Abstract
In Building Better Beings, Vargas develops and defends a naturalistic (compatibilist) account of responsibility, whereby responsible agents must possess a feasibly situated capacity to detect and respond to moral considerations. As a preliminary step, he also offers a substantive account of how we might justify our practices of holding responsible—viz., by appeal to their efficacy in fostering a ‘valuable form of agency’ across the community at large, a form of agency that precisely encompasses sensitivity to moral considerations. But how do these accounts relate to one another? Though I find much that is appealing in Vargas’s general approach, I challenge his insistence that these accounts should be treated as ‘conceptually independent’, arguing that this generates an objectionable “justification gap”: on his analysis, someone could remain an appropriate target of our responsibility practices and yet fail to be a morally responsible agent. In closing, I offer a potential solution to this problem, though it means re-visioning how the account of moral responsibility is conceptually tied to the justification of our responsibility practices.
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Notes
Actually, Stage 1 plays a further critical role in the overall dialectic of the book. It supports Vargas’s revisionist conclusion that the naturalistic features identified in stage 2 have earned the right to count as genuine responsibility-making feature according to our pre-theoretic concept of responsibility, despite not satisfying all our pre-theoretic intuitions about what makes for responsibility. They have earned this right, not simply because they satisfy a sufficient range of our pre-theoretic intuitions, but because they do so in a principled way—that is, by underwriting the “work” done by our [pretheoretic] concept of responsibility in our responsibility-infused attitudes and practices (BBB, p. 107; see chapters 3, 4 and 10 for further discussion).
Note that a ‘normatively sufficient’ justification allows, in Vargas’s view, for other acceptable justifications of the responsibility system (another point of contrast with classic MI theories).
While Vargas admits there must be some connection between the account of what justifies our responsibility system and the account of what makes for responsible agency, he envisions the justificatory relationship as ultimately running in the opposite direction from the classic view: “it only makes sense to demand adherence to norms of praise and blame if one has the capacity to regulate one’s conduct in light of moral considerations. In the absence of such capacities, the thing that justifies praising and blaming (its role in cultivating a moral considerations-regulated form of agency) disappears” (BBB, p. 197).
While I strongly endorse this internalization idea, I think Vargas gives up too quickly on the justificatory importance of the proximal effects of praise and blame. I come back to this point below.
As I indicate at the close of my comments, this move may be unnecessary since these standard objections to classic MI theories are considerably less potent once we see the justifying end of responsibility practices to be that of fostering MCR agency (vs. mere behavioural regulation).
E.g., as we might blame psychopaths.
To summarize this worry in Vargas’s own terms: “…any system-level justification of the sort I’m emphasized is going to tolerate a certain amount of infelicity if the payoff is sufficiently large” (BBB, p. 192).
Perhaps to soften the downside of the empirical gamble in this gap-reducing strategy, Vargas offers a supplementary strategy for dealing with this problem—namely, an appeal to ‘modularity’. The idea here is that we can simply bracket any lingering worries we may have about the justification gap (BBB, pp. 192–193), deferring questions about whether or not it is ultimately acceptable. Why? Because, in Vargas’s view, responsibility theorists can safely adopt a “limited ethics” approach when focussed on the more narrow concerns appropriate to their inquiry. Eventually, their account will need “to be inserted into a more global account of ethical norms”—perhaps deontological, perhaps consequentialist. And within this larger ethical framework, theorists may address the question as to whether responsibility norms that are justified solely in terms of their good effects are thereby fully or actually justified. After all, Vargas adds, “responsibility is only one set of normative concerns, and the end of the responsibility system is only one end among many legitimate concerns. Nothing in this account suggests otherwise” (BBB, p. 193). In response to this I have a different sort of worry: However pleasingly ecumenical this ‘limited ethics’ approach may sound, I don’t see how Vargas can fully endorse it – for reasons I discuss in Sect. 2.3 below.
At least for a thorough-going deontologist. Of course, certain theorists—such as Rawls (1955) and Hart (1961)—have famously tried to combine deontological norms with a practice-level consequentialist justification of those norms. Perhaps Vargas has a similar view in mind. But I don’t quite see how this fits with his ‘modularity’ response to the justification gap (see note 9); for as I understand it, his thought is that we might regard certain norms as justified for their agency-fostering effects and yet see them as unjustified on other normative grounds. But this does not comport with the view defended by Rawls or Hart, which—as I understand it—is to see the practice-level consequentialist justification of norms as definitive.
Vargas disparages this move as misguided ‘overreaching’: “The most important flaw of traditional MI accounts is that they overreach, attempting to account for too many things with the comparatively limited idea of moral influence. It is a mistake to generate a comprehensive account of responsible agency, blameworthiness, praise and blame, and (perhaps) an account of the justification of the responsibility-characteristic practices, all from the same materials” (pp. 171–2).
As an example, Vargas cites powerful evidence of stereotype priming effects on cognitive performance—for instance, when a negative stereotype is activated (e.g. women can’t do math as well as men), women’s performance on math exams is significantly degraded, but only when the exam is presented as testing native ability (BBB, p. 207, citing Aronson et al. 1999; Steele et al. 2002).
Cf. BBB, pp. 213–214. I am not putting in all the fine details of Vargas’s specification, but I do not think what I leave out is germane to my discussion here.
This problem and its possible solution is discussed at length in (McGeer and Pettit 2015).
This is not to say that no modal analysis could do justice to the phenomenon. But it would have to be of a very different stripe than what has been offered to date. Specifically, it would have to allow for the possibility that an agent will change as a result of specific kinds of environmental influence so as to manifest the requisite dispositional profile in circumstances C. See McGeer and Pettit (2015) for further discussion.
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McGeer, V. Building a better theory of responsibility. Philos Stud 172, 2635–2649 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0478-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0478-1