Abstract
In a recent article, George Sher argues that a realistic conception of human agency, which recognizes the limited extent to which we are conscious of what we do, makes the task of specifying a conception of the kind of control that underwrites ascriptions of moral responsibility much more difficult than is commonly appreciated. Sher suggests that an adequate account of control will not require that agents be conscious of their actions; we are responsible for what we do, in the absence of consciousness, so long as our obliviousness is explained by some subset of the mental states constitutive of the agent. In this response, I argue that Sher is wrong on every count. First, the account of moral responsibility in the absence of consciousness he advocates does not preserve control at all; rather, it ought to be seen as a variety of attributionism (a kind of account of moral responsibility which holds that control is unnecessary for responsibility, so long as the action is reflective of the agent’s real self). Second, I argue that a realistic conception of agency, that recognizes the limited role that consciousness plays in human life, narrows the scope of moral responsibility. We exercise control over our actions only when consciousness has played a direct or indirect role in their production. Moreover, we cannot escape this conclusion by swapping a volitionist account of moral responsibility for an attributionist account: our actions are deeply reflective of our real selves only when consciousness has played a causal role in their production.
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Notes
Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sher, G. (2006). Out of control. Ethics, 116, 285–301.
The terms “attributionism” and “volitionism” are mine, but the distinction itself is made by many moral philosophers. For a clear definition and discussion of the distinction, see Angela M. Smith (2005), “Responsibility for attitudes: Activity and passivity in mental life,” Ethics, 115, 236–271. Of course, there is a sense of attributionism in which all sides accept that the debate is about attribution: the attribution of acts to agents and the attribution of responsibility to agents. Attributionists differ from volitionists inasmuch as they disagree about the conditions which must be satisfied for this kind of attribution to be appropriate.
Sher, “Out of control,” pp. 288–290.
Ibid. p. 295.
Prominent defenders of attributionism include Robert Adams (1985), “Involuntary sins,” Philosophical Review, 94, 1–31; T. M. Scanlon (1998), What we owe to each other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) and Angela Smith, “Responsibility for attitudes.”
The clearest expression of the quality of will thesis, and the phrase itself, is found in T. M. Scanlon, “The significance of choice,” in Free Will (pp. 352–371), Ed. Gary Watson, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sher, “Out of control,” p. 295. I have advanced other considerations against attributionism in Neil Levy (2005), “The Good, the bad and the blameworthy,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 1, 1–16.
Sher, “Out of control,” p. 296.
Bargh, J. A. & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479.
Bargh, J. A. (1992). The ecology of automaticity. Toward establishing the conditions needed to produce automatic processing effects. American Journal of Psychology, 105, 181–199.
Sher, “Out of control,” p. 298.
See, for instance, Moskowitz, G. B. (2001). Preconscious control and compensatory cognition. In G. B. Moskowitz (Ed.), Cognitive social psychology: The Princeton symposium on the legacy and future of social cognition (pp. 333–358). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
See Dasgupta, N. (2004). Implicit ingroup favoritism, outgroup favoritism, and their behavioral manifestations. Social Justice Research, 17, 143–168 for a review of the relevant literature.
Dasgupta, N. & Greenwald, A. G. (2001). On the malleability of automatic attitudes: combating automatic prejudice with images of admired and disliked individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 800–814.
Monteith, M. J., Sherman, J. W., & Devine, P. G. (1998). Suppression as a stereotype control strategy. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 63–82.
Fine, C. (2006) Is the emotional dog wagging its rational tail, or chasing it? Reason in moral judgment. Philosophical Explorations, 9, 83–98.
The hypothesis that Eileen finds herself without the attentional resources to interrupt the link between automatic stereotyping and behavior is, it must be stressed, realistic. Conscious control is a slow, inefficient and relatively rare phenomenon. When we lack time, are under pressure or distracted, our behavior is guided by automatic mechanisms without the benefit of the flexibility that consciousness provides.
Indeed, Eileen might actually be worse off for trying to control her response. There is evidence that though under optimal conditions conscious control is effective, when attentional resources are limited attempts at control produce the very kinds of responses they aim to avoid. See Wegner, D. M. & Bargh, J. A. (1998). Control and automaticity in social life. In D. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (pp. 446–496). New York: McGraw-Hill, at p. 474.
That is not to say, of course, that agents may not be appropriate targets for moral criticism on the basis of racist attitudes. Such attitudes are morally abhorrent, and we are justified in calling for people to reject them. But moral criticism need not be moral blame; the fundamental attributionist error consists in confusing them. Elsewhere, I have argued that part of the reason for this confusion may consist in this: when we justifiably criticize someone for their moral attitudes, we often create conditions under which it is appropriate to blame them if they do not take steps to correct those attitudes. But we cannot infer from that fact that it appropriate to blame them before or at the same time as we criticize them.
Ibid. p. 469.
It is intuitive that we are not responsible for our automatic responses when they conflict with our (non self-deceptively) endorsed values and we are unable to prevent them. What, however, if our automatic response happens to be in line with our values, though there is no causal link between our values and our response? In that case, the conformity of the response to our values is merely accidental, and we deserve neither credit nor blame for its expression (unless we are responsible for the fact that we respond automatically).
Baars, B. J. (1997). In the theater of consciousness: The workspace of the mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Other prominent global workspace theorists include Stanislas Dehaene and Lionel Naccache (2001), “Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: Basic evidence and a workspace framework,” Cognition, 79, 1–37; Anthony I. Jack and Tim Shallice (2001), “Introspective physicalism as an approach to the science of consciousness,” Cognition, 79, 161–196; Daniel Dennett (1991), Consciousness explained (London: Penguin); David Chalmers, “Availability: The cognitive basis of experience?”, in The Nature of Consicousness: Philosophical Debates (pp. 421–424), Eds. Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Güven Güzeldere, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Dennett, D. (2001). Are we explaining consciousness yet? Cognition, 79, 221–237.
Block, N. On a confusion about a function of consciousness. In Block, N., Flanagan, O., & Güzeldere, G. (Eds.) The nature of consicousness: Philosophical debates (pp. 375–415). Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Acknowledgement
I thank George Sher and two anonymous reviewers for Philosophia for very helpful comments that have helped me to improve this paper enormously.
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Levy, N. Restoring Control: Comments on George Sher. Philosophia 36, 213–221 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9090-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9090-8