Abstract
This paper provides a discussion and defense of a recent formulation of the idea that moral responsibility for actions depends on the capacity to respond to reasons. This formulation appears in several publications by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, where the authors argue that moral responsibility involves a kind of control over one’s actions which they call “guidance control.” This kind of control does not require an agent’s ability to do something different from what he actually does, but instead requires only that the actual process leading to the action be responsive in some suitable way to the reasons that the agent has for acting. After summarizing this view, I offer the following two innovations to the authors’ view: I argue that the level of control required for moral responsibility (which I call “regular reasons-responsiveness”) is much stronger than what the author’s view allows for; and 2) I give a common-sense account of the kinds of motivational mechanism relevant to moral responsibility. Given these innovations, I show that this kind of view allows us to easily answer some counterexamples that appear in the current literature on moral responsibility.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For example, it is possible that this was the view of Aristotle (1985): he gives examples of forced actions, such as a man being carried somewhere by the wind against his will, which suggest that a morally responsible agent must be able to respond to his own reasons for action. Stampe and Gibson (1992) give a recent version of this view.
As David Lewis (1972) styles our everyday “folk” theory of how our minds work.
I take the authors to mean that a pattern must be intelligible and reality-based in the context of the choice at hand. For example, if the agent is using a mechanism of practical reasoning to decide what to do, then the beliefs that he possesses about the choice at hand must not be mainly delusive. This account allows, then, that he might be substantially deluded in regard to other matters.
It should be noted that there is one other reference that Fischer makes on his own, which is (arguably) a common-sense platitude. In trying to distinguish a compulsive desire from one that is merely very strong, Fischer says that “an irresistible urge is one whose intensity or intrinsic motivational force (whether experienced or not) explains why the action takes place; there is no possible scenario (including those whose pasts differ in their details from the actual past) in which the agent fails to act on the desire, given its intrinsic motivation force” (2006, 234). As we will see during my discussion of desire-strength, common-sense introspection surely holds that this property is explanatory of the subsequent action and also is intrinsic to the motivational mechanism present on the occasion of action. However, it does not seem platitudinous to further say that this represents a property of “intensity” (i.e., something that is presumably analogous to physical intensity, e.g., intense light). My way to cash out intrinsic desire-strength is to refer to a simple quantity of desire-states.
I owe this important point to an anonymous reviewer of this paper. In my original version I gave the impression that Fischer and Ravizza’s asymmetry could be completely denied.
I owe this insightful point to another anonymous reviewer of this paper. This reviewer also suggests that Fischer and Ravizza’s intuitive claim here might not be solely based on what Brown’s mechanism would do in such a possible scenario: for example, perhaps he is in control (and thus morally responsible), at least in part, because he presently chooses on a nonaddictive desire for pleasure. However, the following quote illustrates that Fischer and Ravizza are basing their claim on what Brown would do (when holding fixed the same kind of mechanism): it is that actual-sequence feature that matters for control and moral responsibility.
Horney (1992) also gives a lucid practical application of her views about neurosis. In my discussion of motivational mechanisms, we will see that Horney’s plausible analysis of neurosis is entirely compatible with my account of desire-strength.
My second anonymous reviewer has (rightly) claimed that Horney’s view about neurosis is a bit difficult to follow. However, I felt compelled to use it as my example, because 1) after all, Horney is one of the main architects of the modern psychoanalytic theory of neurosis; and 2) her formulations allow me to easily illustrate how an actual mechanism that rules out control and moral responsibility can nevertheless provide for actual (weak) reactivity.
In the next section I will examine some more of these platitudes. We will see that common-sense has quite a bit to say about how to distinguish the desire-mechanism from other kinds, and how to make more specific determinations (e.g., the distinction between normal v. defective kinds of mechanism).
