Blameworthiness, slips, and the obvious need to pay enough attention: an internalist response to capacitarians

Abstract

Capacitarianism says that an agent can be non-derivatively blameworthy for wrongdoing if at the time of their conduct the agent lacked awareness of the wrong-making features of their conduct but had the capacity to be aware of those features. In this paper, I raise three objections to capacitarianism in relation to its verdict of the culpability of so-called “slips” and use these objections to support a rival (“accessibility internalist”) view which requires awareness of wrong-making features for non-derivative blameworthiness. The objections are that (1) the rival internalist view is just as capable of explaining the culpability of paradigm cases of slips; (2) there are some cases of slips without dispositional awareness of wrong-making features that capacitarians wrongly deem culpable; and (3) capacitarianism cannot adequately ground the reasonable expectation to avoid slips (as Fernando Rudy-Hiller has argued). I then argue that an internalist can simultaneously ground a reasonable expectation to avoid slips and account for slips’ culpability by pointing to the satisfaction of a novel epistemic condition: it is (dispositionally) obvious to the slipping agent that they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing, and how to pay enough attention, to reliably achieve the goal that they have set out to achieve.

1 Introduction

According to capacitarianism about the epistemic condition for moral responsibility, an agent can be non-derivatively blameworthy for wrongdoing if the agent lacked awareness of the features that make her conduct wrong (“wrong-making features”), but ought to have been aware of those features, and could have been aware of those features, due to possessing the capacity for that awareness and the fair opportunity to exercise that capacity at the time of acting (Amaya & Doris, 2015; Clarke, 2014, 2017; Murray, 2017; Murray & Vargas, 2020; Rudy-Hiller, 2017; Sher, 2009). This view parts ways with a very prominent and traditional approach to the epistemic condition—which we might call culpability internalism—according to which (roughly) awareness of an act’s wrong-making features is required for non-derivative blameworthiness, and according to which any blameworthiness for wrongdoing while ignorant of wrong-making features should be “traced” back to (derived from) blameworthiness for past wrongdoing done in such awareness (see especially the so-called “volitionists”: Zimmerman, 1997, and Rosen, 2004).¹ But capacitarianism should also be distinguished from other forms of culpability externalism, such as “epistemic vice” theories (e.g., Montmarquet, 1999) and some “quality-of-will” theories (e.g., A. Smith, 2005), which variously deny that awareness of wrong-making features is required for non-derivative blameworthiness. Capacitarianism’s claim-to-fame is that it accounts for more of our folk intuitions of blameworthiness than other theories, and this is partly owing to its ability to account for a range of cases—sometimes called cases of slips (Amaya & Doris, 2015; Rudy-Hiller, 2019)—which had generally been neglected by the literature on the epistemic condition until capacitarianism emerged. Slips are plausibly defined by Rudy-Hiller as “wrongful actions or omissions that a good-willed (or at least no ill-willed) agent inadvertently performs due to a failure to recall, notice, realize, or think about relevant considerations, a failure that was not preventable by taking measures that any reasonably prudent person would have taken [i.e., not due to a breach of a prior duty of care] and for which there is no obvious excuse” (2019: 727).

In this paper, I raise three objections to capacitarianism in relation to its verdict of the culpability of slips and use these objections to support a variety of culpability internalism that I call accessibility internalism. According to this alternative, there must be dispositional awareness of wrong-making features for non-derivatively culpable wrongdoing (the “internalist” part), but there must also be the capacity and fair opportunity to be occurrently aware of these features (the “accessibility” part). (I interpret Neil Levy [2014] as offering an account like this when he demands that, for culpability, beliefs in the morally significant facts must be “personally available” in the sense of “easily and effortlessly retrieved.”) The first objection to capacitarianism is that its primary motivation—that capacitarianism alone can account for slips—is undercut by the fact that accessibility internalists can also account for cases of slips. The second objection is that capacitarianism yields “false positive” verdicts of blameworthiness in a certain range of cases in which the agent lacks dispositional awareness of wrong-making features. The natural solution is to require, as the accessibility internalist does, dispositional awareness of wrong-making features. The third objection—recently raised by Fernando Rudy-Hiller (2019)—is that capacitarianism’s externalist conditions fail to ground a reasonable expectation of the agent to avoid wrongdoing, where an account of blameworthiness for wrongdoing must do so. Now the capacitarian could turn this objection against the accessibility internalist too. But contrary to Rudy-Hiller (2019), the solution is not that slips are blameless in the end because it is unreasonable to expect people to avoid slips, given a lack of awareness of the need for special vigilance in the circumstances. Rather, the internalist solution is that slips are paradigmatically culpable, because they paradigmatically involve dispositional awareness of the slip’s wrong-making features, and because what grounds the reasonable expectation to avoid slipping is that it is (non-occurrently) obvious to the agent at the time of the slip that (and how) they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing to reliably—that is, in the absence of extraordinary situational factors—achieve their goal (a goal whose achievement would be thwarted or stalled by slipping).

In Section 2, I set out capacitarianism and show how it is supposed, exclusively, to accommodate intuitions of the culpability of slips. In Section 3, I raise the three aforementioned objections to capacitarianism. In Section 4, I then set out Rudy-Hiller’s (2019) proposed alternative to capacitarianism. In Secton 5 I put forward my specific accessibility internalist proposal, and then in Section 6 I defend it against two objections, before wrapping up in Section 7.

Methodologically, this paper turns on the premise that theorists of the epistemic condition should be in the business of accommodating folk intuitions of blameworthiness, or at least that it is an advantage of a theory of the epistemic condition that it can account for such intuitions. Some have doubted these claims given the unreliability of folk intuitions (Levy, 2017; Talbert, 2017). I will not engage with these criticisms here, but simply note that even if accommodating folk intuitions of blameworthiness is not an advantage, there are still interesting questions to ask about which theory of the epistemic condition is most viable on the assumption that it is.

It is also worth saying that by “blameworthiness,” I mean the “accountability” kind of blameworthiness (if there is more than one kind of blameworthiness; cf. Rudy-Hiller, 2019) assumed by capacitarians. This is the kind that involves being the appropriate target of the emotions and reactions constitutive of blame. The nature of blame has, of course, been the subject of intense debate in recent times, but my aim will be to avoid that question by assuming the capacitarian understanding of blame and by focusing on our “ordinary” intuitions of blameworthiness.

2 Capacitarianism

Consider, first, the following three cases, which help to illustrate the capacitarian position:

• House Fire: Hudson has never forgotten to switch off the oven. However, suppose that on the one day that he forgets to switch it off when tidying after cooking, one of its safety features malfunctions in the middle of the night, emitting extreme heat onto the kitchen bench, and setting it on fire. Suppose that he awakes just in time to get himself and the landlord out of the house before the house burns down.

