Abstract
It is intuitive that, under certain circumstances, it can be disrespectful or patronizing to excuse someone for an attitude (even for an attitude one finds objectionable). While it is easy enough to find instances where it seems disrespectful to excuse an attitude, matters are complicated. When and why, precisely, is it disrespectful to judge that someone is not responsible for his attitude? In this paper, I show, first, that the extant philosophical literature on this question is underdeveloped and overgeneralized: the writers who address the question suggest quite strikingly that it is always disrespectful to excuse a sane, rational agent for his attitude, and their arguments rely on false generalizations about what is involved in excusing an attitude. I then sketch an account of respect (something conspicuously missing in the literature on this question) to explain when and why it is disrespectful to excuse an attitude. Using this account, I show that one can coherently (and respectfully) excuse an attitude even in some cases where that attitude was produced by a responsiveness to reasons.
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Notes
Throughout this paper, I use “S excuses R for her attitude,” “S excuses R’s attitude,” and “S judges that R is not responsible for her attitude” interchangeably.
Here and elsewhere, I use “sane” in Wolf’s (1987) sense of having the capacity to understand and respond to moral reasons.
Indeed, Smith (2005) suggests that an agent would not be responsible for attitudes implanted by a mad scientist [with the caveat that, if the agent “becomes aware of these attitudes and shows no tendency to revise or reject them in light of her other beliefs and commitments, we may eventually conclude that these attitudes do accurately reflect her judgment” in a way that implies responsibility (261)].
As noted earlier in this paper, when Smith explicitly discusses disrespectful excusings, she gives voice to a more sweeping and universal version of the thesis—that is, she seems to endorse the DISRESPECT THESIS rather than the DISRESPECT THESIS*. In what follows, I will attribute the more restrictive DISRESPECT THESIS* to Smith, since this thesis is both more plausible and sits better with Smith’s own account of moral responsibility.
Two clarificatory remarks about my account are in order (neither remark has any serious bearing upon the central uses to which I have put my account in this paper). First, if a person suffers from a serious cognitive disability that makes her incapable of drawing epistemically good inferences about S qua agent, it seems mistaken to suggest that her judgment about S is outright disrespectful (though it is not obviously mistaken, to me, to suggest that the judgment may be lacking in some level of respect). My account specifies that Q’s judgment respects S when and only when it is properly responsive to S, and we can add that for Q’s judgment to be outright disrespectful (as opposed to lacking in some level of respect), the judgment must fail to be properly responsive to S and Q must be cognitively capable of being properly responsive. In every case considered above, it was assumed that the person excusing S had the cognitive capacity to be properly responsive.
The second clarificatory remark has to do with the notion of a “morally bad inference.” I am tempted to suggest that my account remains plausible if we drop the reference to “morally bad inferences,” but since there is not the space to resolve this issue in this paper, I will leave open the possibility that a judgment can be produced by an epistemically good inference but be disrespectful because the inference is in some sense morally bad. Perhaps a judgment that relies on a statistically grounded but pernicious stereotype is such an inference. Resolving what might count as an epistemically good but morally bad inference would take us too far astray from our central question about when and why it is disrespectful to excuse an attitude, so I simply flag the issue here.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sophie Horowitz, Hilary Kornblith, and Katia Vavova for helpful discussions of the material in this paper and for extensive comments on earlier drafts.
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Robison, J.W. When and why is it disrespectful to excuse an attitude?. Philos Stud 176, 2391–2409 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1132-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1132-5