Abstract
The contemporary philosophical debate on free will and moral responsibility is rife with appeal to a variety of allegedly intuitive cases and principles. As a result, some have argued that many strands of this debate end in “dialectical stalemates,” boiling down to bedrock, seemingly intractable disagreements about intuition (Fischer, The metaphysics of free will: An essay on control. Blackwell, Cambridge, 1994). Here I attempt to carve out a middle ground between conventional reliance on appeal to intuition and intuitional skepticism in regards to the philosophical discussion of moral responsibility in particular. The main goal of this paper is to propose and defend a new methodological assumption that I argue responsibility theorists can and should accept, one that serves to preserve a general skepticism about the proper role of intuition in our responsibility theorizing while marking a particular class of our responsibility judgments as having a privileged epistemic status such that they can play a role in constraining our responsibility theorizing.
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Notes
For example, van Inwagen’s (1983) Rule Beta, Frankfurt cases, and Pereboom’s Four Case Manipulation Argument.
In particular this kind of unrestricted skepticism makes it difficult, if not impossible, to normatively anchor our best prescriptive account of moral responsibility (McCormick 2013).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting the use of this terminology to best capture the kind of argumentative strategy at issue.
This discussion draws heavily on Hallvard Lillehammer’s (2007) helpful analysis of the scope of this kind of argumentative strategy as it has traditionally been employed in defense of ethical objectivity.
For simplicity I here restrict the status of the claims at issue to their epistemological status, as this is the kind of status that will be relevant to my arguments in support of MAP. It is important to note that this general argumentative strategy might, in principle, be employed in regards to a variety of different philosophically relevant statuses of a particular set of claims.
Another way to think of the role that this kind of paradigmatic judgment plays and the sense in which the privileged epistemic status of this kind of judgment is defeasible is to consider the role that this kind of judgment plays in service of reflective equilibrium. The judgment that what Jimmy does is wrong, bad, or harmful looks like a paradigmatic example of the kind of judgment that will compose the class of intuitions that we start with on one end of this process. We may of course end up giving up some (or even all) of these judgments in light of conflicts with principles at the other end, and this is one sense in which the status of these paradigmatic judgments might be considered defeasible.
And even this is far from uncontroversial.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this point and for raising this potential objection.
Here ‘competent’ is intended to convey only that the judgments in question are produced in the normal sort of way, that the normal psychological processes that generate these judgments are not being biased or distorted.
Though of course this picture only supports the claim that a relatively small subset of our affective responses should be included in MAP—our reactive attitudes.
I am here assuming that these features are relevant to the epistemic status of both kinds of judgments. I will return to the question of whether or not this assumption is plausible in Sect. 5, where I discuss a number of potential objections to both the CIG and CII arguments offered in this section.
I admit that my arguments in support of MAP will get no traction with a steadfast moral nihilist. While this may undermine the persuasiveness of both the CII and CIG arguments slightly, I take this to be an acceptable cost. I am not particularly interested (at least not here) in refuting moral nihilism. My aim is not to convince moral nihilists, but rather those who feel the pull of skepticism about the reliability of our intuitions about moral responsibility that we are nonetheless justified in taking a particular class of them to by immune from this more general skepticism and thus capable of constraining our theorizing about moral responsibility.
For example, see also Woolfolk et al. (2006). While Woolfolk et al. do not focus explicitly on affectivity, their studies do suggest that “identification” (the degree to which an actor wants or desires to perform a behavior) increases subjects’ willingness to judge the actor morally responsible (p. 286). One possible explanation for subjects’ increased willingness to judge identifying agents morally responsible might be that vignettes describing them are more concrete, and that this in combination with identification itself elicits a strong affective response on the part of the subject forming the judgment. This is of course rather speculative, but also suggests a potentially fruitful avenue for future expansion of Woolfolk et al.’s work. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this work might provide some further support for my arguments here.
One possible line of argument here might be to claim that, if we were to cast our cultural or anthropological net wide enough, we would find that none of our moral judgments actually enjoy a sufficiently high level of convergence. This claim is, admittedly, difficult to assess. However, even if it is correct, I do not take it to directly undermine MAP. Rather, if this claim is correct we need only restrict the scope of MAP to a particular culture (or perhaps time period), for example Western civilization. I would not take such a restriction to seriously undermine the significance of MAP. Unless one is presupposing some kind of objective realism about moral responsibility, the fact that MAP will play a role in delivering the best theory of responsibility indexed to Western civilization remains a significant achievement. Furthermore, those who take our best theory of moral responsibility to be tied intimately to our practices of moral praising and blaming (for example, revisionists) might even take restricting the scope of MAP in this way to be a virtue. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this possible line of objection.
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McCormick, K. Companions in innocence: defending a new methodological assumption for theorizing about moral responsibility. Philos Stud 172, 515–533 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0316-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0316-x