Abstract
This paper introduces a new family of cases where agents are jointly morally responsible for outcomes over which they have no individual control, a family that resists standard ways of understanding outcome responsibility. First, the agents in these cases do not individually facilitate the outcomes and would not seem individually responsible for them if the other agents were replaced by non-agential causes. This undermines attempts to understand joint responsibility as overlapping individual responsibility; the responsibility in question is essentially joint. Second, the agents involved in these cases are not aware of each other’s existence and do not form a social group. This undermines attempts to understand joint responsibility in terms of actual or possible joint action or joint intentions, or in terms of other social ties. Instead, it is argued that intuitions about joint responsibility are best understood given the Explanation Hypothesis, according to which a group of agents are seen as jointly responsible for outcomes that are suitably explained by their motivational structures, invoked collectively: something bad happened because they didn’t care enough; something good happened because their dedication was extraordinary. One important consequence of the proposed account is that responsibility for outcomes of collective action is a deeply normative matter.
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Notes
- 1.
Other problems are provided by probabilistic case where there are no causally sufficient conditions for outcomes, and so-called “switching” cases, where necessary parts of sufficient conditions seem to change the way an outcome happens without being causally responsible for it (cf. the case where Alice contributes solvent Y). These are also problems for counterfactual analyses in the tradition of David Lewis (1973); for discussion, see e.g. (Collins et al. 2004; Björnsson 2007).
- 2.
See (Zimmerman 1985:116–17) for an argument that seems to assume that differences of this sort cannot make for different degrees of responsibility.
- 3.
In connecting moral responsibility to reactive attitudes and practices of holding responsible, this hypothesis is closely related to a category of accounts starting with Peter Strawson’s (1962) paper “Freedom and Resentment”. In (Björnsson and Persson 2011) we indicate how our particular way of spelling out this connection avoids some of the standard objections raised against such accounts.
- 4.
In saying that people “take” GET, RR and ER to hold, I do not mean that they are consciously aware of the considerations defined by these conditions in making their judgments of responsibility under these descriptions, only that judgments are in fact determined by such considerations.
- 5.
It is an interesting question whether GET-satisfying explanations require awareness on part of the agent that the sort of outcome in question might take place or whether it can be enough that the person would have been aware and acted on the information if the person had possessed a different motivational structure. We are currently investigating this, and preparatory studies suggest that most people come down on the latter side. For some of the philosophical controversy, see (Zimmerman 2008:chap. 4; Sher 2009).
- 6.
It is possible that GET should be restricted to these two broad kinds of explanation.
- 7.
In (Björnsson 2007) I argue that our causal reasoning is primarily directed towards sufficient rather than necessary conditions and that this is explained by the connection between causal thinking and instrumental reasoning: instrumental reasoning is primarily directed at ensuring certain states of affairs rather than making them possible. The priority of sufficiency over necessity explains why causation is compatible with many varieties of overdetermination and ultimately explains why responsibility is not a matter of difference making. (All this simplifies matters by ignoring probabilistic causation and explanation.)
- 8.
The model of causal judgment developed in (Björnsson 2007) explains the restricted role of difference making or counterfactual dependence in causal judgments and shows why the lack of counterfactual dependence might undermine the claim that Alice’s carelessness caused or explained the death of the fish in the lake. This effect would be even stronger in the version of The Lake where her contribution actually lowered the probability of the outcome.
- 9.
The Explanation Hypothesis also implies that subtle differences in characterizations of outcomes might yield different verdicts about moral responsibility. It is intuitively clear that Eric, Fiona and George are responsible for the fact that Hannah wasn’t saved, but it is less clear that they are responsible for her death. If we ask why she wasn’t saved, it is natural to cite, say, the trio’s lack of concern, but if we ask why she died, it is considerably more natural to cite the fact that she fell into an old well or didn’t watch where she was going than to cite the non-intervention. Different explananda yield different explanatory frames: unlike the fact that she died, the fact that she wasn’t saved implies that she was in danger, thus relegating her initial fall into the well to the explanatory background.
- 10.
- 11.
In (Björnsson and Persson 2011) we argue that explanatory frames of the sort that motivate most of our everyday judgments of moral responsibility should be preferred to the frames that are induced by sceptical arguments against moral responsibility.
- 12.
For related discussions of how normative aspects affect judgments of responsibility, see (Smiley 1992).
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this text have been presented and received valuable input at the International Conference on Moral Responsibility in Delft, August 2009 at the Centre for Applied Ethics at Linköping University, at the Department of Political Science and the Department of Philosophy, Linguistic and Theory of Science at University of Gothenburg, and at the Department of Philosophy, Lund University. I am also grateful to participants at the CEU 2009 summer school on moral responsibility, and for comments from Ibo van de Poel and an anonymous reviewer for this volume.
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Björnsson, G. (2011). Joint Responsibility Without Individual Control: Applying the Explanation Hypothesis. In: Vincent, N., van de Poel, I., van den Hoven, J. (eds) Moral Responsibility. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1878-4_11
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