Abstract
There are two broadly competing pictures of moral responsibility. On the view I favor, to be responsible for some action is to be related to it in such a way that licenses attributing certain properties to the agent, properties like blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Responsibility is attributability. A different view understands being responsible in terms of our practices of holding each other responsible. Responsibility is accountability, which “involves a social setting in which we demand (require) certain conduct from one another and respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson, Philos Top 24:227–248, 1996). My concern here is the relation between moral responsibility and desert. Plausibly, if someone is morally responsible for something wrong then they deserve blame, and it is on the basis of them being morally responsible and its being wrong that they deserve blame. In this paper, I try to make progress toward understanding why it would follow that being morally responsible for something supports a desert claim. I propose to do this by exploring how the “two faces” of responsibility should proceed. An important upshot is that we gain a new currency by which to evaluate extant theories of responsibility that might favor one or the other conception: do they carry plausible desert commitments? To illustrate this benefit, I argue that accountability theory carries implausible implications for deserved praise.
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Notes
Here I draw from Watson (1996). Unless otherwise noted, all references to Watson are from that paper. Recently, there have been renewed efforts to scrutinize the general concept of moral responsibility and attempt to draw out various complexities (e.g., Fischer and Tognazzini 2011; Shoemaker 2011; Smith 2012). But despite this renewed emphasis, there seems no consensus on how to carve up the concept, let alone how to employ the various potential conceptions. (Indeed, there is disagreement over which names pick out which positions.) So I don’t mean to assume here that Watson’s distinction is either correct or the only possible division. Rather, I use his suggestion as a helpful (and familiar) diagnostic tool (and potentially in ways to which Watson himself would object). The extent to which the two approaches I outline here should be regarded as competitors is part of the aim of the present inquiry.
See Frankfurt (1988) for details.
The use of “authority” here might connote more than is needed to make the point. The required notion is just that accountability requires those who hold the agent responsible to be in a position which legitimates their demands and reactions.
See the next section for claims to the effect that moral responsibility must involve a desert claim, as well as McKenna (2009, pp. 11–12) for a similar assessment and some cautionary comments.
A notable exception is McKenna (2013, esp. chaps. 6–7).
While Strawson doesn’t refer to “desert” explicitly here, it seems implied by talk of “just punishment”.
As I understand it, the minimal desert thesis is not a thesis about desert per se, but only about the desert involved in ascriptions of responsibility.
I think this characterization is still imprecise. Surely one doesn’t deserve blame simply for having performed an action. Rather, it must be for performing an action in a particular way or through engaging certain capacities or powers. Still, I think Pereboom would agree on this score. He cannot doubt that determined agents still perform actions, though they presumably wouldn’t count as deserving blame or praise for those actions if incompatibilism is true.
Previously, Scanlon rejected this characterization of the desert thesis as “morally indefensible” (1998, p. 274). More recently, he has conceded that the blameworthy deserve blame, and describes his current position as “desert-based” (2008, p. 188). It seems Scanlon now accepts a minimal desert thesis, even though he rejects a particular (and more robust) formulation of it.
See Feldman (1995) for details.
Kershnar (2008).
As we’ve seen, Strawson (1994) explicitly draws such a parallel between blame and punishment.
Moreover, I’m skeptical that the virtuous deserve pleasure simply in virtue of being virtuous. That is, the morally better among us do not, I think, deserve to have their lives go better in general. I am also skeptical about robust conceptions of character. But on both these scores I can avoid commitment. All that is required here is a restricted desert thesis, one that applies to the blameworthy and relates them to blame, in virtue of the property of being blameworthy. (But see no. 16 below).
In what follows, I think it will be open to a proponent of a more general theory of desert to interpret my proposals in a way friendly to her general theory. One will just need an intermediary account to move between the restricted context of moral responsibility to the more general domain of all desert claims. For example, consider Kershnar (and others) who defend a view of desert in which one’s well-being is related to the quality of one’s character. The virtuous deserve greater well-being; the vicious deserve worse. One way to accommodate my proposals is by acknowledging that the virtuous and vicious owe their quality of character at least in part to their responsibility-relevant features of agency. The virtuous aren’t virtuous by accident; they are morally responsible for lots of virtuous things. (This is true whether or not you think virtue is conceptually prior to virtuous acts or not.) I cannot here adjudicate the merits of such a view. I use it simply to illustrate how we might move from my limited ambition to more general moral matters. (See no. 32 for a qualification on this optimism).
See McKenna (2013, chaps. 6–7) for a defense of a similar claim.
Desert is no less troubling a general concept than moral responsibility. See McLeod (2008) for discussion and references.
To reiterate: my restricted focus concerns exploring the desert claim that is supposed by many to follow from one’s being responsible for something. One important remaining task would be situating such an account within a comprehensive theory of desert. Another would be evaluating such an account against potential competitors within the context of extant problems in the literature. I do not take up either task here.
