“We are complex beings; no one is all good or all bad.”
Van Jones (2010)
Abstract
Recent writers on negligence and culpable ignorance have argued that there are two kinds of culpable ignorance: tracing cases, in which the agent’s ignorance traces back to some culpable act or omission of hers in the past that led to the current act, which therefore arguably inherits the culpability of that earlier failure; and non-tracing cases, in which there is no such earlier failure, so the agent’s current state of ignorance must be culpable in its own right. An unusual but intriguing justification for blaming agents in non-tracing cases is provided by Attributionism, which holds that we are as blameworthy for our non-voluntary emotional reactions, spontaneous attitudes, and the ensuing patterns of awareness as we are for our voluntary actions. The Attributionist explanation for why some non-tracing cases involve culpability is an appealing one, even though it has limited scope. After providing a deeper account of why we should take the Attributionist position seriously, I use recent psychological research to argue for a new account of the conditions under which agents are culpable for straightforward instances of blameworthy acts. That account is extended to blameworthiness for non-voluntary responses. I conclude that even when the agent’s failure to notice arises from a nonvoluntary objectionable attitude, very few such cases are ones in which Attributionism implies that the agent is blameworthy for her act.
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Notes
I earlier dealt with tracing cases in Smith (1983).
Hot Dog and On the Rocks are taken from Sher (2009), p. 24. In Hot Dog I have changed the upshot for the dog from “unconscious from heat prostration” to “death” for later ease of description.
This is a variant on a case described by Sher (2009), p. 7.
On the common legal definition one acts recklessly when one acts in conscious disregard of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that one’s conduct will harm another. See The American Law Institute Model Penal Code (1985), Section 2.02. If Luke was conscious of the risk that the gun was loaded, his action is reckless.
Moreover, as Sher suggests, understanding Hot Dog as a tracing case only pushes back the perhaps equally-hard question of whether Alessandra was culpable for not considering whether to bring the dog with her when she set out. Sher (2009), p. 83.
The term “Attributionist” appears to trace back to Gary Watson’s (2004; originally published 1996) discussion of two different forms of blame, ‘aretaic blame’ (in which we attribute or impute conduct to an individual) and ‘accountability blame.’ Proponents of Attributionism include Smith (2005) and other pieces; Hieronymi (2008) and other pieces; Adams (1985); Frankfurt (1988); Williams (1973); and Scanlon (1998). There are important differences among these philosophers; I shall be guided primarily by Angela Smith’s account.
Of course we often make evaluative judgments that do not reflect at all on our moral character; my lingering over the thought of a chocolate soda, and not lingering over the thought of a strawberry soda, shows I prefer chocolate to strawberry, but this reveals nothing about my moral preferences or values. Attributionists should only be interested, for purposes of assigning moral responsibility and blame, in evaluative attitudes that reflect moral attitudes.
Angela Smith emphasizes that these evaluative judgments may not be conscious, or be consciously recognized by the person who holds them, who may only discover she has such values through her own non-voluntary responses to events. See Smith (2005), pp. 251–252. Smith adds another qualification on which mental states can count as ones for which a person can be blameworthy. She says “In order for a creature to be responsible for an attitude, on the rational relations view, it must be the kind of state that is open, in principle, to revision or modification through that creature’s own processes of rational reflection” (p. 256). (See also Scanlon (1998), pp. 20–24, 272.) For an Attributionist like Smith, who opposes theorists holding that a person is only responsible for those attitudes that are in some way connected to her choices (either her past choice to have this attitude, or her current choice to endorse it, or her ability to modify it in the future), this restriction brings her uncomfortably close to insisting on the very kind of voluntarism that she rejects among her opponents. For this reason I shall not emphasize it.
The term “moral personality” is used by Hieronymi (2008), p. 361.
Note that “non-voluntary,” rather than “involuntary” seems to be the correct term here: typically our emotional reactions, etc., are not contrary to our will, which is what “involuntary” may suggest. See Hieronymi (2008), p. 368.
