Abstract
I argue that wrongdoers may be open to moral blame even if they lacked the capacity to respond to the moral considerations that counted against their behavior. My initial argument turns on the suggestion that even an agent who cannot respond to specific moral considerations may still guide her behavior by her judgments about reasons. I argue that this explanation of a wrongdoer’s behavior can qualify her for blame even if her capacity for moral understanding is impaired. A second argument is based on the observation that even when a blameworthy wrongdoer could have responded to moral considerations, this is often not relevant to her blameworthiness. Finally, I argue against the view that because blame communicates moral demands, only agents who can be reached by such communication are properly blamed. I contend that a person victimized by a wrongdoer with an impaired capacity for moral understanding may protest her victimization in a way that counts as a form of moral blame even though it does not primarily express a moral demand or attempt to initiate moral dialogue.
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Notes
A requirement of this sort plays an important role in Benson (2001), Doris and Murphy (2007), Levy (2003), Wallace (1996), Watson (2004a), and Wolf (1990, 2003), among other examples. Some writers (including some of those just mentioned) use the phrase “normative competence” in roughly the way I use “moral competence.” I chose the latter expression to emphasize my focus on specifically moral norms and considerations.
For the seminal account of blameworthiness in these terms, see Strawson (2003).
For an important treatment of the issues discussed in this paragraph, see Angela Smith (2007).
Again, see Strawson (2003).
I should note that despite their difficulty responding to certain moral considerations, the agents I discuss are, for the most part, not psychopaths (Susan Wolf’s JoJo may be an exception). For my account of the responsibility of psychopaths, see Talbert (2008).
I take moral responsibility to be compatible with determinism and with certain forms of moral impairment, but I do not think this commits me to a view about the compatibility of free will and determinism, or free will and moral impairment. I endorse, then, something like Fischer and Ravizza’s semi-compatibilism. Semi-compatibilists hold that “moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism, even if causal determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 53). A lot hangs here on what we mean by “freedom to do otherwise.” If what we have in mind is the freedom to, as Carl Ginet puts it, “add to the given past” in multiple ways, then free will may not be compatible with determinism (because if determinism is true, there would seem to be a single causally possible extension of the actual past) (Ginet 1990, 103). In reply, compatibilists can argue that Ginet’s formulation does not capture the relevant notion of “free will,” or that, even on this conception, free will is compatible with determinism. Both responses are contentious. The semi-compatibilist finds it dialectically fruitful to leave these debates unresolved, arguing instead that the freedom to add to the given past in multiple ways is not necessary for moral responsibility regardless of whether it is compatible with determinism. Similarly, I would argue that, even if free will is the ability to add to the given past in multiple ways, and even if a morally impaired agent’s free will is undermined, she may still be a proper target for blame because blameworthiness does not depend on this sort of free will. Still, the impaired agents I have in mind satisfy conceptions of freedom that are less metaphysically loaded than Ginet’s. Among other things, the agents I consider should be understood to act as they see fit, to be moved by desires with which they identify, and to be such that they would have acted differently if they had taken themselves to have reason to do so. What the impairment of these agents comes to is that, when they do wrong, they could not reasonably have been expected to grasp the fact that they had good reason to do otherwise.
Another common, though often unstated, assumption is that the relevant states are, as Al Mele puts it, “practically unsheddable.” Values are practically unsheddable for an agent if, given her actual psychological constitution, and the way the world actually is, she cannot change the fact that she has the values in question (Mele 1995, 153).
A compatibilist might make sense of the idea that it is reasonable to expect an agent to have correct moral understanding by appealing to what Fischer and Ravizza (1998, 53) call the “dispositional or modal properties” of the agent’s actual behavior. The idea is that we gain insight into an agent’s general psychological capacities by considering how the agent—or, in Fischer and Ravizza’s terms, the agent’s “reasons-responsive mechanism”—would have responded had she been exposed to counterfactual pressures and incentives. When an agent fails to respond appropriately to a given moral reason, we might say that she had the general capacity to respond to the reason—and that it was reasonable to expect her to do so—if she would have responded to that reason in the proper range of counterfactual scenarios.
Though I do not agree with it in all its particulars, John M. Fischer’s influential concept of “guidance control,” introduced in Fischer (1994), is a helpful way of thinking about the sort of self-government at issue here.
I should note that Strawson himself takes moral competence to be a condition on blameworthiness insofar as he thinks that those we blame should be capable of engaging with the negative reactive attitudes we direct at them: see Strawson (2003, 78–82). Since the morally impaired agents I am interested in may lack the ability to engage constructively with our reactive attitudes, Strawson would presumably regard them as being—like the psychotic or the young child—beyond the proper reach of blame. I consider the degree to which blame presupposes the ability to engage with the negative reactive attitudes in Sects. 5 and 6 below.
This approach is indebted to T. M. Scanlon’s development of Strawson’s account of blame in the terms of contractualist moral theory. According to Scanlon, “a judgment of moral blame asserts that the way in which an agent decided what to do was not in accord with standards which that agent either accepts or should accept insofar as he or she is concerned to justify his or her actions to others” (Scanlon 2003, 365). I take it that we often find an action unjustifiable (and expressive of ill will or objectionable disregard) when an actor explicitly or implicitly judges our needs and interests to be normatively insignificant.
