Attributability, answerability, and accountability: Toward a wider theory of moral responsibility

Ethics

Volumn 121, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 602-632

  Shoemaker, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 79958056038     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/659003     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. Bernard Berosky, Freedom from Necessity: The Metaphysical Basis of Responsibility (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987);
2. Justin Oakley, Morality and the Emotions (London: Routledge, 1992);
3. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
4. Angela Smith, "Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life," Ethics 115 (2005): 236-71.
5. T. M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
6. Angela Smith, "On Being Responsible and Holding Responsible," Journal of Ethics 11 (2007): 465-84, 469.
7. A Smith, "Responsibility for Attitudes."
8. "Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment," Philosophical Studies 138 (2008): 367-92.
9. Smith draws heavily from Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 267-90, esp. 272, 277, and 289.
10. In Scanlon's Moral Dimensions, there is only one passing mention of answerability in his lengthy discussion of blame (193), but it turns out to be subtly and importantly different from his earlier account. See n. 11 below.
11. A Smith, "Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment," 383.
12. The example is essentially Smith's, in "Responsibility for Attitudes," 236.
13. Ibid., 238-40.
14. Ibid., 253.
15. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions, 194.
16. A Smith, "Responsibility for Attitudes," 248.
17. A Smith, "Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment," 385.
18. The exceptions presumably include actions dependent on "random thoughts and mental images, appetitive desires, and 'implanted' attitudes" (Smith, "Responsibility for Attitudes," 262). In Scanlon's "Reasons and Passions" (in Contours of Agency, ed. Sarah Buss and Lee Overton [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002]) and in his Moral Dimensions, 193- 98, he suggests that the set of psychic elements that "belong" to me is far wider than this, perhaps overlapping completely with the set of elements occurring in my mental life, and so could include "conscious states such as judgments and decisions, visual perceptions, itches and pains, and also unconscious desires and beliefs that move me to do what I do" (Scanlon, "Reasons and Passions," 170).
19. A Smith, "Responsibility for Attitudes," 253.
20. Ibid.; emphasis mine.
21. Ibid., 255.
22. One worry is that it is unclear from some of Smith's writing whether or not she thinks such cases involve actual conflicting judgments or simply tensions between mouthed "judgments" and real judgments (identified as those expressed in one's actual attitudes). If the latter, then it is difficult to see how irrationality necessarily involves a conflict of actual judgments. If the former, then it is not so clear that it really is the best description of phobias, for we more likely think that the phobic person fears spiders for no reason, i.e., it is an attitude for which this person in fact is not answerable.
23. Smith has offered a reply along these lines in private correspondence.
24. Alternatively, this conclusion could simply constitute a reductio of rationalist ethical theories.
25. A Smith, "Responsibility for Attitudes," 251.
26. Ibid.
27. Angela Smith, "Conflicting Attitudes, Moral Agency, and Conceptions of the Self," Philosophical Topics 32 (2004): 331-52, e.g., 341-42.
28. Of course, insofar as our answerability demand might then consist in the question, "Why do you say X when your attitudes reflect not-X?" this would make the charge of irrationality sound less like an accusation that one fell below certain rational standards and more like an accusation that one was lying. I set aside this worry to focus on the issues of responsibility allegedly involved in this picture, however.
29. Adrian M. S. Piper, "Higher-Order Discrimination," in Identity, Character, and Morality, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 286-309.
30. Indeed, Harry Frankfurt suggests that these sorts of carings are the source of our other reasons, not the other way round. See The Reasons of Love (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), esp. 35-68.
31. Alternatively, Scanlon insists that there are normative standards for parenting that include requirements of care and concern for one's children... simply in virtue of the fact that they are one's children, and depend on one for their care" (Moral Dimensions, 139). For most parents, though, I suspect the Frankfurtian picture is far more plausible. And even if Scanlon is right, the fact that parents have reasons to care about their children is typically going to be rendered utterly irrelevant by the fact that they do care so much, like some kind of superfluous suggestion to "want happiness." Note
32. Again, a reply suggested by Smith in private correspondence.
33. I am grateful to an anonymous referee at Ethics for suggesting this interpretation.
34. Perhaps one might say, as Scanlon does, that reasons can be demanded with respect to those attitudes which are ones "an ideally rational person would come to have whenever that person judged there to be sufficient reasons for them and that would, in an ideally rational person, 'extinguish' when that person judged them not to be supported by reasons of the appropriate kind" (What We Owe to Each Other, 20).
35. But even if our emotionally committed agents met these sorts of conditions, that would still be insufficient to render them answerable. To be that way they-as they are in their nonideal versions -must be able to respond to the demand for justification by citing reasons. To allow that they are answerable just in case a better epistemically situated version of themselves could respond to the demand is to idealize way too much; it would have to render young children or the insane answerable in a way we would reject.
36. Gary Watson, "Two Faces of Responsibility" (in Gary Watson, Agency and Answerability [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 260-88).