Typically Attributionists don’t address the question of whether the culpably ignorant agent is as culpable as the witting agent who performs the same act.
Note that on this account the agent’s ignorance has no intrinsic moral status; its blameworthiness is derived from the evaluative attitude that generates it. For this reason one can see such “non-tracing” cases as more closely aligned with “tracing” cases than it appears at first blush; in both cases the moral status of the ignorance traces to something else (a motivational state) that has intrinsic moral status.
Sher himself concedes that Alessandra may have no morally objectionable attitude towards the dog (Sher 2009, p. 131).
Inference to a low concern for the victim’s well-being is even less plausible in the horrific cases of parents who have forgotten their infant in the back seat of the car and returned at the end of the day to discover the child dead from heat exposure. For accounts of some of these cases, see Weingarten (2009).
Note, however, that it is also plausible to see this case as a tracing case, rather than a non-tracing case. If Ryland has a standing over-valuation of her own interests as compared with those of other people, this is a moral flaw that she has presumably had ample opportunity to discover and correct in the past. Her failure to do so may well be culpable, so that her culpability for her present personality trait traces at least in part to past derelictions.
Throughout this paper I will often use “reprehensible” as a generic term for attitudes that are morally objectionable. The degree to which an attitude is objectionable varies from attitude to attitude, and in normal discourse we tend to reserve the term “reprehensible” for those attitudes that are highly egregious. One can be blameworthy even if one’s attitude is not highly egregious. However, for brevity, I shall use the term “reprehensible” to cover all cases of attitudes that are morally faulty.
Sher proposes an account according to which an agent is responsible for an act done in culpable ignorance if the agent “is unaware that the act is wrong or foolish despite having evidence for its wrongness or foolishness his failure to recognize which (a) falls below some applicable standard, and (b) is caused by the interaction of some combination of his constitutive attitudes, dispositions, and traits.” (Sher 2009, p. 88). However, this account does not seem helpful. It is unclear how we are to determine whether a person’s failure to notice falls below the “applicable standard” without knowing whether the person’s constitutive attitudes, dispositions, and traits fall short of some related standard. After all, the standard cannot simply say “There was evidence that she ought to have taken into account,” since there are many cases in which an individual ought to have taken evidence into account but is not culpable for failing to do so. But Sher seems to deny that the person’s character (or even a component of that character) must be morally flawed for her to be responsible—it must simply be the case that her underlying character gives rise to the failure to notice (pp. 86–91). Thus we cannot invoke any moral flaw in the person’s constituent character to explain why she falls short of the standard. Taken as a whole, this account gives us no clear handle on the difference between people who are blameworthy and those who are not for their failures to notice.
I take these labels from Levy (2005). Although I will confine my attention to questions about blameworthiness, most discussions of the contrast between Attributionism and Volitionism note that moral responsibility extends beyond blameworthy acts to praiseworthy and morally neutral acts (and emotions), and therefore encompasses acts (or emotions) that are neither blameworthy nor praiseworthy.
Attributionists emphasize that in some (but not all) of the cases in which the agent is responsible for her non-voluntary response, the response may be partly constituted by the judgment. For example, the emotion of jealousy is not only caused by a certain judgment, it involves the judgment, and would not count as jealousy unless the agent made that judgment. (See, for example, Smith (2005), p. 258.) However, Attributionists implicitly admit cases in which the non-voluntary response is merely caused by the judgment (such as failures-to-notice cases) rather than constituted in part by it, although they distinguish these from other bodily reactions that are merely caused by judgments, as one’s nausea before a public speaking performance is caused by one’s fear of public speaking. See Smith, p. 257–259. I think the discussion of the difference between these kinds of cases is as yet inadequate. In any event, these theorists’ discussions tend to render somewhat fuzzy the distinction between the initiating mental state (the evaluative judgment) and the non-voluntary response it gives rise to. I shall have to leave this distinction somewhat fuzzy as well; the important point is that the Attributionists regard the agent as blameworthy for the initiating evaluative judgment as well as for any distinct non-voluntary response to which it gives rise.
