Brute luck and responsibility

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 57-80

  Vallentyne, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI   (United States)

Author keywords

autonomy; cause; chances; choice disposition; determinism; free will; option luck; risk

Indexed keywords

EID: 57749140580     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X07085151     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Michael J. Zimmerman, An Essay on Moral Responsibility (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988).
2. See, for example, Ronald Dworkin, ‘What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 10 (1981): 283-345 (reprinted with minor changes in Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000]); Richard Arneson, ‘Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare’, Philosophical Studies 56 (1989): 77-93; G.A. Cohen, ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’, Ethics 99 (1989): 906-44; Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, ‘Egalitarianism, Option Luck and Responsibility’, Ethics 111 (2001): 548-79; Michael Otsuka, ‘Luck, Insurance, and Equality’, Ethics 112 (2002): 40-54; and Peter Vallentyne, ‘Brute Luck, Option Luck, and Equality of Initial Opportunities’, Ethics 112 (2002): 529-57.
3. Susan Hurley, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
4. For example, T.M. Scanlon, ‘The Significance of Choice’, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Value VIII, edited by Sterling McMurrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 151-216; T.M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), Ch. 6.
5. See for example, Peter Strawson, ‘Freedom and Resentment’, Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962): 187-211 and R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). However, Wallace's view seems to have elements of the normative conception (discussed next). They both focus on responsibility for choices, but the general views can be naturally extended to responsibility for outcomes.
6. See, for example, Joel Feinberg, ‘Action and Responsibility’, in Philosophy in America, edited by Max Black (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), pp. 134-60 (reprinted in Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970], pp. 119-51); Jonathan Glover, Responsibility (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 44; Thomas Nagel, ‘Moral Luck’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 50 (1976): 137-51; Zimmerman, An Essay on Moral Responsibility; and Ishtiyaque Haji, Moral Appraisability: Puzzles, Proposals, and Perplexities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
7. See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, pp. 76-81 and Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, pp. 154-91.
8. This view is also held by Michael J. Zimmerman, ‘Taking Luck Seriously’, Journal of Philosophy 99 (2002): 553-76; Michael J. Zimmerman, ‘Luck and Responsibility’, Ethics 97 (1987): 374-86; and Judith Jarvis Thomson, ‘Morality and Bad Luck’, Metaphilosophy 20 (1989): 203-21 (reprinted in Daniel Statement [editor], Moral Luck [Albany: State University of New York, 1993]).
9. Narrow responsibility is at least roughly what is called ‘direct responsibility’ in Zimmerman, An Essay on Moral Responsibility.
10. Broad responsibility is at least roughly what is called ‘indirect responsibility’ in Zimmerman, An Essay on Moral Responsibility.
11. It is also the notion of responsibility that Fischer and Ravizza address. They call it an ‘externalist’ account. See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, pp. 252-3.
12. Even compatibilists Fischer and Ravizza agree that agents are not responsible for certain kinds of nomically inevitable outcomes. See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, p. 102.
13. Appealing to propensities that are probabilities is, of course, controversial. For a defense, see the contributions in D.M. Mellor, The Facts of Causation (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1995) and D.W. Miller, Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence (Chicago and Lasalle, IL: Open Court, 1994), Ch. 9. For a summary of the criticisms, and further references, see Alan Hájek, ‘Interpretations of Probability’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer 2003 edn., edited by Edward N. Zalta, URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2003/entries/probability-interpret/.
14. About a year after the ideas of this article were first presented, I discovered that a similar appeal to the marginal probabilistic impact is made by Mario J. Rizzo and Frank S. Arnold, ‘Causal Apportionment in the Law of Torts: An Economic Theory’, Columbia Law Review 80 (1980): 1399-429. There are, however, several important differences. First, they are concerned with liability to compensate for harms rather than for agent-responsibility. Moreover, they assume strict liability (according to which, the agent's mental state is irrelevant). Second, they invoke epistemic probabilities rather than objective probabilities. Third, they take absence of choice as the relevant probability baseline rather than reflecting the agent's prior choice disposition. For more on probabilistic causation generally, see Ellery Eells, Probabilistic Causality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Christopher Hitchcock, ‘Probabilistic Causation’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2006 edn., URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causationprobabilistic/.
