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Once More to the Limits of Evil

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“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Howard Beale, Network (1976)

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Notes

  1. As is typical among Strawsonians, I treat resentment, indignation, and guilt as differing only in how the experiencer of the emotion relates to the emotion’s target. A victim resents the person who wronged her, the wrongdoer experiences guilt, and a third-party experiences indignation. While I focus on resentment, the more basic emotion of anger may be apt (Aristotle 2004, bk. II.2; Frye 1983: 85–86; Shoemaker 2015: ch. 3).

  2. More precisely, we learn the conditions for one form of responsibility. A complete account of responsibility would take account of a broader range of emotions, such as shame and gratitude. Such an account would likely find that responsibility is multifaceted, with diverse means of holding responsible associated with different standards or qualities of will. On this, see Shoemaker (2013) and Watson (1996).

  3. Central here is Watson (1987). As I discuss below, Watson (2011): 328n35) seems to change or importantly clarify his view. I thank Neal Tognazzini for emphasizing the importance of this recent work to me. See also, on moral address, Macnamara (2013, 2015), McKenna (1998, 2011), Shoemaker (2007), and Stern (1974).

  4. Among those understanding responsibility through the reactive attitudes’ representational content are Gaus (1990, 2011), Hieronymi (2004), Rosen (2015), Russell (2017), Strabbing (2019), R. H. Wallace (2019), R. Jay Wallace (1996, 2015, 2019), and Van Schoelandt (2018).

  5. Smith (2009): sec. II. iii. I. 5 defends a similar view.

  6. Nelkin here is concerned about “blaming,” which she seems to intend as inclusive of resentment. She (2015: sec. 2) writes that “insofar as one is truly accountable for a past action, it is because one was at the time of the action subject to a demand—a demand to act differently at the time, whether that demand was actually expressed or not.”

  7. Some theorists distinguish “blame” from responsibility, but I take Macnamara here to be using “blame” to mean “hold responsible via resentment” (or like emotions), with a “blamee” being someone at whom resentment is directed.

  8. A weaker characterization here would be that resentment is like address, and so shares some (but not all) of the requirements for appropriate address or has requirements similar to those of address. The expressive view, in contrast, holds that resentment is a form of address, so everything required for address is required for resentment.

  9. Gaus (2011: sec. 7) discusses the evolution of anger to motivate retribution. See Angela Smith (2012) on blame as protest, and Shoemaker and Vargas’s (2019) signaling account.

  10. Denunciation fails to illuminate here for three reasons. (1) Denunciation seems appropriate for a wide variety of criticisms, so may be appropriately directed at beings that are not accountable (though they may have, say, attributability). (2) If “denunciation” is restricted to accountability, so not fitting for psychotics or the like, then assessing the appropriateness of denunciation depends on independently assessing responsibility rather than illuminating the conditions of responsibility by our understanding of denunciation as a form of address. (3) Denunciation is typically addressed to the public, rather than the target, so the problems of directionality (sec. 2.1) would apply to characterization of resentment as denunciation.

  11. Watson (1996: 239): “Yet we blame the dead and the otherwise inaccessible.”

  12. Sartre (1956: 169) suggests that responsibility ends with death.

  13. Compare Beglin’s (2018: 619) interpretation of Strawsonian reactive attitudes as “the direct expression of our basic social concerns, of our social sentimental nature.”

  14. See Gaus (1990: ch. 2), Hurley and Macnamara (2011), Nussbaum (2001: ch. 1), Rawls (1999: 73), Russell (2017: 107–9), Smith (2009: sec. I. i.3. 5–10), Solomon (1973), and Wallace (1996: ch. 2). The cognitive content of emotions may be a non-belief-based way of “seeing as,” as when in the grip of a phobia you do not believe that the bunny is dangerous, but you see it as dangerous nonetheless (Calhoun 2003; cf. Sartre 1993: 52).

  15. This is compatible with using communication-based heuristics as long as the communicative element maintains a derivative role. So, for instance, McKenna (2011) could adopt the representation view and argue that one can gain insight by considering hypothetical conversations of a certain sort. Though resentment is not fundamentally communicative, resentment’s appropriateness may depend on features of an agent that conversational circumstances make salient.