See, for example, Gary Watson (2004), p. 263.
For an accessible account of contemporary psychologists’ work on “emotional regulation,” see Carey (2010).
See, for example, Hieronymi (2008), p. 368.
As we have seen, Attributionists often stress the fact that the evaluative attitudes for which they claim you are responsible are attitudes that are “open, in principle, to revision or modification through that creature’s own processes of rational reflection” (Smith 2005, p. 256).
It is worthwhile noting a further point in the comparison between the act-producing process and the response-producing process. We can often control the way we perform a basic act—for example, I can control whether I raise my arm quickly or slowly. But it is also true that we can sometimes control the way we express an evaluative attitude. I can control whether I grimace in an exaggerated or restrained manner, and can sometimes modulate my look of shock or disgust. These kinds of cases may show that the boundary between acts and non-voluntary responses can be fuzzy. If I display restrained grimaces on sampling foul-tasting substances because I have trained myself to do so, then it is clearly a (trained) non-voluntary response, not an act. But if I am being tortured and suppress the urge to scream because I don’t want to give my captors any satisfaction, or if I modulate my look of shock on the occasion of the upsetting news in order not to worry my children, then these responses begin to look a great deal like acts. They are not full acts in the sense that I initiate the scream or the shocked look, as I initiate raising my arm. But perhaps they could be understood as acts of suppressing or modifying reactions that themselves are non-voluntary.
Note that an aim to “bring something about” can include an aim to omit doing something. For an account of the distinction between “basic” and “higher level” acts, see Goldman (1970).
Note that, as pointed out before, an evaluative attitude such as greed may give rise both to a non-voluntary response (which doesn’t necessarily satisfy it) and to an action (acquiring the desired objects) which paradigmatically does satisfy it.
Setting aside “deviant causal chain” cases, and cases in which the will itself is unfree.
This is sometimes expressed by positing a “control” condition for moral responsibility.
This account is taken from Smith (1983), p. 556. In the original account I used the term “is to blame” rather than “is blameworthy.” As I point out in this earlier work, the process by which the desires and aversions give rise to the act must not involve what has come to be called a “deviant” causal chain. In the following text, I will always assume this further condition is met.
For certain more severe types of offenses, such as homicide, the law recognizes not just the offense of carrying out the homicide, but also the offense of attempted homicide. Inspired by this, one might accuse the teenager of performing the objectively morally wrong act of “attempting to humiliate her classmate.” However, it is not clear that morality recognizes such an offense, or needs to do so, so long as it imputes blameworthiness to agents for their bare choices (as I shall argue it should) as well as for their acts.
Note that to hold a person is blameworthy is always to negatively appraise the person for some episode, such as an act or choice. Such judgments are distinct from negative evaluations of the person, or the person’s character, as a whole (“Pol Pot was evil”).
I shall not try to say a great deal about what kinds of motivations, desires, or aversions, count as morally good or bad in themselves. A clear-cut example of a morally good motive would be a desire to do what is morally right; but many theorists hold that a desire to perform an action for one of the features that makes it right (such as telling the truth, or assisting a person in need) also counts as a morally good motive. In the text I shall assume this is true.
See Smith (1983), p. 556.
Someone might argue that she does lack a requisite moral desire, namely the desire to do what is all-things-considered right. But I don’t think we require non-blameworthy agents to have such a desire. Someone who chooses to help a frail person climb the stairs, simply out of concern for the person’s welfare, is praiseworthy, not blameworthy, even though she doesn’t think about morality at all in making her choice.
Note that there might be nothing unusual or deficient in the strength of her desire to do what is fair; it is just that her desire to promote her self-interest is stronger. Both of her desires might actually be weaker than such desires are in the average person. It is their relative strength that is problematic. For an examination of the manner in which strength of desires may affect an agent’s moral status, see Smith (1991).
This is true even if Brian’s choice is blameworthy. If Brian believes that duty requires him to rescue the more numerous passengers from the Amelia, but chooses to rescue the passengers from the Betty instead because he believes one of them is a billionaire who will reward him handsomely, his choice is blameworthy, but not because he also has an overt desire that Ed die.
