Abstract
Philosophical accounts of moral responsibility are standardly framed by two platitudes. According to them, blame requires the presence of a moral defect in the agent and the absence of excuses. In this chapter, this kind of approach is challenged. It is argued that (a) people sometimes violate moral norms due to performance mistakes, (b) it often appears reasonable to hold them responsible for it, and (c) their mistakes cannot be traced to their moral qualities or to the presence of excuses. In the end, the implications for discussions of moral responsibility are discussed.
Associated Press report Posted: 01/25/2013 08:18:46 AM MSTCOLONIE, N.Y. (AP) – Authorities say a New York man who left his 1-year-old son in his car for eight hours in frigid weather only realized his mistake after a call from his wife. Police in the Albany suburb of Colonie say the man forgot to drop off his son at day care and left the child strapped in the backseat of the car when he parked outside his office Thursday morning.
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Notes
- 1.
The positive condition takes a variety of forms: Humeans require bad character (Brandt 1958; Nozick 1981), Kantians require a deficient will, (Wolff 1990; Wallace 1994), and followers of Frankfurt require motivations with origins in the “real self” (Scanlon 1998; Smith 2005). For an account of the condition that is meant to be neutral between the moral psychological pictures underlying these views, see McKenna (2012).
- 2.
If anything, the second platitude is even more of a platitude than the first. For examples, refer to the references given in parenthesis (Austin 1962; Wallace 1994; Baron 2007; Franklin 2011; McKenna 2012) The standard excuses are sometimes referred to as “Aristotelian conditions,” after Aristotle’s discussion in Nichomachean Ethics III.
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See Vargas (2013a) for an in-depth treatment of moral responsibility from this Strawsonian perspective. Not everyone agrees with this general approach. There are, for instance, retributivist accounts that define responsibility for wrongdoing in terms of deserved suffering (Strawson 2000; Levy 2011). As it will become clear below, we contend that there are several notions in the “responsibility neighborhood,” not all of which are essentially linked to punishment or reward.
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It might be objected that the attitudes that are fitting in these cases are similar, but not identical, with the reactive attitudes associated with responsibility and blame. For instance, one could argue that the fitting response in the case of child neglect is not genuine guilt but, instead, what Williams (1976) has called “agent-regret.” There are complicated issues concerning the individuation of these attitudes and their relation to moral blame, which are beyond the present discussion. But if, as Williams intends, agent-regret is understood as a form of evaluation that is distinctively retrospective, agent-regret is not the attitude that fits this kind of case. At the time the parent had enough information to see that his behavior was inappropriate; in the light of it, what he did was obviously wrong. The case is, thus, unlike the examples discussed by Williams (e.g. Gaugin, the lorry driver), where the agent’s decisions are regrettable or not precisely in the light of information that the agent does not have at the time, namely, information concerning their outcome. For discussion of the retrospective nature of agent-regret, refer to the references given in parenthesis (Williams 1976: esp. 126–128; Rosebury 1995, pp. 505–506).
- 7.
There are, of course, ways in which a moral defect can be implicated but not in the way required for responsibility and blame: if one inadvertently leaves one’s child in the car on the way to do some evil work at the office. The idea that responsibility requires exercising certain rational competences is meant to exclude, in part, this kind of cases by defining what the right (i.e., non-fortuitous) relation is between wrongdoing and a moral defect. It can most perspicuously be found in so-called Reason-accounts of Kantian inspiration (Wolff 1990; Nelkin 2011). But it is also present in Frankfurtians, for whom the motivations of a real self are those whose influence in behavior the agent rationally endorses, and in Humeans, for whom the character traits implicated in responsible conduct are those that provide the agent with reasons.
- 8.
For an insightful review of the account in Fischer and Ravizza, see McKenna (2001). Among others, McKenna discusses the asymmetry between receptivity and reactivity that we discuss below, concluding that Fischer and Ravizza’s requirement of weak reactivity is too weak. Here, we set aside these worries, as a strengthening of the requirement will only make our argument more straightforward.
- 9.
