Abstract
In Making Sense of Free Will and Moral Responsibility Dana Nelkin defends the “rational abilities view.” According to this view, agents are responsible for their behavior if and only if they act with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. It follows that agents who act well are open to praise regardless of whether they could have acted differently, but agents who act badly are open to blame only if they could have acted on the moral reasons that counted against their behavior. I summarize the main themes of Nelkin’s theory of responsibility and offer reasons for rejecting the claim that agents are blameworthy only if they could have responded to moral considerations. It is true that wrongdoers who could not have responded appropriately to moral considerations are often excused from blame, but I argue that not all the forms that such incapacity can take will furnish grounds for excuse. In other words, some circumstances that entail that a wrongdoer cannot respond to moral considerations are compatible with that agent fulfilling conditions that are sufficient for moral responsibility.
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Notes
Susan Wolf, “Asymmetrical Freedom,” Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980), p. 166.
Dana Nelkin, Making Sense of Free Will and Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). All page numbers in the body of the paper refer to Nelkin’s book.
Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 82.
Suppose Rosa acted habitually or instinctively. Whether this undermines praiseworthiness will depend on what we mean by “habit” and “instinct.” If we think of these things as entirely disconnected from rational processes, then Rosa might not be praiseworthy, but if we think of habits and instincts as themselves honed by an agent’s judgments about reasons, then moral praise might still be apt.
Similarly, Nelkin says that doubts about the moral responsibility of subjects in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience (in which subjects mistakenly believed that they were administering painful shocks to other people) arises from the thought that they were “somehow lacking in the ability to do the right thing for the right reasons” (11).
The case of stress is an outlier. If a person acts compulsively, we are unlikely to interpret his behavior as expressing contempt or disregard, but people acting under stress can certainly treat us this way. However, we still seem to make allowances for people in stressful situations by not holding them to the moral standards that we otherwise would. It is tempting to say that this is because it is difficult for people to act well under stress, but I think that we are also reluctant to fully attribute an agent’s behavior to her (in the way required for blame) if we think that she acted as she did only because of the stressors to which she was exposed. When we think this about a person, we see her behavior as attributable more to her circumstances than to her.
The Milgram subjects mentioned in Note 5 might be like this. The subjects who believed that they were administering shocks seem not to have done so because they were contemptuous of the welfare of the people they thought they were shocking. In fact, many subjects appear to have been very concerned about the welfare of their supposed victims; they shocked them because features of Milgram’s experimental setup exerted a surprising pressure on them to follow the experimenter’s instructions even when this conflicted with their concern for others. It may be, then, that many of the Milgram subjects are not open to blame because their behavior is not best explained by attitudes and judgments that make people appropriate candidates for blame. It may also be true that the subjects were unable to respond to good reasons, but this is not the most direct route to explaining why they are not open to blame. See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1969).
Nelkin notes that I have argued that even psychopaths may be open to moral blame (I make this argument in “Blame and Responsiveness to Moral Reasons: Are Psychopaths Blameworthy?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 [2008]: 516–535). She introduces several reasons for rejecting this thesis (76–79) and I admit that the case of the psychopath is complicated because of his utter inability to engage with moral reasons in the way that non-psychopaths do. However, the killer I am imagining here is not a psychopath. He is a very bad fellow, no doubt, but he may well be able to appreciate certain moral reasons, to show genuine concern for the welfare of at least some people, and so on (even if it is impossible for him to respond to good reasons on some occasions).
It may be that the counterpart can reject moral considerations in a way that the original killer cannot. This might mean that the counterpart is capable of a sort of moral badness of which the original killer is incapable; however, the facts about the original killer’s behavior still seem to me sufficient to make him blameworthy. I develop the strategy of comparing a wrongdoer who cannot respond to moral reasons to a counterpart who can in “Moral Competence, Moral Blame, and Protest,” The Journal of Ethics 16 (2012): 89–109.
Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason, p. 121 and “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility,” in Gary Watson (ed.), Free Will (2nd) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 382.
Nelkin is quoting Alex Kotlowitz, “In the Face of Death,” New York Times Magazine (July 6, 2003).
Indeed, it may be that Gross’s defective moral compass is significant for the juror mainly because of the way it was brought about. Would the juror have had the same response toward Gross if he believed that Gross had an exemplary childhood?
For an insightful discussion of a case like this (that doesn’t agree in all respects with what I say here), see Gary Watson, “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme,” in Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 219–259.
