Abstract
This paper deals with two problems that arise in the context of Peter van Inwagen’s treatment of responsibility. First, according to van Inwagen, a human person is identical with a human organism. If so, even drastic events, like an irreversible memory loss accompanied by a severe personality change, would not affect the diachronic identity of persons. It seems at least as plausible, however, to treat the amnesiac like a legal successor who inherits certain obligations without being morally accountable for actions of her predecessor. Second, van Inwagen has argued that neither external (skills, number of opportunities etc.) nor internal (desires, values) factors that have statistical effects on human behavior can provide a moral excuse or mitigating circumstance. We present examples that strongly suggest that van Inwagen’s claim is wrong.
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Notes
- 1.
The following plot description is largely drawn from the Wikipedia-article on Regarding Henry.
- 2.
E.g., Fujiwara et al. 2008 studied five patients with a permanent, almost complete memory loss, two of which also showed a severe personality change.
- 3.
The movie character clearly feels responsible, but this does not entail that he in fact is.
- 4.
Imagine that Jeff is suffering from cancer. A friend who believes in transmigration (and a bunch of other esoteric stuff) approaches him: “You may have led a decent life, but this is the result of bad karma. You are now paying the price for your former life. As I found out during hypnosis, you once were a cruel African princess.” However, even if Jeff had the same soul (or soul stuff) as the African princess, given that he neither has any memory of her life nor seems to have much in common with her, it would be absurd to hold him accountable for the princess’s misdeeds. It is hard to see why the same kind of argument cannot be applied to two people who, though they share the same brain, have neither memories nor (important) character traits in common. Similar arguments can already be found in Locke 1690, II 27, esp. §14.
- 5.
At least we suppose so for the sake of argument. Sacks’ account is ambiguous in this respect. On the one hand, according to him, Walter continued with his normal social life and “was able to keep his compulsions in check”, though “at night, alone, he gave in to his urges”. On the other hand, Sacks claims that Walter “at one point was driven to act out of character under the spur of an irresistible physiological compulsion” (Sacks 2015, our emphasis).
In practice, it will often be impossible to discriminate between people with very strong, though, in principle, controllable desires and people with irresistible ones. Though irrelevant for moral desert, our epistemic limitations are, of course, crucial in the legal realm (In dubio pro reo). Consequently, Walter was acquitted of the original purchase of child pornography. The judge, however, found that he “was culpable […] for not speaking sooner about the problem to his doctors, who could have helped, and for persisting for many years in behavior that, by supporting a criminal industry, was injurious to others” (Sacks 2015). Walter served a sentence of 26 months in prison followed by 25 months of home confinement.
- 6.
Van Inwagen makes some subtle points on how one might establish that a certain type of behavior has a genetic basis (van Inwagen 2001, 225–228).
- 7.
In an endnote, van Inwagen concedes that the distinction between external and internal factors might be more complicated, perhaps even “dubious”: “But if this is so, it can only strengthen the case for the conclusion that we ought to resist our tendency to regard the distinction as morally significant.” (van Inwagen 2001, 241, n.4)
- 8.
With the already mentioned exception of external factors like torture threats or hostage-taking that would force the agent to choose between two great evils.
- 9.
See, e.g., van Inwagen 2015, 283: “if [the lack of free will] rules out blame, it may well rule out praise on the same grounds.”
- 10.
According to van Inwagen, there is also an obligation to try to find ways to lighten or remove psychological and environmental burdens (van Inwagen 2001, 242, n.7).
- 11.
For those who may find themselves with competing intuitions in the Walter B. case, here is another example: Paul had led a respectable life until the henchmen of a criminal regime kidnapped him and subjected him for 2 years to a brutal ‘special treatment’. This treatment causes in its victims sadistic desires that can only be satisfied by immoral acts and, at the same time, lowers their empathic abilities. Once set free, 60% of the ‘treated’ persons commit terrible crimes. Paul could (after great inner struggle) return to his former innocent life, he could resist his new inner demons. However, if he did not succeed, are we really supposed to think that undergoing the traumatic special treatment does not constitute a mitigating circumstance?
- 12.
Note, however, that a defense is not a theodicy. It only purports to provide a story that is not too surprising on the hypothesis that God exists. It need not be true or probable given theism.
References
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Sacks, Oliver. 2015. Urge. New York Review of Books 62: 4.
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———. 1997. Materialism and the psychological-continuity account of personal identity. Philosophical Perspectives 11: 305–319.
———. 2001. Genes, statistics, and desert. In Genetics and criminal behavior, ed. David Wasserman and Robert Wachbroit, 225–242. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2006a. The problem of evil. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2006b. Can mereological sums change their parts? Journal of Philosophy 103: 614–630.
———. 2007. A materialist ontology of the human person. In Persons. Human and divine, ed. P. van Inwagen and D. Zimmerman, 199–215. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2015. Metaphysics. 4th ed. Boulder: Westview Press Inc..
Wikipedia. 2017. Regarding Henry. In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regarding_Henry. Accessed 26 March 2017.
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Strickmann, A., Weidemann, C. (2018). The Strange Cases of Henry T. and Walter B.: Van Inwagen on Personal Identity, Accountability and Mitigating Circumstances. In: Jansen, L., Näger, P. (eds) Peter van Inwagen. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70052-6_10
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