Abstract
Situations are powerful: the evidence from experimental social psychology suggests that agents are hugely influenced by the situations they find themselves in, often without their knowing it (this, roughly-speaking, is the thesis of situationism). In our paper, we evaluate how situational factors affect our reasons-responsiveness, as conceived of by John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, and, through this, how they also affect moral responsibility. We argue that the situationist experiments suggest that situational factors impair, among other things, our moderate reasons-responsiveness, which is plausibly required for moral responsibility. However, even though we argue that situational factors lower the degree of our reasons-responsiveness, we propose that agents remain moderately reasons-responsive to the degree required for moral responsibility. Nonetheless, those (adversely) affected by situational factors are arguably less morally responsible than those who are not subject to similar situational factors. We further evaluate an understanding of reasons-responsiveness (developed by Manuel Vargas in the light of situationist data) which relativizes reasons-responsiveness to agents’ circumstances. We argue that the situationist data do not warrant this kind of divergence from Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account. We conclude by discussing what situationist experiments tell us about our relationship to non-reasons.
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Notes
Situationism, as we understand the term, is thus a significantly weaker thesis than many others which can be found in the literature under the same name. A stronger characterisation of situationism can be found in the work of Dana Nelkin, for example, who defines it as follows: “traditional personality or character traits like honesty, kindness, or cowardice play less of a role in predicting and explaining behavior than do particular situational factors.” (Nelkin 2005: 182)
We will thus not focus on motivating reasons, which we understand to be sets of mental states, such as belief-desire or belief-intention pairs.
The way we understand “sufficient reason” entails that, in cases in which one has two (or more) permissible options but no obligatory one, one does not have a sufficient reason to take any of the available options. Others might prefer to call this kind of reason a “conclusive” or “requiring” reason (one that requires an agent to do something). Nothing of importance turns on this. If our usage of the term “sufficient reason” does not correspond with other people’s usage, they should take our understanding of “sufficient reason” as partly stipulative. We thank an anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics for pointing out this issue to us.
Some data descriptions are, to a degree, appropriated from Herdova and Kearns (2015).
Further, while personality variables were not useful in helping predict subjects’ actions, Darley and Batson explain that “considerable variations were possible in the kinds of help given, and these variations did relate to personality measures—specifically to religiosity of the quest sort.” (Darley and Batson 1973: 108)
The above claim about blameworthiness is perhaps somewhat controversial. Whether the accompanied people in the bystander experiments are at all blameworthy for doing the wrong thing (i.e. not helping) depends, according to at least one prominent view, on why they fail to help. According this view (see, e.g., Haji 2016), an agent is blameworthy for Aing only if (roughly) the agent believes that Aing is wrong. If the situational factor (being accompanied) renders an agent ignorant of her sufficient reason(s), she will (likely) not believe that what she is doing is wrong, and thus will not be blameworthy at all for her action on this view. While we are not sympathetic with this belief condition on blameworthiness, such a view of blameworthiness does not conflict with almost anything we say in the paper (regarding not just bystander experiments, but all other aforementioned experiments). We thank an anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics for drawing our attention to this.
Of course, some situationist experiments do not present people with sufficient reasons at all, but only insufficient reasons (such as to help in a non-emergency situation, by, for example, providing change from a dollar). In this paper our concern is only with those experiments which do (in our judgement) feature sufficient reasons, since it is these reasons which are of interest both to accounts of reasons-responsiveness and to assigning blame (for failing to act on such reasons).
For our purposes, we will take Nelkin’s talk of good reasons to be equivalent to our (and Fischer’s and Ravizza’s) talk of sufficient reasons.
We focus mainly on those situational cues which impair our acting on sufficient reasons. We briefly address the relevance of situational factors which promote our acting on sufficient reasons in Sect. 9.
This is partly, no doubt, why Nelkin highlights this particular account in her paper. (see Nelkin 2005: 200)
Our focusing on Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account (plus Coates’s and Swenson’s extension of it) is not an endorsement of either. Indeed, we suggest an alternative account of the degrees of reasons-responsiveness in Sect. 7.
One might question (a) on the basis that subjects did not in fact have sufficient reasons to act in certain ways, precisely because they were in an experiment (those who appeared to be in need were not in need, etc.). Whether or not these facts show that the subjects lack the relevant sufficient reasons, these experiments still inform us of what people would do if they really did have sufficient reasons.
