Abstract
There is a deep tension in our everyday practices of moral assessment. We tend to think, on the one hand, that people should be held responsible and morally accountable only for what they freely and knowingly choose to do — that is, for their voluntary actions and omissions. On the other hand, we regularly hold ourselves and others morally responsible for various intentional mental states (e.g. desires, emotions, and other attitudes) that seem, prima facie, to fall outside the scope of our immediate voluntary control. We sometimes blame people simply for having objectionable attitudes or vicious desires, for example, even when these arise spontaneously and even when they do not lead to the performance of morally objectionable actions.1 Thus our actual practices of moral assessment seem to conflict with what we often say, and seem to believe, about the conditions under which moral appraisal is legitimate.2
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References
For example, we may blame someone for taking pleasure in the suffering or humiliation of others, for becoming excessively angry over a minor offense, or for believing a certain person to be incompetent simply because of her race or gender.
My thinking about this issue was originally inspired by Robert Adams’s article `Involuntary Sins’, The Philosophical Review, 94, No. 1 (January 1985), in which he argues that we can be held responsible, and morally blameworthy, for our involuntary mental states. I defend a similar position here, though on what I take to be somewhat different grounds.
The articles I have in mind are `Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, `Identification and Externality’, and `Identification and Wholeheartedness’, all of which are reprinted in his collection The importance of what we care about (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Though these articles do not appear to represent Frankfurt’s latest views on this issue (for that, see his 1991 Presidential Address to the APA, `The Faintest Passion’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66 [1991–92]), the ideas he presents in these papers have been enormously influential, and are worth examining in their own right.
T. M. Scanlon defends a view of this sort in his book What We Owe to Each Other (forthcoming, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). See esp. Chapter 1 and Chapter 6.
Identification and Externality’, op. cit. note 3, 60–61.
Gary Watson, `Two Faces of Responsibility’, Philosophical Topics 24, No. 2 (Fall 1996), 228.
The kinds of appraisal in question would include, in the negative case, various forms of criticism, reproach, and blame, and in the positive case, various forms of admiration or esteem. A full account of this sense of responsibility is beyond the scope of this contribution; but I hope it is clear enough, at least in its outlines.
Identification and Externality’, op. cit. note 3, 63.
bid., 66.
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 66–7. It is interesting the way in which Frankfurt encourages us to see the spiteful desire as `external’ even in his description of the case: the person, he says, wants to compliment his acquaintance, but notices within himself a jealously spiteful desire to injure him. Though we do sometimes talk in this way, particularly about desires of which we disapprove, I think a fairer description of the case would have the person wanting both to compliment his acquaintance and to injure him.
Ibid., 67.
`Identification and Wholeheartedness’, op. cit. note 3, 170.
Thomas Nagel, `Moral Luck’, in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 33.
I am grateful to Rahul Kumar for helpful discussion on this point.
I do not at all mean to be denying the importance of these decisions of endorsement and rejection to the project of moral self-governance, nor do I mean to be suggesting that these higher-order attitudes are irrelevant when it comes to a proper moral assessment of the person. My point, as I argue below, is that these decisions cannot be what establishes our responsibility or lack of responsibility for the attitudes themselves.
`Identification and Wholeheartedness’, op. cit. note 3, 171, my emphasis.
A number of people have raised questions and doubts about the claims I make in this paragraph. The relations I am invoking among `intentionality’, `conceptual complexity’ and `background-dependency’ are not entirely clear, nor is it obvious that all of our attitudes involve `responses to reasons’ in the way my argument suggests. These and other worries would need to be addressed in a full defense of this view, which is beyond the scope of this contribution. I think it is enough for my purposes here, however, if I can establish that there is a fundamental flaw in Frankfurt’s analogy between involuntary bodily movements and involuntary attitudes. Determining that a bodily movement occurred without a person’s choice is sufficient for judging it not to be attributable to her `as a person’. Determining that an attitude occurred without a person’s choice, by contrast, is not sufficient for judging it not to be attributable to her (or so I have tried to show). Whether I am correct in thinking that all of our attitudes are attributable to us as persons (because dependent in some way on our thinking about reasons), the relevant point is that the question of attributability (hence responsibility) for our attitudes does not seem to depend upon our after-the-fact choices of endorsement or rejection (which is not to deny that these choices may be relevant to other questions, e.g. at the level of moral assessment). I am grateful to James Lenman and R. Jay Wallace for urging me to clarify my position here.
