Abstract
Theories of moral responsibility rely on tracing principles to account for derivative moral responsibility. Manuel Vargas has argued that such principles are problematic. To show this, he presents cases where individuals are derivatively blameworthy for their conduct, but where there is no suitable earlier time to which their blameworthiness can be traced back. John Martin Fischer and Neal Tognazzini have sought to resolve this problem by arguing that blameworthiness in these scenarios can be traced back, given the right descriptions of these agents’ later conduct. I contend that this strategy may succeed against Vargas’s particular examples, but that it fails to resolve the larger problem. After clarifying some key issues about derivative responsibility and tracing principles, I develop a case that isn’t amenable to Fischer and Tognazzini’s treatment. I then suggest the outlines of a compromise solution to the problem for tracing principles.
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Notes
Vargas is officially agnostic about which conclusion we should draw: that tracing principles should be rejected or that some of our considered judgments of blameworthiness are false.
This essay is an updated and expanded version of Fischer and Tognazzini (2009).
For recent discussions of these issues, see Timpe (2011) and Khoury (2012). Khoury (p. 193) proposes that we resolve the puzzles associated with derivative responsibility by denying that we are indeed blameworthy for the consequences of our actions. In Khoury’s view (pp. 200–01), consequences are relevant to blameworthiness only insofar as they provide evidence of the agent’s quality of will in doing something that had (or might have been expected to have) those consequences. This allows him to hold that the agent is equally blameworthy for her actions whether or not the untoward consequence actually comes about, and thus to avoid the problem of “resultant” moral luck (pp. 195–97). While I find this proposal thoughtful and intriguing, it seems to me that it doesn’t cover all the important cases. This is because, in denying that we are blameworthy for consequences, Khoury restricts the denotation of ‘consequences’: ‘“Consequence’ will be taken to mean an event or state of affairs (causally related in the appropriate way to an action of an agent) under a description that makes no reference to the mental states of the agent in acting’ (p. 197). This means that his account won’t apply to outcomes such as Brett’s deciding to drive while intoxicated, and it seems clear that we need to account for derivative responsibility for impaired decisions (or the fact that such a decision is made), as well as for the further consequences of those decisions.
It should be noted that other authors have suggested promising sketches for scenarios involving derivative moral responsibility without foreseeability. Thus Adams (1985, p. 14) writes: “The morally imprudent voluntary omissions, for example, by which a person has failed to pay the price to extricate himself in time from a situation that has left him embittered, cynical about morality, and full of racist sentiments, may be less gravely blameworthy than the attitudes to which they have led. Indeed, we might think them blameless, a successful gamble, if the sequel had not left the person so corrupted.” As this passage makes clear, Adams’s concern is to show that someone’s blameworthiness for his attitudes is not a function of his blameworthiness for the voluntary actions or omissions that led to those attitudes [see also Smith (2005 and 2008)]. If, however, we can plausibly suppose that the “gamble” was one whose true moral risks the agent could not have been expected to foresee, such a case, suitably developed, could support a challenge KC. More recently, McKenna (2008) has provided a template for another such challenge (see note 13 below). It should be noted that KC presupposes a broadly “volitionalist” view of moral responsibility, on which (roughly) the actions, traits and attitudes, and outcomes for which we are fundamentally morally responsible are ones that are subject to our voluntary control. The “attributionist” alternative, endorsed by Smith, Adams, and others is to say (roughly) that what is fundamental for assessments of moral responsibility is whether an attitude or trait can be attributed to us in such a way that we can be morally appraised for it, where the answer depends on its being suitably related to our other attitudes, and not on its being voluntarily formed or maintained. For the purposes of discussing KC, I shall adopt such a broadly volitionalist view.
Ginet (2000) provides an influential discussion of the foreseeability requirement. For some other influential discussions of tracing principles in the free-will debate, see Fischer and Ravizza (1998), ch. 7, Dennett (1984), pp. 131–33 and Kane (1996), pp. 38–40, 77–78. For a recent, more extensive treatment of the knowledge condition for moral responsibility, see Sher (2009).
While Vargas seems to offer KC as a statement of the “knowledge” or “epistemic” condition for moral responsibility in general (Vargas, op. cit., pp. 273–74), this principle is more plausibly understood as a statement of the knowledge condition for derivative moral responsibility. If, for example, you take my book, which you (non-culpably) mistake for your copy, you’re not blameworthy for this act because you don’t meet the knowledge condition in performing it. But your failure to meet this condition isn’t a matter of whether this occurrence was foreseeable at some suitable prior time. Thus, I submit, KC should be understood as a statement of the knowledge condition specifically for derivative responsibility (or as a foreseeability condition). However, nothing in what follows hinges on this.
