Abstract
Over the course of the past few decades 4E approaches that theorize cognition and agency as embodied, embedded, extended, and/or enactive have garnered growing support from figures working in philosophy of mind and cognitive science (Cf. Chemero 2009; Dreyfus 2005; Gallagher 2005; Haugeland 1998; Hurley 1998; Noë 2004; Thompson 2007; Varela et al. 1991). Correspondingly, there has been a rising interest in the wider conceptual and practical implications of 4E views. Several proposals have for instance been made regarding 4E’s bearing on ethical theory (Cf. Colombetti and Torrance, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(4), 505–526, 2009; Cash, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9, 645–671 2010). In this paper I contribute to this trend by critically examining the enactive contribution made by Colombetti and Torrance, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(4), 505–526 (2009) and by laying the foundations for an alternative enactive approach. Building off recent enactive approaches to social interaction, Colombetti and Torrance, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8(4), (2009, 518) maintain that many of our actions and intentions “and in particular the ethical significance of what we do and mean” are “emergent from the interactions in which we participate”. Taking this seriously, they argue, entails a radical shift away from moral theory’s traditional emphasis on individual or personal responsibility. I challenge their suggestion that accepting a broadly enactive 4E approach to cognition and agency entails the kind of wholesale shift they propose. To make my case I start by revisiting some of the general theoretical commitments characteristic of enactivism, including some relevant insights that can be gathered from Vasudevi Reddy’s broadly enactive approach to developmental psychology. After that I examine both the arguments internal to Colombetti and Torrance’s proposal and, in an effort to sketch the beginnings of an alternative view, I draw some connections between enactivism, the ethics of care and P.F. Strawson’s work on personal responsibility. I believe that a consideration of the commonalities but also the differences between these views helps advance the important conversation concerning the link between enactivism and questions of personal responsibility in ethical theory that Colombetti and Torrance have undeniably helped jumpstart.
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Notes
This list of commitments is not meant to be exhaustive. I have chosen to foreground these aspects of 4E because they most clearly apply to the discussion below, concerning the nature and possibility of responsible agency.
Cf. A.J. Ayer (1954)
In a paper delivered at a 2009 conference at The New School for Social Research, Hubert Dreyfus struggled with this very issue when he tried to make room for responsibility within his specific conception of unreflective action (or “absorbed skillful coping”).
I say “indirectly” because Colombetti and Torrance do not explicitly engage with the traditional freedom and determinism debate. As we will see, though, some of the conclusions they draw echo conclusions drawn in that debate.
I use the terms individual and personal responsibility interchangeably throughout the paper.
Varela gives the following example: “a bacterium swimming in a sucrose gradient” can be “analyzed in terms of the local effects of sucrose on membrane permeability, medium viscosity, hydromechanics of flagellar beat, and so on” (Varela 1991, 85). However, “the sucrose gradient” and the bacterium’s “flagellar beat are interesting to analyze only because the entire bacterium points to such items as relevant … Remove the bacterium as a unit, and all correlations between gradients and hydrodynamic properties become environmental chemical laws, evident to us as observers but devoid of any special significance” (Varela 1991, 85).
Echoing two points we just saw with De Jaegher and Di Paolo, Reddy emphasizes that (1) “dialogue create[s] and transform[s] the individual and the realm of meaning,” and (2) it “demonstrate[s] the recognition of another being. You would not have a dialogue with someone unless you took for granted, or at least hoped, that he or she was a minded being, capable – at some level – of understanding and responding” (Reddy 2008, 66). Building off Colwyn Trevarthen’s proposal, Reddy argues that there are convincing reasons to attribute at least four structural features of adult dialogical interaction to dyadic non-verbal infant-caretaker “proto-communication,” namely “communicative acts (such as expressions, words, gestures), self-synchrony (the ability to produce organized and coherent actions), interactional and affective synchrony (the ability to relate your own actions and emotions to the other’s actions and emotions), [and] turn-taking (an ability to take turns in acts)” (2008, 71). Numerous other developmental psychologists agree that by the time that they are 2 months-old, human infants engage in proto-dialogues with their caretakers (Cf. Mary Catherine Bateson; Lynne Murray; Daniel Stern; Colwyn Trevarthen; Ed Tronick; as discussed in Reddy 2008, 68–89).
Likewise, not only is there more of the other that we come to see in the process of engagement, but we ourselves are affected by the interaction process; we are “constantly being re-shaped as an entity in relation and … gradually building up awareness of … [ourselves] in these relations” (Reddy 2008 148–9).
I do not want to deny that this can sometimes be for wholly legitimate purposes (think of the Surgeon operating on a patient or the psychoanalyst analyzing, explaining and predicting the behavior of his patient).