• Day-Care Mix-Up. Tammy usually drops her baby off to day-care, but today she has prearranged her husband to do so. However, moments after sending him off with the baby, he comes bursting back in, exclaiming that plans need to change after an urgent issue has arisen at work. Tammy responds accordingly and forms the plan to drop the baby off to day-care on the way to work. “Minutes later, however, instead of taking the freeway exit for the daycare, [Tammy] heads straight to work. [Her] child is quiet. Children tend to fall asleep in a moving car” (Amaya & Doris, 2015: 265). Tammy arrives at work and entirely forgets about her sleeping child as she leaves her car. (She has already “moved on” in her head to what needs doing this morning at work, and so she leaves and locks the car absent-mindedly.) The baby is left strapped in the hot car for hours and suffers heat stroke (cf. Amaya & Doris, 2015; Rudy-Hiller, 2019).

• Daft Commute Home. When I arrived at the bus-station, recently, I hopped onto another bus that would take me home, completely forgetting that I had taken my car to the bus-station and parked it there in the morning. Just like poor Randy (who forgot to buy milk on the way home after promising his wife that he’d do so; Clarke, 2014), the reason why I forgot was that I was daydreaming philosophically. Still, before this incident, I had never forgotten that my car was at the station when I had chosen to commute that way. And on that day, it never occurred to me before I reached the bus station on my way home that my car was parked there, nor that I would risk not thinking of it upon arrival at the bus-station. Now, as it happened, nothing morally significant was riding upon my remembering to take my car home, but suppose that on that day there was something morally significant riding on that. Suppose, for example, that I had promised to help my wife tidy our messy house before dinner guests arrived.

In each case, (i) the agent performs an intuitively wrong omission in or from a lack of occurrent awareness in a wrong-making fact. Hudson fails to turn the oven off without realising that it is still on; Tammy fails to take her baby to day-care while forgetting the baby is the back of the car; and in Daft Commute Home, I fail to take my car home, forgetting that I brought it to the bus station this morning. Nonetheless in each case (ii) it is intuitive to say that the agent is morally blameworthy for that omission (assuming that the agent is not exempt from blame in the first place by falling short of basic moral competence). For those of us who see the need to vindicate this intuition (see the methodological qualification in the introduction), the challenge is how to account for the agent’s intuitive blameworthiness for their wrongful omission, given that they are crucially factually ignorant at the time of their omission, and given that we tend to think that blameless factual ignorance excuses.² The capacitarian claim-to-fame is that capacitarianism alone can account for the agent’s culpability. On the one hand, popular quality-of-will theories of blameworthiness—according to which conduct is culpable only if it displays a bad quality of will (e.g., callousness, or an objectionable evaluative attitude)—cannot account for the agent’s culpability, because the agent plausibly does not, nor need not, exhibit ill will.³ On the other hand, popular internalist tracing theories of blameworthiness for unwitting conduct—according to which culpability for unwitting conduct must be traced back to culpability for “witting” conduct which violates an obligation to take a precaution against ignorance—cannot account for these cases either, because it is plausible to take these cases as so-called “non-tracing cases” (cf. H. Smith, 2011). Hudson has never forgotten to turn the oven off. Tammy has always remembered to drop her baby off to day-care. And I had never forgotten to take my car home. Indeed, provided that neither ill will nor tracing to awareness can account for these agents’ blameworthiness (and that there are no extraordinary circumstances explaining their failure of awareness), their omissions are what capacitarians call slips (Rudy-Hiller, 2019: 727; cf. Amaya & Doris, 2015) and so capacitarians say that they alone can account for slips.

But how? Capacitarianism is the view that direct responsibility or blameworthiness for some conduct requires either awareness, or the capacity for awareness, of that conduct’s wrong-making features. The view is disjunctive, because capacitarians allow blameworthiness in paradigm cases of blameworthiness for acting in full awareness of the morally relevant facts. However, the key point of contrast is the claim that having the mere unexercised capacity for awareness without actual awareness of the wrong-making features can be enough for direct blameworthiness. Capacitarians demand the satisfaction of other conditions related to the exercise of the capacity, too. Fernando Rudy-Hiller describes the view as holding that when the agent is not aware of the relevant considerations, “they should and could be aware of them given the available evidence, the opportunity to adequately process it, and their cognitive capacities” (Rudy-Hiller, 2022). Thus, there must not only be (i) unexercised capacities for awareness, but it must be that (ii) the agent should have the relevant awareness, and that (iii) they have a (fair) opportunity to exercise their capacity for awareness.

With these conceptual ingredients, capacitarians argue that they are able to account for intuitions of the blameworthiness of slips. Hudson plausibly has the capacity to be aware that the oven is still on while tidying up. Tammy surely has the capacity to be aware that the baby is in the car and that this is the freeway exit that she needs to take as she drives past. I definitely had the capacity to remember my car’s location or that I took my car to the bus-station this morning, as I arrived at the bus station. And these hold true on either the counterfactual or temporal accounts of “capacities.”⁴ The agents plausibly also have the opportunity to exercise this capacity at the time of the omission. There are no “situational factors that decisively interfere with the deployment of the relevant abilities” (Rudy-Hiller, 2017: 408), nor are there any that “mask… the manifestation of psychological capacities without diminishing or eliminating them” (Clarke, 2017: 68). It is not as if Tammy has “just witnessed a horrible accident, [in which case] it might not be reasonable to expect her to remember or think to do certain things that she has a capacity to remember or think to do” (ibid). Finally, it is plausible to say that at the time of their omissions the agents ought to be aware of the relevant facts, or that they fall below “cognitive standards that apply” to them (Clarke, 2014) by failing to be thus aware. This is because being aware of the relevant facts is needed for them to avoid their wrongful omissions (Sher, 2009: 111–12) and no doubt because they can be thus aware through having the opportunity to exercise their capacity for awareness (cf. the ought-implies-can principle).

3 Three objections to capacitarianism

Capacitarianism does well to account for intuitions of culpability for slips. However, three important objections should be raised against it. The first two are my own. The third is found also in Rudy-Hiller (2019). My contention is that they point to a return to culpability internalism.

3.1 Objection #1: lost explanatory advantage

The first objection is that the capacitarianism “claim-to-fame”—that capacitarianism alone can account for the culpability of slips—is undercut by the fact that a plausible variety of culpability internalism can also account for the culpability of slips. Of course, this is not to say that capacitarianism is false, or even that it should not be accepted, but that it is no better than a rival view on this issue. As such, the objection is intended to level the playing field.

