Reasons-Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility: The Case of Autism

In this paper, I consider a novel challenge to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. According to their view, agents possess the control necessary for moral responsibility if their actions proceed from a mechanism that is moderately reasons-responsive. I argue that their account of moderate reasons-responsiveness fails to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for moral responsibility since it cannot give an adequate account of the responsibility of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Empirical evidence suggests that autistic individuals demonstrate impairments in counterfactual thinking, and these impairments, I argue, are such that they cast doubt on Fischer and Ravizza’s construal of moderate reasons-responsiveness. I then argue that modifying the view in order to accommodate individuals with ASD forces them to defend a strong reasons-responsive account despite the fact that they explicitly deny that such an account can adequately characterize what it is to be morally responsible for one’s actions.     

What Happens When Someone Acts Compulsively?

The standard philosophical view is that compulsive behaviors are caused by “irresistible” desires. Gary Watson famously argued that this view conflates compulsion with weakness of the will, and proposed differentiating weakness and compulsion by appealing to the normal strength-of-will of members of the community. This extrinsic distinction leaves no room for phenomenological differences between weakness and compulsion. Evidence from clinical psychology shows, however, that compulsion is associated with certain phenomenological features that are absent in cases of weakness. I therefore reject the irresistible desire account. Instead, I propose that psychological compulsions “wear down” an individual’s normal faculty of self-control, i.e., the will. The recurrent inhibition of the behavior by the will overexerts this faculty, causing the psychological stress noted by psychologists. This stress raises the cost of resistance until it is unbearable. The subject abandons resistance and therefore performs the behavior.     

Aquinas and Weakness of Will

Aquinas's admirers, reacting against Donald Davidson's criticisms of him, commonly argue (a) that the will does play a role in Aquinas's account of incontinence, and (b) that his explanation of incontinent action turns on the weakness of the will. The first part of this paper argues that they are correct about (a) but wholly mistaken about (b). Aquinas rarely even mentions the weakness of the will, and he never invokes it to explain why someone acts counter to her own better judgment. In his view, such a person has the capacity for self-control but fails to exercise it.
  The second part of the paper considers Gary Watson's account of incontinence, including and especially his objections to analyzing it as the failure to exercise one's capacity for self-control. Here I argue that Aquinas's account better serves the purposes of moral discourse and that it should not be expected to provide the kind of causal explanation Watson seeks.     

How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?

Libertarianism has, seemingly, always been in disrepute among philosophers. While throughout history philosophers have offered different reasons for their dissatisfaction with libertarianism, one worry is recurring: namely a worry about luck. To many, it seems that if our choices and actions are undetermined, then we cannot control them in a way that allows for freedom and responsibility. My fundamental aim in this paper is to place libertarians on a more promising track for formulating a defensible libertarian theory. I begin by arguing that Robert Kane's influential formulation of libertarianism actually generates an acute worry about luck, showing specifically that Kane's recipe for solving the problem of luck and his attendant conception of the location and role of indeterminism derived from it are deeply problematic. I then offer a reformulation of libertarianism – particularly a new conception of the location and role of indeterminism – that is capable of avoiding the problems that beset Kane's theory and that, I argue, places libertarians on a more promising track for formulating a defensible theory.     

Moral Responsibility and Motivational Mechanisms

This paper provides a discussion and defense of a recent formulation of the idea that moral responsibility for actions depends on the capacity to respond to reasons. This formulation appears in several publications by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, where the authors argue that moral responsibility involves a kind of control over one’s actions which they call “guidance control.” This kind of control does not require an agent’s ability to do something different from what he actually does, but instead requires only that the actual process leading to the action be responsive in some suitable way to the reasons that the agent has for acting. After summarizing this view, I offer the following two innovations to the authors’ view: I argue that the level of control required for moral responsibility (which I call “regular reasons-responsiveness”) is much stronger than what the author’s view allows for; and 2) I give a common-sense account of the kinds of motivational mechanism relevant to moral responsibility. Given these innovations, I show that this kind of view allows us to easily answer some counterexamples that appear in the current literature on moral responsibility.     

