Abstract
This paper addresses external aspects of personal autonomy and the self by discussing the role attributions of responsibility play. It is argued that the concepts of responsibility and personal autonomy are, in a Hegelian expression, concepts of reflection, i.e. concepts that can only be explicated in terms of their mutual connection and whose respective content refers to each other. Central to this thesis is the idea of understanding both responsibility and personal autonomy in an ascriptivist sense. Human agents are held responsible for their actions by others. This social practice of being held responsible plays a constitutive role for the development of the evaluative self-relationship that is characteristic of persons and thus for our understanding ourselves as responsible and as autonomous agents. Following that line of thought, a second aim of the paper is then to show that the difficulty an ascriptivist position usually has with our ability to criticize our practice of ascribing responsibility as well as personal autonomy does not necessarily have to appear. For, there are properties and capacities necessary for personal autonomy that have a descriptive content and which can be put to critical use. Moreover, because our concept of personality (or the self) is also relevant in other contexts than that of ascribing responsibility, conditions within such other contexts can be imported as well, thus allowing ourselves to place our practice of ascribing responsibility in a wider and materially richer evaluative context.
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Konrad Adenauer
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Cf. the contributions in McKenna and Russell (2008).
- 5.
For a more elaborate exposition, see Quante (2007a).
- 6.
In philosophy of mind, the unity of consciousness is treated as an independent topic. In the literature on personal identity, this problem comes up when we dismiss the rule “one human being – one person” (e.g. in discussing group persons or personality disorders).
- 7.
Phrasing the problem this way presupposes that persistence is sortal dependent; cf. Wiggins (2001).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Cf. Beauchamp and Childress (2009).
- 11.
- 12.
Michael Bratman bases his planning theory of agency on this insight, but his account presupposes a neo-Lockean conception of personal identity; cf. Bratman (2007, Chaps. 1,2, 3, 4 and 5). A conception of this kind that is directly derived from the practice of ascribing responsibility can be found, to my knowledge for the first time, in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; cf. Quante (2010a).
- 13.
This assumes the normal inertia or tenacity of preferences. If all processes were accelerated appropriately, everything would remain unaffected, and we would have before us a personal life in fast motion.
- 14.
At this stage, I leave open whether this “should” is interpreted in the sense of a norm of rationality or in the sense of an ethical norm.
- 15.
For an elaborate conception of biographical (or narrative) identity, see Henning (2009).
- 16.
- 17.
If these reflections are plausible, then they reveal that one cannot grasp the ascriptivist nature of responsibility solely by recourse to reactive attitudes and the ethical principle of justice. This suggestion, which to my knowledge was made especially by Jay Wallace, must be extended by the connection developed here. Wallace himself alludes to this line in talking about the possibility of a deep responsibility that points to the autonomy of the person (see Wallace 1998, 52 ff.). I presume that a comprehensive analysis of this connection would shed light on the metaethical question as to how the principle of respect for autonomy and the principle of justice interconnect factually as crucial ethical principles.
- 18.
In what follows, I count omissions as actions; cf. Birnbacher (1995).
- 19.
Cf. Willaschek (1992, § 9).
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
This claim implies that there can be contingent-constitutive conditions that go beyond causal-genetic function; for an explanation and defence of the contingent-constitutive, see Vieth and Quante (2005).
- 23.
This does not rule out our understanding the intertemporal intra-personal self-relationships of human persons by way of an analogy with interpersonal relationships. As long as one is aware of the analogical or even only the metaphorical status of this way of talking, this strategy can be instructive for some purposes.
- 24.
In order to prevent possible misunderstanding, I have to stress that I do not regard these motivational dimensions to be philosophically irrelevant. On the contrary, I think that these connections play an important role, e.g. in philosophical pedagogy and in ethics.
- 25.
This presupposes, of course, that the conditions of adequacy for these statements of memory include not just the theoretical aspect but also the practical aspect of the evaluative self-relationship of human persons. But my discussion of Derek’s case should have shown explicitly that self-commitment always encompasses the evaluative self-relationship of human persons; thus, we are always dealing here with a personal and evaluative form of self-relationship that thematizes the biographical constitution of the person.
- 26.
