Abstract
P.F. Strawson’s compatibilism has had considerable influence. However, as Watson has argued in “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil” (1987/2008), his view appears to have a disturbing consequence: extreme evil exempts an agent from moral responsibility. This is a reductio of the view. Moreover, in some cases our emotional reaction to an evildoer’s history clashes with our emotional expressions of blame. Anyone’s actions can be explained by his or her history, however, and thereby can conflict with our present blame. Additionally, we too might have been evil if our history had been like the unlucky evildoer’s. Thus, our emotional responses to the evildoer compromise our standing to blame them. Since Strawson’s view demarcates moral responsibility by moral emotional responses, his view appears to be self-defeating. In this paper, I defend the Strawsonian view from the reductio and self-defeat problems. I argue that two emotions, disgust and elevation, can be moral reactive attitudes in Strawson’s sense. First, moral disgust expresses neither blame nor exemption from responsibility. Instead, moral disgust presupposes blameworthiness but is instead a distinct response to the extreme wrongdoer. Secondly, moral disgust involves self-directed attitudes that explain away our apparent lack of standing to blame the evil agent. The structure of disgust as a reactive attitude is mirrored along the positive dimension by the emotion that Haidt (2003a) has called “elevation”, a feeling of moral inspiration. I conclude by defending my view from objections about the moral appropriateness of disgust.
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Notes
This kind of moral responsibility is opposed to moral responsibility in other senses, like moral assessment of character (attributability responsibility) or moral assessment of judgement-sensitive attitudes (answerability responsibility). For an extended discussion see Shoemaker (2015).
This is an expanded paraphrase of Macnamara (2015)’s excellent characterization of the argument. I have made an amendment. Macnamara thinks that to be the appropriate target of address is to undergo the right sort of response to a reactive attitude. I disagree. People often understand what they should feel but do not concurrently have those feelings. Watson (2008/1987), Shoemaker (2007) and Darwall (2006) each propose a similar argument.
This is paraphrased from Miles Corwin’s Los Angles Times article, “Icy Killer’s Life Steeped in Violence,” as quoted in Watson (2008/1987).
Again, this is paraphrased from Miles Corwin’s Los Angles Times article, “Icy Killer’s Life Steeped in Violence,” as quoted in Watson (2008/1987).
On the conversational model I have adopted from McKenna (2012), there is a sense of engagement relevant to the features of one’s interlocutor in an instance of moral address. How we decide to engage another person with moral demands ought to depend on what they are like. I will have more to say on this point in the concluding section.
One could feel degraded for all sorts of particular features of oneself, although here the difference between shame, humiliation, and degradation becomes obscure.
The preceding is directly quoted from the National Transportation Safety Board, “Aircraft Accident Report: Air Florida, Inc., Boeing 737-222, N62AF, Collision with 14th Street Bridge, Near Washington National Airport, Washington, D.C., January 13, 1982,” and paraphrased from McDougall (2007).
Paraphrased and quoted from McDougall (2007).
My discussion owes much to Strohminger (2014)’s thoughtful guidance through contours of the current debates about disgust. My presentation here follows hers closely. A reader looking for more information about this growing topic should begin with her excellent overview.
As Giubilini (2015) points out, “moral disgust” is ambiguous between the two uses.
Michael McKenna expressed this worry to me in personal communication.
I follow Wallace (1994) in thinking that reactive attitudes have beliefs about quality of will, involving judgment, as their objects.
The person who considers disgust to be a non-standard form of blame is suggesting something close to Scanlon (2008)’s sense of blame: blame is whatever response is appropriate from one person towards another person who through some action has indicated that they hold attitudes that impair the relationship between them (122–123, 128, 138). On this kind of view, disgust is a form of blame because it is an appropriate response to an impaired relationship. Harris holds attitudes that make it appropriate for us to be disgusted and distance ourselves from him. However, my analysis of disgust indicates that something is very wrong with this view. We maintain our commitment to Harris’s blameworthiness, but we take no action towards him that constitutes blame. We give up trying to express blame him. To call this response “blame” in the fullest sense is absurd.
It shouldn’t surprise us that disgust at slime is non-communicative. Slime lacks the relevant capacities to understand the meaning of reactive attitudes. Disgust is a primitive emotion, and like other moral emotions it only gains moral significance as it becomes a part of our moral practices and becomes interconnected with our moral concepts.
Thanks to David Shoemaker for pressing me on this point in conversation.
It also shows that the exclusionary effect of disgust need not be total. More on this later.
I offer no calculus here; in real life cases, the degree of appropriate disgust, and therefore appropriate exclusion, will likely be a matter of good moral judgement.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this important objection and pointing me towards the relevant empirical research.
Jones and Fitness used versions of the disgust scale presented in Haidt et al. (1994) to measure disgust sensitivity. Importantly, this disgust scale does not specifically focus on one kind of disgust, e.g., moral disgust.
Specifically, Jones and Fitness label disgust sensitivity a trait-like construct that describes the ease and intensity with which one is prone to experience disgust (2008, 614).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mark Timmons, Jeremy Reid, and David Shoemaker for comments and feedback. I would especially like to thank Michael McKenna for his generous assistance. Finally, thanks to an anonymous reviewer at Philosophical Studies for thoughtful and constructive suggestions.
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Wallace, R.H. Responsibility and the limits of good and evil. Philos Stud 176, 2705–2727 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1147-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1147-y