Abstract
Given the pervasiveness of habit in human life, the distinctive problems posed by habitual acts for accounts of moral responsibility deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. But whereas it is hard to find a systematic treatment habitual acts within current accounts of moral responsibility, proponents of such accounts have turned their attention to a topic which, I suggest, is a closely related one: unwitting omissions. Habitual acts and unwitting omissions raise similar issues for a theory of responsibility because they likewise invite us to rethink the assumption that moral responsibility requires awareness of the relevant features of one’s conduct. And given the increasing interest in the problem of responsibility for unwitting omissions, it is reasonable to expect that the theoretical moves made in response to this problem might be used to make sense of judgments of responsibility regarding habitual acts. I substantiate these points by inquiring into whether some well-known accounts of unwitting omissions can be used to explain how we can be responsible for things we do out of habit.
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Notes
I restrict my attention to habitual acts that involve the operation of automaticity. Elsewhere I argue against the view that automaticity is an essential feature of habitual acts (author a; author b). But since the problems at issue in this paper arise from the operation of automaticity, I shall use ‘habitual acts’ as shorthand for ‘acts that ensue from the automaticity of habit’.
In the literature one finds several distinctions between different conceptions of moral responsibility. The conception usually in play in the approaches I shall engage with is that of accountability, which is typically understood as the appropriateness of certain kinds of reactive attitude. The mode of moral responsibility with which I shall mainly be concerned is blameworthiness, which is associated with culpability-imputing forms of blame. See Shoemaker (2015) for a discussion of the distinctions at issue.
For example, in their influential account of moral responsibility, Fischer and Ravizza (1998) discuss ‘nonreflective behavior’ only in passing (1998, pp. 85–89), and habitual acts are only one case of such behavior. The same holds for Sher’s (2009) extensive treatment of ‘responsibility without awareness’, a theme which is clearly hospitable to the topic of habit. This oversight is partly explained by the fact that the topic of habit itself has been largely neglected in current literature—though I shall mention some exceptions below. That said, there are at least two strands of the literature that bear a connection to the present topic. The first is the literature that addresses responsibility for acts and attitudes involving the operation of automaticity generally (see for instance the essays on responsibility for implicit bias in Brownstein and Saul 2016, vol. 2, part 1). The second is the literature which addresses the question of responsibility for character traits (see for instance Jacobs 2001). Note, however, first, that habits (as we ordinarily use this word) should be distinguished from character traits, and second, that responsibility for having acquired a power or attitude is not quite the same as responsibility for its manifestation.
One might wonder whether an agent can be praiseworthy for a slip which is a manifestation of a bad habit, but which was a good thing to do on that occasion. On the common assumption that an act is praiseworthy only if done for the right reasons, this is not possible. So I leave this aside.
Philosophers with revisionist tendencies might dispute this. It seems clear, however, that in everyday life we do hold agents responsible in such cases. Murray et al. (2019) present evidence supporting this claim.
This point is more often assumed than stated, but it is explicit, for instance, in Rosen (2004, p. 300), Arpaly (2002, p. 161), King and Carruthers (forthcoming), Rudy-Hiller (2017, fn. 34). To appreciate its significance, it helps to consider how automaticity affects praiseworthiness. Consider another common example in the literature. Ann sees a child struggling in the water. She immediately jumps to the rescue, without pausing to think about the risks or the costs involved. Now contrast this with a second case. Ann sees a child struggling in the water. After briefly estimating the costs and weighing the risks, she decides to jump to the rescue. There seems to be an intuition here that the immediate response in the first case somehow increases the praiseworthiness of Ann’s conduct (Rees and Weber 2014). If this is correct, the operation of automaticity tends to mitigate blameworthiness, whereas it tends to increase praiseworthiness. However, this asymmetry claim involves additional complications, and it would be a digression to discuss the complex issues involved. In what follows I focus on comparative judgments about blameworthiness.
Philosophers typically ask whether or not an agent is responsible for something. This gives the impression that the concepts at issue are binary. But blameworthiness and praiseworthiness come in degrees: ‘is praiseworthy’ and ‘is blameworthy’ are gradable predicates. See Nelkin (2016) for discussion. Nelkin does not include automaticity in her discussion of the factors that modulate the degree of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, but she acknowledges that factors beyond those she discusses might be operative.
