Moral address, moral responsibility, and the boundaries of the moral community

Ethics

Volumn 118, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 70-108

  Shoemaker, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 38949107917     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/521280     Document Type: Article

References (121)

1. See, e.g., Peter Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," in Free Will, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 72-93;
2. Lawrence Stern, "Freedom, Blame, and Moral Community," Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974): 72-84;
3. Gary Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme," in Agency and Answerability, ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford. University Press, 2004), 221-59;
4. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
5. Beyond the theorists already mentioned, one can see explicit support for this stance in R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
6. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 211-1.4 (the phrase "moral conversation" is theirs);
7. Jeanette Kennett, "Autism, Empathy, and Moral Agency," Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2002): 340-57;
8. Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 71-93;
9. Susan Wolf, Freedom within Reason (Oxford: Oxford. University Press, 1990);
10. and George Sher, In Praise of Blame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), e.g., 9.
11. I will, however, offer some reasons for why this is the right conception of moral responsibility in Sec. III, titled "Moral Fetishism."
12. Strawson's is by no means an uncontroversial theory, of course. Nevertheless, it is either accepted by, or at least not incompatible with, the views of the authors I will discuss here, so the fact that I am taking this particular theory for granted should cause no controversy with them.
13. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," 82.
14. Ibid., 77-80.
15. See also Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil," 223-25.
16. See, e.g., Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," 79.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 84.
20. See Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil," 230-31.
21. As already mentioned, others who agree with Wallace's emphasis on the capacity for grasping and applying certain sorts of reasons as the entry pass into the moral community include Arpaly, Darwall, Fischer and Ravizza, Kennett, Sher, Watson, and Wolf.
22. Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, 157.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 158-59.
25. I should point out that Wallace limits the Strawsonian connection between moral responsibility and interpersonal relationships somewhat, citing Gary Watson's discussion of the Robert Harris case (see Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil," 235-48).
26. Harris was a truly nasty man, someone who brutally murdered two teenagers and then calmly ate the fast food they'd just purchased. If being a fair target of the reactive attitudes were sufficient for rendering one eligible for interpersonal relationships, then Harris-whom we still blame (quite vociferously)-is someone eligible for interpersonal relationships, which seems quite unlikely: extreme evil typically disqualifies one from such relationships. What Wallace maintains, therefore, is not that responsibility renders one fit for any old interpersonal relationship; instead, it renders one fit for moral relationships, defined by "successful exchange of moral criticism andjustification" (Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, 164). Of course, while one may not ever actually have to engage in this sort of exchange with the target of the reactive attitudes, it is enough that the targets are at least candidates for this sort of exchange.
27. Harris fits the bill here, even if he would not actually deign to reply to us: stony silence may still count as moral address, after all, just as a quiet, threatening form (see Michael S. McKenna, "The Limits of Evil and the Role of Moral Address: A Defense of Strawsonian Compatibilism," Journal of Ethics 2 [1998]: 123-42, esp. 132). But, in any event, for Wallace, there is a tight connection between moral responsibility and moral relationships and both are dependent on the putative moral member's having the capacity for reflective self-control.
28. Wallace does so explici tly on 177-78 of Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments.
29. Strawson ("Freedom and Resentment") includes as exempt those he variously calls "psychologically abnormal" (79), "warped, or deranged" (79), and "moral idiots" (82), the last of which Watson understands to be a reference to "being a sociopath" (Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil," 224).
30. Jeannette Kennett, in Agency and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), allows that, while a true "sociopath" may be legally responsible, he is indeed not morally responsible (189, 209-14).
31. Darwall (The Second-Person Standpoint) considers psychopaths to be exempt as well, although I will discuss his particular view in more detail in an upcoming footnote. Other defenders of MRBT are slightly more circumspect, but they tend to agree.
32. Watson, while admitting that the "case of the sociopath is . . . complicated," suggests that even so reactive attitudes are "pointless" with respect to them ("Responsibility and the Limits of Evil," 231 n. 12; on 239, he also clearly distinguishes the case of the psychopath from the case of the murderer Robert Harris, whom he discusses in great detail as being a much more difficult, even paradoxical, case for the Strawsonian).
