Abstract
It is reasonable to assume that much wrongdoing for which agents are generally thought blameworthy occurs by way of unintentional omission. In this paper, I explain why certain will-centered accounts of moral responsibility tend to struggle to provide convincing explanations of the theoretical basis for judgments of blameworthiness in cases of unintentional omission. To provide such explanations, these will-centered accounts typically rely upon a “tracing strategy”, according to which an agent’s blameworthiness for an unintentional omission necessarily presupposes that it is a casual result of some prior blameworthy intentional choice she apparently made. I argue that this sort of appeal to the tracing strategy, upon further inspection, produces distorting implications for the way we ordinarily think about the conditions of legitimate moral criticism in cases of unintentional omission. I conclude by identifying a peculiar assumption that defenders of these will-centered accounts of moral responsibility appear to adopt and that, once rejected, renders the volitionalist’s appeal to the tracing strategy unnecessary for purposes of explaining the conditions of blameworthiness for unintentional omission. The upshot of my investigation is rather modest, but it does remain unclear just what advantage, if any, will-centered accounts of moral responsibility enjoy over their rival non-will-centered accounts.
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Notes
- 1.
Scanlon (1998:274–75).
- 2.
See Watson (2004). Because some philosophers have assumed that blame carries a characteristic force that requires justification in order for its application to be morally fair, questions about the conditions of moral blameworthiness have sometimes been framed as fundamentally involving the conditions that must be met in order for it to be morally “fair” or “just” for some moral judge to impose sanctions upon a wrongdoer. For an important criticism of the idea that the characteristic force of blame is to be located in these overt sanctioning behaviors, see Hieronymi (2004).
- 3.
Watson, op. cit.
- 4.
I think this much can be granted, though I recognize that some will balk at the idea that forgetting an anniversary could involve the violation of a moral expectation. For this reason, I have included the other two example cases which, I take it, rather obviously do involve such violations.
- 5.
- 6.
This is admittedly an oversimplification of Smith’s account, but for my purposes here, the oversimplification is justifiable.
- 7.
Smith (2005a).
- 8.
The violation of a moral expectation entails wrongdoing, but wrongdoing does not by itself entail blameworthiness. This much seems to me to be common ground. For a contrary view, see Norman O. Dahl (1967).
- 9.
Zimmerman (1988).
- 10.
Levy (2005:2, emphasis in original).
- 11.
Wallace (1994:128).
- 12.
Here, I assume that it is uncontroversial that volitionalists must recognize constraints imposed by basic conditions of “moral attributability”; these are conditions that must be satisfied in order for an agent to be morally responsible for some action, omission, attitude, etc. in the first place. Of course, satisfaction of these conditions is not by itself sufficient for moral blameworthiness.
- 13.
Wallace (op. cit.:132) seems to think that intentionally violating a moral obligation others accept is what constitutes showing ill will or disregard. For Zimmerman, the crucial element of a choice that makes it one for which the agent is culpable, and hence blameworthy, is an occurrent belief that the choice is itself morally wrong. See Zimmerman (op. cit.: 40).
- 14.
I take it that the notion of a choice reflecting a particular quality of will is commonly recognized. As I will elaborate in Section 7.5, choices necessarily implicate an agent’s evaluations of reasons and other intentional mental states, and the quality of an agent’s will seems to be constituted by the quality of just these evaluative mental states.
- 15.
See Wallace (op. cit.:138–39), and Zimmerman (op. cit.:93). Wallace claims that in cases involving negligence or forgetfulness – e.g., cases like Abby’s – “one may have to trace the moral fault to an earlier episode of choice.” A concise statement of Zimmerman’s alignment with the tracing strategy can be found in his claim that a question of responsibility and blameworthiness “for an omission arises only where there is an initial volition of which the omission in question is itself a consequence.”
- 16.
One question that faces the volitionalist, then, concerns just which choice it is reasonable to think an agent’s moral responsibility and blameworthiness for an unintentional omission are traceable to. Volitionalists face a further question of how rigidly to construe the kind of cognitive connection between a choice and a consequence in order for consequence to be a basis for legitimate blame. Wallace (p. 138) seems to understand this cognitive connection as involving the consequence’s reasonable foreseeability from the agent’s perspective at the time of prior choice, while Zimmerman opts for explicit foresight. For a fascinating discussion of the problems that the foreseeability constraint poses for the tracing strategy, see Vargas (2005) and a reply by Fischer and Tognazzini (2009).
- 17.
For a discussion of the kinds of normative requirements that can make such expectations reasonable, see Goodin (1986).
- 18.
Indeed, this kind of case seems analogous to the kind of case that forms the subject matter of Steven Sverdlik’s excellent discussion of what he calls “Pure Negligence”. He claims that “there do seem to be cases of negligence where there is no deliberate prior abstaining from getting knowledge or a deliberate prior refraining from stopping a loss of knowledge. All that there is, in some cases, is an unwitting violation of a norm, preceded by an indefinitely long period in which it never occurs to the person to consider the relevant risks”. See Sverdlik (1993:140–41).