As previously noted, Fischer and Ravizza do not take reasons-responsiveness to be a property of agents, only of mechanisms. Throughout the paper, our talk of an agent’s reasons-responsiveness is intended only as elliptical for talk of the agent’s acting on a reasons-responsive mechanism. [Of course, some readers may hold that reasons-responsiveness is straightforwardly a property of agents. Such a reading is compatible with our main theses, but we do not endorse (or reject) this claim here].
It is beyond the scope of this paper to assess this claim and the various challenges to it. (e.g. Mele 2000)
We take it take it that reasons-receptivity comes in degrees. In Sect. 7, we discuss the degrees of reasons-responsiveness.
See (Herdova 2016) for more on this, plus evidence that agents are often not consciously aware of their reasons when faced with certain situational factors.
In order for the data to suggest otherwise, the experiments would have to show that people fail to recognise their sufficient reasons even when they do in fact attend to/reflect on their reasons.
How might we determine to what degree a pattern of reasons recognition is understandable? Unfortunately, there is no simple algorithm. As mentioned in the previous section, a multitude of elements contributes towards the degree to which a pattern of reasons recognition is understandable, and each of these elements also comes in degrees. Further, it is not only unclear how each of these elements should combine to produce an overall degree of understandability, but it is also often unclear how these individual elements should be measured. Still, it seems wrongheaded to expect an exact measure of reasons-receptivity (and thereby of reasons-responsiveness and moral responsibility)—it is simply too artificial to assign exact degrees of reasons-receptivity to an agent or mechanism.
This is not to say that there is nothing we can do to determine how reasons-receptive someone is. It is possible to notice, for example, whether someone is inconsistent in her assessment of reasons from circumstance to circumstance (whether it be because of double-standards, implicit biases, seemingly innocuous situational factors, or something else). We may be able to ascertain, once we prompt an agent to reflect on her reasons and communicate her thoughts to us, how well she comprehends what reasons she has, which reasons outweigh which, whether certain reasons are sufficient, whether she accepts something as a reason once informed of it, etc. A person can become quite familiar with the ways in which her friends and partners ignore, under-weigh, or resist acknowledging the strength of various reasons.
Coates and Swenson mention the obvious worry with this picture: we often wish to blame some people just as severely even if they are acting on a mechanism that issues in their acting on sufficient reasons only in more distant possible worlds. The racist who has a sufficient reason to help a person of another race, for instance, may be only very weakly reactive to such reasons, yet we do not think him less blameworthy. Their response is to argue that such agents may be more morally blameworthy because they are responsible for making themselves very weakly reactive to reasons through their past actions.
An anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics has pointed out to us that different measures of reasons-reactivity pull in different directions when applied to certain situationist agents. Consider an agent who fails to act on her sufficient reasons (even though she recognises them), but would have so acted had some normatively irrelevant situational factor been absent. What’s more, let’s suppose that the nearest possible world in which this situational factor is absent is extremely close (the absence of the factor would be a very minor alteration to the situation). If we measure reasons-reactivity by the closeness of possible worlds in which a mechanism produces an action based on a sufficient reason (as do Coates and Swenson), then the agent’s mechanism is highly reasons-reactive. However, if we measure reasons-reactivity by understandability (that is, to what degree the pattern of behaviour produced by the mechanism in the actual world and nomologically possible worlds is rationally understandable), then the agent’s reasons-reactivity seems considerably diminished. Indeed, it is precisely because there is such a close world in which the mechanism produces an action based on a sufficient reason that makes the agent less rationally understandable—the mechanism does not produce action based on sufficient reason reliably, but rather arbitrarily, thus leaving the agent open to the influence of irrelevant factors on her behaviour.