Elsewhere, Levy writes: “It is a necessary condition of agents’ possessing this capacity [for conforming to moral norms]—and therefore of us reasonably expecting them to behave appropriately—that conforming their behavior to normative standards is something they can do rationally (and not merely by chance or accident)” (Levy 2009, 735).
For a critical examination of Doris and Murphy’s argument, see Talbert (2009).
Slave-owners may have held a paternalistic attitude toward slaves that they regarded as incapable of looking after their own interests, but this attitude is compatible with offensive racial contempt. Paternalism is a central topic of Eugene Genovese’s classic study of American slavery, Roll, Jordan, Roll. Genovese claims that, “Southern paternalism … had little to do with Ole Massa’s ostensible benevolence, kindness, and good cheer. It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation. It did encourage kindness and affection, but it simultaneously encouraged cruelty and hatred” (Genovese 1974, 4). Making a related point, J. L. A. Garcia notes that “the racist who condescendingly and deliberately deprives others of education and autonomy, even if ultimately well intentioned, acts with the instrumental intention of stunting and infantilizing the ‘beneficiary’ she victimizes. So we should not assume that immoral paternalism involves nothing that offends against the virtues of goodwill” (Garcia 2001, 142 n. 22).
As Scanlon notes: “[a] person who is unable to see why the fact that his action would injure me should count against it still holds that this doesn’t count against it” (Scanlon 1998, 288).
Doris and Murphy consider something like this in their discussion of “‘strict liability’ for the reactive attitudes” (Doris and Murphy 2007, 54).
I would claim something similar about attempts to apply Gary Watson’s distinction between the “attributability” and “accountability” faces of responsibility in this context (Watson 2004b). With this distinction in hand, one might argue that JoJo is blameworthy in the limited sense that his wrong actions are attributable to him, but that it is inappropriate to hold JoJo accountable for his actions by targeting him with negative reactive attitudes. But this fails to acknowledge the moral quality of the actions we are attributing to JoJo. Suppose that after calm deliberation, JoJo judges there to be no good reason to refrain from arbitrary arrest and torture. JoJo’s victims might be obliged to withhold resentment if his actions were not malicious or if they were not attributable to him, but if these actions are attributable to JoJo, and if they are as deliberate and disdainful as I suggest, then his victims seem to have grounds for resenting him. For additional discussion and criticism of Watson’s distinction, see Angela Smith (2008, 375–380).
Scanlon makes a related point: “if we give up the idea that an agent can be properly condemned for his action, then it seems that we must also withdraw the claim, on his victim’s behalf, that they were entitled not to be treated in the way that he treated them” (Scanlon 1998, 332). Thanks to Angela Smith for pointing me to this passage.
On my view, blame is appropriate when our actions manifest an unjustifiably contemptuous orientation towards others; I have particularly focused on the way our actions can express blame-grounding judgments about the normative significance of others’ welfare. Thus, there is likely to be more to Jessica’s and James’ racism than their possession of false beliefs about a certain race. Such beliefs may play a relatively superficial role in explaining what is objectionable about racism. For one thing, racist beliefs need not be firmly held. Kwame Anthony Appiah states that it would be odd to call someone racist if she easily gave her views upon the presentation of appropriate evidence, but even if we disagree with Appiah about whether such a person counts as “racist,” he is certainly right to write that “[r]eal live racists” often “exhibit a distorted rationality,” and that their beliefs display a disturbing resistance to contrary evidence (Appiah 1990, 8). I suspect that often what makes the racist, and her beliefs, so offensive are the underlying attitudes of contempt that hold these beliefs in place. Thus, I am attracted to J. L. A. Garcia’s suggestion that “[a]ctions and beliefs are racist in virtue of their coming from racism in the desires, wishes and intentions of individuals” (Garcia 1996, 11). More generally, Garcia characterizes racism as “a vicious kind of racially based disregard for the welfare of certain people” (Garcia 1996, 6). I view Jessica and James as being moved by the kind of disregard Garcia has in mind: they have racist beliefs, but their racism also (and perhaps more fundamentally) involves an orientation characterized by contempt, ill will, and antipathy towards certain others on account of their race. Still, I do not necessarily endorse Garcia’s broader view that beliefs are inessential to racism. I want merely to emphasize the role that ill will can play in some instances of racism, and this emphasis is compatible with accepting, for example, Tommie Shelby’s claim that racism is best construed as an ideology, as a system of beliefs that functions “to establish or reinforce structures of social oppression” (Shelby 2002, 415).
I write “perhaps” because Smith’s aim is to distinguish the various positions one might take on this issue rather than to argue that a particular approach is correct.