  16. The regard “is revealed in her reasons for action, her immediate proximal intention in acting as she did, and the attitudes she has for relevant others, as well as the broader motives or plans into which specific reasons and intentions for action are nested” (McKenna 2011: 18).

  17. Gaus (1990: 369, cf. Gaus 1996, 166) distinguishes those to whom we must justify ourselves and “the beneficiaries of our moral duties,” McKenna (2011: 11–12) distinguishes morally responsible agents and moral subjects, and Watson (2011: 319) distinguishes morality’s scope and jurisdiction. Lomasky (1987: chs. 7–8) and van Schoelandt (2015) discuss strategies to derive duties protecting the interests of nonresponsible moral beneficiaries.

  18. Here and throughout, I am primarily concerned with when an exculpating condition makes resentment unfitting, though I am not focused specifically on differentiating the conditions for excuse and exemption. See Watson (1987: 259–61; Watson 2015: sec. 4) for important discussion of that distinction.

  19. van Schoelandt (2015) provides an account of the relevant features of an agent’s perspective.

  20. For controversy about whether moral ignorance exculpates, see Rosen (2002), and Harman (2011).

  21. Wolf (1987: 55, emphasis in original) seems to have a view of this sort, in that she sees sanity as necessary for being a responsible agent and requiring “that one’s values be controlled by processes that afford an accurate conception of the world.” Cf. Wolf’s (2011: 333–34) discussion of Harris.

  22. Responses other than resentment may still be appropriate, such as moral horror (Watson 2011: 317), moral disgust (R. H. Wallace 2018), disappointment (Pereboom 2016: 8, 146), or contempt (Shoemaker 2015: 3, 14).

  23. McKenna (2011: 12) likewise writes: “A morally responsible agent must be able to understand morally salient considerations….”.

  24. Not all emotions require that the target have this sort of understanding, or even any understanding. We can be sensibly afraid of a hurricane though it does not understand fear or danger. Note, however, that on the representation view this requirement for understanding makes resentment different in content, but not structure, from other emotions. The expressive view, on the other hand, takes the understanding to be necessary for the special communicative aspect of resentment, while other emotions are not said to have any communicative aspect at all.

  25. In light of evidence that upbringing-induced moral blindness reduces without eliminating responsibility, Faraci and Shoemaker (2014: 14) suggest that “while it is more difficult for [the deprived individual] to identify and do the right things because of that childhood, it is nevertheless not overly demanding to expect him to do so.”

  26. Thomas (1998: 158) writes that some forms of abuse create “a moral gulf… between the proper normative story that the abused child learns and his corresponding normative experiences.” Without the normative experience, Thomas (1998: 161) argues, the moral belief may not have adequate “normative pull,” and the child may not be able to “fully grasp the importance of” the moral values.

  27. That is, insofar as many of the responsibly evil seem just as impervious to our efforts at communication as monsters, the expressive view does not illuminate this important distinction.

  28. To consider what the relevant understanding might amount to, see McKenna and Van Schoelandt’s (2016) consideration of reason-responsiveness and psychic harmony. Compare Watson’s (2011: 318) discussion of “suppressed or partial or partitioned moral sensibilities” in virtue of which “it is possible for us to have relations of mutual accountability.”

  29. Note that for evolutionary fitness “often enough” does not imply usually. Sperm fulfill their fertilization function often enough, though less than one in a billion succeed.

  30. Alternatively, we may focus on the content of the expression instead of expression per se. Along this line, resentment may represent its target as having at least some of the capabilities necessary for complying with the demand that resentment prompts. If, for instance, resentment motivates the resentful to demand that the target empathize with her victim, a theorist may hypothesize that resentment represents the target as having been capable of empathy at the time of her wrongdoing. Again, the representation would not include that the target is currently capable of receiving and complying with the demand, but we should expect some congruence between the representation and the demand.

  31. Strawson insightfully discusses the function of “social morality.” See also Van Schoelandt (forthcoming).

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Neil Tognazzini and the anonymous reviewers for careful and insightful constructive criticism. I have also benefitted greatly from feedback and discussion of these ideas with many people over the years, and I give special thanks to Nathan Biebel, Harry David, Jerry Gaus, Trevor Griffith, Michael McKenna, Hannah Tierney, and the students in my seminar on social morality at Tulane University.

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Van Schoelandt, C. Once More to the Limits of Evil. J Ethics 24, 375–400 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-020-09325-3

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