Kittay herself rejects the capacities-based approach to moral worth advocated by McMahan and defends a relational approach instead (see Kittay 2009, especially 623–5).
As Kittay notes in a footnote: “it is not unreasonable, in the case of this young man, that he held back his grief to spare his mother and sister.”
Colombetti and Torrance’s enactive contribution to ethical theory is self-reflectively programmatic and tentative: “What we are presenting here must be seen as very much a first outline sketch” (516). In offering this sketch Colombetti and Torrance take up a maximally broad perspective: they engage with debates in metaethics by touching on non-cognitivism and by presenting “the enactive view” as providing “a fresh perspective on the traditional ‘reason versus emotion’ dialectic in ethics.” They furthermore gesture towards connections between enactivism and moral psychology by gesturing at links between enactivism and Spinoza’s ethics of autonomous self-emancipation, as well as conceptions of moral accountability. Finally, they suggest enactivism represents an approach to moral evaluation that differs from mainstream utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethical theories in normative ethics. Though this broad approach may further Colombetti and Torrance’s programmatic goal of indicating a variety of ways in which enactivism offers insights that are currently underdeveloped in ethics it also has a clear downside. This is because this maximally broad perspective requires Colombetti and Torrance to skip over some of the important details needed to gauge how novel their enactive approach genuinely is (For instance, virtue ethics already challenges the “reason emotion dichotomy” that Colombetti and Torrance speak of, and one could add furthermore that this dichotomy trades on a strawman image of Kantian ethical theory. Furthermore, as I point out in this paper, Colombetti and Torrance leave undiscussed the striking commitments shared by enactivists and thinkers from the ethics of care. Someone who does discuss the link between feminist ethics of care and the field of embodied cognition is Mason Cash (2010).
Colombetti and Torrance initially present their “ethical account centering on participatory sense-making and interaction … as supplementing other accounts, as making good some deficiencies and silences in those accounts, rather than as supplanting them” (517). They suggest that three of the most prominent normative ethical theories currently on offer each get something right about ethical life and that “a more reasonable view is to see each approach as offering a distinctive and important contribution to an overall picture.” It seems highly questionable to me that the commitments of a virtue ethicist, an act-utilitarian and a Kantian can be unified into one coherent “overall picture,” since they operate with decisively different conceptions of human nature, the springs of human action, and what gives those actions moral worth. What is more, as Colombetti and Torrance advance they seem to veer in a more critical direction that rejects what they see as the starting-point of Kantian, Utilitarian, and Virtue ethics: namely the image of the “alone-in-a-crowd single agent.”
I want to thank Hanne Jacobs for drawing my attention to this problematic upshot.
Indeed, whereas Colombetti and Torrance urge us to defocus from responsibility-ascriptions at the level of individual agents, Di Paolo et al. (2010) insist that “because an enactive approach places great importance on the autonomy of the individuals involved [in interaction], this approach to social cognition, while focusing on the interaction process, paradoxically also gives social agents an autonomy and role that has not been thematized before: that of participation in contrast to mere observation” (72).
Although I don’t want to overintellectualize the facts and characterize infants, people with severe cognitive disabilities and advanced Alzheimer’s disease as robustly responsible agents, it might not be implausible to understand the activity of turn-taking characteristic of even pre-verbal second person dialogical interaction as a precursor of a genuine taking and attributing of responsibility. After all, turn-taking entails a targeting of the other and a relating to oneself as an intentional agent who can succeed or fail to play their part in the promotion of interaction.
