Abstract
In this chapter, I assume that, contrary to the above argument, individuals are morally responsible and then explore how narrow responsibility would be. Here I argue for internalism in moral responsibility. My argument is that connection and control are what make people morally responsible. Because connection and control consist of, and only of, reasoning (and mental states) that a person is phenomenally aware of, what makes someone responsible is such reasoning. Because such reasoning is an internal feature of a person, internalism in responsibility is true. Internalism in this context leads to a very narrow scope for responsibility. It is so narrow, for example, the people are at most blameworthy for akrasia . I then explore the implications of this argument with regard to principal-agent responsibility, negligence, attempted versus completed crimes, and akrasia. If the above analysis is correct, then our everyday judgments of moral responsibility are unreliable.
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Notes
- 1.
See Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism and R. J. Rummel, Death by Government
- 2.
See Katie Thomas, “Ex-Student Sues Brown Over Rape Accusation.”
- 3.
See Model Penal Code 213.3.
- 4.
For examples, see Michael C. Ford, “Reconciling Environmental Liability Standards After Iverson and Bestfoods,” 231–33, Keith Onsdorff and James Mesnard, “The Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine in RCRA Criminal Enforcement: What You Don ‘t Know Can Hurt You,” 10099, 10102–04, and ‘Kathleen Brickey, “The Rhetoric of Environmental Crime: Culpability, Discretion, and Structural Reform,” 125–135.
- 5.
For the claim that the average American adult performs three felonies a day, see Harvey Silvergate, Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.
- 6.
See Wikipedia, “Pamela Smart,” June 28, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Smart.
- 7.
See 18 U.S.C. sec. 1961–1968.
- 8.
Today’s military snipers have killed people more than a mile away. See Michael Smith, “Hotshot sniper in one-and-a-half mile double kill,”
- 9.
These examples come from George Sher, Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness and George Sher, “Out of Control,” 285–301.
- 10.
See Al Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy, p. 172.
- 11.
See Michael McKenna, Responsibility and Globally Manipulated Agents,” 169–192, esp. 180–181.
- 12.
See Sher, Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness, Angela Smith, “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment,” 367–392 and Matthew Talbert, “Unwitting Behavior and Responsibility,” 139–152.
- 13.
For reasons-responsiveness, see John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. For the sanity theory, see Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason. For the mesh theory, see Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” 5–20 and Gary Watson, “Free Agency,” 205–220.
For incompabilist models of control, see Roderick Chisolm, “Human Freedom and the Self,” Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will, Timothy O’Connor, Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will, and Randolph Clarke, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will.
- 14.
I owe this point to Travis Timmerman. See Travis Timmerman and Sean Clancy, “Book Review of Levy, N., ‘Consciousness and Moral Responsibility’,” 109–111.
- 15.
See Patty Hearst and Alvin Moscow, Patty Hearst: Her Own Story.
- 16.
See Fred Feldman, “Basic Intrinsic Value,” 319–346.
- 17.
See Noah Lemos, Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant and Ramon Lemos, The Nature of Value.
- 18.
For the notion that collective responsibility might support responsibility externalism, see Michelle Ciurria, “Moral Responsibility Ain’t Just in the Head,” 601–616, esp. 607.
- 19.
See American Law Institution, Model Penal Code § 210.2(1)(b) (1962).
- 20.
See Restatement (Second) of Agency.
- 21.
For an argument to the contrary, see Michael Moore, Placing Blame: A Theory of Criminal Responsibility.
- 22.
For the view that responsibility at some later time can depend on what a person thought or did earlier, see John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, Chap. 7.
- 23.
Gideon Rosen also argues that people are not responsible for negligence. See Gideon Rosen, “Skepticism about Moral Responsibility,” 295–313; Gideon Rosen, “Culpability and Ignorance,” CIII: Part 1; Gideon Rosen, “Kleinbart the Oblivious and Other Tales of Ignorance and Responsibility,” 591–610. For criticisms of Rosen’s argument, see William FitzPatrick, “Moral Responsibility and Normative Ignorance: Answering a New Skeptical Challenge,” 589–613; Alexander Guerrero, “Don’t Know, Don’t Kill: Moral Ignorance, Culpability, and Caution,” 59–97; Elizabeth Harman, “Does Moral Ignorance Exculpate?” unpublished manuscript. See, also, Sher, Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness and Michael Zimmerman, “Negligence and Moral Responsibility,” Nous 20 (1986): 199–218.
- 24.
The notion that negligence supports externalism about responsibility can be seen in Ciurria, “Moral Responsibility Ain’t Just in the Head,” 603–604.
- 25.
See Plato, Republic, 4:435a–436a. and Aristotle, Politics, 7:1327b, and Heraclitus, frag. 53.