Here is a relevant passage from Zimmerman:
If one is culpable for nonignorant behavior, then of course, one’s culpability involves lack of ignorance. If, in contrast, one is culpable for ignorant behavior, then one is culpable for the ignorance to which this behavior may be traced… But one is never in direct control of whether one is ignorant… Indirect culpability for something presupposes direct culpability for something else. Whatever this something else is, it cannot be ignorant behavior, because then the argument would apply all over again to this behavior. Hence all culpability can be traced to culpability that involves lack of ignorance, that is, that involves a belief on the agent’s part that he or she is doing something morally wrong. (Zimmerman 1997, 418)
Here is a similar passage from Rosen:
Recall our observation that responsibility for action done from ignorance is invariably a matter of derivative responsibility: One is responsible for the act done from ignorance only if one is independently responsible for something else. On the present broad conception of action done from ignorance, this entails that the only possible locus of original responsibility is an akratic act. In weakness begins responsibility. Our first sin must be a knowing sin—a sin done in full knowledge of every pertinent fact or principle. (Rosen 2004, 307)
Rosen’s aim, more than Zimmerman’s, is to urge epistemic humility: in most cases, we will not know whether a wrongdoer satisfies the conditions of blame (Rosen 2004, 295). Still, the tenor of his discussion suggests that Rosen would agree that there are fewer instances of genuinely blameworthy wrongdoing than ordinarily supposed.
See FitzPatrick’s discussion of “Mr. Potter” for an example of a wrongdoer who is situated similarly to James, and whom FitzPatrick regards as probably blameworthy (FitzPatrick 2008, 603).
R. Jay Wallace develops this sort of argument in Wallace (1996, 196–207).
R. Jay Wallace develops a similar position, claiming that insofar as the reactive emotions are “bound up with moral obligations we accept, they will only be fully intelligible as forms of expression when addressed to people who are capable of grasping moral reasons” (Wallace 1996, 164).
An obvious reply to this line of argument is that blame aims at securing future compliance with moral demands or at inspiring a wrongdoer to apologize or otherwise make amends. I consider this perspective in the next section.
It is important to Watson’s argument that impaired wrongdoers cannot flout the demand for respect, but Angela Smith and Pamela Hieronymi have both pointed out to me that I need not concede this point. After all, competent and impaired wrongdoers both fail to act in conformity with this demand, so why should not both failings count as “floutings”? However, I am willing to allow that there is a difference between the kind of disregard we can attribute to a competent wrongdoer, and what we can attribute to an impaired wrongdoer. Perhaps, an impaired wrongdoer cannot be said to disregard the demand for respect in the sense of rejecting this demand on its merits. As an anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics has pointed out, whatever ill will is expressed in the impaired wrongdoer’s action, it cannot involve disregarding the demand for respect in the sense of disregard just identified. But it is important to note that when we pose a demand for respect, we are often asking others to recognize certain reasons. Now even if an impaired wrongdoer cannot recognize the reasons that provide the normative basis for a demand, he can still judge that there are no reasons in the vicinity, and that he has no reason to refrain from behavior that he knows will injure another. As Scanlon writes (in a passage I quoted earlier): “[a] person who is unable to see why the fact that his action would injure me should count against it still holds that this doesn’t count against it” (Scanlon 1998, 288). This is an important, and, I think, morally offensive, form of disregard of which even quite impaired agents may be capable.
David Shoemaker (2007) has recently offered a detailed and sophisticated account (along the lines favored by Watson and Wallace) of the conditions for membership in the moral community.
Pamela Hieronymi (2001) also characterizes the moral offense involved in blame as a form of protest.
An anonymous referee for The Journal of Ethics has pointed out that, given the nature of my conclusion and the way I associate it with compatibilism, the critic of compatibilism may welcome my arguments as a reductio of that view. Of course, I do not regard the denial of the moral competence requirement as absurd. Indeed, accepting the competence requirement has burdens of its own (whether one is a compatibilist or an incompatibilist). As I argued in Sect. 2, it is a significant burden to say that blaming responses on the part of the victims of malicious actors like JoJo are unreasonable. Proponents of the competence requirement typically do not want to give up the claim that JoJo is guilty of offensive and objectionable behavior. Part of what makes JoJo’s actions offensive and wrong is the fact that he knowingly, and without proper justification, inflicts pain on others. But this same feature of JoJo’s action is, as I have argued, a reasonable basis for blame: JoJo’s victims should not be expected to view the intentional, methodical suffering inflicted on them as justified or excused just because JoJo cannot recognize that he has moral reasons to refrain from such behavior. JoJo’s inability in this regard need not change the meaning of his behavior in his victims’ eyes, but to say that JoJo is not an appropriate target for blame does seem to alter his behavior’s status and meaning in important ways.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editor of The Journal of Ethics and the journal’s anonymous referees for their valuable advice on this paper. I presented versions of this paper at the 2009 Central meeting of the American Philosophical Association, with comments by Paul Benson, and at the 2010 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, with comments by Johann Klaassen; I sincerely thank both commenters for their thoughtful and challenging criticisms. Angela Smith, Pamela Hieronymi, David Shoemaker, John Martin Fischer, and Matt King were all kind enough to read a late draft of this paper, and I am very grateful to each of them for their time and for their extremely helpful insights and suggestions.
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Talbert, M. Moral Competence, Moral Blame, and Protest. J Ethics 16, 89–109 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-011-9112-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-011-9112-4