37. My notion of answerability ranges over Watson's versions of both attributability and accountability, and my notion of attributability is wider than his. On a different point, while I do speak here of responsibility for both actions and attitudes, there may be important differences between the types of responsibility I have for the two targets that are worth keeping in mind. For instance, I may not be answerable for some attitude I have that stems from an ungrounded emotional commitment, but I may well still be answerable for some action I perform in light of that attitude. Thanks to Michael McKenna for urging me to be clearer about this point.
38. Susan Wolf, Freedom within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38-45.
39. One response has been that the type of responsibility implicated in aretaic appraisal is actually deep insofar as it implicates one's practical identity, but the truth of this claim for my purposes depends on what that phrase means. In Watson's writing, it seems to refer to those psychological elements one has actively adopted as ends, with respect to which one has taken a stand (and so has taken responsibility for).
40. Watson, Agency and Answerability, 267-71.
41. If this is what one's practical identity consists in, however, what I mean by aretaic appraisal does not necessarily implicate it, for something may be part of one's real self -and explain one's action thereby in normatively charged situations-without one's having taken a stand with respect to it or even being aware of its presence. The Watsonian understanding of practical identity ties it tightly to practical (justificatory) reasoning.
42. Alternatively, if one's practical identity is taken to consist more broadly in those psychological elements that are merely explanatory with respect to one's motivations in nor-matively charged situations, then I have no problem adopting the label to apply to what is implicated in my version of aretaic appraisal.
43. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen ("Identification and Responsibility," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 [2003]: 349-76) marks an explicit distinction between authenticity and authority conceptions of identification, a distinction that might be said to run along the lines of the distinction I am suggesting here between mere attributability and answerability.
44. Lippert-Rasmussen, however, claims that only the authority conception of identification is relevant to moral responsibility (see 368-71). What I am pressing instead is the view that both conceptions are relevant.
45. And again, to claim that Huck is nevertheless answerable in principle-perhaps his ideal self could give an answer-is simply to ignore the intelligibility constraints on answerability demands. A demand for justification presupposes that the agent as he is is capable of offering a reason-based account of his actions or attitudes. This is because such demands are forms of communication, and as such, they are constrained by the actual capacities of their targets.
46. I cannot engage in a communication exchange with someone's ideal self, after all. Of course, one might make "answerability" demands to those not yet capable of answering them (e.g., children) as part of an educational or developmental process, such that one brings these agents to a state whereby they actually are answerable, but this is, to a great extent, playacting (thus the scare quotes around "answerability"). In such cases, we are treating these agents as if they were answerable, but this is a different kind of communication with a different set of intelligibility conditions than genuine an-swerability demands. (For example, what seems to matter most in such "as if" cases is that the demand simply be recognized as a demand, whereas the specific normative content of the demand is not necessarily at issue.) Note
47. These might seem to be the sorts of practical payoffs involved in blaming that Scanlon emphasizes in Moral Dimensions, esp. 139-52. Nevertheless, he would object to my characterization of them as nonanswerability appraisals given that he thinks all blame is built on top of attributability assessments which are themselves of attitudes sensitive to evaluative judgments in the ideally rational, so the corollary of judgment-sensitivity is just answerability. I have said something about the notion of the "ideal" here in preceding footnotes. I will say much more about his account of blame in the last half of this article.
48. I should also make clear here that I am not suggesting in the text that having this sort of practical payoff is sufficient for an appraisal to be a responsibility assessment, only that this sort of practical payoff is typically thought necessary to responsibility assessments, so the fact that it is included in aretaic appraisals merely provides one building block in the overall case for their counting as assessments of responsibility.
49. As we will see below, though, the types of justifying reasons one cites may also render appropriate kinds of responsibility appraisals other than aretaic.
50. P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 72-93.
51. As Scanlon rightly points out, Strawson does not make this connection explicit, but nevertheless "this identification is a natural application of his analysis" (Moral Dimensions, 224 n. 6).
52. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," 75;
53. Watson, Agency and Answera-bility, 277-79.
54. See, e.g., Smith, in "Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment," 377: " 'Shoddy'... implies a certain meanness or contemptibility, a despicable lack of concern for the interests of others; one cannot apply such an epithet to a person's conduct, it seems, without expressing some degree of condemnation for it." Note
55. Watson, Agency and Answerability, 257-58;
56. Lawrence Stern, "Freedom, Blame, and Moral Community," Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974): 72-84.
57. In particular, Scanlon takes his view to account better for our responses in cases of moral luck. See Moral Dimensions, 128.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 128-29.
61. It is actually somewhat unclear what the relation is between the judgment of blameworthiness and blame itself. On 130 of Moral Dimensions, Scanlon claims that, insofar as one's relations to others are constituted by one's reasons to treat them in certain ways, "a judgment of blameworthiness, taken seriously, marks a change in that relationship and hence is a form of blame" (emphasis mine).
62. But he then repeatedly suggests otherwise by maintaining that the judgment of blameworthiness is a judgment about what the target's actions reveal about his attitudes toward others-attitudes impairing his relationship with those others-whereas to blame him is to modify one's own attitudes in a way this judgment of impairment renders appropriate (see, e.g., 131). But even if my judgment of another's blameworthiness involves the judgment that a modification of my own attitudes would be appropriate, that doesn't imply (a) that I have indeed modified any attitudes toward him yet or (b) that I-all-things-considered-ought to modify my attitudes, given that there may be a variety of appropriate responses to his behavior.