- 26.
For the notion that people in the past are not fully responsible for their acts when they reflect their times because they didn’t know and couldn’t reasonably be expected to know the true or good, see Susan Wolf, “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility,” Ferdinand Schoeman, ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology 46–62.
- 27.
For the notion that people are responsible for negligent thoughts, see George Sher, Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness and George Sher, “Out of Control,” 285–301.
- 28.
Cases #10 and #13–15 come from Sher, Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness.
- 29.
See Sher, Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness.
- 30.
Examples #13–14 come from Al Mele, Self Deception Unmasked. Mele’s examples #14 comes from Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t, p. 77
- 31.
The scandal was first reported in the following article: Alan Feuer, “Four Charged With Running Online Prostitution Ring,”
- 32.
For the notion that moral saints are boring, see Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” 419–439.
- 33.
See John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, Chap. 7, John Martin Fischer, Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value, Chap. 12, John Martin Fischer, “Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility,” pp. 81–106, esp. 103–105, and John Martin Fischer, “Responsibility and Control,” 24–40. For a similar approach, see John Christman, “Autonomy and Personal History,” 1–24.
- 34.
See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, p. 201.
- 35.
See ibid., 195.
- 36.
See ibid.
- 37.
For the notion that semantic content isn’t in the head and is a matter of causal history, see Hillary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” pp. 131–193 and Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity.
- 38.
The examples come from ibid., 173–183 citing Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’,” 131–193, Alvin Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing,” 355–372, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and Amelie Rorty, “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters When It Alteration Ends,” pp. 399–411 and Robert Kraut, “Love De Re,” pp. 413–430.
- 39.
See Robert Nozick, “Love’s Bond,” 418.
- 40.
See Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” 5–20 and Harry Frankfurt, “Identical and Wholeheartedness,” pp. 27–45.
- 41.
See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility and John Martin Fischer, My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility.
- 42.
See Courtois, The Black Book of Communism (1997) and Rummel, Death by Government.
- 43.
See United States Census Bureau, “Table 1103. Motor Vehicle Accidents—Number and Deaths: 1990 to 2009,”
- 44.
The number comes from Christopher Ingraham, “How just a couple drinks make your odds of a car crash skyrocket,” In 2009 in the U.S., there were 210 million people with driver’s licenses and the annual licensed driver drove 14,000 miles. See Federal Highway Administration, “Our Nation’s Highways: 2011,”
- 45.
The average U.S. citizen lives for 79 years and the average person with a driver’s license in the U.S. drove 14,000 miles. See Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and Federal Highway Administration, “Our Nation’s Highways: 2011,”
- 46.
H. Laurence Ross, Confronting Drunk Driving, 35.
- 47.
The number comes from Christopher Ingraham, “How just a couple drinks make your odds of a car crash skyrocket,”
- 48.
See Ken Bogen, “Of Apples, Alcohol, and Unacceptable Risk,” 199.
- 49.
See National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “National Survey of Drinking and Driving attitudes and Behaviors,”
- 50.
See Sylvie Blazejewski et al., “Factors Associated With Serious Traffic Crashes: A Prospective Study in Southwest France,” 1039–1041 and Joris Verster et al., “Prolonged nocturnal driving can be as dangerous as severe alcohol-impaired driving,” 585–588.
- 51.
For the former, for example, see New York State Penal Code Article 130—Sex Offences, especially 130.00 (5) and 130.05(2). For the latter, see New York State Penal Code Article 15.25.
- 52.
See Jed Rubinfeld, “The Riddle of Rape-by-Deception and the Myth of Sexual Autonomy,” 1372–1444.
- 53.
In some Jurisdictions, there appears to be a good faith defense when the victim tricked the defendant into falsely believing she is old enough for legal intercourse. See United States v. Kantor, 858 F.2d 534 (9th Cir. 1988).
- 54.
See Model Penal Code 213.3.
- 55.
For a real life case of this, see Jonathon Morgan, “Judge lets off rapist of 10-year-old because girl wore “provocative” clothing,”
- 56.
See Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us 204–205.
- 57.
A classic discussion of this issue occurs in Gary Watson, “Skepticism About Weakness of Will,” 316–339.
- 58.
See Neil Levy, Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will & Moral Responsibility, Chap. 6.
- 59.
I am very grateful to Neil Feit, David Hershenov, Bob Kelly, and the participants in the June 2016 Blameless Buffalo conference for their extremely helpful comments and criticisms of this chapter.
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Kershnar, S. (2018). If There Were Responsibility, It Wouldn’t Do Much Work (Responsibility and Internalism). In: Total Collapse: The Case Against Responsibility and Morality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76950-9_7
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