Abstract
Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility argues that the normative basis of moral responsibility is anchored in the effects of responsibility practices. Further, the capacities required for moral responsibility are socially scaffolded. This article considers criticisms of this account that have been recently raised by John Doris, Victoria McGeer, and Michael Robinson. Robinson argues against Building Better Beings’s rejection of libertarianism about free will, and the account of desert at stake in the theory. considers methodological questions that arise from the account of desert, providing some additional resources for thinking about these issues within the framework of the account. McGeer objects to the particular mode of justification used to motivate the prescriptive aspect of the account. This article presents replies to each of these lines of response.
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Notes
Incompatibilism is the view that possession of free will is incompatible with the truth of the thesis of determinism. For views on which free will is required for (non-derivative) moral responsibility, the incompatibility of free will with determinism entails the incompatibility of moral responsibility with determinism. Compatibilism is the view that possession of free will (and/or moral responsibility) is compatible with the truth of the thesis of determinism.
Perhaps there is something especially normatively appealing about the forms of agency identified by various libertarian accounts, quite apart from the extent to which they capture important strands of our self-image. I take no stand on this matter. However, that some form of libertarianism identifies a normatively appealing form of agency does not entail that there are truth-relevant considerations in favor of its existence. But see Speak (2004) for an interesting objection to this view.
For other reservations about framing the issue in terms of basic desert, see Nahmias (2014, 55 n.3).
Here is another piece of evidence that BBB is not as clear as it should be about where and how plausibility arguments are supposed to work. Tamler Sommers (2013) has objected that the first part of BBB fails to demonstrate the comparative plausibility of revisionism over eliminativism. By his lights, this means the revisionist proposal in the second part of the book is insufficiently motivated. But as I understood the structure of my argument, Part One of BBB was primarily an argument for the possibility of revisionism (given the implausibility of libertarianism and the difficulties facing conventional compatibilist proposals). Thus, it was not the task of that first part to show that revisionism is more credible than eliminativism. In contrast, the second part of the book was intended to show that there is an adequate normative account of our practices that could ground a revisionist approach to responsibility, thus earning the warrant for greater comparative plausibility over eliminativism. Given that both Robinson and Sommers ascribe to me plausibility arguments that I do not take myself to have given in BBB, this is pretty strong evidence that my exposition there was less clear than it should have been.
Note that when we think our moral thoughts, whether about desert, blame, obligation, virtue, or better and worse states of affairs, it is no requirement on those thoughts that a person must have a worked-out account of what makes those thoughts true or why we should have thoughts of that class. We might have some vague beliefs about these things, or take some things as background presumptions in our thinking, but these do not seem to be requirements on thinking the thought that, for example, Annie deserves blame, or that Jeff is under an obligation to treat others well.
Kelly McCormick (2015) argues that there is a class of privileged responsibility judgments that can anchor contested accounts of responsibility. We can identify those judgments by looking to convergence on concrete cases with a particular kind of affective character. If her account is right, then capturing judgments that so-and-so deserves blame (as the simple model does) is crucial in a way that more abstract judgments about the precise basis of desert are not.
Relatedly, one might think (as Doris suggests) that the view on offer entails that if punishment is structured by desert, then a prosertist conception of the institution of desert claims will be saddled with the consequence that those most likely to benefit from punishment would be the ones most deserving of punishment, and that the most incorrigible offenders would deserve the least punishment (§1). There are, I think, various familiar reasons why norms justified systemically might not function in that way (tied to considerations of deterrence, the effects of internalized norms, the idea of derivative responsibility for making oneself incorrigible, and so on). However, the basic thought that our existing system of criminal punishment does a bad job of reflecting moral desert seems to me very plausible.
McGeer rightly notes that in BBB I do not adopt a conception of capacities on which it is “an accordion-like feature of agents that expands and contracts over time, depending in part on agents’ internal features, but also in (very large) part on the external circumstances in which they are embedded” (§2). That said, I see no reason why the account I offer cannot be amended in a way consistent with capacities as McGeer conceives of them.
Notice that I am not making the objection that McGeer’s account requires a coldly manipulative picture of blame, nor am I objecting that it does not have the resources to distinguish between moral and non-moral agents, complaints to which older moral influence accounts were subject. Rather, my point is that there is a recognizable class of cases where we think blame can be apt, but for which McGeer’s account requires that we regard it as a mistake.
Recall Doris’ remarks: “on a prosertist rendering of desert, those most deserving of punishment are those most likely to benefit from it. Among the many interesting side effects of this proposal is that the most incorrigible offenders would deserve the least punishment” (2015, §1).
McGeer provides a delightful reversal of a standard objection to moral influence views, charging that deontological retributivists are letting “their mania for delivering ‘just deserts’ trump any sensitivity to the forward-looking concerns we might actually have in blaming others” (§1.3).
Again, there are deontologists who do not share the diagnostic picture I have given of our agency, who are prepared to accept the existence of noumenal selves as the basis of the freedom that grounds responsibility, or who would maintain that my framing of the issues is an artifact of failing to appreciate different cognitive standpoints or the limits of distinct explanatory frameworks. No theory will satisfy everyone, and even the thin metaphysics of agency I have invoked will have too many commitments for some sets of metaphysical priors.
These considerations propel what McGeer characterizes as the “gap-reducing strategy.” On this approach, we can finesse the modal properties of reasons-responsiveness to get a reasonable fit between the various conceptual demands afforded by the independent characterization of responsible agency (e.g., the capacity to recognize and respond to reasons, the idea that some threshold is required to be responsible, above which an agent might fall above or below; the idea that this may be connected to difficulty and excuses).
For some diverse ways to resist this kind of objection, see §1, above, and also Vargas (2013, 91–96, 105–109, 309–313).
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Kevin Timpe for organizing the book symposium from which this exchange is drawn. Also, my thanks to Michael Bratman, Stephen Morris, Dan Speak, and Kevin Timpe for feedback on aspects of this article.
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Vargas, M.R. Desert, responsibility, and justification: a reply to Doris, McGeer, and Robinson. Philos Stud 172, 2659–2678 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0480-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0480-7