33. Susan Wolf suggests that, when it comes to eligibility for responsibility, sociopadis and normal humans are different (in Freedom within Reason, 152 n. 2),
34. and she takes it as a basic pretheoretic intuition that her famous character Jo Jo (who has all the earmarks of a psychopath) is not responsible (see Wolfs "Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility," in Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987]).
35. Fischer and Ravizza {Responsibility and Control, 78-80),
36. along with Sher (In Praise of Blame, 118 n. 3), agree that some psychopaths are exempt from moral responsibility, but they also think that some are not. What's important, though, is that they think that the psychopath's eligibility for responsibility corresponds directly to his ability to recognize and respond to certain sorts of moral reasons, and that is all that is necessary for my point in this section. Nevertheless, there are those who disagree with this general view, arguing instead that psychopaths are indeed morally responsible.
37. For an early example, see Vinit Haksar, "The Responsibility of Psychopaths," Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1965): 135-45 (although Haksar does admit that perhaps "when we know more about him, we may be able to show that his responsibility was substantially impaired" [145]). Matt Talbert, in some unpublished work, also seems to think that psychopaths (the morally blind) are morally responsible.
38. And while T. M. Scanlon does not talk explicitly in tenus of psychopathy, his stated view about warranted moral criticism suggests that be might, agree (see What We Owe to Each Other [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998], 287-90). Nevertheless, I will, simply adopt the view here that paradigm-case psychopaths are exempt, insofar as that is what the prominent defenders of MRBT do, in older to articulate what they take to be the precise conditions of the exemption (and exemptions generally).
39. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," 78.
40. Answers.com Web site, http://www.answers.com/topic/antisocial- personality-disorder.
41. American Psychiatric Association, Psychiatric News Web site, http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/39/1/25-a. While it may seem as if the bar for being diagnosed as a psychopath is set fairly low (only three of these conditions need be metl), it is extremely important to the diagnosis that one exhibit repeated and chronic patterns of these behaviors, which should be sufficient to distinguish genuine psychopaths from, one's deceitful and impulsive teenage neighbor. Nevertheless, psychopathy is estimated to be present in 4 percent of the U.S. population, so it is actually more prevalent than anorexia (3.43 percent) and colon cancer (.04 percent);
42. see Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 6-8. Of course, because the DSM-IV-TR conditions still seem as if they might let a number of garden-variety criminals through the net, there are those who disagree with the American Psychiatric Association's incorporating psychopathy under its more general "antisocial personality disorder" rubric and think that, in order to make a distinction between ordinary criminals and psychopaths, we should preserve psychopathy as a separate disorder.
43. See, e.g., the Wikipedia entry for "Psychopathy" (http://en.wikipedla.org/wiki/Psychopathy) for a discussion of this issue. I, however, am interested in what I have called the "paradigm case" psychopath, an individual whom we can assume exhibits all, or nearly all, of the seven symptoms and so will surely be distinct from the common criminal.
44. This claim is contrary to Susan Dwyer's assertion that "almost to a one, philosophers writing about psychopathy typically assume that . . . he lacks moral motivation" (Susan Dwyer, "Evil and Moral Competence: What Psychopaths Can Teach Us," Philosophers' Magazine 9 [2000]: 32-33, 32, http://www.umbc.edu/philosophy/dwyer/papers/whatpschopathscanteachus.html). With respect to the philosophers I have cited to this point, though, Dwyer's claim is just false. One possible exception are Fischer and Ravizza, but interpretation of their view is tricky, and so I'll have more to say about this possibility later on.
45. Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, 178.
46. See also Jonathan Glover, Responsibility (London: Routledge, 1970), 138, 177-78.
47. Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 89. However, a word of caution is in order here.
48. While Darwall explicitly takes himself to be discussing psychopaths and their "imperviousness to moral demands" (89), matters are made more complex by the fact that he takes a paradigm case of psychopathy to be that of Robert Harris, the California murderer discussed at length by Watson. But it's not at all clear that Harris was a psychopath (although Arpaly labels him one as well, claiming as support that Harris was "utterly unresponsive to moral reasons" [Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue, 157, 170]).
49. I actually think of Harris as a paradigm case amoralist, someone who is entirely capable of acting on moral reasons but just doesn't. At any rate, not much hangs here on this point, but it is at least worth mentioning that Darwall's categorization of Harris isn't uncontroversial (e.g., Watson himself explicitly asserts that Harris is unlike psychopaths, noting that, while the latter lack moral understanding, Harris, by contrast, merely "exhibits an inversion of moral concern" [Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil," 239]).
50. Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, 79.
51. Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil," 239.
52. Indeed, Fischer and Ravizza even allow that, as long as the psychopath could recognize moral reasons and as long as he were weakly reactive to nonmoral reasons, then he would, actually be morally responsible, even if he weren't weakly reactive to moral reasons. See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, 79-80.
53. Jeffery Murphy, "Moral Death: A Kantain Essay on Psychopathy," Ethics 82 (1972): 284-98, 285-86.
54. Antony Duff, "Psychopathy and Moral Understanding," American Philosophical Ouarterly 14 (1977): 189-200, 192.
55. Herbert Fingarette, On Responsibility (New York: Basic, 1967) 26.
56. I owe the example to John Deigh, in "Empathy and Universalizability," Ethics 105 (1995): 743-63, esp. 743.
57. Murphy, "Moral Death," 286.
58. See also Shaun Nichols, Sentimental Rules (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 72:
59. "A psychopath can be fully rational and judge that some action is morally required, without being motivated, to do it." Nichols goes on to cite a study he conducted that suggests that this may be a platitude of folk morality rather than the view that psychopaths make moral judgments only in the "inverted commas" sense, which is taken to be the case by conceptual rationalists. Note also Stout's remarks: "It is not that this group [psychopaths] fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior" (The Sociopath Next Door, 9).
60. One might wonder how this analysis conforms to determinations of legal responsibility for psychopaths. Attempts to get psychopaths excused from punishment for their crimes typically involve showing that they are insane, that psychopathy is a form of mental illness rendering them unable either to understand, the nature of their actions or to understand the difference between right and wrong. The difficulty, of course, is in establishing either disability, but in any event the thought is that psychopaths can't be excused from legal responsibility unless they have some sort of cognitive disorder. If their disorder were solely motivational, after all, this wouldn't serve to excuse them, for if they were at least able to conform their conduct to the law - regardless of their reasons for doing so - this would be sufficient to establish their legal responsibility for failing to do so. The worry, then, might be that if the conditions for moral responsibility are essentially the same as those for legal responsibility, I have, by focusing on the psychopadi's motivational deficiencies, given the wrong account of his being excused (especially since I have denied that he necessarily suffers from any cognitive deficiencies). Alternatively, if I am assuming that the conditions for moral responsibility are not the same as those for legal responsibility, this might be viewed as a significant, departure from traditional understanding, in which case I owe the reader an argument for such a nonstandard view. (I am grateful to an anonymous associate editor for pressing this point.) I take the latter view here, but I don't think it is much of a departure from the traditional view, nor do I think a great deal of argument is necessary to defend it. We hold one another morally responsible for a much larger set of things than we do legally responsible. For instance, beyond blaming, we praise people for the good things they do, whereas criminal responsibility is simply about the assessment of legal blame and punishment. We also hold people morally responsible for their character, blaming or praising them for their vices or virtues, whereas there is no such analogous category in legal responsibility. Finally, and most important, even if we focus solely on blame for actions (so the case is most closely analogous to the criminal case), moral blame includes an assessment of whether or not one did the right thing for the right reasons, whereas this last bit is (mostly) irrelevant for criminal responsibility. In other words, in holding people accountable for their actions, we express the basic demand for goodwill, but that is clearly a demand for more than that one simply conform one's actions to the moral law; it is also a demand that one do so based on the right sort of motive, a motive of goodwill (or at least not ill will). My point in this section, then, is that if one is incapable of acting on such a motive, one is exempted from moral responsibility, even if one is capable of conforming one's conduct to the moral law for other reasons. In the next section, I will say more about the nature of the right reasons.
61. Duff, "Psychopathology and Moral Understanding," 191.
62. Fingarette, On Responsibility, 24-26.
63. For an interesting discussion of the psychological literature, which is in almost uniform agreement on these points, see Stout, The Sodopath Next Door.
64. See also the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikiped.ia.org/wiki/Psychopathy): "A psychopath is defined as having no concerns for the feelings of others and a complete disregard for any sense of social obligation. They seem egocentric and lack insight and any sense of responsibility or consequence. Their emotions are thought to be superficial and shallow, if they exist at all. They are considered callous, manipulative, and incapable of forming lasting relationships, let alone of any kind of love."