There may be desires that motivationally connect with the agent’s decision, but which weigh evenly on each side of the choice, so on balance they neither favor nor disfavor it. Nonetheless, because they motivationally connect with it, they are relevant to the agent’s overall blameworthiness.
Notice that I am interpreting Coast Guard Rescue I as a case in which Brian has no beliefs about, or motivation regarding, the all-things-considered moral status of his options. He is motivated solely by considerations of professional duty and hatred for his rival. However, we can easily imagine a variant of Coast Guard Rescue I in which Brian believes, and is motivated by the belief, that his rescuing the survivors of the Amelia is the all-things-considered morally right act. In this variant he would also not be blameworthy, since part of his motivation would focus on the all-things-considered status of his proposed action.
In this variant Brian desires to do something (let Ed die) that he recognizes as prima facie wrong, and this leads us to see him as morally flawed. But since he has no desire to do something that he recognizes as all-things-considered wrong, we don’t conclude that his choice is blameworthy.
We should also make room for a person being blameworthy for an act if he believes it to be all-things-considered subjectively wrong. I shall leave this complication aside.
As Kenneth Simons points out, this statement may be too strong, since there may be cases (a teenager who gets a thrill from violating social conventions and moral norms) in which we wouldn’t be clear that the behavior was blameworthy. Certainly the degree of blameworthiness can vary with the importance of the norm intentionally violated, and there may be cases in which we don’t view the behavior as blameworthy at all, if the norm is a sufficiently modest one (Simons’ examples: showing politeness, not talking back to one’s parents, etc.).
Of course a strict Kantian would deny that any “motivation” aside from respect for duty has moral significance, but few people are strict Kantians about this issue.
I am interpreting “moral” desires as ones with explicit moral content, such as the desire to do what one is obligated to do. “Non-moral” desires are all other desires, many of which of course are morally important, including the kinds of desires described in the text.
A similar account could now be stated for an agent’s being blameworthy for performing an act. Note that these accounts do not overtly cover cases in which the agent knowingly risks causing a harm. Such cases can be incorporated by understanding “act A” so that it can be the act of “risking a harm,” and understanding “features F, G, and H” so that they can be probabilistic features, such as “is likely to lead to an injury.”
This account would have to be complicated in order to correctly handle cases in which S believes that A would be all-things-considered wrong, but also that A has the highest expected value of any of S’s alternatives and is therefore subjectively right. See (Zimmerman 2008, pp. 17–18, and Smith 2011).
Note that this account doesn’t satisfactorily handle “Huck Finn” type cases, in which the agent both believes his act to be all-things-considered wrong, and also believes it to have features F, G, and H, in virtue of which he wants to perform the act—but it is also the case that if the act had features F, G, and H, then A would be all-things-considered right. Huck Finn famously believed it would be all-things-considered wrong for him not to turn in his friend Jim, who is a slave, and also wanted not to turn in Jim because of Jim’s humanity. People’s reactions to such cases understandably vary; some respond that Huck is blameworthy for choosing to do what he believes to be all-things-considered wrong; others respond that Huck is praiseworthy (and certainly not blameworthy) for choosing to do what, for the non-normative reasons he chooses it, is all-things-considered right. Here I will not take a position on such cases, but only note that one’s final account of when an agent’s choice is blameworthy must take such cases into account, as Account IV does not attempt to do. For one discussion of this case, see Arpaly (2003), pp. 75–78 and passim.
Cited in Bargh (2005).
Glaser and Kihlstrom dispute the accuracy of some of these descriptors, in particular citing research to show that the unconscious can compensate for threats to the achievement of its goals.
For further research on dual process theory, see Evans and Frankish (2009). While Hassin et al. (2005) report research among social psychologists, Evans and Frankish report research across a broader range of fields. For a penetrating discussion of the extent to which the kinds of experiments cited genuinely establish unconscious operations of the mind, see Uhlmann et al. (2008).