As Watson puts it, “[O]ne is worthy of blame just in case the attribution of fault is warranted. ‘S is blameworthy for C’ stands in the same relation to ‘S’s conduct is faulty’ as ‘P’ is true’ stands to ‘P’” (p. 238). This comment is suggestive, though, as is clear below, I don’t fully endorse it.
For a more detailed defense see King (2012).
It is worth noting that the similarity in a suffix is insufficient to suggest an additional term well-suited to FA analysis; one must also have the suggestion of an attitude. For example, ‘seaworthy’ refers to a craft suitable for sea travel and the edible is what we are able to eat. Neither term contains reference to an attitude, despite the similarity in suffix to FA-ready terms. Compare, however, ‘trustworthy’ or ‘estimable’.
This isn’t to say any characterization of fittingness is as good as another. But we need not evaluate between respective proposals here. See King (2012) for a preliminary defense.
See King (2012).
We do have reason to think that FA analyses are very promising. See Schroeder (2010) for a defense of this optimism.
The defense that follows draws from King (2012).
The faulty strut may be ‘to blame’ for the bridge’s collapse, but this isn’t of any direct moral relevance. Indeed, to say that it was faulty and to blame isn’t really an evaluation. We could equally well say that the cause of the collapse was a weakened strut, and we would have said no more.
Though we can, of course, be ‘disgusted’ by someone’s wrongful behavior or viciousness. Still, even were we to distinguish between moral disgust and non-moral disgust completely, an FA analysis of the latter might nevertheless be correct.
Of course, another strand of Strawson’s thought might be that the reactive attitudes (like resentment, and indignation) presuppose holding their target accountable. Strawson has certainly been interpreted this way (see Wallace 1994). But whether or not this is the best exegesis of Strawson’s view is orthogonal to the discussion here, for we could just as easily develop a Strawsonian view along similar, but different, lines, wherein the reactive attitudes only presuppose their targets to be responsible. If the presupposition is only that the impetus for the reactive attitude is attributable to the agent, and therefore reflects the agent’s values and commitments, then the resulting view can still make use of Strawson’s basic observation, even if Strawson himself (or his interpreters) took the view in a different direction.
My view is in this respect is similar to D’Arms and Jacobsen (2000). There is reasonable disagreement about how to fill out the details of FA accounts. My preference is that the attitudes target certain features which the object of those attitudes must then possess. So, for attributability, those features might be spelled out by the conditions adopted by self-disclosure views. Blame targets morally objectionable aspects of an agent’s will. Fear targets those features that are, say, dangerous. Not everyone agrees this is how FA accounts should proceed. But I am confident that any plausible FA account will be compatible nonetheless with desert-as-fittingness, as it is modeled on the general features which all FA accounts share.
This consideration provides another reason for my restricted scope. A full theory of desert would have to consider all of these various desert claims and their grounds and justification.
This means that desert-as-fittingness plus attributability may not be compatible with every possible general theory of desert, if we take there to be only one univocal concept of desert which must also be the desert implied by ascriptions of responsibility. I think both elements of this supposition are false, but I take no stand on the matter here. I simply reiterate that my goal is to try to illuminate some potential connections between moral responsibility and some notion of desert, one sufficient for vindicating the implication captured by the minimal desert thesis. This ambition is necessarily limited.
Of course, Pereboom would likely not concede that just any set of attributability conditions would be sufficient for grounding basic desert. But that is a separate issue.
Watson goes so far as to say that, should private judgments of blame constitute harms, this would make “sanctions inseparable from aretaic judgments” (p. 247, no. 41). Watson seems to favor withholding meaningful blame from attributability altogether, whereas I favor making accountability concern expressions of blame alone. My reasons are in the text. Fischer and Tognazzini (2011, p. 384, especially no. 7) make a similar restriction as Watson’s.
All I mean here is that punishment can be a blame-related treatment. I don’t think it is necessarily so. It is perfectly consistent to think the blameworthy deserve blame but to deny that they deserve punishment, on the grounds that no one deserves punishment. One’s theory of punishment is not conceptually beholden to one’s theory of moral responsibility, even if one views blame as the imposition of moral sanctions, so long as a conceptual distinction between moral sanctions and punishment proper can be sustained. I am allowing for such a distinction here.
This line of thought is adapted from King (2012).
As enshrined in the notion of lex talionis. All I’m noting here is the connection between desert and fittingness retributivism often invokes; I am not endorsing retributivism.
For an exploration of the relation between punishment and an aesthetic notion of fittingness, see Zaibert (2006).
For a related discussion of kinds of cases that might be relevant here, see Smith (2007).
Again, I borrow from D’Arms and Jacobsen (2000) here for illustrative purposes. Though there are different proposals for how to work out an FA account, there is rough agreement that certain sorts of reasons are to be ruled out as “reasons of the wrong kind” (e.g., that you would suffer horrible pain should you fail to fear, or blame, or admire). My suggestion here is that at least some considerations essential to understanding accountability will plausibly fall into this category. See Schroeder (2010) for a partial comparison of approaches to the wrong kind of reasons problem. See also no. 30 for related discussion.
