Abstract
Recent social theory has departed from methodological individualism’s explanation of action according to the motives and dispositions of human individuals in favor of explanation in terms of broader agencies consisting of both human and nonhuman elements described as cyborgs, actor-networks, extended agencies, or distributed cognition. This paper proposes that moral responsibility for action also be vested in extended agencies. It advances a consequentialist view of responsibility that takes moral responsibility to be a species of causal responsibility, and it answers objections that might be raised on the basis of intentions and deserts.
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Notes
As the last example indicates, extended agency is an open-ended concept, allowing the addition of ever more participants. The agency that perpetrated vehicular homicide, for example, might also include the conditions of the road, the weather at the time and still other components, depending on the particular circumstances. There comes a point of diminishing returns, where the participation of some elements is so small (e.g., clothing color might have been a factor in the driver’s seeing or not seeing the victim, but whether it was dark brown or dark blue is less significant) or so constant (e.g., the effect of gravity) that they can be disregarded. Since this is a discussion of general concepts rather than exact allocation of responsibility for particular events, it considers only the most obviously important components of any extended agency.
That judgment of course rests on the particular criteria of good and bad in play, and these are subject to cultural, historical and other variables. But that is not pertinent to this theoretical discussion. It is enough to note that the judgment is made.
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Parts of the research on which this article is based were supported by National Science Foundation Grant BCS 92618, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities, and sabbatical leave from the University of Kansas. I am grateful to Tony Genova and Rex Martin for helpful discussions of the issues and to Louise Hanson, Richard De George, Ben Hale and Timothy Enström for having read and commented on earlier drafts.
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Hanson, F.A. The anachronism of moral individualism and the responsibility of extended agency. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 415–424 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9098-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9098-y