It would be a different but also common case if Joschka, for instance through the critique of a long-time friend or an old political companion, were confronted with the fact that he has acquired attitudes and beliefs which he, at an earlier point in time, would not have wanted to acquire. In biomedical ethics, this constellation comes up in the context of advance directives and so-called Ulysses-contracts; see Quante (1999) and (2002, Chap. 7).
- 27.
Reference to the connection between responsibility ascriptions and the development of a personality that is committed long-term is not to be understood in such a way that the reason for the validity of responsibility is reducible e.g. to the evolutionary utility of cooperation. What is claimed here is only that, on the condition that one depends on repeated cooperation, the development of personal autonomy and personality figures as an adequate solution strategy.
- 28.
Use of the term “self-reliance” that is not stinted to this ideological usage, but seeks to do justice to the claims and obligation connected with personal autonomy within the priorities of social institutions is presented by von Maydell et al. (2006).
- 29.
It is especially in economic and legal discourse that this enforcement of self-reliance presently appears in an anti-paternalist guise and takes the shape of the hint that social safeguarding against self-inflicted risks misleads individuals not to exercise their autonomy out of laziness. This view mostly ignores that even the readiness to exercise one’s own autonomy and to take over the obligations connected therewith relies on material preconditions of inclusion and safeguarding whose provision cannot simply be devaluated as a form of paternalism by the social state; cf. von Maydell et al. (2006).
- 30.
Within the framework of a conception of personal identity such as the one developed by Parfit (1984), such behaviour is conceived as a case of cooperation between numerically distinct selves and thus treated as equivalent to cooperation between numerically distinct persons. Precisely this is what is not meant with the above suggestion, which speaks of an analogy.
- 31.
In an extreme case, this can be enhanced to the statements: “I regret nothing!” or “I would do it all over again!” Here, I can neither deal with the question of whether the first statement is not often used as a strategy for immunising oneself against critique, nor can I go into the philosophically equally interesting question as to what the differences are between the two statements.
- 32.
This is also the factual reason why Hegel develops his theory of responsibility ascriptions as a theory of social institutions and not just on the basis of individual moral obligations or considerations of rationality; see Quante and Schweikard (2009).
- 33.
It is tempting to deepen this connection philosophically and take into account a conceptual necessity or a transcendental conditional relationship. To my knowledge, Hegel (in his Philosophy of Right) was the first to subscribe to the claim that one subject alone cannot act on a maxim but needs the response of other subjects within the framework of a practice of ascribing responsibility; see Quante (2004). Wittgenstein established the prominence of this argumentative scheme with the concept of rule-following and with the private language argument. Although I sympathize with this argument in the context of self-commitments, I will not pursue this line here. The connections explicated here are thus based on contingent presuppositions, but I think they are sufficient for an understanding of our ethical practice.
- 34.
For an elaborate suggestion of a list of criteria needed at this stage, see Henning (2009).
- 35.
Cf. Quante (2002, Chaps. 5, 6, 7 and 8), (2007a). This does not contradict my constitution claim since the above connection departs from the factually given situation in which the notions of personhood, personality, and personal autonomy have already been developed and are available as intersubjectively accessible justificatory resources.
- 36.
A symmetric objection in the reverse direction is that the withholding of rights through misrecognition becomes conceptually impossible if one assumes that having rights is constituted through recognition; for a rejection of this objection, see Quante (2007b).
- 37.
‘Accepting’ does not mean that we internalize this perspective; it means only that we regard it as tenable.
- 38.
In the case of an ascription of negligence, there can, in a further step, also be exculpatory reasons.
- 39.
Here we can invoke the elaborate studies on the preconditions of informed consent in the field of medical action, for example. But since we have to envisage the possibility of enabling conditions that are sensitive to particular fields or contexts, it is only by way of analysing the particular practices that we can determine which standards can be transferred from one context to another and which of them are possibly universally valid, i.e. independent of special contexts.
- 40.
This corrective function serves not as an external but as an internal precondition, i.e. as a criterion that arises from and through our practice. This structure of justification and critique follows Hegel’s model of positing and presupposing, which is spelt out within a theory of subjectivity, as well as the default-and-challenge model as a pragmatist figure of thought.
- 41.
I wish to thank Nadja Jelinek and Michael Kühler for helpful critical hints and suggestions for improvement.
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Quante, M. (2013). Being Identical by Being (Treated as) Responsible. In: Kühler, M., Jelinek, N. (eds) Autonomy and the Self. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 118. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4789-0_12
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