Let me start by spelling out the form of culpability internalism that I have in mind. According to this view, which I call accessibility internalism, there must be occurrent or dispositional awareness of wrong-making features at the time of wrongdoing for the act/omission to be non-derivatively culpable, but when the awareness is dispositional, the three capacitarian conditions with respect to occurrent awareness must be met: there must be the capacity and fair opportunity to be occurrently aware of these features—that is, they must be internally accessible—and their failure to be occurrently aware must fall short of a cognitive standard that applies to them (because it is needed for them to avoid wrongdoing). The key thing that distinguishes accessibility internalism from capacitarianism, then, is that the former requires occurrent or dispositional awareness of wrong-making features—that is, possession of an occurrent or dispositional true belief in wrong-making features—at the time of wrongdoing for direct culpability, while capacitarianism does not. Capacitarians can, of course, (and plausibly do, with counterfactual analyses; see n. 4) analyse capacities for awareness in terms of “dispositions” to be aware, but dispositions to be aware are different from instances of dispositional awareness: you can have a disposition to form the true belief that p under certain circumstances (perhaps by noticing the fact that p in those circumstances) without already having the dispositional (implicit or non-occurrent) belief that p, and vice versa.⁵ Given, then, that accessibility internalism falls short of “strong internalism” (Yates, 2022) or “volitionism” (Rudy-Hiller, 2022) (because it does not require occurrent awareness of wrongdoing), the view therefore counts as a form of “weakened internalism” (cf. Rudy-Hiller, 2022). It might also be dubbed “capacitarian internalism” (cf. Yates, 2022), given that the three capacitarian conditions must be satisfied when there is only dispositional awareness of wrong-making features. However, to avoid confusion with capacitarianism proper (which requires no awareness of wrong-making features), I will stick to the label of accessibility internalism.

There are two important components to the awareness on this view. (1) The nature of the awareness need not be occurrent, but dispositional (i.e., it need not be tokened in a conscious thought at the time of acting). (2) The content of the relevant awareness need not be morally de dicto, but morally de re (to use language from the literature; cf. Rudy-Hiller, 2022). That is, awareness of wrong-making features can suffice for the relevant content, whether or not this awareness includes awareness of these features so conceived, and whether or not there is awareness of the fact that the act is wrong (contrary to volitionists such as Zimmerman [1997] and Rosen [2004], and dispositional belief-in-wrongdoing theorists such as Haji [1997] and Peels [2011]). Thus, if you cheat on your partner without having the occurrent thought that you are being “unfaithful,” “disloyal,” or “adulterous” (wrong-making features) but you are aware dispositionally that these correctly describe you, then you can be blameworthy for cheating on her, even if you are not occurrently or dispositionally aware that this makes the act wrong or immoral (i.e., aware de dicto).⁶

The reason why there must be the capacity and fair opportunity to be occurrently aware of wrong-making features is that there are some cases in which an agent’s dispositional awareness of wrong-making features cannot be easily “activated” (to use Peels’ [2011] terminology) by the agent, and that it is unfair to blame them for failing to activate those features: it is not fair to blame Jimmy, say, for failing to use important information about the whereabouts of something valuable in his home town, which he deep down knows but cannot easily access (due, e.g., to trauma).

In the literature, I interpret Neil Levy’s (2014) view as a form of accessibility internalism.⁷ On his view, the non-derivatively culpable wrongdoer must be conscious of the “morally significant facts” that play a role in explaining the act’s moral valence, where by “conscious,” Levy means “online”—that is operative in the actual reasons for which the agent acts (the agent’s explanatory reasons)—and “personally available,” that is, “easily and effortlessly retrieved” (without any special prompt, such as in response to the question posed to them, “what are your reasons for doing that?” [2014, 33]). This notion of personal availability provides a plausible analysis of the accessibility condition, or the capacity and fair opportunity to have occurrent awareness.

How is it that accessibility internalism is able to account for the same intuitive cases of blameworthiness as capacitarianism? Well, consider that in each of the three cases above, the agent possesses dispositional awareness of the wrong-making features of their omission and these features are accessible, in the right, internal way, to these agents. Hudson is plausibly aware that the oven is on while he is tidying up the kitchen (given that he switched the oven on in the first place, and that he can hear the oven in the background), even though he is not attending to that fact and so this awareness is merely dispositional. Surely, moreover, this dispositional awareness is accessible. Similarly, Tammy is plausibly still aware that her baby is in the car (after she put her baby in) and that she needs to take the baby to “day-care.” In fact, as she drives past the freeway exit, we can even attribute to her the dispositional awareness that “that is freeway exit n” and “freeway exit n is the exit that I need to take to drop the baby off to day-care.” And this dispositional awareness is very accessible to her. Finally, the same considerations can be made about Daft Commute Home. I am surely dispositionally aware that I left the car at the bus-station this morning and even that I need to take my car home from the bus-station. And surely these facts are accessible to me. On every other occasion, I have remembered these facts at the right time when I have taken the car to the bus-station in the morning.

I contend, in fact, that there are no uncontroversial cases of slips given by capacitarians in the literature that cannot also be evaluated as cases of non-derivative culpability by accessibility internalists, and the reason is that these uncontroversial cases of slips always appear to involve dispositional awareness of wrong-making features. This is actually quite surprising on capacitarianism, or so I will argue in the following section. Meanwhile, cases of intuitively culpable unwitting omissions that are controversially regarded as “slips” by capacitarians—because critics of capacitarianism take the omissions to be only indirectly culpable on tracing grounds (and so deny that they count as “slips”)—are dealt with by accessibility internalists either as cases of culpable slips (like the three cases above) or as cases of indirectly culpable unwitting omissions. I have in mind cases such as Sher’s (2009) Hot Dog, Clarke’s (2014) forgetting to buy milk, as well as Sher’s (2009) On the Rocks and Nelkin and Rickless’ (2017) Secret Service discussed in Section 6. Essentially, if the agent has dispositional awareness of wrong-making features at the time of the omission, then accessibility internalism treats the omission as a directly culpable slip.⁸ But if the agent lacks both occurrent and dispositional awareness of wrong-making features at the time of the omission, accessibility internalism can only secure culpability for the omission indirectly through tracing. I illustrate how this works in Section 6. But here, too, we see how accessibility internalism differs from capacitarianism: sometimes, in cases where capacitarians offer non-derivative analyses of unwitting omissions, accessibility internalists can only offer derivative or tracing analyses of their culpability.

3.2 Objection #2: false-positives

Now, the capacitarian could try to exploit this difference by contending that there are some intuitive cases of slips whose blameworthiness accessibility internalists cannot account for. These would have to be cases in which the agent lacks both occurrent and dispositional awareness of the wrong-making features of their wrongful omissions—so that tracing would be required, for the accessibility internalist—but where there is definitely no prior breach of a duty of care to which culpability can be traced, and yet the agent is intuitively blameworthy for their conduct. Alas, according to my second objection to capacitarianism, any such cases are not really cases of intuitive blameworthiness. Rather, I think that if there are such cases, capacitarianism produces “false positive” verdicts of blameworthiness in them.

Consider an interesting example from the command responsibility literature in international criminal law. In a recent (2017) paper, legal scholar Darryl Robinson criticises the “had reason to know” (HRTK) test sometimes employed by international tribunals to assess the legal culpability of commanders for their subordinates’ war crimes. Robinson points out that the HRTK test for commander responsibility would be satisfied if the commander had “possession” of reports that had made it to his office with details about these war crimes. But according to the way that the Chambers have understood the term, Robinson points out that “possession” means only that the information “needs to ‘have been provided or available’ to the commander” (2017: 644). “[The] commander need not have ‘actually acquainted himself’ with the information” (2017: 643–644). As a matter of fact, it would be sufficient for the reports to have “made it to his desk, even if exigent demands of his work understandably delayed him from reading the reports” (2017: 645). Robinson, however, criticises this test as being “over-inclusive,” for surely the commander who, on account of these extenuating circumstances, did not get to read the reports in time for effective remedial action, is not negligent here, and so not legally culpable.