63. Ibid., 131.
64. Ibid., 141.
65. Ibid., 140.
66. Ibid., 141.
67. Or, if I have previously modified my attitudes in this way, my blaming her now may simply consist in a reaffirmation of that previous modification.
68. See ibid., 131.
69. What Scanlon actually says is a bit less clear: "I do not deny that these attitudinal responses [e.g., resentment] can be appropriate, and that they are elements of blame. But an account of blame that focused only on these elements would be too thin" (ibid., 143). What I take from these remarks is that, while resentment may be one way in which the modification of an attitude could count as blame, that specific sort of modification is not necessary to all instances of blame.
70. So blame is not merely a negative correlate of praise. See ibid., 151, as well as Scanlon's comments about this point on PEA Soup in May 2009: http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2009/05/scanlon-on-moral-responsibility-blame-part-1.html.
71. The positive case is much trickier, and I am not entirely certain it even has any kind of analogous structure to the one I am about to detail for the negative case.
72. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions, 124.
73. Whether or not the Martha of Cheating has additional reasons to refrain from actually hitting George is another matter.
74. Scanlon gestures at a distinction that bears a passing similarity to this one in Moral Dimensions, 134, but he does not fill in the details, nor does he explore what this might mean for the place of reactive attitudes and sanctions in his account.
75. This is not to say that resentment will not occasionally be experienced orexpressed in merely relationship-potential blame, but here it will merely be an accoutrement of the otherwise fitting response, not constitutive of the fitting response.
76. The connection here to Stephen Darwall's work on second-personal reasons should start to seem obvious to those who know it.
77. The Second-Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
78. Darwall thinks resentment is conceptually tied to violations of moral obligations, which are conceptually tied to the second-personal reasons potentially addressable to one another, reasons like that I demand it of you. What I am adding to the mix is the thought that resentment and second-personal reasons may constitute the basic demands of relationships simpliciter, and these norms could thus possibly include more than merely moral obligations. But I won't say more about that idea here.
79. This is a distinction that quality-of-will theorists do not seem to make (that I know of).
80. To hold someone to account is thus distinct from requesting that they account for themselves. The latter is just an answerability demand on my terminology.
81. Harry Frankfurt occasionally draws on such an example.
82. Michael E. Bratman," in Buss and Overton, Contours of Agency, 86-90, 89.
83. A possible example: a wanton who acts on his strongest desires and makes no judgments about the worth of what he does or the type of person he is may nevertheless be able to recognize certain second-personal demands as authoritative and yet flout them because his desire for doing something else was stronger.
84. More compelling, perhaps, is the case of mild cognitive disability, which I have explored in "Responsibility and Disability," Metaphilosophy 40 (2009): 438-61.
85. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions, 188.
86. Ibid., 178.
87. Matthew Talbert, "Blame and Responsiveness to Moral Reasons: Are Psychopaths Blameworthy?" Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2008): 516-35.
88. Talbert's view (which definitely counts as Scanlonian) is that, as long as psychopaths express ill will in the second sense, and they have the general capacity for practical reason, then they are morally responsible and blameworthy. I will eventually argue that, while they are answerability-responsible thereby, they are not yet accountability-responsible.
89. I may be able to act as if I respect the grass's moral status, and that may be all that is required for me to meet various legal demands the aliens might make, but that is just not the same as actually respecting the grass's status. To do so would involve, roughly, my recognizing its status to be reason-giving for me (and not, say, my recognizing what will happen to me if I get caught tramping on it to be reason-giving).
90. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions, 139.
91. Whether these reasons really do justify is irrelevant. Again, answerability requires simply that the agent be able (in principle) to cite what she took to be justifying reasons for her action or attitude.
92. The ability to judge that certain facts do not count as reason-giving is what distinguishes him from a bear, say.
93. Talbert, "Blame and Responsiveness to Moral Reasons."
94. "Moral Address, Moral Responsibility, and the Boundaries of the Moral Community," Ethics 118 (2007): 70-108.
95. Psychopathy is in reality a matter of degree. To simplify matters here, then, I will be talking about a "full-fledged" psychopath, someone who meets all the criteria to their fullest extent. Real-life psychopaths will typically meet only some of these conditions and only to a certain extent, and this complicates the picture quite a bit. I hope to deal with these complications in future work.
96. It is doubtful as well that the psychopath could enter into genuine personal friendships either insofar as they seem to presuppose the moral relation in a way the aesthetic and citizenry relations may not.
97. "The Trouble with Psychopaths" (in Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar, and Samuel Freeman [New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming]),
98. Gary Watson suggests that the psychopath may be what he calls attributability-responsible without being accountability-responsible. Although my conceptions of attributability and accountability are somewhat different from his, I have nevertheless been deeply influenced by Watson's thinking on this issue.