A few other writers have also noticed problems with Fischer and Ravizza’s modal claim. For example, in a review of Responsibility and Control, Gary Watson (2004) gives two objections: 1) Fischer and Ravizza’s modal claim “is very puzzling (since) in general, dispositional properties don’t behave in this way. That a substance is soluble in one kind of liquid does not indicate that it will respond in this way to other kinds” (300), and 2) Brown’s attempted justification of his behavior “seems to arise from intuitions supporting a principle of alternative possibilities (but, we have seen that) Fischer and Ravizza reject this principle because of so-called Frankfurt cases” (300).
As we will see soon, this way of specifying these processes is a bit inaccurate: our platitudes clearly reveal that these processes can vary because of simple input/output differences. Thus, these processes are partly constituted by such factors. It should also be noted that my endorsement of functionalist considerations in order to (partly) define the meaning of mental processes does not mean that I am endorsing what is often called “analytical functionalism” in the philosophy of mind. That is, I am not claiming (as David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson express it) that “mental states are . . . internal states within us, but we identify and name them by the effect the world has on them, the effect they have on one another, and the effect they have on the world causing our behavior” (2007, 48). Instead, I am merely claiming that the platitudes include functionalist considerations. Indeed, I intend my discussion to be compatible with any of the plausible views in philosophy of mind.
As with my discussion of mental states themselves, I will avoid taking a stand on what precisely these properties are. For example, I will not inquire into the relations that must obtain between a belief and something in the world, in order for that belief to be true. Nevertheless, because of the vagueness in our ordinary talk about desire-strength (e.g., during the above discussion of the neurotic desires we saw that Horney could only describe them as “extremely” strong), it will be necessary to say something in order to get an account that is precise enough to answer the counterexamples. I believe that my account (i.e., in terms of a quantity of states) is one plausible way to capture our ordinary talk about the degrees of desire-strength. Further, I leave it open as to how to cash this account out ontologically. For example, while a dualist in philosophy of mind may wish to simply identify these states with mental objects having an independent and self-contained existence, a token-identity theorist may wish instead to point to a collection of neural items. One further caveat: I will also refrain from a stand on how precisely we are able to know the facts enshrined in our platitudes. For example, it seems plausible that we learn about desire-strength by simply introspecting on our occurrent desires: that is, this property seems to be intrinsic to our desires (e.g., we often describe our strong desires as “hot passions”). When it comes to identifying the properties of our beliefs, however, it is not so clear how introspection works: after all, beliefs don’t seem to have such distinctive phenomenal “feels.” In any case, I will not take a stand on these epistemological issues: I will merely rely on the fully-developed platitudes themselves. For a good discussion of these ontological and epistemological issues, see Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (2007) for the physicalist standpoint, and Foster (1991) for the dualist rebuttal.
It is an interesting question as to how we come to pick out a state (or states) from these processes, and come to designate it as the cause of the outputs. One factor that might be relevant is our common-sense belief that causes always exist prior in time to their effects. For example, in regard to the desire-mechanism it seems that the mental state that always immediately precedes the action is a desire that is (in some fashion) directed to the relevant state-of-affairs. John Mackie (1974) famously discusses these issues, but see also A. J. Ayer (1984).
The first of my two anonymous reviewers has (rightly) pointed out that this notion of a “normal situation” of action (and indeed, the further architecture that is based on it; e.g., the notion of “upper fringes of the abnormal range”) is rather vague. I have to agree: perhaps precision in these motivational matters will have to wait for progress in the infant sciences of psychology and neuroscience. My only claim is that my common-sense view is much less vague than Fischer and Ravizza’s account: after all, they only discuss our “relatively clear intuitive judgments” in regard to the first of the three motivational kinds discussed in this paper (1998, 40). Indeed, one of my contentions is that my more detailed view is at least precise enough to account for the counterexamples present in the literature. While we are on the topic of common-sense, this reviewer also suggests that common-sense might be ambivalent in its support for some of the kind-distinctions presented here (and indeed, might even allow for conflicting intuitions in regard to some of the cases that I discuss; for example, we saw that Fischer and Ravizza disagreed with my intuitive claim about cases of extreme weak-will). In response to this, I can only hope that I have built my account on non-controversial such intuitions. I have also tried to single out those aspects that are not so clearly supported by common-sense (for example, in note 5 I pointed out that my account of intrinsic desire-strength, although hopefully plausible, is not something that is platitudinous). The final judgment about the cogency of my claims about common-sense, of course, must lie with my readers.
