Oppression and Victimization; Choice and Responsibility

This essay discusses a cluster of problems for feminist theory and practice which concern responsibility and choice under conditions of oppression. I characterize four major perspectives from which situations of oppression or victimization can be seen and questions about choice and responsibility answered: The Perspective of the Oppressor; The Perspective of the Victim; The Perspective of the Responsible Actor; and The Perspective of the Observer/Philosopher. 1 compare their strengths and weaknesses and discuss their compatibility.     

Sensitivity and Responsibility for Consequences

Philosophical Studies -     

IX—On Being Bored Out of Your Mind

The contemporary philosophical debate over practical reasoning—over how one ought to figure out what to do—has been almost entirely focused on whether there is more to it than means-ends reasoning. But a prior and very difficult question has to do with why instrumental deliberation is so important an aspect of our cognitive life (regardless of whether there is anything else). I consider an answer broached by Harry Frankfurt, that having ends is the alternative to being literally bored out of one's mind, and adapt an argument from John Stuart Mill's political and psychological writings to show what more there is to not being bored than just having something to aim for.     

Choice, Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities

Is choice necessary for moral responsibility? And does choice imply alternative possibilities of some significant sort? This paper will relate these questions to the argument initiated by Harry Frankfurt that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility, and to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza's extension of that argument in terms of guidance control in a causally determined world. I argue that attending to Frankfurt's core conceptual distinction between the circumstances that make an action unavoidable and those that bring it about that the action is performed – a distinction emphasised in his recent restatement – provides a new route into an analysis of Frankfurt's argument by showing how it depends on a person's ‘decision to act’ involving the exercise of choice. The implicit reliance of Frankfurt's argument on this notion of choice, however, undermines his claim that the example of the counterfactual intervener strengthens the compatibilist case by providing a counter-example to the principle of alternative possibilities. I also argue that Frankfurt's reliance on the exercise of choice for moral responsibility is also evident in the Fischer/Ravizza argument, and that a close analysis of both arguments shows that such exercise of choice is not available if causal determinism is true.     

Truth and Consequences: The Effect of Responsibility on Eyewitness Behavior

Previous research has revealed that eyewitness identification errors are so common as to render such testimony of questionable value as courtroom evidence. However, all of this research was conducted in settings where the eyewitnesses were not responsible for the consequences of their responses—that is, they were aware they were in an experiment. The present research compared eyewitness behavior in an explicitly experimental setting with behavior in a setting that the subjects perceived to be real and in which loss of time, potential embarrassment and discomfort, a student's reputation, and the validity of a scholarship competition were at stake. Surprisingly, two studies both found that subjects were just as willing to offer information, just as willing to make a positive identification, and just as inaccurate in the real as in the experimental setting. These results indicate that previous research has accurately portrayed eyewitness error rates in actual investigations. Implications of the present research for the use of eyewitness testimony are discussed.     

责任意识:前因与后果、结构与动力

责任意识,不仅是一个多学科、多领域共同关注的社会性主题,也是一个可以从多个视角审视、多种认知逻辑考量的复杂性问题.心理学对责任意识有着特殊的关注,已经取得了大量的研究成果,对责任归因、儿童责任意识发展、责任与情感关系等进行了实验研究,对责任意识的文化特征和文化差异,也有研究者做了深入分析.     

Perpetrators' Freedom of Choice as a Determinant of Responsibility Attribution

Abstract

In the present study, a swindler had high versus low freedom of choice while deciding to commit a crime. He actually swindled Polish university students (involved observers) out of a large versus a small amount of money (high vs. low loss). Other students (noninvolved observers) were informed about the swindler's action. All students suggested the punishment that they believed the swindler deserved (the punishments chosen were used as an index of responsibility attribution). Involved students assigned more severe punishments than noninvolved students did. In the high-loss condition, involved observers were more punitive than they were in the low-loss condition. The judgments of the swindler's victims were determined by the magnitude of their loss; they ignored information about the swindler's freedom of choice. In contrast, the responsibility attributed by the noninvolved observers was influenced by the swindler's freedom of choice, but only in the low-loss condition. Noninvolved observers informed that the swindler had high freedom of choice were insensitive to information about the magnitude of the consequences for the victim.     