Suppose one fails to do something because one does not know the relevant norms or facts giving rise to the corresponding normative expectation. One has never heard that one ought to bow before the queen, say. If in such a case it is appropriate to say that the agent ‘omits’ to do the thing in question, then there is a third category, properly called unintentional omission.
In discussions of responsibility a distinction is often made between responsibility for acts and for outcomes. I adopt the standard assumption in action theory that an action can be re-described in terms of its consequences or outcomes: these are all things an agent does. So I shall speak only of responsibility for what an agent has (not) done: an act or omission, which I take to correspond to action-specifications.
I do not mean to imply that alternatives to Control-Based accounts can easily deal with this problem. See Vargas (2020) for discussion on this issue.
The idea that habit involves diminishing awareness and attention is common ground in psychology, at least since William James (1981, p. 114). As Ouellette and Wood (1998, p. 55) observe, there is general agreement that diminishing attention is a mark of the automaticity of habit. Definitions of habit that explicitly cite (diminishing) awareness include van t’Riet et al. (2011, p. 586), Nilsen et al. (2012, p. 1). In philosophical discussions of habit the term ‘automaticity’ is not used that often, but philosophers have long noticed that habitual acts typically involve the aforementioned features. Some examples include Ryle (1949, p. 30), Brett (1981, p. 357), Pollard (2008, pp. 55–56).
Sher presents a range of cases explicitly designed to rule out the suggestion that responsibility can be anchored in the agent’s history, a suggestion which—he thinks—might be forthcoming if some kind of habit were involved. See especially his discussion in Sher (2009), pp. 35–39).
Amaya’s claim might be doubted. One may intend not to do so something, say to leave the front door unlocked or not to greet someone upon meeting her. If one slips in doing so, this does not obviously involve an omission. However, what matters in the present context is that this is still a case of unwitting conduct. As I explain in the following paragraph, the core problem concerns responsibility for conduct that does not satisfy the Epistemic Condition.
Schlosser (2013) likewise suggests that habitual acts and unwitting omissions raise similar problems for an account of moral responsibility, but does not explicitly relate these problems to the Epistemic Condition.
Authors who address the problem of responsibility for habitual acts usually appeal, in one way or another, to the idea of omitting or failing to do something. For Pollard (2008, Chap. 5), habitual behavior ensues from the operation of automaticity: the agent is on ‘auto-pilot’. Still, the agent possesses ‘Rational Intervention Control’: she can always step in to assume deliberative conscious control, and thus block or adjust the course of habitual behavior. So agents are required to maintain some level of alertness or vigilance when on auto-pilot. If the agent fails to assume deliberative control when this is required, she is blameworthy for this failure. Thus for Pollard responsibility for habitual acts is closely related to something the agent did not do but was normatively expected to do. Lumer (2017) adopts a similar line of thought: agents are blameworthy for a habitual act to the extent that they are able to rein in the operation of automaticity but omit to do so—i.e. fail to do so when this is required (Lumer 2017, esp. 15–16, 24). Notice that the omission here occurs in the mental realm. As I shall explain in Sect. 6, this leads to a problem for this sort of account, the same sort of problem that arises with respect to Capacity Accounts for unwitting omissions.
As Pollard (2006, 2011) argues, habits do not exhibit the characteristic first-person authority of the mental realm. We are not very good at registering our own habits. Consider for instance the habit of putting one’s right sock on before the left, or of interrupting one’s interlocutor too often. One’s partner might know one’s habits better than oneself, especially the irritating ones, and quite often it is those close to us who bring our habits to our attention. Pollard’s point extends to the acquisition of a habit: if one does not know that one is in the grip of some habit, then presumably this habit has been acquired inadvertently (which is not to deny that the series of acts by which the habit has been formed are intentional). This explains why people find themselves saddled with habits they repudiate and would rather not have. In such cases, it is rather obvious that (i-a) is not met.
This is not to deny that one might be held to account for acquiring some habit, in which case tracing considerations are presumably in play, provided the reasonable expectation requirement (i) is met. Still, blameworthiness for habit acquisition should be distinguished from blameworthiness for its manifestation.
Fischer and Ravizza (1998) attempt to accommodate habitual acts without appeal to tracing, though they think that appeal to tracing can accommodate them as well. These authors understand the Control Condition in terms of reasons-responsiveness, and suggest that habitual acts exhibit this feature (1998, pp. 85–87). But as we have seen in Sect. 3, this sort of account cannot accommodate unwitting omissions, and therefore habitual slips. And since the tracing approach fails as well, this account fails to satisfy the first explanatory requirement outlined in Sect. 2.