Taking responsibility for health in an epistemically polluted environment

Proposals for regulating or nudging healthy choices are controversial. Opponents often argue that individuals should take responsibility for their own health, rather than be paternalistically manipulated for their own good. In this paper, I argue that people can take responsibility for their own health only if they satisfy certain epistemic conditions, but we live in an epistemic environment in which these conditions are not satisfied. Satisfying the epistemic conditions for taking responsibility, I argue, requires regulation of this environment. I describe some proposals for such regulation and show that we cannot reject all regulation in the name of individual responsibility. We must either regulate individuals’ healthy choices or regulate the epistemic environment.     

Barry Taylor

I respond to an argument made by Gunnar Björnsson and Ragnar Francén Olinder against motivational internalism. Björnsson and Olinder present a hypothesis in which all of us are selfishly motivated to act in accordance with our moral judgments. The conceivability of such a possibility, they argue, rules out motivational internalism. I argue that this is not the case, and that, according to one dominant view about moral judgments, the agents in the hypothesis do not make genuine moral judgments. One therefore cannot argue decisively against motivational internalism without arguing against this view about moral judgments.     

Moral responsibility,conversation, and desert: comments on Michael McKenna’s conversation and responsibility

In this paper, I engage with several of the intriguing theses Michael McKenna puts forward in his Conversation and Responsibility. For example, I examine McKenna’s claim that the fact that an agent is morally responsible for an action and the fact that an agent is appropriately held responsible explain each other. I go on to argue that despite the importance of the ability to hold people responsible, an agent’s being morally responsible for an action is explanatorily fundamental, and in this sense responsibility is response-independent. I then explore some of the specific aspects of McKenna’s conversational theory before turning to his suggestion that the conversational nature of our responsibility practices gives us special kinds of reasons for accepting that agents are deserving of the harms of blame. Finally, I conclude by raising questions for his argument that the scope of blameworthy actions extends beyond that of impermissible actions.     

Evolution and Free Will: A Defense of Darwinian Non–naturalism

In his recent book The Natural Selection of Autonomy , Bruce Waller defends a view that he calls "natural autonomy." This view holds that human beings possess a kind of autonomy that we share with nonhuman animals, a capacity to explore alternative courses of action, but an autonomy that cannot support moral responsibility. He also argues that this natural autonomy can provide support for the ethical principle of noninterference. I argue that to support the ethical principle of noninterference Waller needs either a libertarian or a compatibilist theory of autonomy. I then go on to argue that, contra Waller, the libertarian view is both compatible with Darwinism and able to make sense of how autonomous acts belong to the agents who perform them. Thus, I conclude that the libertarian position is a live option for Darwinians. If however, naturalism is taken to include a deterministic view of the universe (at least at the nonquantum level), as is often the case, then my article takes some strides in defending "Darwinian non–naturalism."     

Schizophrenia and Moral Responsibility: A Kantian Essay

In this paper, I give a Kantian answer to the question whether and why it would be inappropriate to blame people suffering from mental disorders that fall within the schizophrenia spectrum. I answer this question by reconstructing Kant’s account of mental disorder, in particular his explanation of psychotic symptoms. Kant explains these symptoms in terms of various types of cognitive impairment. I show that this explanation is plausible and discuss Kant’s claim that the unifying feature of the symptoms is the patient’s inability to enter into an exchange of reasons with others. After developing a Kantian Quality of Will Thesis, I analyze some real life cases. Firstly, I argue that delusional patients who are unable to enter into an exchange of epistemic reasons are exempted from doxastic rather than moral responsibility. They are part of the moral community and exonerated from moral blame only if their actions do not express a lack of good will. Secondly, I argue that disorganized patients who are unable to form intentions and to make plans are exempted from moral responsibility because they do not satisfy the conditions for agency.     