Nelkin is quoting John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza, “Responsibility, Freedom, and Reason,” Ethics 102 (1992): 368–389.
Again, Nelkin is quoting Fischer and Ravizza, “Responsibility, Freedom, and Reason.”
Just to be clear, when Nelkin says that we don’t have to reject “the asymmetry in question” she is not, I think, saying that we don’t have reason to reject the asymmetry that Fischer and Ravizza are encouraging us to reject. What we don’t have reason to reject, on Nelkin’s view, is a different asymmetry, one that Fischer and Ravizza don’t recognize. As we will see, Nelkin distinguishes between two senses of an ability to do otherwise. I take it that she agrees with Fischer and Ravizza that possession of this ability in one of these senses—the sense in which this ability conflicts with determinism—is unnecessary for either praise or blame. So Nelkin accepts one sort of symmetry between praise and blame, but she insists that possession of the ability to do otherwise in the other sense is a necessary condition on blameworthiness but not on praiseworthiness, which gives rise to the asymmetry that she endorses.
Nelkin draws this description from Wolf’s, Freedom Within Reason.
Here is an obvious worry that Nelkin considers (72–76): does determinism entail that whenever an agent acts, his ability to do otherwise was actually interfered with? Nelkin’s response is very interesting. First, she argues that simply eliminating determinism from the causal sequence of an agent’s behavior does not increase the sort of control over behavior that grounds moral responsibility. Next, Nelkin notes that her argument so far only shows that determinism is no less hospitable to control than is indeterminism, which leaves open the possibility that neither determinism nor indeterminism have room for the control over behavior necessary for moral responsibility. This leads Nelkin to a fruitful discussion of the possibility that compatibilist accounts might make use of an agent causal approach—normally the province of incompatibilists—to help secure the relevant sort of control (80–97).
Indeed, it seems that no counterfactual intervener case could provide a counterexample to this principle since in such cases the intervener does not intervene, so there is no actual interference with an agent’s abilities.
Strictly speaking, Nelkin would not endorse this claim either because there can be cases in which a wrongdoer is responsible for the actual interference with his ability and is thus blameworthy for his subsequent behavior. I set this complication aside below.
Nelkin is quoting John Martin Fischer, “‘Ought-Implies-Can,’ Causal Determinism and Moral Responsibility,” Analysis 63 (2003): 244–50.
As I indicate in Note 27 below, I don’t actually accept this conclusion about the potential unfairness of blame.
Nelkin is drawing here on Frances Howard-Snyder, “‘Cannot’ Implies ‘Ought Not,’” Philosophical Studies 130 (2006): 233–46.
One might say that what it is hard for this person to do is to try to lift the boulder, which is different from the case of a person who can try to lift the boulder but who must fail to actually lift it. I don’t think this presents a real problem for my example, though. My point is just that it is one thing to explain that a boulder was not lifted by referencing its weight, and it is something very different—morally different—to explain this fact by referencing a person’s moral attitudes. At any rate, Nelkin’s original example could be changed a bit so that the relevant inability is an inability to try to lift the boulder: we could, for example, compare the contemptuous person I describe to someone who is so physically exhausted that she can’t bring herself to try to lift the boulder. My claim would be that while an inability predicated on physical exhaustion might well count as an excuse, an inability predicated on objectionable moral attitudes would be unlikely to do so.
Nelkin acknowledges the possibility of drawing a distinction like this (108–109), but she does not put it to the use I am suggesting.
For a more detailed argument along these lines, see my “Unwitting Wrongdoers and the Role of Moral Disagreement in Blame” in David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 225–245.
What I have said so far does not address the issue (raised above) of whether it is fair to blame someone who could not have done otherwise and therefore could not have avoided the sanctions associated with blame, particularly the negative reactive attitudes. Very briefly, my view is that though it may be unpleasant to be targeted with negative reactive attitudes, it is not the point of these attitudes to sanction wrongdoers. These attitudes are simply natural responses to the recognition that another has wronged you. Therefore, facts about the wrongdoer will not tend to show that these attitudes are unfair except insofar as they tend to show that no wrong was committed. For a detailed argument along these lines, see Pamela Hieronymi, “The Force and Fairness of Blame,” Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 115–48.
I would like to thank Dana Nelkin for kindly giving me comments on this paper and for fielding questions about her view.
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Talbert, M. Symmetry, Rational Abilities, and the Ought-Implies-Can Principle. Criminal Law, Philosophy 10, 283–296 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9309-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9309-2