What should we conclude from this? One possibility is that the above kind of example shows that the two ways of measuring reasons-reactivity are not compatible—they measure reasons-reactivity in inconsistent ways. Should we take this tack, we must choose between these measures (on the assumption that these are the only two options available). Faced with this choice, we opt for understandability as the measure of reasons-reactivity. This is so for three reasons. First, there is a simplicity and elegance to reasons-reactivity and reasons-receptivity both being measured in the same way (something Coates’s and Swenson’s account lacks). Second, exactly the same considerations that count in favour of measuring receptivity in terms of degrees of understandability also count in favour of measuring reactivity in this way—our responsibility ascriptions are not only sensitive to the more or less sensible ways in which people recognise reasons, but also the more or less sensible ways in which they act on these reasons. Third, as mentioned above, Nelkin (2016) has objected to Coates’s and Swenson’s account on the basis that, roughly, the closeness of a possible world in which a mechanism produces an action based on a sufficient reason may not always reflect a mechanism’s reactivity to reasons, but rather something extrinsic to the mechanism. Our alternative proposal does not have this problem.
Perhaps there are other alternatives to choosing one measure over the other. For instance, we could instead accept that the degree of reasons-reactivity is determined by some measure that combines the closeness and understandability measures, but is reducible to neither. After all, the measure of degrees of reasons-responsiveness is some combination of the measures of the degrees of both receptivity and reactivity. How to combine these measures is no easy task, as they too may pull in different directions. How responsive is an agent who is highly receptive, but barely reactive? Or an agent who is highly reactive (when in possession of her sufficient reasons), but barely receptive? We see no easy way to answer these questions. Indeed, answering them to any satisfactory degree would no doubt involve writing another paper.
We are not sure how to make sense of the idea of proportions of possible worlds since the sets of possible worlds that concern us are infinite. We are also not sure what it takes for a proportion to be “suitable”. We will not press these issues.
For the remainder of this section, in adjudicating between Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account of reasons-responsiveness and Vargas’s, we shift to talking about capacities. As we understand Fischer’s and Ravizza’s view, it makes essential appeal to capacities. The mechanisms that produce (or fail to produce) an agent’s recognition of and reaction to sufficient reasons count as reasons-responsive precisely because of their actual and (nomologically) possible patterns of reasons-recognition and reaction. That is, the active mechanism must have the capacity to respond to sufficient reasons in various circumstances. (Indeed, Fischer and Ravizza make this explicit when they claim that reactivity is “all of a piece” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998: 73); in making such a claim, they attribute to mechanisms the “general capacity” to react to various sufficient reasons in multiple ways). Of course, other accounts of reasons-responsiveness do not seem to make appeal to capacities, such as that detailed in Sartorio (2016), in which Carolina Sartorio argues that only facts pertaining to the actual causes of an agent’s behaviour are pertinent to the agent’s responsibility. Given this, our examination of the relationship between reasons-responsiveness and situationism may not neatly apply to all understandings of reasons-responsiveness.
Though we talk in the text of an agent’s capacities, it may be more in the spirit of Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account to talk instead about the agent’s mechanism’s capacities. We are happy, again, to treat the following talk of an agent’s capacities as a shorthand for the capacities of the agent’s mechanisms (roughly speaking, an agent has the capacity to respond to a reason if and only if the agent’s active mechanisms have the capacity to respond to the reason).
Of course, given Fischer’s and Ravizza’s aim of providing an account of reasons-responsiveness that does not rely on the idea that a responsible agent must be able to do otherwise, they will grant that Harmony may lack the (freedom-level) ability to respond to sufficient reasons in her circumstances (perhaps because she is determined, perhaps because a counterfactual intervener hovers close by, ready to stop any attempt she makes, etc.). Still, this is consistent with her acting on a reasons-responsive mechanism that does and would produce actions based on sufficient reasons in many situations. This suffices, on Fischer’s and Ravizza’s picture, for Harmony to have the capacity to respond to reasons—this capacity simply is not exercised.
While our understanding of capacities here does not depend on any particular analysis of capacities, we should clarify that capacities, as we understand them here, are not necessarily different from general abilities (and, even if they are not equivalent, we believe that having a general ability to A is sufficient for having the capacity to A). We certainly do not mean to equate capacities with specific abilities (we understand the latter as general abilities, coupled with the opportunity to exercise those general abilities). We thank an anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics for drawing our attention to this point.
In a manuscript currently in development, we argue for this in more detail. We suggest that the hypothesis that situational factors make it more difficult to exercise one’s abilities to respond to reasons is part of the best explanation of the situationist data. We spell out the idea that an ability is difficult to exercise in terms of the mental effort it takes to exercise it. We also discuss the nature of mental effort.