Clearly, my intention is not to contribute to the command responsibility literature, but I think that the case, or at least a variant of it, is useful for assessing what capacitarians should say about the commander’s moral culpability (regardless of what test we might want to employ to assess his legal culpability), and accordingly, about the culpability of agents in similar types of cases.

• Subordinate War Crimes. Suppose that we have a commander whose subordinates have committed a terrible atrocity (the unjustified killing of civilians) without knowledge of it. A report indicating these crimes (presumably not from the perpetrators themselves) makes it to his desk and ends up at the bottom of a pile of other reports. Now suppose that the “exigent demands of his work,” including the reading of other reports, delay his reading the relevant report, but that he could easily have picked it up to read about the incriminating information in time for effective remedial action (say, because he has recently developed the habit of flipping the pile of reports to work on the bottom ones first).

The commander seems to satisfy the capacitarian’s conditions. He has the capacity to acquire the information (e.g., he can read the reports; he has recently flipped the pile of reports), he seems to have the fair opportunity to acquire the information (a number of days to possibly pick up this report), and one of his work obligations is to know what his subordinates are up to: he ought to know the contents of this report. Suppose, however, that he does not read the report in time for effective remedial action against what happened.

It appears that the capacitarian should say that he is blameworthy for this omission. But this seems counterintuitive. After all, the information has not “made it” to the commander. And even though his workload still allows it to be the case that the commander could easily—in fact, let us say, would usually have—read the report in time for effective remedial action, his failure to read it does not seem traceable to any blameworthy conduct. He has carried out his job as usual, to a decent standard. It just seems unlucky that he has failed to read the report—and unlucky, of the kind that threatens a judgment of culpability for his subordinates’ war crimes. Robinson himself seems to have this intuition guiding his judgments about the commander’s legal responsibility: the HRTK “test hinges too dramatically on whether other actors or external events bring the alarming information into the nebulously-defined ‘possession’ of the passive commander” (2017, 646). Culpability is made too external and, in consequence, too subject to luck.

I think that the same observations could be made about other cases like it, involving the clear lack of awareness of relevant facts, even though it would be easy to acquire this awareness, and one should acquire it. Think of a case in which (a) a major incident appears in your peripheral vision—a high-profile burglar breaks into building in the distance—such that you would usually and could easily spot it, and (b) you are there to spot incidents like that—as a security guard—but (c) you are focused on something unrelated in your foreground that seems suspicious (an escalating disagreement between two shadowy men). It would be easy for you to spot the break-in and it is your job to spot breaches of security but since your attention seems to be focused on something else, it would seem unfair for someone (e.g., your boss) to blame you for not responding to the break-in. The information has not properly entered into your head. And yet capacitarianism seems, wrongly, to entail that you are blameworthy for this omission (all things being equal): you had the capacity and fair opportunity to be aware of something you ought to be aware of.

3.3 Objection #3: reasonable expectations

So far I have argued against capacitarianism that it cannot exclusively account for paradigm examples of slips and that it seems to yield false positive verdicts of blameworthiness in cases of slips involving a lack of occurrent or dispositional awareness of wrong-making features. My final objection to capacitarianism (ultimately, as I will show; Section 5) gives the accessibility internalist an edge over capacitarianism. It is Rudy-Hiller’s (2019) objection that capacitarianism cannot ground a reasonable (thereby fair) moral expectation of the agent to avoid wrongdoing, and that any theory of blameworthiness should ground such an expectation—because it is unfair to blame someone for failing to do something that it would have been unreasonable and thereby unfair to expect them to do. Capacitarians tend to claim that their view can ground such an expectation (Amaya & Doris, 2015: 257; Clarke, 2017: 72; Murray, 2017: 519; cf. Rudy-Hiller, 2019: 729), and so this objection should concern them.

But how does capacitarianism fail to ground reasonable expectations? Consider Day-Care Mix-Up. The capacitarian would accommodate the intuition of Tammy’s blameworthiness by insisting that Tammy meets their conditions on non-derivative blameworthiness as she drives past the freeway exit (or indeed, as she exits the car at work without noticing or recalling that her baby is in the back). These are moments in which Tammy should recall that the baby is in the car, has the capacity to recall or notice it, and has the fair opportunity to exercise that capacity. But here comes the rub about reasonable expectations: while Tammy is distracted, it seems unreasonable to expect her to “snap out” of her distraction and recall or notice that the baby is in the car. Surely we cannot, to quote James Montmarquet (1999: 845), “[expect] this individual, magically, to exert a suitable effort while being in the mental state [s]he is in.”

Capacitarians could reply that what makes Tammy the subject of a reasonable expectation to avoid wrongdoing is either that on many other occasions in the past she has easily recalled that she has to drop the baby off (Amaya & Doris, 2015: 267), or indeed that in other similar circumstances she would recall that information (the precautious mother that she is). But Rudy-Hiller has persuasively replied that:

Amaya and Doris’ inference is mistaken. We cannot infer from the fact that the parent effortlessly recalled that she had to drop her baby off at the day-care on the days it was prearranged that she would do so that she was equally capable of effortlessly recalling this when she had unexpectedly switched turns with her spouse (2019: 734).

Similarly, the mere fact that she would normally recall her responsibility whilst driving in similar cases of unexpectedly switching turns with her spouse, does not seem to license a reasonable expectation to do it this time.

But the capacitarian could now reply that the accessibility internalist does no better to ground a reasonable expectation to avoid a wrongful omission. And the challenge of answering this charge should, I think, be accepted by the accessibility internalist. How is it reasonable to expect that the agent “consults,” “accesses,” or (to use Peels’ [2011] language) “activates” their dispositional awareness of wrong-making features in the circumstances? Isn’t this to expect a “magical” effort of reflection, given the state she is in? Don’t we need something that prompts the need to do so? This is, after all, why reasonable expectations are at home with “volitionist” and other occurrent awareness internalist theories. With occurrent awareness of wrong-making features (“that is the exit that I need to take”), such theories provide the necessary “prompt” to engage in a reasoning procedure with the outcome of avoiding wrongdoing (Levy, 2009). But, as I would now like to demonstrate in the next two sections, the accessibility internalist has conceptual resources here—with their appeal to awareness—that the capacitarian lacks.