15. Harry Frankfurt, ‘Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’, Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 829-39 and Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control. The most powerful argument for the view that one is not responsible for that which one cannot influence is given by Peter Van Inwagen, ‘Ability and Responsibility’, The Philosophical Review 87 (1978): 201-24 and Peter Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Ch. 6. A sophisticated (but mistaken, in my view) account of how, under very special circumstances, one could be responsible for something that one cannot influence is given by William Rowe, ‘Causing and Being Responsible for What is Inevitable’, American Philosophical Quarterly 26: 153-9.
16. Of course, many theories of free will or responsibility assume, as I do, that there are objective probabilities governing choice. See, for example, Kane, The Significance of Free Will, Ch. 10. On the subject of subjective probabilities concerning one's choices, Isaac Levi has argued that agents cannot assign any such probabilities - at least not to their current choices while deliberating about them. See Isaac Levi, ‘Rationality, Prediction, and Autonomous Choice’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 19 (1989): 339-62 (reprinted in Isaac Levi, The Covenant of Reason [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], pp. 19-39). For an opposing (and convincing, to my mind) view, see Wlodek Rabinowicz, ‘Does Practical Deliberation Crowd Out Self-Prediction?’ Erkenntnis 57 (2002): 91-122. For formal models of decisionmaking involving probabilities of choice, see Charles F. Manski, ‘The Structure of Random Utility Models’, Theory and Decision 8 (1977): 229-54 and R.D. Luce and Patrick Suppes, ‘Preference, Utility, and Subjective Probability’, in Handbook of Mathematical Psychology Vol. 3, edited by R.D. Luce, B. Bush and E. Galanter (New York: Wiley, 1965), pp. 249-410.
17. The appeal to the agent's disposition to choose is similar to that invoked in John Roemer, ‘A Pragmatic Theory of Responsibility for the Egalitarian Planner’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993): 146-66 and in John Roemer, Equality of Opportunity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). There is, however, an important difference. Roemer appeals to the distribution of choices actually made by agents of the same ‘type’ (that is, same brute luck features) as the agent in question, whereas I appeal to the objective propensity of the agent in question to choose. Roemer, that is, appeals to the relative frequency of choice for a population of individuals of the same brute luck type, whereas I appeal to the single case propensity to choose for the individual at issue.
18. This objection is made by (among others) Alfred R. Mele, ‘Book Review of The Significance of Free Will’, Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998): 581-4; Alfred R. Mele, ‘Kane, Luck, and the Significance of Free Will’, Philosophical Explorations 2 (1999): 96-101; Alfred R. Mele, Free Will and Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Ishtiyaque Haji, ‘Libertarianism and the Luck Objection’, Journal of Ethics 4 (2000): 329-37. See also Carl Ginet, On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Ch. 6 and Randolph Clarke, ‘Free Choice, Effort, and Wanting More’, Philosophical Explorations 2 (1999): 20-41.
19. For the most elaborate (and effective) reply, see Robert Kane, ‘Responsibility, Luck, and Chance: Reflections on Free Will and Indeterminism’, Journal of Philosophy 96 (1999): 217-40. See also, Kane, The Significance of Free Will, Ch. 10; Storrs McCall, A Model of the Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), Ch. 9; Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will, Ch. 4; and Randolph Clarke, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Chs 4-5.
20. See, for example, Kane, The Significance of Free Will, Ch. 10 and Timothy O'Connor, ‘Freedom with a Human Face’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (2005): 2007-27.
21. The account of liability given by Rizzo and Arnold, ‘Causal Apportionment in the Law of Torts’ agrees that the temporal order of choice matters in the way that I suggest. The compatibilist account defended by Fischer and Ravizza also makes responsibility depend on temporal order, but (implausibly in my view) it makes it depend on the order in which the bullets (for example) strike the victim, as opposed to the order in which choices were made to fire the bullets. See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, Ch. 4.
22. The chance of being shot by only me is the probability of my firing (.01) times the probability of your not firing (.99), or. 0099 that is, 0.99 percent). The calculation is the same for the chance of being shot only by you. The probability of being shot by both is the probability of my firing (.01) times the probability your firing (.01), or. 0001 (that is, 0.01 percent).
23. Thus, where the choices are simultaneous and the outcomes are simultaneous, the model agrees with the view of Fischer and Ravizza that both agents can bear near-full responsibility for the outcome. See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, Ch. 4. It also agrees with the assessment of Rizzo and Arnold, ‘Causal Apportionment in the Law of Torts’.