- 19.
Interestingly, even if such a prior choice can be found, the more distant it is in the agent’s history, the harder it will be for this choice to satisfy the foreseeability constraint on the tracing strategy (see note 16). Indeed, for an approach like Zimmerman’s that requires explicit conscious foresight of all the consequences of a volition that can be legitimate grounds for moral appraisal of an agent, this constraint may be even less often satisfied.
- 20.
Indeed, it seems that something like just this kind of explanation applies in cases of persons who, for want of adequate moral reflection, become habitual unintentional wrongdoers who exhibit deep patterns of insensitivity to moral considerations.
- 21.
It may seem unfair to suggest that the volitionalist must ground an agent’s blameworthiness for a chain of deep negligence or forgetfulness in a single prior choice the agent made. Why couldn’t the volitionalist insist that this chain is the result of more than one prior choice? My concern is not with such cases. Rather, my concern is with cases in which a chain of deep negligence or forgetfulness doesn’t appear to be owing to any prior choices the agent has made. In such cases, I am not claiming that the chain of deep negligence is owing either to one ultimate choice or no choice at all.
- 22.
See notes 16 and 19 above.
- 23.
While this may sound like an attempt at excuse, and so to affirm the idea that blameworthiness for the unintentional omission must be traceable from a prior choice, this appearance should be resisted. In such a case, we can imagine that each agent would find it important to point out that the disregard was not explicitly chosen. But this would not entail that each agent would be insinuating that no disregard was shown.
- 24.
Consider a friend who is visiting from a country in which there is no established social practice of tipping. The fact that it does not occur to him to leave a gratuity when paying the check seems to be explainable in virtue of the fact that tipping is not an activity that he sees any reason to regard as important. My frustrated attempts to explain to him how important it is that it does occur to him to tip can be seen as my trying to convince him to believe that tipping is important, at least while he is a visitor in my country. What is objectionable in this scenario is not some prior choice he has made to ignore the social customs of my culture, but some underlying evaluative belief that directly explains his failure to think to leave a tip.
- 25.
I am not claiming that your failure to think to leave a tip is only explainable in virtue of the presence of these underlying beliefs and attitudes. I am only claiming that such an explanation is possible, and that there may be no reason to think that this kind of failure is explainable only in virtue of some prior choice you have made.
- 26.
But what about circumstances in which the forgetting is just a kind of “mental hiccup”, and doesn’t appear to be explainable in virtue of any of the agent’s evaluative beliefs and attitudes? I am not saying that these circumstances are impossible. The fact that sometimes an episode of forgetting is explainable in terms of such mental hiccups does not jeopardize my claim that in some cases it might be appropriate to see an episode of forgetting as explainable in terms of an agent’s evaluative beliefs and attitudes.
- 27.
Some might object that what is of interest is how the agent deliberates over these evaluative mental states, and how she selects which will be effective in moving her to action and which ones will not. I think this is a very implausible objection, insofar as it seems to present a picture of the agent as something that is capable of standing over and above all her evaluative mental states and distancing herself from them so significantly so as to be constituted purely by her rational will. This is why I do not think it is plausible for a volitionalist to maintain that it is the fact that a choice is a choice – a moment of pure self-determination – that is morally significant.
- 28.
One motivation behind this assumption is that these mental states cannot be identified as “the agent’s own” except when they are somehow endorsed or are a basis for the agent’s explicit identification with a certain evaluative perspective insofar as she chooses that they be effective in moving her to action. I will not consider this motivation here since there is much controversy surrounding it, and in any event this motivation is more reasonably seen as a statement, rather than as a defense of the volitionalist position. For further discussion, see Wallace (2002), Smith (2004), and Hieronymi (2008).
- 29.
Strawson (1962).
- 30.
That indignation is only slightly felt does not indicate, by itself, that the absence of choice substantially mitigates to the point of near excuse. For it may be an implicit assumption that Abby’s holding the underlying objectionable evaluative attitude is compatible with her making strong efforts to satisfy her duty. If this is so, then the overall quality of the reactive sentiment we experience will be conditioned by this further assumption, and the concomitant attitudes of approval this further assumption entails.
- 31.
Indeed, guilt seems appropriate when one realizes, as a result of one’s conduct, that one holds an objectionable evaluative attitude or belief one previously hadn’t recognized.
- 32.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Angela M. Smith, Janice Moskalik, and the participants of the University of Delft Conference on Moral Responsibility, Neuroscience, Organization, and Engineering for helpful comments on both written and presented versions of this paper.
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Benchimol, J. (2011). The Moral Significance of Unintentional Omission: Comparing Will-Centered and Non-will-centered Accounts of Moral Responsibility. In: Vincent, N., van de Poel, I., van den Hoven, J. (eds) Moral Responsibility. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1878-4_7
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