4 Rudy-Hiller’s (2019) solution

Rudy-Hiller (2019) is well aware of this problem for capacitarianism, which is partially why he retreats from his earlier (2017) capacitarian position. His (2019) solution is to propose an internalist conception of “cognitive control” as necessary for blameworthiness. Cognitive control, according to Rudy-Hiller, is “realized through the management of [one’s] attention” and “brings about a desired [cognitive] state of affairs,” such as “avoiding distraction” (2019: 724). To exercise this control is to exert what Samuel Murray calls vigilance, “the disposition to become occurrently aware of morally or prudentially relevant considerations that constitute a sufficient reason to act or omit” (Murray, 2017: 508). Importantly, however—and contrary to Murray—“the capacity for vigilance per se [does not] add up to responsibility-level control” (Rudy-Hiller, 2019: 731). Responsibility-relevant cognitive control also requires the satisfaction of an awareness-of-risk condition, involving awareness of the need for vigilance due to the risk of cognitive failure (i.e., the risk of failing to notice, think, recall, etc.), and a know-how condition, involving awareness of how to avoid that cognitive failure in the circumstances. Although, like the accessibility internalist view, Rudy-Hiller’s view combines capacitarian conditions with a demand for some kind of awareness for non-derivative culpability, it is not an accessibility internalist view because the awareness-of-risk and know-how conditions do not entail awareness of wrong-making features at the time of the wrongful omission (a point to which we will return).

Recall that in Day-Care Mix-Up Tammy has never forgotten to drop her baby off. Without awareness of the risk of cognitive failure and awareness of how to avoid that failure—that is, for Rudy-Hiller, without having been in similar circumstances in the past which would have alerted her to the possibility of forgetting that the baby is in the car—Rudy-Hiller would argue that Tammy is “in the dark regarding the risks associated with allocating cognitive resources in certain ways and therefore… in the dark regarding the need to exercise that capacity” (my emphasis, 2019: 731). Indeed, Tammy is even “entitled to rely on the good functioning of [her] cognitive capacities without having to put in special effort to shore them up” (my emphasis, 2019: 732). His point is put persuasively with the following pair of rhetorical questions:

How could it be fair to blame someone for a cognitive failure that resulted from her having entrusted something to memory when she was entitled to do so and hadn’t had the opportunity to learn about the possible risks involved? (2019: 733)

How could she [reasonably] be expected to anticipate [the risk of failing to recall that the baby is in the back and needs taking to day-care] in the absence of some relevant previous experience that alerted her of the need to exert more vigilance in the particular circumstances she was in? (2019: 735)

No answer is forthcoming, thinks Rudy-Hiller, so agents like Tammy are blameless. In the end, a consideration of reasonable expectations runs up against our ordinary intuitions of blameworthiness in cases of slips, and so, for the reason that an account of blameworthiness must include a reasonable expectations condition, slips must be denied as culpable.

5 The obvious need to pay enough attention

Rudy-Hiller’s “internalist”⁹ capacity-based view requires that we ignore intuitions of culpability for slips so as to account for what it would be reasonable to expect. But I think that accessibility internalism can do better. I think that it can account for both culpability intuitions and for the need to ground reasonable expectations by affirming the blameworthiness of slips like Tammy’s. How so?

Start with the idea that direct culpability depends on something like the capacity for vigilance, as Rudy-Hiller (2019), Murray (2017), and Murray and Vargas (2020) think,¹⁰ but in particular, on the reflective ability to access “easily and effortlessly” (Levy, 2014) one’s dispositional awareness of wrong-making features, or to attend to the sufficient reasons that one already possesses (i.e., one’s motivating reasons) to act or omit.¹¹ Something like this reflective capacity is needed in an accessibility internalist account of direct culpability, which, after all, requires occurrent or dispositional awareness of wrong-making features for direct culpability. The capacity is not merely reflective, however. It is often triggered by a kind of external “prompt”—for example, seeing something in the environment that would cause one to be occurrently aware of a reason that one already has.

But how is it reasonable to expect the agent to exercise this capacity to “consult” or “access” their motivating reasons in the circumstances? It would certainly be reasonable if there were an external prompt to access one’s reasons, but there are manifestly no external prompts in cases of slips. I propose the following answer for cases of slips.¹²

• The obvious need to pay enough attention

• (a) It is obvious to the agent at the time of the slip that they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing to reliably (that is, in the absence of extraordinary “situational factors”) achieve their goal—where achieving that goal would be thwarted (or stalled) by slipping.

• (b) It is obvious to the agent how to pay enough attention.

I contend that this is the condition whose satisfaction simultaneously grounds the reasonable expectation to avoid slipping and accommodates intuitions of culpability for slips. While this account draws from, and has important similarities, with Rudy-Hiller’s awareness-of-risk and know-how requirements, in that it proposes a requirement of a higher-order awareness of the need for exercising one’s capacity for awareness and of how to exercise this capacity, it has some important dissimilarities with his account which I argue make all the difference in the assessment of culpability for slips.

Let me first spell out the components of these conditions. To begin with, it must be true that the agent needs to pay enough attention to what they are doing to reliably achieve their goal.¹³ Of course, an agent cannot do anything without paying some attention to what they are doing. But the claim here is that the agent needs to pay enough attention to what they are doing, where “enough” is set by what would reliably achieve their goal. In other words, the amount needed is whatever amount would guarantee the achievement of their goal in the absence of the sort of extraordinary situational factors that capacitarians recognise would threaten the agent’s fair opportunity to become aware of their omission and its wrong-making features (e.g., an accident at the bus-station).¹⁴ This and only this is what I mean by “reliably.” Now by paying attention to “what they are doing” I do not, of course, mean paying attention to the way that they are currently distracting themselves (unless it were under that description) but rather paying attention to the complex action that they understand themselves to be engaged in (e.g., commuting home the way I commuted into work), or to the part of the complex action that they understand themselves to be engaged in (e.g., at the bus station needing to find my car), or to what needs doing to achieve one’s goal (e.g., I need to find my car), or to the goal itself (e.g., to get home the same way I commuted to work), or something equivalent. Clearly, in order to pay attention to what they are doing, they also need to be paying attention to their external environment in the ways needed to achieve their goal (e.g., paying attention to the fact that I am now at the bus-station needing to recall where I parked), and so I include this object of attention in “attention to what they are doing.” I don’t see any reason to exclude these distinct objects of attention as all equally valid ways of paying attention to “what one is doing” and so I will simply use this phrase. The relevance of the reference to the “goal” is that a slip, when it is culpable, is something that thwarts, or else stalls (e.g., in Tammy’s case), the achievement of a goal. Hudson’s goal is to clean up after using the kitchen, a job which involves turning off the oven. Tammy’s goal is to drop the baby off to day-care. My goal was to take my car home. It is possible, however, that some slips do not thwart or stall the achievement of a goal; and if so, they are not the sort of slips that are culpable.¹⁵

Let us now focus on the attitude ascription, “it is obvious to the agent that.” There is a reason why the need to pay enough attention must be obvious to the agent, but first we should ask what is involved in this ascription. If some proposition p is obvious to the agent, it is plausibly a matter of their strongly held belief that p, indeed psychological certainty that p. Importantly, p need not be occurrent. Compare that it may be obvious to you that the sum of three squared is nine, or that the sun sets in the west, even though you are not thinking of these propositions. Indeed, the particular proposition in the proposed condition—that one needs to pay enough attention to what one is doing to reliably achieve one’s goal—is typically not occurrent in cases of slips. Finally, what must be obvious to the agent is either this proposition as stated or a proposition equivalent in meaning. For example, the proposition that they “ought” to be, rather than “need” to be, “sufficiently” “focusing” or “concentrating” on, rather “paying enough attention to,” “their action,” “task,” “role,” “job,” “goal,” rather than “what they are doing”—or even that they need to have enough “presence of mind” or “vigilance” in the circumstances—are all equally valid candidates for satisfying what must be obvious to the agent. (One exception is that it need not necessarily be obvious to the agent that they need to pay enough attention to reliably—that is, in the absence of extraordinary situational factors—achieve their goal, where the italicised part is explicit in their mind. If it is obvious that they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing so that they can complete it (without any concept of “reliability” or “extraordinary situational factors”) that would be enough.)