Parfit’s criterion is also a quantitative one, but he does not use it to specify degrees of desire-strength: rather, he uses it to precisify the degree of psychological connectedness that is needed to give an account of personal identity in terms of strong such connectedness. Parfit’s suggestion is clearly appropriate for our purposes: as we have seen, Fischer and Ravizza’s account is an “actual sequence” approach to moral responsibility, and it is obvious that Parfit is also concerned with what occurs “in the lives of nearly every actual person” (206).
It is obvious that there are also relevant properties of the (internal) causes of the outputs that can determine different kinds. For example, on the Bayesian model of practical-reasoning, an agent: 1) assigns an initial value to the states-of-affairs represented by his reasons; 2) calculates the probabilities of those states obtaining given certain courses of action; and 3) computes the expected desirability of performing each action given these initial values and probabilities. If the agent is rational, he subsequently performs that action that has the highest expected desirability. Given this, it is clear that many things can go wrong to make this an abnormal (or even defective) mechanism. For example, perhaps the agent at stage (2) often miscalculates the relevant probabilities (due to a deficiency in his mathematical ability). A deficiency of this sort would seem to be independent of the actual inputs to the mechanism (although we might need to appeal to some general historical facts about the agent in order to account for such irrationality). These complexities, however, are beyond the scope of this paper: I will only examine a few of the input deficiencies here.
It should be noted in passing that it is also possible (on the above account) to have an abnormal mechanism containing too many true beliefs about a given choice. This seems to be in accord with our common-sense understanding: for example, we often criticize a person as being “too smart for his own good,” and if someone is really too smart, we start to attribute supernatural attributes to him. In such a case, however, we would not view his mechanism as “defective” in any way. Given examples like this, I was careful to note above that the concept of an abnormal mechanism per se does not entail any sort of defect.
There could be several different concrete forms of causality here. For example, perhaps this works at stage (1) of the internal causality described in note 17, so that Linda overvalues the emotional reasons she has to get Obama elected. Perhaps this overvaluation occurs simply from being unable to focus on the other kinds of reason (due to the mere presence of so many obsessive feelings).
The kind of (purported) counterexample in question here arises from the vagueness of Fischer and Ravizza’s original account of mechanism individuation. One such example comes from Eleonore Stumpe (2002), who gives a number of manipulation cases to show that Fischer and Ravizza’s view is inadequate. Fischer himself (2006) seems to give a good rebuttal, by showing that Stump makes the mistake of individuating the relevant manipulative mechanisms too coarsely. In the same essay, Fischer also responds to another such objection from Derk Pereboom (2001), where Pereboom wonders how Fischer and Ravizza are able to distinguish between an irresistible desire v. a desire that merely determines a particular action. For example, one can’t simply say that the irresistible desire can’t be resisted, since (by hypothesis) both are irresistible. Fischer’s rebuttal is along the right track: he notes that “an irresistible urge is one whose intensity or intrinsic motivational force . . . explains why the action takes place” (234). Quite so; but, as we saw above, Fischer and Ravizza don’t have a way to specify this kind of desire-strength. This shows that we need something along the lines proposed in this paper.
It might help to note that this example is isomorphic to the cases of “weak-will” discussed above that also (intuitively) permit moral responsibility. In both cases, the agent may fail to act on this or that sufficient reason to do otherwise, but he is able to both recognize and react to a range of such reasons in the other possible scenarios. Thus, although we would concede that his mechanism is abnormal, we would not think that is it so defective as to rule out the agent’s responsibility for his action.