The thesis of determinism has generated roughly three different postures regarding the nature and justifiability of our responsibility, referred to by Strawson as that of the skeptic, the optimist and the pessimist respectively. Since a version of the pessimist’s posture is operative in Colombetti and Torrance’s proposal I will, for my current purposes, restrict myself to a brief discussion of the pessimist stance and Strawson’s critical engagement with it. For a 4E proposal that opts roughly for the pessimist’s counter-view, namely the optimist’s approach, see Mason Cash (2010). Cash argues that taking responsibility (and not avoiding it altogether on the basis of a theoretical insight that our agency might be at its heart “morally impaired”) is something agents will continue to do because “A defense of ‘I cannot help it, my genes and society made me that way’ or ‘my environment made me do it’ abdicates the responsibility for attempting to improve and to earn the right to be trusted, a right that a society otherwise accords to all members who have shown themselves capable of living up to the responsibility that this trust assumes.” (2010, 652) Membership in a community of trusted inter-actors is thus at stake. Freedom and responsibility are “accorded” on the basis of an “earn[ed] … right to be trusted,” which we achieve by claiming ownership where our communal norms tell us it is appropriate to take ownership: “recognition of this potential for improvement, and thus for taking control over factors that otherwise might be external influences on one’s actions is crucial. It can enable us to admit that the potential for systems wider than individual agents to produce actions does not automatically absolve individuals of all responsibility. A forward-looking justification for practices of punishment would support sometimes applying relevant sanctions even to people with a history or environment that might undermine their ability to act responsibly, in order to increase their ability to do so” (2010, 652–3). Similarly, Strawson’s optimist argues that a deterministic conception of human conduct is perfectly compatible with our practices of holding people accountable for their actions; of praising and blaming them for what they do. My beliefs, desires, and intentions may be fully determined by prior conditions or external constrains that preclude the possibility for me to act from a place of unconstrained freedom, but as long as my conduct was caused by my desires, and not by means of coercion or compulsion, we have a sufficient ground for justifying our responsibility-practices. Specifically, the optimist’s idea is that holding people responsible, praising and blaming them for their voluntary non-coerced actions, can shape their motivational states in highly desirable ways. This ‘forward looking’ approach, with its emphasis on the after-the-fact influence of incentives like praise and blame on an agent’s motivational states, justifies responsibility practices for being useful tools in regulating, manipulating or training human behavior. The pessimist objects, and Strawson agrees, that this emphasis on behavior-manipulation cannot capture our sense that our responsibility-practices track moral desert and that they “are expressions of our moral attitudes and not merely devices we calculatingly employ for regulative purposes. Our practices do not merely exploit our natures, they express them” (Strawson, 36)
Of course a fair range of reactive attitudes will still be wholly appropriate for persons who warrant agency-excusing conditions. Our discussion so far has precisely emphasized the epistemological and ethical priority of the second-person engaged attitude with its ability to contribute to the flourishing of persons like Sesha and Audrey. At first glance, Strawson’s way of juxtaposing the objective and the reactive attitude may seem to entail that people like Sesha and Audrey, who are certainly not appropriate targets of the kind of resentment characteristic of typical adult human relationships, are rightfully viewed through the lens of the objective attitude. Strawson touches on this issue when he acknowledges that “the simple opposition of objective attitudes on the one hand and the various contrasted attitudes which I have opposed to them must seem as grossly crude as it is central.” Nuancing his view, he adds, “parents and others concerned with the care and upbringing of young children cannot have to their charges either kind of attitude in a pure or unqualified form. They are dealing with creatures who are potentially and increasingly capable of holding, and being objects of, the full range of human and moral attitudes, but are not yet truly capable of either. The treatment of such creatures must therefore represent a kind of compromise, constantly shifting in one direction, between objectivity of attitude and developed human attitudes” (2008, 32, my italics). The point, then, is not that Audrey and Sesha warrant a wholly objective stance as persons, but that a certain way of understanding their behavior, namely as behavior for which they are responsible, loses traction. Our engagements with Audrey and Sesha and “the range of reactive feelings and attitudes which belong to involvement or participation with others in inter-personal human relationships … cannot include resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, anger, or the sort of love which two adults can sometimes be said to feel reciprocally, for each other” (Strawson 2008, 25). And to have one’s reactive attitudes curtailed in this way, Strawson wagers, just is to place the agent in question outside the community of responsible agents.
Alva Noë argues for a similar point in Out of Our Heads (2010) when he writes: “Our commitment to other minds is … not really a theoretical commitment at all. We don’t come to learn that others think and feel as we do, in the way that we come to learn, say, that you can’t trust advertising. Our commitment to the consciousness of others is … a presupposition of the life we lead together. I cannot both trust and love you and also wonder whether in fact you are alive with thought and feeling.” (33)
Of course a committed Strawsonian pessimist could respond (and perhaps, although this strikes me as unlikely, Colombetti and Torrance would want to respond) that the natural or psychological impossibility for us to give up the reactive attitudes does not rationally justify them and that “the real question is not a question about what we actually do, or why we do it. It is not even a question about what we would in fact do if a certain theoretical conviction gained general acceptance. It is a question about what it would be rational to do if determinism were true, a question about the rational justification of ordinary inter-personal attitudes in general” (2008, 27). However, as Strawson points out, the pessimist’s concern with rational justification is located at the wrong level. If it turned out we had a choice to suspend our reactive attitudes and the inter-personal relations negotiated through them on the basis of a rational theoretical insight, Strawson argues, this choice would derive its rationality from “an assessment of the gains and losses to human life, its enrichment or impoverishment; and the truth or falsity of a general thesis of determinism would not bear on the rationality of this choice” (2008, 28).
Thanks to Alice Crary for urging me to make this more explicit.
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van Grunsven, J. Enactivism, second-person engagement and personal responsibility. Phenom Cogn Sci 17, 131–156 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9500-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9500-8