Attributability, answerability, and accountability: In defense of a unified account

Ethics

Volumn 122, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 575-589

  Smith, Angela M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84861860266     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/664752     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. David Shoemaker, "Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility," Ethics 121 (2011): 603-32.
2. The notion of "aretaic appraisal" was first introduced by Gary Watson in his article "Two Faces of Responsibility," Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 227-48
3. reprinted in Gary Watson, Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 260-88.
4. Watson describes aretaic appraisal as an evaluation of an agent's "excellences and faults-or virtues and vices-asmanifested in thought and action" (Agency and Answerability, 10).
5. Neil Levy was one of the first to raise this objection in "The Good, The Bad, and the Blameworthy," Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (2005): 2-16.
6. He has since raised it in several other contexts, including "Restoring Control: Comments on George Sher," Philosophia 36 (2008): 213-21,
7. "The Responsibility of the Psychopath Revisited," Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 14 (2007): 129-38,
8. "Doxastic Responsibility," Synthese 155 (2007): 127-55.
9. Similar claims have been made in Neil Levy and Michael McKenna, "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility," Philosophy Compass 4 (2009): 96-133;
10. Michael Zimmerman, "Responsibility and Awareness," Philosophical Books 50 (2009): 248-61, esp. 259-60.
11. Though it is certainly true that the account of moral responsibility I defend draws much of its inspiration from Scanlon's discussion of moral responsibility in What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), it should be pointed out that the view Scanlon defends in his more recent book, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) appears to have changed in a number of significant respects. In particular, it is not entirely clear to me that Scanlon still holds that responsibility presupposes judgment sensitivity (he now emphasizes "relational significance" rather than judgment sensitivity), and he has certainly backed away from an understanding of "moral appraisal" that ties it to any kind of even implicit communicative demand for justification (see especially Moral Dimensions, 234-35 n. 54). Since I do not embrace these changes, it might be misleading to describe my view as "Scanlonian" at this point. But the label seems harmless so long as this point is kept in mind.
12. I defend this view in "Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life," Ethics 115 (2005): 236-71,
13. further clarify it in "Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment," Philosophical Studies 138 (2008): 367-92,
14. "Conflicting Attitudes, Moral Agency, and Conceptions of the Self," Philosophical Topics 32 (2004): 331-52.
15. I say open "in principle" to mark the fact that there may not in fact be anyone in a position to legitimately make such a demand of the agent in the circumstances. What matters, though, is that the thing in question is of a sort that such demands would make sense, or be intelligible. For such a demand to make sense, the agent herself need not have consciously reflected on or remember the reasons she took to justify the thing in question; it need only be the case that there were such reasons, and that it is reasonable to expect the agent to defend them. I am grateful to an editor of Ethics for urging me to clarify my position on this point.
16. I give this example in "Responsibility for Attitudes," 253.
17. Unfortunately, Shoemaker assumes that I am describing a phobia here, when I meant to be describing simply an ordinary case of irrationality. I do not take agents to be morally responsible for genuinely phobic attitudes. On this point,
18. see especially my "Conflicting Attitudes," 352 n. 37.
19. Or we might say: Even if there is a distinct trait that supervenes on these attitudes, it is not that trait for which we hold agents responsible when we blame them for being racist, selfish, or irrational. Thanks to an editor of Ethics for this suggestion.
20. There may, however, be a disanalogy between cases of irrationality and cases of racism/sexism, in that in the latter cases we can point to particular attitudes with objectionable content, while in the former case neither of the conflicting attitudes need itself be objectionable (what is objectionable is the simultaneous possession of both attitudes). So there is still something puzzling about what we are holding the agent responsible for when we charge her with irrationality. In response, it could be argued that in cases of genuine irrationality, one of the conflicting attitudes must be mistaken, and thus we are holding her responsible for holding an unjustified attitude (though we may not always know which of her attitudes is the mistaken one). I am grateful to David Shoemaker for raising this objection.
