Abstract
In Responsibility From the Margins, David Shoemaker distinguishes three forms of responsibility: attributability, answerability, and accountability. The introduction of various normative competence requirements lends precision to the contrasts that Shoemaker draws between these forms of responsibility. I argue, however, that these competence requirements are less well motivated than Shoemaker supposes, which raises the possibility that we cannot distinguish between forms of responsibility in the way that he hopes.
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Notes
But, since I’m inclined toward a broad view of what counts as “evaluation,” some of Shoemaker’s evaluation-independent cares may turn out to include an evaluative component.
Anger directed at the dead might suggest a similar conclusion. None of this conflicts with Shoemaker’s claim that “one simply does not count as being angry at someone without having some motivational impulse to communicate that feeling” (104). Anger may include an urge to communicate itself, but it doesn’t follow that the prospect of communication grounds or explains our anger or that anger that cannot be communicated is not anger or that it is inapt anger.
Shoemaker raises this worry himself when he notes that prominent examples of “slights” (which manifest poor regard) involve poor judgments. Shoemaker responds this way:
judgments take as their object reasons, whereas regard takes as its object agents. So when, for example, I see your interests as providing reasons against stealing your money but I decide to steal it anyway, my decision is poor insofar as it reflects my disregard for you, my failure to take you seriously enough. So you may both be angry at me and disapprove of (and criticize) my judgment. But there are distinct objects here, respectively, poor regard and poor judgment. (98)
But the poor regard here—the cause of my anger—seems to be just a function of a poor judgment about the weight of my interests, so it’s not clear to me that I am disapproving of, and angry about, two separate things. Now there certainly are, as Shoemaker points out, cases of poor judgments made “in nonmoral normative domains” (99), and these poor judgments are not instances of disregard just because we are outside of the moral domain, but this doesn’t help us see the difference between these two things when we are in the moral domain. Shoemaker also notes that there can be cases in which one’s poor regard is non-judgmental, for “whether some facts appear to one to be reasons is not directly sensitive to, or a function of, judgment” (99). But this seems to me related to the idea (briefly noted at the beginning of this paper) that the morally interesting features of an agent’s self include both her judgments and her non-judgmental cares. So, while it may be that some cases of poor regard don’t involve poor judgment, I wonder if everything that was supposed to be the distinct object of accountability assessment is still included in Shoemaker’s conception of the character or self, which was supposed to be the distinct province of attributability.
References
Shoemaker, D. (2015). Responsibility from the margins. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wolf, S. (1987). Sanity and the metaphysics of responsibility. In F. Schoeman (Ed.), Responsibility, character, and the emotions (pp. 46–62). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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Talbert, M. Judgmental alternatives, empathy, and moral responsibility. Philos Stud 175, 973–980 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1046-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1046-2