See Jacobs (2001) for a suggestive defense of this possibility. Jacobs contends (p. 3) that someone can be morally responsible for such ethical disabilities and their untoward consequences even if he or she did not aim to become that way. Although Jacobs does not explicitly argue that such agents aren’t directly morally responsible for such consequences, his view that someone could become ethically disabled with regard to certain kinds of moral reasons, if well founded, could be used to substantiate Vargas’s claim that Jeff doesn’t meet the control conditions for moral responsibility when he fires the workers.
Thanks are owed to two anonymous referees for prompting me to address this concern, and for helping me to see it more clearly.
An ancillary point is that while cases of ethical disability present an interesting and auspicious starting point for a challenge to KC, tracing theorists should not suppose that they will be the only problem cases. If such cases succeed, they may provide a template for other cases that challenge KC. In the interests of space, I won’t try to develop a second example here. However, it seems to me that many of the same points that support the judgment of derivative responsibility in ethical disability cases could also support such a judgment of agents who, though not ethically disabled, suffer from intermittent bouts of genuinely compulsive behavior, where the kind of behavior at issue didn’t “come from nowhere,” yet wasn’t specifically foreseeable as a risk of the habits that led to it. If our judgment that such agents are derivatively blameworthy for their compulsive behavior can be bolstered by analogy with agents whose similar habits have led solely to non-compulsive manifestations of such behavior, it seems to me, this should give Fischer and Tognazzini further pause about summarily dismissing derivative blameworthiness in the relevant cases by appeal to KC.
It’s worth noting that Fischer and Tognazzini don’t claim that Jeff’s coming to possess impairment-level jerkiness (or insensitivity) is foreseeable, or that his blameworthiness depends on the foreseeability of this state of affairs.
For a contrasting view, see Zimmerman (1986), p. 211. Zimmerman takes a fine-grained approach to the individuation of outcomes, on which causing Brittany to suffer whiplash and causing someone to suffer whiplash would count as distinct occurrences. By contrast, I see these as two descriptions of the same particular occurrence.
Fischer and Tognazzini note that McKenna presents a case that is similar to Vargas’s, in that the agent “consciously chooses to cultivate his aggression and thick skin in order to survive in the locker room during his junior varsity football days…with little reason to expect that [this] will be the source of his coolness and tragic distance from his own children” (McKenna 2008, p. 33, emphasis added; cited in Fischer and Tognazzini 2011, p. 209 n. 3.) While Fischer and Tognazzini don’t say how they would address this case, it seems likely that they would see the agent’s conscious choice as the source of his later responsibility (as they do with Jeff the Jerk), still assuming that the agent isn’t directly morally responsible for the later outcome(s) in question. However, we could present a similar case without a pivotal choice, where the agent’s later paternal failings are consequences—but arguably not readily foreseeable consequences—of the earlier pattern of aggressive behavior.
Here again I find Jacobs’ discussion of ethical disability suggestive (see note 7). Jacobs writes: “Some agents develop characters that disable them for sound ethical comprehension and action. The agent whose vices are especially entrenched, to the extent that she cannot appreciate ethical considerations in a correct manner, is ethically disabled” (Jacobs, op. cit., p. 34, emphasis original). Moreover, Jacobs writes, some agents turn out this way “as a result of habituation and their own voluntary conduct” (p. 37). As will become clear, I’m sympathetic to this general idea; however, Jacobs says little about how he understands the ability to appreciate ethical considerations.
It should be noted that I’m adopting the familiar conception of personal traits as stable cognitive, affective, and behavioral dispositions that are formed over extended periods in part by agents’ voluntary actions and the resulting habits. Like the writers I’m discussing—and against situationists—I’m supposing that there are such personal traits, including traits like T and Jeff’s jerkiness.
In this connection, Bill Pollard’s discussion of moral responsibility for habitual actions is helpful. According to Pollard, we can be morally responsible for habitual actions because we have “intervention control” over whether we perform them—the ability to stop ourselves at will before performing or completing a habitual action, however natural its performance may be (See Pollard 2006, pp. 59–60). I shall suppose that such control allows us to see habitual action as voluntary in a way that supports attributions of derivative moral responsibility.
The claim that we are morally responsible for personal traits, unforeseeable though they are, may be grist for the attributionist’s mill (see note 4). The attributionist may say that the correct lesson from such cases is that neither voluntary control nor foreseeability is required for moral responsibility. Be this as it may, I will continue to suppose that moral responsibility for such traits depends on our having some degree of voluntary control over the actions and habits that produce them.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for prompting me to consider the implications of the revised requirement for character-shaping decisions, including ones whose effects are gradual.
I am deeply indebted to two anonymous referees for Erkenntnis for exceptionally helpful and generous comments, which resulted in numerous improvements to the manuscript. I would also like to thank John Fischer and Kai Draper for valuable feedback on an earlier draft of the manuscript.
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Shabo, S. More Trouble with Tracing. Erkenn 80, 987–1011 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9693-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9693-y