For an articulation and defense of this approach to questions of responsibility, see T. M. Scanlon, `The Significance of Choice’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, VIII, Sterling M. McMurrin (ed.) (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), and What We Owe to Each Other, op. cit. note 4.
As my parenthetical phrases are meant to suggest, this is an easy point to miss, because the expression `A holds B responsible for X’ is ambiguous. In fact, I think it is trebly ambiguous. It can mean: (1) A believes B to be responsible for X (where this implies that B is open to moral appraisal in virtue of X, but nothing is implied about what that appraisal, if any, should be); (2) A believes B to be blameworthy for X (where this implies a judgment that B is liable to justified moral criticism in virtue of X); or (3) A blames B for X (where this implies not only a judgment that B is liable to justified moral criticism, but actual critical attitudes toward B such as resentment or indignation). Though I cannot give a detailed defense of my position here, I should just say that I take (1) to express the primary question of responsibility. When we ask whether a person is responsible for some thing, we are asking whether that thing is attributable to her in a way that makes her open to moral appraisal. And I take (2) to express the primary question of moral appraisal: once we have determined that some thing is attributable to someone in this way, the question is whether she is liable to justified moral criticism on account of it, not whether we (or the person herself) should actually express this criticism. I give a fuller defense of this approach in the first chapter of my dissertation, Attitudes, Agency,and Responsibility.
Consider a parallel at the level of action: if I make an insensitive comment, and immediately (and sincerely) apologize for it, it would be inappropriate to `beat myself up’ over it with excessive feelings of guilt or self-reproach. But that is not because I was not, really, responsible for the comment, or because it was not, really, objectionable. It’s because I have already responded to my failure in an appropriate way. Why then, in the case of attitudes, are we so anxious to say that the fact of `rejection’ shows that we were not, really, responsible for the attitude in the first place?
Frankfurt calls decisively rejected desires `outlaws’ in `Identification and Wholeheartedness’, op. cit. note 3, 170.
This should not, I think, be confused with Frankfurt’s own claim in `Identification and Wholeheartedness’ that some conflicts of desires may be `within’ the person, rather than `between’ the person and an outlaw psychological force. He says we may experience this kind of conflict of desires if our commitment to some higher-order volition is `less than wholehearted’ (op. cit. note 3, 165). Though he does not give any examples of this kind of conflict, it seems he cannot have in mind cases of the sort we are considering, in which someone continues to experience a desire or attitude she has explicitly rejected as unworthy. For if he does, then it would become quite unclear what role these `decisions’ of identification and rejection are supposed to be playing in his own theory. For if it can `turn out’ that one has not `really’ rejected a desire if it persists, and if we can infer from the mere persistence of a desire that one is in fact identified with it (regardless of whether one has ever voluntarily endorsed it), then these acts of endorsement and rejection do not seem to be playing any role at all in establishing our identification with and responsibility for these states. My own view, of course, is that this is the correct conclusion to draw. But Frankfurt, presumably, should want to resist it.
Note that we need not doubt the sincerity of a person’s disavowal in such a case; we need only think that she has not worked through her attitude in a way that would make her disavowal fully effective. Consider the case of someone who sincerely claims to reject racist or sexist attitudes, and yet continues to judge (perhaps unreflectively) that certain people are less competent on the basis of their race or gender. Even if he always rejects these judgments when they are brought to his attention, we might still hold him responsible for the underlying attitudes they manifest.
I am grateful to Carla Bagnoli, Sean Greenberg, Pamela Hieronymi, Rahul Kumar, Mitzi Lee, Adam Leite, Richard Moran, and T. M. Scanlon for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this contribution. I have also profited greatly from discussions with participants in the Harvard Workshop on Moral and Political Philosophy and with members of the Graduate Fellows Seminar in the Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions. James Lenman and R. Jay Wallace both gave me detailed and extremely helpful written comments on the version of this contribution I presented at the Conference on Moral Responsibility and Ontology, and I also benefitted from discussions with other participants at that conference.
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Smith, A.M. (2000). Identification and Responsibility. In: van den Beld, T. (eds) Moral Responsibility and Ontology. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2361-9_17
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