And if not lost, my standing appears at least weakened.
Watson notes and sets aside the important self-reflexive case where one holds oneself accountable. He also discusses interesting non-moral instances, like a janitor being held accountable for neglecting the furnace (p. 236). Like Watson, I will focus on the moral, non-self-reflexive cases.
His example is a hijacker making one of the hostages “accountable” for the behavior of the others, on pain of death. Plausibly, the hijacker lacks the standing to legitimately make such a demand (p. 237).
Watson also notes the paradigmatic nature of promises for highlighting authority in the context of accountability (pp. 237–248).
Indeed, Darwall’s (2006) approach is best understood as proceeding from a contractualist circle of interdefined moral notions: obligation, authority, respect, and accountability. This is not to say, however, that to defend accountability one must also commit to contractrualism more broadly.
Watson takes something of a stand on this point, arguing that one can be legitimately held accountable for the behavior of others (against some standard) even if one could not have ensured their behavior met the standard. His example is hiring someone to keep order in a dance hall, where blaming them for the disorder is fair even though they may not have been able to control the crowd, so long as they agreed to the terms and conditions. This may be a special case, as it involves an explicit agreement (wherein we might think one is able to agree or refuse), and so still leaves open general questions about the demandingness of obligation in general (p. 237).
It is perhaps worth noting that these considerations also tend to disrupt the connection between one’s action and their values and commitments. That is, they also plausibly affect attributability.
For a critical discussion of the relevance of fairness to blame, brought out through a discussion of its force, see Hieronymi (2004).
Compare, Gideon Rosen: While “[i]t is obviously not a matter of equal distribution of the reactive attitudes… or of procedural impartiality in their application”, nevertheless, “we possess a robust body of opinion about when it is fair to treat someone adversely for what he has done” (2002, p. 74).
Again, see Smith (2007) for related discussion, though her focus is not on desert.
I owe the example to Pete Graham.
Smith (2007, pp. 478–479).
Watson also compares aretaic moral judgments with aesthetic ones.
Smith (2007) also emphasizes the difference between holding others responsible and holding them to be responsible. The latter use of ‘hold’ is in the sense of entertaining a proposition, rather than an interpersonal stance involving demands and distinctive responses.
Of course, this may just betray our preoccupation with blame and negative evaluations. Watson suggests this is perhaps to be expected given that blame can be a more serious affair (p. 242).
Notice that the same cannot be said of blameworthiness. If there were no negative obligations, we plausibly couldn’t be blameworthy for anything. This is the thought behind the so-called Deontic Argument, which holds that (i) if determinism were true, no one could act otherwise, which, (ii) according to some ‘ought implies can’ principle would imply that no one is obligated to do other than they do, and (iii) since blameworthiness requires violating an obligation one has, shows that (iv) if determinism were true, no one could be blameworthy for anything. No matter what one thinks of that argument in general, if there were no negative obligations, accountability-blame would be impossible, for there would be no legitimate demands to hold anyone to.
This follows Watson’s own suggestion (p. 242).
We might suppose that Donald shoots Mickey in the eye with a cork that has “shot” off from the champagne bottle Donald was opening, ricocheting off walls and other objects, only to hit Mickey as he unexpectedly enters the kitchen.
This is slightly ambiguous. One might mean that Wayne saved the child though he was trying not to. I obviously mean the other interpretation: that he was trying to do something else entirely, but wound up saving a child’s life (though he didn’t know at the time he was doing so).
It is partly for similar reasons that I reject understanding blame as a form of moral sanction. If a conception of blame cannot be made parallel to one for praise, this counts against that conception in my book. While this claim is admittedly contestable, I won’t defend it here.
This possibility suggests an intriguing line of inquiry, however. Though guilt is thought by some to be first-personal blame, it is less clear that it can count as unfair. Can individuals subject themselves to sanctions? And if they lack grounds for doing so, can they be treating themselves unfairly? I think these questions are provocative, and their answers are important for both the accountability perspective of responsibility, as well as our understanding of guilt and its relation to blame. Still, I cannot pursue them here.
Despite granting it for the sake of argument, I doubt that even failing to praise the praiseworthy is generally unfair, though I concede that it is unfitting or mistaken, and may be subject to normative critique as a result. As nothing here depends on the claim, however, I won’t defend it further.
Additionally, a complete defense would require contending with those who have suggested yet finer discriminations in our conceptions of responsibility. See no. 1.
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank John Martin Fischer, Michael McKenna, Mark Schroeder, Angela Smith, Gary Watson, and an anonymous referee for this journal. Versions of this paper were given at the University of Southern California and the University of California-Riverside. My thanks go to both audiences.
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King, M. Two faces of desert. Philos Stud 169, 401–424 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0188-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0188-5