65. See also Stout: "Sociopathy [what we are calling "psychopathy"] is an aberration in the ability to have and to appreciate real (noncalculated) emotional experience, and therefore to connect with other people within real (noncalculated) relationships" (The Sociopath Next Door, 126).
66. See my "Caring, Identification, and Agency," Ethics 114 (2003): 88-1.18.
67. It might be thought that psychopaths-at least those homicidal ones we occasionally read about - can meet this general definition insofar as they might experience delight in the suffering of their victims, so at least they would experience emotions in response to the fortunes or misfortunes of others, just the opposite of the emotions experienced by those who have benevolent concern for others. (I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this point.) If it is true delight, though, or some other complex emotion that this person is feeling at the misfortunes of his victims, he is not a psychopath in the common psychiatric sense under discussion, according to which psychopaths are simply defined in terms of their lack of emotional capacity or at least, their severe emotional shallowness. As Stout puts it, "The only emotions that sociopaths seem to feel genuinely are the so-called 'primitive' affective reactions that result from immediate physical pain and pleasure, or from short-term frustrations and successes" (The Sociopath Next Door, 127).
68. (In addition to the above citations, see Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity, 5th ed. [St. Louis, MO: Mosby, 1988], esp. 92, where Cleckley talks about psychopaths' "emotional emptiness.") Indeed, on this understanding, psychopaths do not even care about themselves: they fail to engage in prudential planning, they are persistently indifferent to the prospects of imprisonment, they take and quit jobs on a whim, etc.; in general, they simply act on whatever egoistic impulse is strongest without having any worries about any emotional, ramifications that might stand in their way.
69. See Stout, The Sociopath Next Door, 50.
70. I argue for this point in some detail in "Caring, Identification, and Agency," esp. 90-104. Exceptions include the actions of addictives, compulsives, and those with severe cognitive impairments.
71. In an episode of the series South Park, the clearly psychopathic Eric Cartman tries desperately to figure out how to make his "friend" Kyle like him so he'll take him to an amazing Mexican restaurant he's been dying to visit. He seeks advice from a disabled kid that everyone likes and asks him, "How can I act nice so Kyle will like me?" The reply is that the best way to act nice is simply to really be nice. Cartman's reply sums up the world of the psychopath perfectly: "OK, so how can I act so he'll think I really am nice?" For less "cartoony" support for this point, see the Wikepedia discussion of psychopathy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Psychopathy#_note-3: "Psychopaths understand that, society expects them to behave in a conscientious manner, and therefore they mimic this behaviour when it suits their needs."
72. Stout (The Sociopath Next Door) makes this point repeatedly as well.
73. As Stout puts it, "An obligation of any kind is something one feels toward beings, or toward a group of beings, who matter emotionally. And to a sociopath, we simply do not matter" (The Sociopath Next Door, 126).
74. Duff seems to suggest a criterion roughly like this one, although he emphasizes only the psychopath's lack of concern for moral values. See his "Psychopathology and Moral Persuasion," 198.
75. The similarity of my position in this section to the recent view about second-personal reasons espoused by Stephen Darwall will be obvious. In many ways, what I say here has indeed been influenced by Darwall's work, but I intend my remarks in this section to be, for the most part, freestanding and plausible in their own right via consideration of the various types of fetishists I introduce. In addition, I take a sharp detour from the work of Darwall in the final part of this section, where I emphasize the crucial importance of emotion-based caring to the picture, something that Darwall explicitly resists.
76. See Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 6-8.
77. See also his unpublished paper, "Audiority and Second-Personal Reasons for Acting," University of Michigan, Department of Philosophy, 2006.
78. Again, see Darwall's The Second-Person Standpoint, e.g., 8, and his "Authority and Second-Personal Reasons for Acting."
79. This is the fetishist most closely akin to the one Michael Smith introduces in The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 73-76. There has been considerable reaction to this case in the literature, but it is simply beyond the scope of this article for me to engage with it here.
80. So, while there may be those who care both about morality as such and about the moral demanders and the particular moral reasons stemming from them, I am concerned here only with the person who cares exclusively for morality as such, i.e., the fetishist.