21. Shoemaker suggests that in order for an answerability demand to be intelligible, the agent herself must be consciously aware of and endorse the evaluative judgments implicit in her attitudes. I think it is often the case, however, that we simply take or see certain things as counting in favor of certain attitudes without being fully aware of these reasons or the role they play in justifying our attitudes. And I think these normative "takings" or "seemings" can sometimes operate alongside more consciously formulated judgments to the effect that such considerations do not serve to justify our attitudes. So, for example, a person may consciously hold egalitarian views and yet still find herself taking the fact of a person's race as a reason not to trust her or not to hire her. In these cases, I think an answerability demand directed toward her racist reactions still makes perfect sense-a person's explicitly avowed beliefs do not settle the question of what she regards as a justifying consideration. I discuss these sorts of cases in more detail in "Conflicting Attitudes, Moral Agency, and Conceptions of the Self." I am grateful to an editor of Ethics for urging me to say more about this important issue.
22. Both Shoemaker and an editor of Ethics have suggested to me that some recent social psychological literature appears to support Shoemaker's position, particularly the work of Jonathan Haidt, who has argued that the justifications people give for their (moral) attitudes are often post hoc rationalizations rather than accurate representations of independent evaluative judgments.
23. See especially Jonathan Haidt, "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment," Psychological Review 108 [2001]: 814-34.
24. As I understand Haidt's position, however, he does not in fact deny that our spontaneous reactions are "cognitive" or that they may embody subconscious evaluative judgments or appraisals; what he denies is that most of our moral judgments are based on conscious mental activity that involves "intentional, effortful, and controllable" processes of deliberate reasoning ("Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail," 818). He describes his central social intuitionist thesis as follows: "That moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions and is followed (when needed) by slow ex post facto moral reasoning" (817). My thesis is fully compatible with these findings-indeed, the possibility broached in the previous footnote of subconscious racist reactions co-existing alongside consciously endorsed egalitarian views seems to illustrate the two different forms of moral cognition Haidt's research has uncovered. The debate between Shoemaker and myself, then, might be understood as a debate over whether our more spontaneous "moral intuitions" can really be said to embody evaluative judgments. I don't think we (yet?) have convincing experimental evidence that can settle this question one way or another.
25. See Smith, "Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment," 375-80.
26. It might be thought that my view is open to a similar objection. The attitudes of the OCD agent, after all, appear to reflect her own (albeit mistaken) evaluative judgments. Does it not follow that such an agent is "answerable" for such attitudes on my view? This is a serious concern that requires a much fuller discussion than I can give it here. But my general approach would be to show that the requisite "rational relation" to an agent's judgments does not, in fact, hold in the case of genuinely phobic attitudes and similar psychological disorders. I am grateful to an editor of Ethics for raising this concern.
27. Consider the following exchange: Speaker A: "Joe is a coward (or a jerk or a disloyal friend) for not visiting Bill in the hospital after his gruesome accident."
28. Speaker B: "But don't you realize he suffers from severe OCD?"
29. Speaker A: "Oh, really? Geez, I didn't know. I guess I was wrong about him." These morally thick aretaic appraisals are viewed as inappropriate once it is suggested that Joe is not answerable for the underlying attitudes motivating his behavior.
30. It is not entirely clear whether Shoemaker thinks unexpressed (i.e., nonsanctioning) reactive attitudes could be licensed by answerability. He defines "accountability" (confusingly, in my view) both in terms of "liability to sanctions" and in terms of what kinds of relationship norms an agent has violated (norms specifying the potential of a relationship vs. norms specifying basic normative demands defining the relationship itself). At certain points, Shoemaker implies that resentment presupposes accountability (in the latter sense) and therefore even private resentment requires accountability.
31. Of course, there may well be additional or distinct conditions that must be met in order to be liable to legal punishment. But that would mark a distinct conception not of moral responsibility but of legal responsibility.
32. See Scanlon, Moral Dimensions, 166-79.
33. I make a similar point in my article "On Being Responsible and Holding Responsible," Journal of Ethics 11 (2007): 465-84.