Sher’s (2009) approach, however, cannot be properly classified as a Control-Based account.
Clarke’s account also requires that these capacities are sufficiently developed, as well as that, at the relevant time, they are (i) in functioning order, and (ii) not masked by extraordinary circumstances or some debilitating psychological condition. These factors modulate the extent to which we can reasonably expect an agent to think of doing the thing in question. Clarke supposes that in Milk-Forget all these conditions are met, and I make a similar assumption in the other cases I discuss.
We can take this point a bit further, though this is not necessary for my purposes here. One might argue that it is not just that it is not the case that Ann should be aware of the relevant considerations. It is rather that, in some sense, she should not be aware of them. This is because, in certain cases at least, the absence of awareness seems to add to praiseworthiness. Recall the example of rescuing a child above. The operation of automaticity, the fact that the agent did not pause to consider the costs and risks, makes the agent’s conduct all the more praiseworthy. In the Recycling-Good there may not be any significant cost or risk involved. Still, we may feel that there is something self-indulgent in an agent who, each time she throws something in the recycle bin, thinks to herself something like ‘I am helping the environment’. Praising oneself for such a mundane act seems to detract from one’s praiseworthiness for it, and casts a shadow on the moral qualities of the agent.
One issue that is raised by Sher is related to the asymmetries between the conditions of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. In Sher’s account, these asymmetries result in a formulation of the third disjunct which is quite different from that of the second (see Sher 2009, p. 143). It is an open question how Clarke’s Ability View would treat this issue. Moreover, Sher argues that since an act is praiseworthy only if it is done for the right reasons, the third disjunct should posit that, though not aware of these reasons, agents must have made ‘enough cognitive contact’ with the right-making features of their act. [Sher appeals to Arpaly’s (2002, Chap. 2) discussion of a range of cases where the agent acts for the right reasons without explicitly appealing to them]. Evidently, what is meant by ‘cognitive contact’, and when this is sufficient for praiseworthiness, are very difficult questions.
This is stated more explicitly in Clarke (2017b, p. 248). As Mele (2010) explains, the same also holds for Fischer and Ravizza’s Control-Based account. This implies that the Epistemic Condition is part of the Control Condition. Levy (2011, Chap. 5) also argues that any relevant notion of control (what he calls ‘freedom-level control’) has to incorporate epistemic requirements. This is acknowledged by Clarke (2017a, pp. 65–66). See also Sher (2009, p. 145).
Levy (2017), for instance, makes a criticism along these lines.
Note that this problem affects all accounts of responsibility for habitual acts which rely on the idea of intervening in the operation of automaticity, such as Pollard (2008, Chap. 4) and Lumer (2017). Realizing that one should intervene in the automaticity of habit is not under one’s (direct) control. How, then, one can be blameworthy for failing to do do?
See Murray and Vargas (2020) for considerations that support this argumentative line.
Clarke (2017a, pp. 72–73) does not present this claim as necessary to address the problem above. And one might think that one of the distinctive twists of his Ability Account, that the Control Condition is met either when one exercises direct control over one’s conduct or when one is merely able to, is all we need to address the problem above: having the capacity to become aware of something suffices for control. But this cannot be right, since this disjunctive twist does not affect what the relevant capacities are capacities for.
Clarke plausibly posits that in cases where psychological capacities are masked by some unexpected contingency, the reasonable expectation requirement might not be met. So if, for example, Ann had just witnessed a horrible accident, she might well not be blameworthy for her omission. Stressful events tax one’s psychological resources; hence it might not be reasonable to expect Ann to recall her promise in this amended Milk-Forget scenario. But now contrast this case with a corresponding Milk-Refrain case. Ann recalls her promise despite witnessing a horrible accident, but does not bother to stop. In this latter case Ann might well be blameworthy, depending on how we fill in the details. It seems, then, that whether or not an agent is blameworthy for her conduct may largely depend on what she was aware of at the relevant moment.
Recall that a corresponding point could perhaps be made with respect to praiseworthy conduct. In the corresponding variation of Recycling-Good, Ann’s awareness of the relevant considerations seems to render her act less praiseworthy than in the original case. This also presents a problem for an account that is committed to the claim that one is (non-derivatively) responsible only for her acts and omissions.
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Douskos, C. Habit, Omission and Responsibility. Topoi 40, 695–705 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09708-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09708-z