81. I am grateful to Doug Portmore for emphasizing the need to conceive the morality fetishist in this way.
82. See Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint.
83. Matters are slightly more complicated in the third-person analogue case, where I react with indignation over your treatment of someone else, but, as will become clear later, my authority in this case arises insofar as I empathize with my fellow harmed moral agent, so what you are doing to her is, in an important sense, something you're doing to me as well. Indeed, it actually seems to me that the phenomenology of resentment is qualitatively identical to that of indignation, suggesting that the difference is determined solely by whether or not I was in fact the target of the original harm.
84. I am grateful to Doug Portmore for suggesting this way of putting it.
85. I am grateful to Stephen Darwall for impressing the importance of this point on me. Note also his explicit distinction between respect and care in The Second-Person Standpoint, 126-30.
86. The third-person analogues of the reactive attitudes work in the same way: as an observer of his wronging someone else, say, I react with indignation, which serves to express to him (a) a second-personal reason for ceasing the wrongdoing (or not doing it in the future) and. (b) an invitation to feel what he's done to the victim. I will have more to say about the relevance of this point in the final section.
87. See, e.g., Carl Elliott, "Diagnosing Blame: Responsibility and the Psychopath," Journal of Mediane and Philosophy 17 (1992): 200-214;
88. Gwen Adshead, "Commentary on 'Psychopathy, Other-Regarding Moral Beliefs and Responsibility,'" Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychobgy 3 (1996): 279-81;
89. Lloyd Fields, "Response to the Commentaries," Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 3 (1996): 291-92.
90. See also Deigh, "Empathy and Universalizability," for a discussion of the psychopath and "mature empathy."
91. Kennett, "Autism, Empathy, and Moral Agency," 354.
92. See also Nichols, Sentimental Rules.
93. Incidentally, I am granting Kennett this claim for the sake of argument, but it turns out that matters aren't nearly so tidy as this Another person with autism (who has actually been diagnosed as being low-functioning), Sue Rubin, self-reports as follows: "Another stereotype of people with autism is that we lack a theory of mind, the ability to imagine how another person is thinking, what his perspective is, what he is feeling-empathy. This is totally wrong. The ability to see something from another perspective is something I have been developing since I started typing [a form of facilitated communication she uses].... I actually enjoy looking at problems from various perspectives. As for understanding another persons [sic] emotions, I frequently overly react to the feelings of others and often get sucked up in their emotions to such a degree that I can't function" (Sue Rubin, "Castigating Assumptions about Mental Retardation and Low Functioning Autism," http://soeweb.syr. edu/thefci/7-1rub.htm). Nevertheless, it will be fruitful to continue under Kennett's assumptions in order to explore a distinctly possible type of moral agent, one that brings out important points for our more general discussion.
94. Kennett, "Autism, Empathy, and Moral Agency," 351.
95. Ibid., 357.
96. This is not yet, of course, the type of second-personal moral reason I have argued is involved in moral address and responsibility, but (a) Kennett simply does not make any distinction between the various types of moral reasons in the first place and (b) it is thoughts of this more general type of moral reason anyway by which she thinks the psychopath is incapable of being moved.
97. Kennett, "Autism, Empathy, and Moral Agency," 351; emphasis mine.
98. See Temple Grandin, "Social Problems: Understanding Emotions and Developing Talents," http://www.autism.org/temple/social.html. It would be interesting to see whether or not those with HFA like Grandin care more or less about people than about inanimate objects. The strongest, emotions reported by Grandin were those occurring after the University of Colorado's library flooded and nearly a million books "drowned"; Grandin responded by crying and crying, grieving for the drowned books.
99. I say "hinted, at" because, while there is clear evidence that those with HFA (and autism generally) experience emotions, both simple and complex, I have found no literature explicitly discussing autism and guilt or remorse. This may be because it's simply taken for granted that these emotions are indeed experienced by those with autism, or it may be that no one has yet figured out a. way to determine whether or not these are the precise emotions they experience. At any rate, I think I am quite safe in assuming that guilt and remorse are among the many emotional experiences undergone by those with autism (especially those with HFA). For some examples of the "hinting" I have run across, see, e.g., Nurit Yirmiya, Marian Sigman, Connie Kasari, and Peter Mundy, "Empathy and Cognition in High-Functioning Children with Autism," Child Development 63 (1992): 150-60;
100. Lisa Capps, Nurit Yirmiya, and Marian Sigman, "Understanding of Simple and Complex Emotions in Non-retarded Children with Autism," Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 33 (1992): 1169-82;
101. and Hidehiko Takahashi, Noriaki Yahata, Michihiko Koeda, Tetsuya Matsuda, Kunihiko Asai, and Yoshiro Okubo, "Brain Activation Associated with Evaluative Processes of Guilt and Embarrassment: An fMRI Study," Neurolmage 23 (2004): 967-74.