Determining Factors in Choice of Arcade Games and their Consequences upon Young Male Players

Two experiments, one conducted with male university students and the other with male high school and junior high school students, investigated (a) determinants of preferences for driving-type games widely available in public game arcades, and (b) the effects of extended play upon mood and motivation to continue playing. Four games were investigated: these were Death Race and Demolition Derby , which simulate violent, antisocial driving behavior; and Night Driver and Le Mans , which simulate skilled prosocial driving behavior. Preference for arcade games simulating aggressive behavior was found to be independent of personality and mood. However, preferences were closely related to the performers' c]apabilities. Players who exhibited higher levels of skill preferred the more skilldemanding games and those who showed less skill preferred aggression games, suggesting the operation of competency motivation in that the players preferred games appropriate to their level of skill. Subjects reported that the games were exciting, but extended play produced discomfort or an increase in negatively toned moods (fatigue, anxiety, and depression) and a decrease in positively toned moods (social affection, surgency, skepticism, concentration and vigor). However, these effects were not found to be a function of the anti- or prosocial content in the specific games studied and may well be effects accompanying activities that are subjectively fatiguing.     

Social Behaviors as Determined by Different Arrangements of Social Consequences: Diffusion of Responsibility Effects With Competition

Abstract

According to a recently proposed synthesis, social loafing, social facilitation, and deindividuation can be viewed as different ways of arranging social consequences (B. Guerin, 1999). The effects of such arrangements have been measured in past research as productive output (social loafing and social facilitation) or as antinormative behaviors (deindividuation), but all 3 effects are manipulable by changing individual identifiability, evaluation, social identity, task difficulty, and presence in a group. The synthesis also predicted that these same variables would apply to other measures and other arrangements of social consequences. To this end, in the present 2 experiments, the author varied the arrangements for consequence diffusion in a competition situation by varying small and large competing groups and measured productive output and antinormative behaviors simultaneously. The 2 experiments showed social-consequence effects in competition situations with college students, giving further support for the social-consequence synthesis and the idea that the verbal naming of phenomena in social psychology is arbitrary.     

Reasons-Responsive Compatibilism and the Consequences of Belief

John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer a theory of moral responsibility which makes responsibility dependent upon the way in which moral agents view themselves. According to the theory, agents are responsible for their actions only if they think of themselves as apt candidates for praise and blame; if they come to believe they are not apt candidates for praise and blame, they are ipso facto not morally responsible. In what follows, I show that Fischer and Ravizza’s account of responsibility for consequences is inconsistent with this subjective element of their theory, and that the subjective element may be retained only if they are willing to implausibly restrict their account of responsibility for consequences. I end by discussing the broad significance of the failure of the subjective element for their overall approach to moral responsibility.     

Responsibility and the shallow self

Contemporary philosophers of moral responsibility are in widespread agreement that we can only be blamed for actions that express, reflect, or disclose something about us or the quality of our wills. In this paper I reject that thesis and argue that self disclosure is not a necessary condition on moral responsibility and blameworthiness: reactive responses ranging from aretaic appraisals all the way to outbursts of anger and resentment can be morally justified even when the blamed agent’s action expresses or discloses nothing significant about his or her “deep self,” judgments and cares, or the quality of his or her will. I argue that the self-disclosure requirement on responsibility overestimates the extent to which our blaming practices and responsibility judgments are responsive to agents as opposed to actions, and that this mistake has the potential to distort both our reactive responses and our understanding of blamed agents’ characters.     

Responsibility and the Kinds of Freedom

In this paper I seek to identify different sorts of freedom putatively linked to moral responsibility; I then explore the relationship between such notions of freedom and the Consequence Argument, on the one hand, and the Frankfurt-examples, on the other. I focus (in part) on a dilemma: if a compatibilist adopts a broadly speaking “conditional” understanding of freedom in reply to the Consequence Argument, such a theorist becomes vulnerable in a salient way to the Frankfurt-examples.