility. Philosophical Studies 139: 29–37.
Miller, E.K., and J.D. Cohen. 2001. An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience 24: 167–202.
Murray, S. 2017. Responsibility and Vigilance. Philosophical Studies 174 (2):507–27
Murray, S., and M. Vargas. 2019 "Vigilance and control," Philosophical Studies Forthcoming
Rosen, G. 2004. Skepticism about moral responsibility. Philosophical Perspectives 18: 295–313.
Savine, A.C., and T.S. Braver. 2010. Motivated cognitive control: Reward incentives modulate preparatory neural activity during task-switching. Journal of Neuroscience 30: 10294–10305.
Scanlon, T.M. 1998. What we owe to each other. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Scanlon, T.M. 2008. Moral dimensions: Permissibility, meaning, blame. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Shenhav, A., M.M. Botvinick, and J.D. Cohen. 2013. The expected value of control: An integrative theory of anterior cingulate cortex function. Neuron 79: 217–240.
Sher, G. 2009. Who knew? Responsibility without awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shoemaker, D. 2015. Responsibility from the margins. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, H. 1983. Culpable Ignorance. The Philosophical Review 92 (4): 543–571.
Smith, A. 2005. Responsibility for attitudes: Activity and passivity in mental life. Ethics 115: 236–271.
Smith, A. 2008. Control, responsibility, and moral assessment. Philosophical Studies 138 (3): 367–392.
Smith, A. 2015. Attitudes, tracing, and control. Journal of Applied Philosophy 32 (3): 115–132.
Sorensen, R.A. 1985. Self-deception and scattered events. Mind 94 (373): 64–69.
Speer, N.K., L. Jacoby, and T. Braver. 2003. Strategy-dependent changes in memory: Effects on behavior and brain activity. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 3 (3): 155–167.
Strawson, P.F. 1962. Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25.
Timpe, K. 2011. Tracing and the epistemic condition on moral responsibility. The Modern Schoolman 88 (1–2): 5–28.
van Inwagen, P. 1989. When is the will free? Philosophical Perspectives 3: 399–422.
van Inwagen, P. 1994. When the will is not free. Philosophical Studies 75: 95–113.
Vargas, M. 2005. The trouble with tracing. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29: 269–291.
Vargas, M. 2013. Building Better Beings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zimmerman, M. 2008. Living with uncertainty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Manuel Vargas, Juan Pablo Bermúdez, and Santiago Amaya for extensive discussion and comments on different versions of this project. Research for this project was supported by the Stanford University Neurobiology Department, as well as grants from Florida State University through the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control project and the John Templeton Foundation’s “Getting Better at Simple Things: understanding and improving vigilant control” project. The views expressed in this chapterare my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton Foundation, Florida State University, or Stanford University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Murray, S. The Place of the Trace: Negligence and Responsibility. Rev.Phil.Psych. 11, 39–52 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00444-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00444-x