Methodology in Ascribing Moral Responsibility
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moral responsibility, mental illness, methodology, intuitions, thought experiments
Using Moral Intuitions
There is much to admire in Michelle Ciurria’s provocative approach to ascribing moral responsibility. Her work is detailed and spells out explicitly her methodological assumptions. In this commentary, my main focus is on the methodological assumptions she makes.
Ciurria’s arguments often depend on our reactions to actual cases and thought experiments. She takes it for granted that we need a theory that matches certain of our intuitions. This is not an unreasonable way to proceed. We definitely need a good reason if we are going to adopt a theory that does not fit with well-established moral intuitions. Nevertheless, we need to be cautious in using these cases to guide our theory choice, especially when our intuitive reactions vary depending on how the cases are framed and the intuitions that people have are not uniform. My experience in teaching these issues of moral responsibility is that student reaction to cases is far from uniform. Work in experimental philosophy and experimental psychology has highlighted how context dependent subjects’ responses are to proffered scenarios (Nichols and Knobe 2007; Zamzow and Nichols 2009). The variability of response may give us pause, and could suggest that there is no single right answer to question of when people are morally responsible for their actions, or that there are different kinds of moral responsibility that need to be separated. The method of using thought experiments and real cases needs to be carefully inspected as a guide to our “pretheoretical intuitions” needs to be carefully inspected.
On Doing Without Moral Responsibility
Most approaches to ascribing moral responsibility to agents tend to agree on central cases of competent adults who are well-informed about relevant facts who have not suffered traumatic experiences and who have been educated about a diverse range of moral outlooks. They agree that those people are morally responsible for what they do. Conversely, most approaches tend to agree that people who are very out of touch with reality are much less morally responsible for what they do. The disagreements tend to occur with difficult cases such as that of Robert Harris, other real cases, and the kinds of hypothetical cases that Ciurria mentions. As Cirurria admirably shows, it is possible to draw up a number of objections to the different theories, and of course we are looking [End Page 17] for a theory that is able to adequately answer all possible objections better than all competing theories.
Ciurria uses the work of William Cartwright as a way to sort through different theories. She points out that Cartwright’s position ends up being skeptical: he argues that the main theories rest on fictions. She argues that this leaves us in an impossible position, because “Doing without moral responsibility is not an option, because this concept plays a vital role in structuring our social relationships and maintaining social order” (Ciurria 2014, 2).
Let us distinguish between two ways in which we might do without moral responsibility. The extreme version of this would be to say that there is no such thing as moral responsibility. This is a position that has been held by some philosophers who deny the existence of freedom of the will and who insist that such freedom is necessary to hold people morally responsible for their actions. (Galen Strawson [1994] and Derk Pereboom [2006] are prime examples in philosophy, and, of course, a whole generation of behaviorists in psychology dismissed concepts of free will and moral responsibility.) On this view, it is a mistake to allow moral responsibility to play a vital role in structuring our relationships. This does not leave us in a vacuum, however, because it should be possible to find some other way to guide our social relationships and our reaction to harmful and disruptive behavior. The fact that we do currently rely on a concept of moral responsibility does not imply that we have to rely on it or that it is indispensable. However, let us put this extreme version to the side, because it takes us...