102. However, see a more nuanced articulation of Jeanette Kennett's view in "Reasons, Reverence, and Value," forthcoming in Moral Psychology, vol. 3, The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
103. Kennett, "Autism, Empathy, and Moral Agency," 346.
104. See Deigh, "Empathy and Universalizability," 761, for a somewhat, similar discussion of what the thinks of as the immature empathy of the sadist.
105. It is sufficient, I should be clear, for interpersonal engagement, where this doesn't necessarily involve behavioral responses to that engagement. For that, one will need the motivational capacities discussed earlier.
106. This is not sympathy, however, which is a concern for the other person for her sake. See, e.g., Stephen Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp. chap. 3, "Empathy, Sympathy, Care." While I believe that sympathy typically follows from full empathy, as described above, the two are certainly distinct: I may fully appreciate what things are like for you and care about what you care about (to some extent) but. still fail to care about you.
107. But isn't, it true that, the psychopathic sadists and serial killers we read about often get a charge out of imagining the torture and suffering of their victims, suggesting that their identification with, them is fairly robust? To the extent that they are true psychopaths, they simply do not experience genuine emotions, so they are incapable of being emotionally vulnerable - of sharing the cares of the victim - in the way that I have described it. (See Stout, The Sociopath Next Door, 127.) Of course, they do feel something when imagining the plight of their victims, to be sure, but it is more akin to a kind of sexual pleasure than the emotional reactions that people who care undergo when the things they care about are doing well or poorly. (I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this concern.)
108. I am focusing here on the second-personal reactive attitudes, but the analysis goes as well for the third-person and first-person analogues (typically expressed as indignation and guilt, respectively). In addition, I should make clear that I agree with Gary Watson that the emotional reactions expressing the basic demand are neither necessary to, nor constitutive of, the demanding itself. After all, there are certainly some extraordinary agents, like Gandhi and King, who are able to hold their oppressors responsible without expressing their demand in so doing via negative reactive attitudes like resentment. (I remain agnostic, however, regarding whether or not such saintlike agents still do experience the negative emotions but just do so without expressing them publicly.) See Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil," 255-58.
109. For the first articulation of this point, see Stern, "Freedom, Blame, and Moral Community," 78.
110. It is no coincidence that moral education starts with a question very much like this: "How would you feel if someone did that to you?"
111. See, e.g., citation and discussion of the DSM-IV-TR definition in Mary Beirne-Smith, James R. Patton, and Shannon H. Kim, Mental Retardation, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2006), 65-66.
112. Ibid., 271-72. The other three stages of development, according to this model, are the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years, standardly), the preoperational stage (2-7 years), and concrete operations (7-11 years).
113. Note, e.g., what Wallace suggests in Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments in 167 n. 14: "Similar remarks [as those about children] apply to people who are mentally retarded, who may be seen as having perpetually undeveloped capacities for reflective self-control."
114. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," 88.
115. Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, 167.
116. Daniel Wikler, "Paternalism and the Mildly Retarded," Philosophy & Public Affairs 8 (1979): 377-92, 381.
117. Wikler is here citing Travis Thompson from an address made to the Behavior Control Group, Hastings Center, New York, 1977.
118. See also Thompson's "The Behavioral Perspective," Hastings Center Report 8 (1978): 29-32.
119. See, e.g, Mark J. Hauser and John J. Ratey, "The Patient with Mental Retardation," http://www.psychiatry.com/mr/patientwmr.html.
120. See also the fact sheet on mental retardation from, the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services, http://www.dads.state.tx.us/services/ dads_help/mental/retardation/mr_fact_sheet.html.
121. This may seem overly complicated, but this is because, I suggest, our reactions to those with MMR are themselves quite complicated.