Gratitude,Rights, and Moral Standouts

Many maintain that if a beneficiary has a right to a benefit provided by his benefactor, then the former cannot owe the latter gratitude for that benefit. In this paper I argue against that view. I provide examples in which benefactors provide others with benefits to which they have a right even though most others are denying them that right. These benefactors are moral standouts; they do what is right when most similarly situated agents fail to do so. I then spell out some of the features of these benefactors’ actions that make them worthy of gratitude.     

The Limits of Evil and the Role of Moral Address: A Defense of Strawsonian Compatibilism

P.F. Strawson defends compatibilism by appeal to our natural commitment to the interpersonal community and the reactive attitudes. While Strawson's compatibilist project has much to recommend it, his account of moral agency appears incomplete. Gary Watson has attempted to fortify Strawson's theory by appeal to the notion of moral address. Watson then proceeds to argue, however, that Strawson's theory of moral responsibility (so fortified) would commit Strawson to treating extreme evil as its own excuse. Watson also argues that the reactive attitudes do not lend unequivocal support to Strawsonian compatibilism and that the reactive attitudes are sometimes sensitive to considerations which suggest an incompatibilist or skeptical diagnosis. Watson attempts to provide a Strawsonian defense against these difficulties, but he ultimately concludes that the skeptical threats raised against Strawsonian compatibilism cannot be sufficiently silenced. I believe that Watson has done Strawsonian compatibilism a great service by drawing upon the notion of moral address. In this paper I attempt to defend the Strawsonian compatibilist position, as Watson has cast it, against the problems raised by Watson. I argue against Watson that Strawson's theory of responsibility, as well as the notion of moral address, does not commit the Strawsonian to treating extreme evil as its own excuse. I also argue that Watson misinterprets the point of certain reactive attitudes and thereby wrongly assumes that these attitudes are evidence against Strawsonian compatibilism.     

Psychopaths and blame: The argument from content

The recent debate over the moral responsibility of psychopaths has centered on whether, or in what sense, they understand moral requirements. In this paper, I argue that even if they do understand what morality requires, the content of their actions is not of the right kind to justify full-blown blame. I advance two independent justifications of this claim. First, I argue that if the psychopath comes to know what morality requires via a route that does not involve a proper appreciation of what it means to cause another harm or distress, the content of violations of rules against harm will be of a lower grade than the content of similar actions by normal individuals. Second, I argue that in order to intend a harm to a person—that is, to intend the distinctive kind of harm that can only befall a person—it is necessary to understand what personhood is and what makes it valuable. The psychopath's deficits with regard to mental time travel ensure that s/he cannot intend this kind of harm.     

Human action and virtue in Descartes and Spinoza

In this paper, I argue that despite undeniable fundamental differences between Descartes’ and Spinoza’s accounts of human action, there are some striking similarities between their views on right action, moral motivation, and virtue that are usually overlooked. I will argue, first, that both thinkers define virtue in terms of activity or freedom, mutatis mutandis, and thus in terms of actual power of acting. Second, I will claim that both Descartes and Spinoza hold a non-consequentialist approach to virtue, by which human actions are evaluated as virtuous or good on the basis of their motivational forces rather than their consequences. I will show further that both philosophers identify virtue qua free action with the highest good (summum bonum), and thus with that which is to be sought for its own sake and not as a means to anything preferable to it.     

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.     

Are liberal perfectionism and neutrality mutually exclusive?

In this paper, I question the view that liberal perfectionism and neutrality are mutually exclusive doctrines. I do so by criticizing two claims made by Jonathan Quong. First, I object to his claim that comprehensive anti-perfectionism is incoherent. Second, I criticize his claim that liberal perfectionism cannot avoid a paternalist stance. I argue that Quong’s substantive assumptions about personal autonomy undermine both of his arguments. I use the discussion of Quong to argue that the standard assumption in liberal theory about mutual exclusivity of liberal perfectionism and neutrality needs to be reconsidered, and I show why the argument about the convergence of perfectionism and neutrality makes conceptual sense.     