Lastly it should be clear what is meant by its being obvious to the agent how to pay enough attention. Precisely how they can pay enough attention will depend on the case, but it must be obvious to the agent at least under someone general description (e.g., “it is obvious to me that I need to pay enough attention by keeping myself from being distracted”).

Now my contention is that whenever we understand ourselves to be doing something or to be in pursuit of a goal whose achievement would be thwarted or stalled by a slip, it is obvious to us at the time of the slip, that we need to pay enough attention to what we are doing to reliably achieve that goal, and how to pay enough attention. In fact, I contend that in all the cases of slips under consideration (including others put forward by Rudy-Hiller and capacitarians), it is overwhelmingly plausible to attribute to the agent the obvious recognition of the need to pay enough attention (and of how). If these agents were asked whether they should be paying enough attention to what they are doing, they would undoubtedly retort: “of course!” obviously!” “no duh!” Consider, first, Day-Care Mix-Up. Tammy has taken responsibility for taking her child to day-care. Thus, at any moment on her way to the day-car, and so moments before she passes the freeway exit, it is surely obvious to Tammy that she needs to pay enough attention to what she is doing to ensure that she drops the baby off to day-care. And she is also certain how to pay enough attention to what needs doing as the case may be (e.g., notice the sign for the freeway exit at the right time). The same applies to her later as she goes to leave her car at work. At that point, it is surely still obvious to her that she needs to pay enough attention to what she is doing or to what needs doing to drop the baby off, but now of course the answer would be different. Evidently, she has forgotten what her goal is, but that doesn’t preclude its being dispositionally obvious to her that she needs to pay enough attention to achieve her goal.¹⁶ The same goes for House Fire. While Hudson is tidying up the kitchen after use, it is obvious to him that he should pay enough attention to the tidy-up so that it is tidied up properly, where (obviously) one of the things that he needs to do is to switch off the oven. Indeed, enough attention on what he needs to do would cause him to notice that the oven is still switched on. And precisely how he can pay enough attention to the tidy-up is obvious to him (e.g., by making a conscious effort to look around to see what needs tidying up). Similarly, in Daft Commute Home, as I am commuting home and thus when I arrive at the bus station, it is obvious to me that I need to pay enough attention to what I am doing to commute home the way I commuted to work this morning. And it is obvious to me how to pay enough attention (e.g., by recalling how I got to the bus-station this morning). In each of these cases the proposed conditions are satisfied. Consider finally that in retrospect, it would have been natural or fitting for these agents to feel guilty, stupid, or remorseful for their slip, and to have thought to themselves: “I knew I should have been paying more attention to what I was doing in that moment.”

It is now time to consider the way that this account clashes substantively with Rudy-Hiller’s account. Rudy-Hiller would likely object that since these agents have not slipped in the past, they haven’t had “a fair opportunity to learn about the possible risks involved” (2019: 733), and so it is not obvious to them that they need to pay special attention to what they are doing this time, or more attention than usual in order to avoid their slip. In fact, Rudy-Hiller would argue with respect to Day-Care Mix-Up that before Tammy passes the freeway exit, she is entitled to “rely on the good functioning of her cognitive capacities” (2019: 732) or entitled to “entrust to her memory” (2019: 733) the job of taking the freeway exit. Tammy does not need to put in any “special effort” to “shore up” these capacities (2019: 732).

But surely the response to this is that Tammy is entitled to rely on her capacities, such as memory, without having to put special effort in to shore them up, only to the extent that this counts as paying enough attention to what needs doing to reliably achieve her goal. It is not as if she is entitled to entirely “switch off” to the need to drop her baby off. Unless she knows that she has exceptionally bad short-term memory, she need not pay constant attention to the need to drop the baby off to day-care (e.g., “day-care, day-care, day-care”). But she knows that a certain degree of effort is needed to pay enough attention to achieve her goal. And since she fails to achieve her goals despite the fair opportunity to do so, or the lack of any significant disruption to her attention, we can infer that she failed to have the level of attention that was needed to fulfil her goal.

As a matter of fact, whenever we take responsibility for achieving a goal (i.e., much of the time!), it is obvious to us that we need to pay enough attention to what we are doing, at the right time, to achieve it. We may come to have a further reason for this already obvious recognition in our awareness of the risk of not paying enough attention given the failure to do so in the past (and this would give us heightened awareness of the need to pay more attention this time). But this is not essential, nor even typical of our basic recognition of the obvious need to pay enough attention. We also recognise the need to pay enough attention especially when we have to achieve multiple goals at once (as in the case of Tammy), for then we have the mental burden of multi-tasking. Indeed, when we have taken responsibility for achieving some immediate goal, we often have the occurrent thought—that is, we ask ourselves—“what am I doing again?” or “what do I need to do?”, and not necessarily because we also have the occurrent thought that “last time I didn’t think hard enough about what I needed to do and it was a disaster.” I take this to be evidence of our basic recognition of the obvious need to pay enough attention.

Now let us come to the important question of why it needs to be obvious to the agent that (and how) they need to pay enough attention. Someone might grant some of the argument that I have been making so far but take issue with the appeal to obviousness. Why won’t simple “awareness” do? The answer has to do with the all-important need to ground a reasonable expectation to avoid the slip. Recall that for the occurrent awareness internalist (such as the “volitionist”), an expectation to avoid wrongdoing would be reasonable only when there is an occurrent belief that prompts the agent to engage in an explicit reasoning procedure with the output of avoiding wrongdoing (Levy, 2009). Similarly, although Rudy-Hiller (2019) remains silent on the occurrent/dispositional distinction, I interpret him to be putting forward the idea that occurrent awareness of the risk of not being vigilant is required to ground a reasonable expectation, for similar reasons.¹⁷ I think that something in the ballpark of this claim is true. Mere dispositional awareness is not enough to ground a reasonable expectation, even if it is “easily and effortlessly retrieved.”¹⁸ What I think these occurrent awareness theorists overlook, however, is that it is enough for someone to be subject to a reasonable to expectation to avoid wrongdoing if, at the time of their omission, something related to their obligation to act (such as the need to pay enough attention, in cases of slips) is at least obvious to them—even if it is not obvious to them occurrently. In other words, a reasonable expectation does not require that the agent is prompted by a thought, nor that they are consciously thinking of something.

