Abstract
It has often been noted that many of our intuitive assessments of particular actions suggest that there is an asymmetry between blameworthy and praiseworthy actions with regard to the question of whether moral responsibility requires that the agent could have acted otherwise. It is a quite different question, though, whether such an asymmetry between good and bad cases can be supported by more systematic considerations. In this paper, I will develop a new argument for a restricted version of the asymmetry, by showing that in cases of praiseworthy actions responsibility cannot generally presuppose that the agent could have acted otherwise. This argument will be based on a distinction between two different kinds of roles that moral norms can play in determining whether an action is right and in guiding our deliberation. That agents can sometimes be responsible for their praiseworthy actions even though they cannot act otherwise is best seen as a reflection of the fact that moral norms can prohibit treating certain courses of action as genuine options at all.
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Notes
Of course, if there is an asymmetry with regard to ‘originary’ responsibility, we can expect this to have consequences for ‘tracing’ responsibility as well. But in this paper I cannot address the question of what these consequences are.
It is not obvious that such cases of truly ‘irresistible urges’ really exist; but most philosophers in the discussion assume they do, and, for the purposes of this paper I will follow suit here.
As highlighted by the debate about ‘robust’ alternatives in the literature about the Frankfurt cases. See, e.g., McKenna (2003).
E.g., Ekstrom (2000, pp. 165 f.).
Instead of determining them in some other way, e.g. by being expressed in them.
Nor is it ruled out that Catherine could (or would) have acted differently if the situation had been somewhat different, in particular if there had been stronger incentives not to jump in.
A , disjunctive ‘principle of alternative possibilities of this sort is proposed, e.g., by Ekstrom (2000, p. 211).
Philosophers with strongly entrenched incompatibilist intuitions may still disagree, objecting, e.g., that even in Catherine’s case there might be a background assumption at work that she could have acted otherwise earlier—e.g. in forming her character. I cannot discuss all possible incompatibilist counter-moves here, and since I do not want to use Wolf’s cases as a knockdown argument for the asymmetry, this is not necessary here. But I want to point out that even if such a background assumption may be at work, incompatibilists bear the burden of proof that this assumption is indeed at work, and will have to provide some independent argument for this.
See Watson (1996, p. 284). However, Watson himself is skeptical about the asymmetry and immediately goes on to suggest that praising or rewarding an agent may be unfair to others when the agent couldn’t have acted otherwise. For a helpful discussion and, to my mind, convincing criticism of this further argument see Nelkin (2013, pp. 34 ff.).
Kant KpV AA 5: 54: “er urteilet also, daß er etwas kann, darum weil er sich bewußt ist, daß er es soll”. A more systematic contemporary development of this idea can be found in Nelkin (2013), ch. 5.
This feature distinguishes accounts like Nelkin’s from accounts like Fischer and Ravizza (1998), which assume that responsibility only requires weak reasons-responsiveness.
This would be different if the power in question were taken to be a so-called ‘two way power’, which an agent could always either exercise or refrain from exercising even when the circumstances for exercising the power are present. But neither of the philosophers mentioned in fn. 13 holds this view (see Raz loc. cit. for a discussion of this point).
I owe this example to Matthias Haase.
The distinction between these two roles is developed in more detail in Ammeller and Mayr (2011).
In Raz’s sense, see his (1975, pp. 36 ff.).
In Nozick’s sense, see his (1974, pp. 29 f.).
E.g. GMM AA 4: 424: “unnachlaßliche Pflichten”.
For a similar case see Raz’s case of Ann, who knows she is too tired to properly assess the material she is presented with (1975, p. 37).
Wolf (1990, p. 59), considers this as one way in which the virtuous person may be unable to do otherwise in the life-saving cases.
You might object that even if the agent’s inability to act otherwise did exclude her being subject to praise or blame, it might still leave her subject to other forms of moral assessment, e.g. to aretaic appraisal as having a ‘good character’. I will consider the distinction between these different forms of responsibility at more length in Sect. 4 (\(\upbeta \)) and argue that we should indeed consider Catherine to be praiseworthy (i.e. to be responsible from the so-called accountability perspective), and not just to have a ,good character‘. To anticipate the main point I will make there: Accountability responsibility is tied to what responses from the moral community the agent deserves or is entitled to, and it seems that Catherine is at least as much entitled to moral praise as George is. Relying on this point, we could rephrase the ,absurdity‘ point from above as follows: It would be truly absurd if fully complying with the relevant moral norms would make the agent undeserving of praise and if she had to be at fault in some respect in order to deserve praise.
Note that what would make this effect so absurd is that the agent’s responsibility would be ruled out directly by his compliance with the norms which only allow him take one option seriously. This crucially distinguishes the case from others, where an agent’s responsibility is only eliminated via some intermediate process. We can, e.g., imagine that an agent, by doing something he ought to do, causes himself not to be responsible for his actions at a later stage—e.g. when he takes a strong drug for medical reasons. But the case described above is not one where the agent’s responsibility is undermined only indirectly.
If one thinks that moral reasons are always accessible to an autonomous agent, one may be skeptical about whether such a scenario is really possible. But such cases are conceivable e.g. when the adoption and internalization of the policy are due to a particularly biased and flawed education involving indoctrination with deeply immoral values.
As Nelkin (2013, pp. 41f.), convincingly argues, the fact that the agent couldn’t act otherwise doesn’t necessarily make the action less difficult for him, either.
Pace Watson (1996, p. 283).
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Konstanz and Erlangen universities, and I am grateful to the audiences for their comments. I am also indebted to Stefan Brandt, Franz Knappik, Angela Matthies and Barbara Vetter for very helpful advice on earlier drafts.
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Mayr, E. Alternative possibilities and asymmetry. Synthese 196, 105–125 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1503-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1503-z