Witmer provides a poignant example of this. His daughter Michelle was the first female National Guardsman killed while serving in Iraq. Witmer writes that on hearing the news of her death, his first instinct was to bring his other two daughters home from their military assignments. He notes wryly that his first instinct was to protect his daughters, not to think about the fact that they were adults who had to decide for themselves, or to think about the patriotic need to support the country (John Witmer 2010a, b).
Discussions of whether an act is one for which the agent is responsible often raise the question of whether the act is truly “free” because the desire that gives rise to it comes from “outside” the agent, as in cases in which a hypnotist or brain surgeon implants a foreign desire in an agent, who then acts on it. There are serious issues about whether or not such agents are responsible for their acts, but the question is irrelevant to our concern, since the attitudes and desires in most of my cases are not foreign to the agent in this sense.
Of course the situation could have been different. If a friend had warned you to, at all costs, avoid crossing your legs during the interview, because the interviewer is offended by women crossing their legs, then you would have been alert for any inclination to cross your legs, and would have suppressed it. However, without any such warning, your guard is not up.
Note that the number, as such, of the agent’s desires and aversions, is not the relevant factor. If an agent has only one relevant (bad) desire that could be called into action by a prospective act, and indeed that desire does, by itself, lead to the agent’s decision to perform the act, then we can judge the agent to be blameworthy for her decision, even though it arose from a single bad desire. What is relevant here is not the number of desires that give rise to the decision, but the extent to which they represent the agent’s full set of attitudes towards the act in question.
Theorists sometimes say that an agent’s ignorance blocks the otherwise natural inference from the fact that the agent performed a wrong act to the conclusion that the agent had a reprehensible desire to perform that act. What I am pointing out is that ignorance operates to block culpability in another way as well, by blocking the inference that a reprehensible desire actually possessed by the agent played any role in contributing to the agent’s decision.
Many theorists of blameworthiness have claimed that a person’s blameworthiness depends on whether or not his act or his choice arises from his character. This seems incorrect, since a person’s character is a stable psychological feature, and some acts seem to be blameworthy even though they arise from fleeting motivational states that are too short-lived to count as part of the person’s character. However, the impulse to look for states of character in assessing blameworthiness may arise from an unconscious recognition that blameworthiness requires that the action or choice issue from something close to the agent’s full psychology at the time of the choice.
My colleague Doug Husak is persuading me that the notion of degrees of culpability is what is appropriate here.
Nor does the agent have the thought, on deciding, that this act is all-things-considered right or wrong. It would be possible to have such a belief without having consulted more than one reason for acting, but the agents in “hair trigger” cases typically do not decide on the basis of this thought (which might be enough to establish blameworthiness or lack thereof).
Someone might say that it is part of the agent’s “full moral personality” that his other pertinent motivations are not activated in such cases, so that we can hold him blameworthy. However, this would require us to hold that the failure of the triggering stimulus to recruit his other motivations shows his configuration of desires and aversions is reprehensible. This is implausible, since it is simply part of the way human beings are “wired up” that we respond in these ways to these kinds of stimuli. And, as John Bargh argues, such wiring is evolutionarily extremely important for survival (Bargh 2005, pp. 43, 53), so we do not want to claim that it is morally reprehensible.
More work needs to be done on the concept of “relevance” in this account. In the normal case, a desire is relevant if the prospective act has feature J, and it is true that if S believed the act to have J, and if S’s motivational system were fully active, then S would desire to do the act because it has J (or would be averse to the act because it has J), and that desire would be active in S’s decision whether or not to perform A. For example, suppose in Coast Guard Rescue II that Captain Brian’s rival Ed is on the Amelia, but Brian does not believe Ed to be on the Amelia or that his rescuing the Amelia survivors will involve saving Ed’s life (J). Then Brian’s desire to see Ed dead is “relevant” to his choice to rescue the Amelia’s passengers, even though his ignorance prevents this desire from playing an active role in his choice.
