Out of control

Ethics

Volumn 116, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 285-301

  Sher, George ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33644754156     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/498464     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. Thomas Nagel, "Moral Luck," in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24-38.
2. It is often said that, because people cannot help having their bad traits, they are neither responsible nor blameworthy for having those traits. However, for an argument that responsibility and blame are not this tightly linked - that people can be blamed, though not held responsible, for bad traits that they cannot help having - see my "Blame for Traits," Noûs 35 (2001): 146-61. For an argument that people can be both blamed and held responsible for bad traits they cannot help having,
3. see Robert M. Adams, "Involuntary Sins," Philosophical Review 94 (1985): 3-31.
4. In classifying actions of these sorts as involving a lack of control, I depart from the usage of those who distinguish control (understood as a kind of freedom) from knowledge of what one is doing: for an account which separates these factors and which takes responsibility to require them both, see John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 12-14. Although I think the idea that agents lack control when they do not know what they are doing is supported both by our linguistic intuitions and by the interpenetration of knowledge and will, I also think that nothing of substance depends on this. Anyone who thinks of control exclusively in terms of freedom can simply recast my examples as cases in which agents appear responsible despite their failure to satisfy the epistemic condition for responsibility.
5. See, e.g., H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 136-57.
6. In this and the preceding paragraph, I have presupposed an objective interpretation of the "reasonable person" standard - that is, one that defines the agent's situation without reference to his own beliefs or mental attributes. This has traditionally been the dominant interpretation; see, e.g., Joshua Dressler, Understanding Criminal Law, 2nd ed. (New York: Bender, 1995), 115. If instead the standard is interpreted subjectively, so that it takes the test for responsibility to be whether a reasonable person who shared some or all of the agent's beliefs and dispositions would have acted as the agent did, then it may indeed preserve the principle that responsibility presupposes control. However, because the subjective version of the standard will preserve the principle by implying that Joliet, Scout, and Father Poteet are not responsible for what they have done, it will go no distance toward showing how the principle can be reconciled with the intuition that they are responsible.
7. Although Michael J. Zimmerman is dealing with only a relatively narrow range of cases, he draws a conclusion of just this sort when he writes that "the conditions [for culpable ignorance] are pretty restrictive" and that therefore "culpable ignorance occurs less frequently, perhaps far less frequently, than is commonly supposed" (Michael J. Zimmerman, "Moral Responsibility and Ignorance," Ethics 107 [1997]: 410-26, 411).
8. Holly Smith, "Culpable Ignorance," Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 543-71, 547;
9. see also Zimmerman, "Moral Responsibility and Ignorance."
10. For relevant discussion, see Jonathan Jacobs, Choosing Character: Responsibility for Virtue and Vice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001);
11. and Gregory Trianosky, "Natural Affection and Responsibility for Character: A Critique of Kantian Views of the Virtues," in Identity, Character, and Morality, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Cambridge, MA: Bradford, 1990), 93-109.
12. For a further illustration of the problems associated with this approach, consider a case that is introduced by Eugene Schlossberger in his book Moral Responsibility and Persons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). Schlossberger asks us to consider Joel, an American in England who causes a traffic accident because he does not realize that the British drive on the left. To explain why Joel is responsible for causing the accident, Schlossberger writes that "other things being equal, Joel is responsible for instantiating the trait of not having bothered to check the local traffic laws before driving. . . . For had he placed more importance on [the safety of other motorists], he would have thought that the risk to their safety, though, as far as he knew, rather slight, outweighed the extra three minutes of sleep he gained by not getting up earlier to look up the law, to make sure that no curious but important feature of English traffic laws escaped his attention" (109). This passage is both typical of what those who wish to associate all instances of culpable ignorance with prior benighting acts must do and so far-fetched that it nicely illustrates the reasons for not adopting their strategy.
13. For additional defense of the view that we rarely have a clear view of the ways in which our present actions will affect our future characters, see Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 139-44.
14. For an extended and powerful discussion that supports the claim, see Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue. I am much indebted to this discussion.
15. In proposing this account of control, I mean to take no position on the question of whether the beliefs, desires, and attitudes that account for the agent's failure to recognize that he is acting wrongly must themselves have been produced in an appropriate way. One common worry about what Susan Wolf has called the "real self view (see Susan Wolf, Freedom within Reason [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990]) is that the beliefs, desires, and attitudes that make someone the person he is may have arisen through such responsibility-undermining processes as manipulation, indoctrination, or abuse. If this worry is well founded, then the proposed account of control can be augmented by a requirement that the relevant features of the agent not have been produced in these ways.
16. In his essay "Two Faces of Responsibility," Gary Watson distinguishes between holding someone responsible in the sense of judging his act to express his basic values or commitments (responsibility as attributability) and holding him responsible in the sense of judging him blameworthy or praiseworthy (responsibility as accountability) (Gary Watson, Agency and Answerability [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 260-88). Invoking this distinction, one of the editors of Ethics has suggested that my account of control may be relevant only to responsibility as attributability but not to responsiblity as accountability. I think, in fact, that the judgments of responsibility that my notion of control supports are clearly not all judgments of what Watson calls attributability, for the features of someone's character that explain his failure to recognize his act's wrongness need not have anything to do with his basic values or commitments but may instead be fine-grained cognitive or inferential patterns that he neither endorses nor even recognizes. Because its basis is not spelled out, I am less sure how to respond to the claim that the specified form of control does not support judgments of responsibility as accountability. However, if the rationale for this claim is that blaming someone for an act whose wrongness he did not recognize, and thus could not avoid, is unfair - a view that figures prominently in Watson's own discussion - then it is worth noting that it would beg the question simply to assume that the subjects whose ability to avoid wrongdoing is in question must be simple centers of consciousness rather than the more complex selves that we in fact are. I discuss these issues further in my essay "
17. Kantian Fairness" (Philosophical Issues 15 [2005]: 179-92)
18. and my book In Praise of Blame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
19. For discussion of the idea that a bad act can be rooted in an agent's character without manifesting a character flaw, see my essay "Blameworthy Action and Character," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002): 381-92, and chaps. 2 and 3 of my In Praise of Blame.
20. As two of the editors of Ethics have noted, the fact that an agent's constitutive desires, beliefs, and attitudes have prevented him from drawing an inference that would have led him to recognize his act as wrong will at best establish that he is responsible for acting wrongly if the undrawn inference is one that a reasonable person would have drawn. This is a fair point, and what it shows is that my proposal is itself partly normative. However, to concede this is hardly to concede that the proposal collapses back into the "reasonable person" view. Put most simply, the difference is that whereas the "reasonable person" view says nothing positive about the responsible agent-it attributes his responsibility exclusively to the fact that he has not drawn the inference that a reasonable person would draw - my own proposal does say something positive about him when it traces his failure to draw the inference to the desires, beliefs, and attitudes that make him the person he is. Because it contains this positive element, my own account, but not its "reasonable person" rival, enables us to see how the agent's failure to draw the inference can justify holding him responsible.