More precisely, Fischer and Ravizza require that the agent exercise a suitable degree of reasons-recognition, which obtains, on their view, whenever the action is brought about by a certain kind of mechanism in the agent. Thus, their account not only requires that the agent has the capacity to respond to reasons but also that such capacity be displayed to a certain degree (or “be operative” as they sometimes put it) in the workings of certain mechanisms. For an explicit statement of the view, refer to the references given in parenthesis (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, p. 53; Fischer 2006, p. 242).
- 10.
For reviews and discussion of the situationist evidence, refer to the references given in parenthesis (Ross and Nisbett 1991; Doris 2002; Miller 2003; Nahmias 2007; Merrit et al. 2010; Miller 2013; Alfano and Fairweather 2013). Elsewhere, one of us has systematically explored how this evidence raises generalized skepticism in relation to traditional notions of character and agency (Doris 2002, 2009, 2014). For discussion of how situationist evidence affects traditional accounts of responsibility, refer to the references given in parenthesis (Nelkin 2005; Vargas 2013b; Brink 2013).
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For data of noise level in NYC transportation system, refer to the references given in parenthesis (Neizel et al. 2009). Díaz and Pedrero (2006) measured sound exposure in different locations in Madrid, several of which presented averaged continuous sound levels over 85db: nightclub, soccer pitch, musical theater, primary school (exit door), and carwash.
- 14.
Sher (2009) discusses a hypothetical case, “hot dog,” that looks like the performance mistake exemplified by these hyperthermia cases. However, as he constructs his example (and other cases he discusses), the mistake is meant to illustrate a different kind of failure—one in which the mistake reflects psychological states constitutive of the agent’s individual character. Even if Sher’s interpretation of his hypothetical case is accepted, it is not clear that it applies generally to the real cases discussed here.
- 15.
For a discussion of possible pitfalls in diary studies and self-reports of slips, refer to the references given in parenthesis (Morris 1984; Reason 1993). For a review of more recent studies and discussion of Reason’s original results, refer to the references given in parenthesis (Sellen 1990; Jónsdóttir et al. 2007).
- 16.
In fact, even though in the US system, judges are generally moved by the parents suffering to give lenient sentences, there are a significant number of cases in which parents receive extremely harsh punishments: 15 years to life prison sentences or spending one day in jail on the child’s birthday for 7 years. For an empirical study of the treatment of hyperthermia cases in the US judicial system from 1998 to 2003, see Collins (2006).
- 17.
Unfortunately, in some cases, the slip does result in the person having a false belief. Having spent all day at work, some parents drive to the day care in the afternoon to pick up their child, not having realized their slip. But as an explanation of how the mistake first came about, attributing the false belief clearly gets the order of things wrong.
- 18.
Here we refer to the kind of luck that is normally described as resultant luck (Nagel 1979; Nelkin 2013). Some philosophical accounts of luck, formulated in terms of chanciness, might seem applicable here: Roughly, a chancy event is one that fails to occur in a large enough number of possible worlds obtainable by making a small change in the actual world (Pritchard 2005; Coffman 2007, p. 390). Even assuming the correctness of this kind of approach to common instances of luck (see Lackey 2008 for discussion), it is questionable whether chanciness thus understood excuses. An agent might introduce small changes in counterfactual scenarios and that may very well mean the difference between the agent being or not being blameworthy. The parent, for instance, could put his briefcase in the backseat, which will “remind” him that his child is still in the car before anything happens to her. Of course, things might be different in relation to other kinds or accounts of luck. Levy (2011), for instance, argues that it is a matter of (constitutive) luck whether and what kind of moral considerations cross your mind at the time of any action. But notice that he advances this claim to defend his general skepticism about human beings ever being responsible.
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We would like to thank Neil Levy and Michael McKenna for insightful comments, as well as audiences at the University of Lund, University of Texas, El Paso, and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain for helpful criticisms and suggestions.
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Amaya, S., Doris, J.M. (2015). No Excuses: Performance Mistakes in Morality. In: Clausen, J., Levy, N. (eds) Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4707-4_120
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