However, S will sometimes have inaccurate beliefs about A, beliefs that would normally trigger a desire with respect to A, but which (because it is an automatic case) are not engaged by the choice to do A. Thus S might falsely believe A to have feature K, and have a standing desire not to do acts that have K—but because S’s decision to do A is an “automatic” decision, his belief and desire with respect to K have no impact on his decision. For example, suppose the soldier in the dangerous environment falsely believes that shooting under these circumstances will disobey his commander’s orders (K). (His belief is false because the commander, bent on revenging a comrade’s death, has not issued such orders for this situation). Normally the soldier would desire to obey orders, but because of the perceived danger his desire to obey orders is never activated. Since the soldier’s desire to obey orders would normally be an active part of his overall evaluative attitudes with respect to shooting (as he understands this act), it seems that it should count as a relevant desire as well, even though shooting would not in fact disobey his commander’s orders.
Note that response R must be appraised as “bad” rather than “wrong,” since R is not a voluntary act.
Some racists would have a reaction of dismay because of ignorance or mistake—for example, they might believe that African-Americans do not have the intellectual capability to become good dentists. This ignorance or mistake may itself be culpable, but such a case would involve a “tracing” instance of culpable ignorance. I am imagining a racist who now has no such beliefs (although she may have held them in the past).
Her reaction may arise from what Tamar Szabo Gendler has labeled “aliefs”—epistemic states that one retains in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. See, for example, Gendler (2008), in which she describes experiments in which subjects refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, are loathe to put their mouths to a piece of vomit-shaped rubber, and are averse to tasting fudge made in the shape of dog feces (p. 636). These subjects appear to have “belief-like” states (e.g., the “belief” that a bedpan is contaminated) which give rise to their emotional reactions, despite the fact that they have contrary genuine beliefs (the knowledge that the bedpan is not contaminated).
What should we say about the response of what we might call a “confirmed” racist who evinces the same pang of dismay on learning that his new dentist is African-American? A “confirmed” racist is someone who has thought about racism and, for bad reasons, accepted racist attitudes as appropriate. For this reason he has made no attempt to eliminate his own biases. The “confirmed” racist’s response to the new dentist, like that of the agent in the text, is also non-voluntary. However, his response traces back to a history in which he has culpably failed to extirpate his racist attitudes. Thus his case should be considered a “tracing” case, in which he is blameworthy for his current non-voluntary response because it can be traced back to his earlier failures. The agent in the text also thought about race in the past, but her consideration was not flawed, and so cannot infect her current response with culpability.
Of course we can imagine a case in which someone’s non-voluntary response to a stimulus is caused by an objectionable evaluative attitude, and the objectionable evaluative attitude is part of an objectionable set of evaluative attitudes on her part—but it is the only attitude activated by the stimulus in question. Hence her non-voluntary response does not tell us the full story about her moral psychology, although the full story is not a good one. My view implies that in this case, as in the case of the liberal racist in the text, the person is not to blame for her non-voluntary response, since it does not sufficiently reflect her full psychology.
This suggests some of the difficulties with spelling out what a “reprehensible” or “morally good” configuration of desires and aversions is. Does it have to do with the upshots of the configuration on that very occasion, or with the upshots of that configuration over some longer span of the agent’s life? Or does it not have to do with “upshots” at all, but rather with the content of the configuration? This question mirrors some of the problems that arise in trying to construct a plausible form of rule utilitarianism.
Even George Sher (2009, p. 25) points out that “We all know what it is to be assaulted by an urgent problem that drives all other thoughts from our minds….”
Thanks to Douglas Husak for pointing out the infrequency with which philosophers’ examples provide all the necessary information. For an account of differential reactions to these kinds of cases, see, for example, Weingarten (2009).
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Acknowledgments
For comments on earlier versions of this paper I am grateful to Alvin Goldman, Karen Shanton, discussants at Union College, and especially Douglas Husak and Kenneth Simons.
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Smith, H.M. Non-Tracing Cases of Culpable Ignorance. Criminal Law, Philosophy 5, 115–146 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-011-9113-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-011-9113-1