Let me try to motivate this point with respect to other cases in which it seems reasonable to expect someone to do something based on an obvious premise, even though what is obvious to the agent is not occurrent. They include the following: (1) It is reasonable to expect someone to calculate the answer to a maths problem for whom it is obvious how to answer it—so obvious, even, that the method of calculating it need not be occurrent to them while they calculate it. (2) It is reasonable to expect your romantic partner to avoid cheating on you when it is obvious to them—but not occurrent to them—in the heat of the moment that cheating is wrong. (3) It is reasonable to expect someone to avoid wrongdoing, despite being morally uncertain about whether to perform the act, if it is obvious to them that they need to deliberate about what to do (and if that deliberation would uncover the fact that the balance of their reasons weighed in favour of avoiding wrongdoing).¹⁹ What these claims have in common is that it is reasonable to expect to act on a premise that is obvious, if not occurrent, to them. Occurrent awareness is not required to license a reasonable expectation; obviousness is.

6 Two objections

I have just argued that it is reasonable to expect an agent to avoid a slip only when at the time of the slip it is obvious to them (if only dispositionally) that they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing to reliably achieve their goal. Given that slips (almost always)²⁰ thwart or stall the achievement of a goal, and given that in such cases, it is always obvious to the agent that (and how) they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing to reliably achieve their goal, it follows that slips are (almost always) culpable—assuming, as we have been, the fulfilment of the other conditions on culpability, such as awareness of wrong-making features. Let us now consider two likely objections to my proposal.

The first objection tries to use my proposal from last section against accessibility internalism’s requirement of (occurrent or dispositional) awareness of wrong-making features. Consider, first, the following two cases from the literature:

On the Rocks. Julian, a ferry pilot, is nearing the end of a forty‐minute trip that he has made hundreds of times before. The only challenge in this segment of the trip is to avoid some submerged rocks that jut out irregularly from the mainland. However, just because the trip is so routine, Julian’s thoughts have wandered to the previous evening’s pleasant romantic encounter. Too late, he realizes that he no longer has time to maneuver the ferry. (Sher, 2009, 24)

Secret Service. Alvaro is an important member of the president’s Secret Service detail. His job is to keep the president safe at all times. Right now, the president is working a rope line at a rally. There are hundreds of people along the rope line hoping for the chance to shake her hand. Alvaro is next to the president, checking for signs of suspicious behavior. His iWatch vibrates. Stealing a quick glance at it, he sees that he has a text message from his son, who is at a restaurant with some of his… high school friends… Suppose, now, that Alvaro stops for a second to read the text message, and, just at that moment, a person in the rope line lunges at the president. (Nelkin & Rickless, 2017, 123–24)

Now, intuitively, Julian and Alvaro are culpable for their wrongful unwitting omissions. Whilst distracted, it is surely obvious to Julian and Alvaro that (and how) they should pay enough attention to what they are doing as to reliably do their job (to get the ferry passengers safely to their destination, and to protect the president from an attack). Julia and Alvaro are not, however, aware, at the time of their omission, of the features of their omission that suffice to make it wrong. Julian is too distracted to even notice the impending rocks. Alvaro has looked at his phone and has not seen the attack. But an objector could well reply that this is where accessibility internalism, with its requirement of awareness of wrong-making features, breaks down. An objector could account for the capacitarian’s intuition of non-derivative blameworthiness in these cases, and indeed account for what it takes to be subject to a reasonable expectation to avoid wrongdoing, by asserting only the (fulfilled) requirement of its being obvious to them that need to pay enough attention to what they are doing. In other words, Julian could be non-derivatively blameworthy for failing to avoid the rocks because he is aware of the need to concentrate on his job, even while he is distracted by his daydreaming, and even though he is not aware that the rocks are coming up now and need manoeuvring.

But there are two reasons to resist this move. To begin with, such a view seems to inherit the false-verdicts problem for capacitarianism. The commander in Subordinate War Crimes and the security guard in the burglary case both seem to recognise the obvious need to pay attention to their job, but, as we saw above, they are intuitively blameless for their omissions—and the reason that I proposed above was that they are not (occurrently or dispositionally) aware of the wrong-making features of their omissions, and there is no prior breach of a duty of care to which their culpability can be traced. Awareness of wrong-making features is needed to avoid false positives, if there are any.

There is a second worry for the idea that we should reject accessibility internalism but retain obvious recognition of the need to pay enough attention. I think that this account fails to ground a reasonable expectation in the following way. Pause the sequence of events in On the Rocks and Secret Service moments before Julian and Alvaro “perform” their omissions when distracted by their daydreaming and text message. Now imagine that we could ask Julian and Alvaro what they ought to do, given what they know. Neither could say “avoid the omission”: Julian could not say “avoid the rocks”; Alvaro could not say “prevent the attack on the president.” That is because they are distracted, and distracted enough that they are not aware of the morally significant facts even dispositionally. Rather, in response to our question, they could only reply: “return my attention to my job.” This strongly suggests that it would not have been reasonable to expect them to avoid the rocks or prevent the attack directly. For that, they would have needed to know more—namely, that the rocks are rapidly coming up and need avoiding, and that the president is being attacked. Indeed, these are the kinds of facts that the agents do know in the above cases of slips. Think, for example, of Daft Commute Home (with awareness that the car is at the bus station) and House Fire (with awareness that the oven is on).

How then do we account for the intuitive culpability of Julian and Alvarro? Here is where we should appeal to tracing (following, e.g., Nelkin & Rickless, 2017), for it does not appear that these are clear cases of slips: these are omissions with a breach of a prior duty of care, a breach at the time of which there seems to be a wrong-making feature of that breach that is obvious to them (e.g., that they have jobs which require close and constant attention).²¹ I would say that it is because this wrong-making feature is itself obvious to Julian and Alvarro that it is reasonable to expect them to fulfil their duty of care by keeping focused on their job. (Recall the example of sexual infidelity despite the obvious wrongfulness of doing so, for another example of where the obviousness of the wrong-making feature itself grounds the reasonable expectation to avoid wrongdoing.)