Inner Opacity. Nietzsche on Introspection and Agency

Abstract

Nietzsche believes that we do not know our own actions, nor their real motives. This belief, however, is but a consequence of his assuming a quite general skepticism about introspection. The main aim of this paper is to offer a reading of this last view, which I shall call the Inner Opacity (IO) view. In the first part of the paper I show that a strong motivation behind IO lies in Nietzsche’s claim that self-knowledge exploits the same set of cognitive capacities as well as the same folk-psychological framework involved in outward-directed mind-reading. In the second part I turn to Nietzsche’s view of agency and argue that he sees a fundamental discrepancy between the conscious attitudes we have introspective access to, on the one hand, and the subpersonal processes and states occurring at the unconscious level of the drives, on the other hand.     

Two faces of desert

There are two broadly competing pictures of moral responsibility. On the view I favor, to be responsible for some action is to be related to it in such a way that licenses attributing certain properties to the agent, properties like blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Responsibility is attributability. A different view understands being responsible in terms of our practices of holding each other responsible. Responsibility is accountability, which “involves a social setting in which we demand (require) certain conduct from one another and respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson, Philos Top 24:227–248, 1996). My concern here is the relation between moral responsibility and desert. Plausibly, if someone is morally responsible for something wrong then they deserve blame, and it is on the basis of them being morally responsible and its being wrong that they deserve blame. In this paper, I try to make progress toward understanding why it would follow that being morally responsible for something supports a desert claim. I propose to do this by exploring how the “two faces” of responsibility should proceed. An important upshot is that we gain a new currency by which to evaluate extant theories of responsibility that might favor one or the other conception: do they carry plausible desert commitments? To illustrate this benefit, I argue that accountability theory carries implausible implications for deserved praise.     

Hegel on Legal and Moral Responsibility

When Hegel first addresses moral responsibility in the Philosophy of Right, he presupposes that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do, but appears to offer little, if any, justification for this assumption. In this essay, I claim that the first part of the Philosophy of Right, “Abstract Right”, contains an implicit argument that legal or external responsibility (blame for what we have done) is conceptually dependent on moral responsibility proper (blame for what we have intended). This overlooked argument satisfies the first half of a thesis Hegel applies to action in the Encyclopaedia Logic, namely, that the outer must be inner, and thus provides a necessary complement for his more explicit treatment of the second half of that thesis, that the inner must be outer. The claim that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do might appear, at first, to risk conflating legal and moral responsibility and to lack the necessary means to deal with the phenomenon of moral luck, but I argue that if it is properly situated within the whole of Hegel's philosophy of action it can be saved from both of these consequences and so take its place as an essential component of Hegel's full theory of moral responsibility.     

Dismantling Desert

Abstract

In this paper I argue that we are never morally responsible for our actions in the sense that we justly deserve to be rewarded or punished for them. I examine two distinctions: (1) the distinction set out by Gary Watson between two distinct types of responsibility: accountability and attributability and (2) the distinction set out by Ted Honderich between origination and voluntariness. I argue that Watson’s distinction maps onto Honderich’s distinction in the sense that we can only properly be held accountable if we are the originators of our actions, and actions can be seen as attributable to us as their authors if they flow voluntarily from our endorsed beliefs, intentions and character. It seems to me that attributability and accountability can be held apart so that an action can be attributable to me without this necessarily entailing that I can properly be held accountable for it in the sense of deserving the type of praise and blame that entails retributive-style reward and punishment. I argue further that compatibilists can only properly defend the weaker attributability. If my argument is correct then the classic determinist divide collapses - since compatibilism can only properly defend voluntariness and attributability and both concepts are prima facie compatible with hard determinism. Given this (and given the standard failures of libertarianism) I argue that it is most plausible for us to be committed to a new position in the free will debate which combines the important insights of compatibilism with the intuitive force of hard determinism.