Abstract
According to Michael Zimmerman, no interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal captures a significant truth. He raises several worries about the Strawsonian view that moral responsibility consists in susceptibility to the reactive attitudes and claims that this view at best supports only an etiolated interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. He outlines three problems. First, the existence of self-reactive attitudes may be incompatible with the interpersonal nature of moral responsibility. Secondly, Zimmerman questions the significance of the interpersonal nature of moral responsibility, according to the Strawsonian view. Thirdly, he argues that that view may be taken to suggest the wrong kind of priority relation between ‘P is morally responsible’ and ‘it is appropriate to adopt some reactive attitude toward P’. I discuss each of these problems in turn and conclude that Strawsonians can respond to all three problems raised by Zimmerman. The Strawsonian view supports a significant interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal.
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Notes
Strictly speaking, Zimmerman offers a definition of retrospective moral responsibility. Because the difference between prospective and retrospective moral responsibility is of no importance for my argument, I will leave ‘retrospective’ out of the discussion.
A reviewer has remarked that charity would seem to demand that I inquire further into why Zimmerman thinks that self-reactive attitudes might nonetheless pose a problem for Responsibility-2. I must confess that my inquiries have not been successful. Neither in Zimmerman’s paper nor in his other works have I been able to find a reason why this solution to the problem of self-reactive attitudes would be inadequate. It should be remarked, moreover, that it is not entirely clear that Zimmerman thinks that this solution is inadequate; after all, he describes it as ‘more promising’ than another solution. (Zimmerman 2016: 258) One reason why he may nevertheless be reluctant to accept it is that the proposed solution, though promising, is nothing more than a suggestion that has to be worked out. If that is the case, I hope that my discussion goes some way towards explaining why the solution’s promise is not empty.
There are many versions of the view of color expressed in this definition, and many more or less similar definitions have been proposed to capture that view. The subtleties of the color discussion are of no importance for my argument.
I am grateful to Stefan Rummens for suggesting this point to me.
It should be noted that, in his presentation of the fitting-attitude analysis of value, Zimmerman uses the word ‘person’. However, most proponents of fitting-attitude analyses take these analyses to bring out that values cannot be understood independently of human responses. (Jacobson 2011) This move is not innocent: if Zimmerman had formulated Responsibility-2 in terms of human beings rather than persons, his objection would have seemed less compelling: the possibility that one human being exists while no other human being ever existed does not seem to be a coherent idea.
I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.
The requirements are also met by Responsibility-2, provided that one understands the idea of a definition in a certain way. According to Zimmerman, a definition offers a decompositional conceptual analysis. According to a recent contribution on definitions by Kai Büttner, however, definitions only determine ‘that the conditions for the applicability of the definiens are also the conditions for the applicability of the definiendum.’ (Büttner 2017: 53) I will not go into the theory of definitions here.
He does not argue that only decompositional definitions of x, and not accounts of necessary and sufficient conditions of x, can provide information about what is essential to something.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO). I am grateful to Filip Buekens, Arnold Burms and Stefan Rummens, members of the Reading Group Free Will (KU Leuven, Institute of Philosophy), for discussion of Zimmerman’s article. I would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for extremely helpful comments.
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De Mesel, B. Is Moral Responsibility Essentially Interpersonal? A Reply to Zimmerman. J Ethics 21, 309–333 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-017-9251-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-017-9251-3