Let us now turn to a second objection to my account. According to this objection, the dispositional obviousness of needing to pay enough attention is not able to license a reasonable expectation to avoid the slip, and thus to make someone responsible (in the full accountability sense) for it. Occurrent awareness is necessary. While the objector might concede that, on the one hand, it is sometimes natural or fitting for one to “feel guilty, stupid, or remorseful” for their slip, it might, on the other hand, be equally natural or fitting to have feelings that suggest the opposite of culpability. One might, when reflecting on one’s slip, feel a sort of estrangement regarding one’s own agency, an incredulity toward what happened, or a sort of bewilderment at the frailty of one’s cognitive capacities: “how could I have missed (forgot, failed to realise) that?” Accordingly, one might feel that it was entirely out of their hands—that there wasn’t anything one could have done intentionally to prevent the slip given one’s current mental frame at the time. These feelings suggest that one is not responsible in the accountability sense for one’s slip, as the fitting subject of an adverse response on the part of the people affected by it. We might then appeal to other theoretical resources to account for the intuition of culpability for slips—perhaps to the idea that one is still “responsible” in another, weaker sense for one’s slips, such as causally responsible, role-responsible, or in need of providing compensation for them (Rudy-Hiller, 2019, 736ff.; Derk Pereboom, 2016).²²

This objection certainly has much to be said for it. To begin with, I agree that given the agent’s current mental frame at the time of a slip, there isn’t anything they can do intentionally to avoid slipping. Since their occurrent thoughts or feelings are not about their goal (or about something they know they’ve forgotten but can’t bring themselves to remember), the agent cannot choose to engage in an explicit reasoning procedure with the outcome of achieving their goal. It’s not like the choice is clearly presented to Tammy: “either (a) drop the baby off or (b) keep driving to work.” In this way, one’s agency is at the mercy of one’s occurrent feelings or spontaneous thought-forming mechanisms; and one is in need of some luck to avoid slipping. But, even if this element of luck lessens one’s culpability compared with the culpability of fully advertent wrongdoing, I don’t think that this removes one’s culpability entirely. It is still obvious to the agent, at the time of the slip, that they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing, at the right time, to achieve their goal. And they still have the capacity and fair opportunity, afforded by this obviousness, to be occurrently aware of the morally significant facts to which they already have internal access, and to avoid the slip. This (alongside the ability to avoid the slip; viz., the satisfaction of the “control condition” on culpability) seems to suffice for licensing a reasonable expectation to avoid it. As Philip Robichaud has argued:

it seems plainly reasonable to expect drivers to check their mirrors before changing lanes, and the reasonability of this expectation on a given occasion does not depend on whether the agent consciously [i.e., occurrently] believes on that occasion that she should check them. (2014, 150)

And consider, by analogy, our (non-slipping) case of the sexually unfaithful man to whom, in the heat of the moment, it is only dispositionally obvious that cheating is wrong or has the features that make it wrong. Can we justifiably say that it turns out to be unreasonable to expect him to avoid his infidelity because he is not explicitly thinking of any of these properties of cheating at the time he’s tempted? Surely not. To tie reasonable expectations and blameworthiness so tightly to occurrent thoughts and feelings has unwelcome and implausibly revisionary implications not just for cases of slips.²³

Now, the objector is right to point out feelings of incredulity or bewilderment at the frailty of one’s cognitive faculties when reflecting on one’s slip, but these feelings are not surprising on my view either. By the definition of “slip,” the agent has never slipped in this way before. They have never forgotten, failed to realise or notice the same sorts of morally significant facts in similar circumstances. No wonder it is natural for them to feel incredulous. The objector also cites the question “how could I have missed that?” as tending to show the lack of culpability for the slip. But this seems to neglect an important feature of the phenomenology of blame. In my view, “how could I?” is just as indicative of self-blame as “how could you?” is of blaming others. Properly analysed, the question is: “How could they do that, when they clearly knew better²⁴ and were able to the right thing?” Everything in them was stacked against their doing the wrong thing (slipping), such that it would have been harder, in some sense, metaphysically, to do that than to do the right thing. “How could they?” then captures our incredulity at their doing wrong despite this judgment about them.

Finally, while we must admit that there are responsibility concepts other than concept of accountability, nevertheless appealing to these non-accountability concepts to account for the intuition of the culpability of slips fails to do justice to their culpability. In my view, these concepts do not concern openness to blame but to other (weaker) forms of moral criticism. Although I cannot defend this claim at length here, merely judging the slipping agent as causally responsible, violative of a role that they undertook, or as owing recompense to those affected by the slip, does not suffice for moral blame.²⁵ But even if I am wrong about this, and we must recognise each of these as constitutive of different kinds of blame, I take it that I have given a successful argument for why slips are (nearly always) culpable in the full accountability sense. Of course, the objector could now press the charge that:

ordinary intuitions about blameworthiness for slips are a jumble of these different notions of responsibility (Rudy-Hiller, 2019, 737).

But it is not clear to me what positive reason we have to think this, outside of the need to explain ordinary intuitions about blameworthiness for slips only once we take ourselves (like Rudy-Hiller does) to have a successful argument that slips are not culpable in the accountability sense. But my case is that there is no such argument. Thus, in the absence of independent (e.g., empirical) evidence that ordinary intuitions about blameworthiness for slips are indeed muddied by intuitions of responsibility in these other senses—something that Rudy-Hiller admits that he only “speculates”—I do not see the need to defend my view against this charge.

7 Conclusion

Any theory of the epistemic condition worth its salt must address the intuitive culpability of slips. Capacitarians have done well to bring slips to the forefront of responsibility theorists’ attention and to grapple with what a theory of the epistemic condition should look like given the need to account for their culpability. But their answers have proved unsatisfying. It turns out that the examples of slips typically considered by capacitarians can be explained as non-derivatively culpable just as readily by internalists who say that occurrent or dispositional awareness of wrong-making features is required for non-derivative blameworthiness. Moreover, capacitarians seem wrongly to be committed to the culpability of slips that involve no awareness whatsoever of wrong-making features; and capacitarians are unable to explain why it is reasonable to expect agents to avoid slips. With volitionists and Rudy-Hiller, reasonable expectations are sensitive to the agent’s awareness. The internalist, equipped with her demand for awareness, therefore has the upper hand: she shares the advantage of accounting for the intuitive culpability of paradigmatic slips with capacitarians, but she can also say that capacitarians get some cases wrong, and that she alone is on the right turf for grounding the reasonable expectation to avoid slipping. Capacitarians, however, could reply that the appeal to awareness itself does not make any difference to the licensing of a reasonable expectation to avoid slipping, for the question still remains (given that there is no occurrent awareness of wrong-making features in slips), “how is it reasonable to expect someone to activate their dispositional awareness of wrong-making features?” This challenge, though, can be met: it is reasonable, when there is something obvious about the situation that makes one’s dispositional awareness of wrong-making features relevant (either one of these features themselves or some other feature about one’s situation). Volitionists (and arguably Rudy-Hiller) get close to the truth with their requirement of an occurrent belief to be subject to a reasonable expectation, but the requirement of occurrent belief is too strong. What matters is obviousness. And my proposal is that in cases of slips, what is obvious to the agent is that they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing to reliably achieve a goal (a goal whose achievement would be thwarted or stalled by slipping) and it is obvious how they can pay enough attention. Since these are obvious to the agent, it follows that they can be subject to the reasonable expectation to avoid slipping. The accessibility internalist can therefore account for the intuitive culpability of slips and provide a plausible grounding for reasonable expectations. And they can do so without straying from the traditional idea that blameless factual ignorance excuses (at least where “ignorance” here is taken to mean the complete lack of awareness of wrong-making features).