The first of my anonymous reviewers has (rightly) noted that Fischer and Ravizza’s view about the reactive attitudes is very controversial: s/he points out that it at least seems commonsensical to say that being morally responsible is the same as being either praiseworthy or blameworthy (although s/he agrees that moral responsibility does not imply overt praise or blame). I will leave it to the reader to make up his/her own mind over this matter. If my reviewer is correct, however, it should be noted that this does not affect my above attempt to (partly) account for the (to my mind, incorrect) intuition that Schmidt is not responsible in these mild cases. After all, although it does (now) follow that the lack of praiseworthiness or blameworthiness in Schmidt implies that he is not responsible, it still does not follow that the lack of overt such reactions implies a lack of responsibility. Thus, I can still appeal to the (false) assumption that the lack of a reactive attitude implies a lack of moral responsibility, in order to attempt to explain the intuition that Schmidt is not responsible in these mild cases.
It should be noted that a plausible common-sense account of mechanisms requires more than merely holding fixed the quantitative aspects that define the kinds. As Fischer and Ravizza note (1998, 51–54), we must also hold fixed the actual laws of nature in the other scenarios, but we would not hold fixed the actual conditions producing the reasons to do otherwise (since different conditions would be needed to produce different reasons).
References
Aristotle (1985) Nicomachean ethics. Terence Irwin (trans). Hackett, Indianapolis
Ayer AJ (1984) On causal priority. In: Ayer AJ (ed) Freedom and morality and other essays. Clarendon, Oxford, pp 51–62
Braddon-Mitchell D, Jackson F (2007) Philosophy of mind and cognition. Blackwell, London
Fischer JM (1987) Responsiveness and moral responsibility. In: Schoeman F (ed) Responsibility, character and the emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 81–106
Fischer JM (2006) Responsibility and manipulation. In: Fischer JM (ed) My way: essays on moral responsibility. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 223–250
Fischer JM, Ravizza M (1991) Responsibility and inevitability. Ethics 101:258–278
Fischer JM, Ravizza M (1998) Responsibility and control: a theory of moral responsibility. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Foster J (1991) The immaterial self: a defence of the Cartesian dualist conception of the mind. Routledge, London
Frankfurt HG (1969) Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. J Philos 66:829–839
Frankfurt HG (1971) Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. J Philos 68:5–20
Horney K (1991) Neurosis and human growth: the struggle toward self-realization. Norton, New York
Horney K (1992) Our inner conflicts: a constructive theory of neurosis. Norton, New York
Kane R (1998) The significance of free will. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Lewis D (1972) Psychophysical and theoretical identifications. Australas J Philos 50:249–258
Long T (2004) Moderate reasons-responsiveness, moral responsibility, and manipulation. In: Campbell JK, O’Rourke M, Shier D (eds) Freedom and determinism. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 151–172
Mackie J (1974) The cement of the universe: a study of causation. Clarendon, Oxford
Marks J (1986) The difference between motivation and desire. In: Marks J (ed) The ways of desire: new essays in philosophical psychology on the concept of wanting. Precedent, Chicago, pp 133–147
Parfit D (1984) Reasons and persons. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Pereboom D (2001) Living without free will. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Ravizza M (1994) Semi-compatibilism and the transfer of non-responsibility. Philos Stud 75:61–93
Stampe D, Gibson M (1992) Of one’s own free will. Philos Phenomenol Res 52:529–556
Stumpe E (2002) Control and causal determinism. In: Buss S, Overton L (eds) Contours of agency: essays on themes from Harry Frankfurt. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 33–60
Watson G (2004) Reasons and responsibility. In: Watson G (ed) Agency and answerability: selected essays. Clarendon, Oxford, pp 289–317
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Steadman, J.D. Moral Responsibility and Motivational Mechanisms. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 15, 473–492 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9303-x
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9303-x