We are open in principle to there being situational factors that do prevent us from recognising and acting on reasons despite our expending considerable effort to do just this. If there are such factors, we also find it likely that they do strip agents of their capacities to recognise and act on certain reasons. Even so, the situational factors considered in the situationist experiments simply do not seem to be of this sort.
An anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics has pointed out to us that there may be a middle ground between Fischer’s and Ravizza’s view and Vargas’s view that is more plausible than either. It is easy to see why one may wonder whether the Fischer and Ravizza account downplays too greatly the importance of the situation. If an agent literally never (i.e. in no nomologically possible world) recognises or acts on a sufficient reason when in a certain situation, it is tempting to conclude that her active mechanism is not reasons-responsive in that situation (it is also tempting to conclude that the mechanism lacks the capacity to respond to reasons in that situation). Contra Fischer and Ravizza, then, whether or not a mechanism is reasons-responsive can sometimes depend on its performance in a situation. On the other hand, Vargas’s account may seem too extreme a corrective to Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account. By relativizing reasons-responsiveness to situations, Vargas renders irrelevant (to reasons-responsiveness) the performance of a mechanism or agent outside these situations. But such performance is relevant to reasons-responsiveness—a mechanism that is totally insensitive to reasons is less reasons-responsive than one that is sensitive to reasons in some situations, but insensitive in others. Furthermore, it is implausible that a realistic agent would never recognise a sufficient reason in a certain situation. Even Cordelia, despite being in a hurry, would help a person in need should this person be screaming in agony and bleeding profusely. Thus, even if the reasons-responsiveness of a mechanism is tied to the situation in which it is currently operating, it is likely that it will still count as reasons-responsive in many situations studied by psychologists in the situationist literature. Should one accept that the truth about reasons-responsiveness lies somewhere in between Fischer and Ravizza and Vargas, this by no means is the end of the discussion. There are many possible ways to spell out such a middle ground—many ways to emphasize or downplay the importance of the situation to an agent’s reasons-responsiveness. It is beyond the scope of this already lengthy paper to explore the details of these various suggestions, but we think doing so will be philosophically fruitful. As we mention in this section and the next, however, the general upshot of this paper is that the situationist data suggest that the adverse effects of situations on agents’ behaviour reduces agents’ reasons-responsiveness (and thus responsibility). This is so whether we accept Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account, Vargas’s, or something in between.
Above, and in what follows, we conceive of reasons-responsiveness as Fischer and Ravizza do. If we were to follow Vargas, the prospects for moral responsibility seem dimmer—more people would not be at all responsible for their actions and even those people who were responsible would be less so than on Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account.
Of course, if we know that one agent has been adversely affected by situational factors, and the other one has not, this warrants differential treatment.
This may be questioned on the basis that perhaps the situational factor that prevents the agent acting on her (known) sufficient reason also renders the agent unable to act on this reason. We argue in Herdova and Kearns ms. that situational factors do not render agents so unable.
Some may conclude that agents who are unaware of their sufficient reasons, and thus do not believe that what they are doing is wrong, are thereby not blameworthy at all for their actions (cf. footnote 8). While we are not sympathetic with this strong claim, we are sympathetic with the (perhaps more moderate) view that this lack of awareness mitigates one’s blameworthiness, as outlined above.
Consider an analogy: even in her lucid moments, we might hold a person with Alzheimer’s less responsible for her actions than someone who does not have this disease.
Possible beneficial effects of situational factors have been explored in the research on nudging, which looks at how structuring a person’s environment in certain ways may promote better decision-making. (see, e.g., Sunstein and Thaler 2008, Hausman and Welch 2010) Unfortunately, we do not have space here to deal with the particulars of this research nor with the ethical concerns regarding engineering people’s choices in this manner.
RNR also helps explain why we are less than ideally reasons-responsive—we fail to respond to sufficient reasons because we are too influenced by non-reasons (or insufficient reasons).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Al Mele, Randy Clarke, Natalie Gold, Daniel Star, Josh May and the audiences at Florida State University, King’s College London, University of Alabama at Birmingham and Boston University. Herdova received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n. 283849.
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Herdova, M., Kearns, S. This is a Tricky Situation: Situationism and Reasons-Responsiveness. J Ethics 21, 151–183 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-017-9246-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-017-9246-0