Deprivation and moral ecology

You might have heard that I have a new book out. On a per-page basis, it is one of the better deals out there among the new books on free will and moral responsibility. However, as T-Dog has rightly noted, one of the suboptimal features of the book for ballers like ourselves is that many of the Big Payoffs of the book are buried in the second half of the book. So, I want to take the opportunity here to foreground one of the features of the account in the book, and to talk about some potential consequences of it (i.e., stuff not in said book).

The idea I have in mind arises from a broadly anti-“atomistic” or anti-individualist strand of thinking in the book, which holds that we theorists of responsibility spend too much time thinking about individual features of agent, and not enough about agents in contexts. The anti-atomist idea gets developed in different ways, including an account of how to think about the capacities underpinning freedom and responsibility, but also in the idea that moral ecology is important. By moral ecology, I mean the circumstances that support and enable exercises of agency in ways that respect and reflect a concern for morality. I argue that moral ecology matters a great deal for responsible agency, both in its development but also in its ongoing effectiveness.

I’m inclined to think that questions about moral ecology are partly questions of political philosophy and our obligations to other agents. But, there are also some meat and potatoes issues in interpersonal responsibility and legal responsibility that seem to me to arise when we focus greater attention on moral ecology. I want to reflect on one instance where the ecological conditions of responsibility matter—deprivation cases (think: economic, but presumably the basic ideas generalize). To put it bluntly, can poverty make people less responsible for the bad things they do?

First, suppose that responsibility requires the ability to suitably recognize and respond to moral reasons. On conventional accounts, there are two standard ways in which deprivation could matter for responsibility:

(1) Deprivation is detection-capacity damaging. That is, conditions of deprivation may (in at least some circumstances) reduce the agent’s capacity to respond to moral considerations (of sorts x, y, or z, in some contexts) by damaging his reasons detector, whatever that comes to. 

(2) Deprivation is volitional-capacity impairing. On this picture, the detection capacity might be intact, but deprivation might swamp an agent’s attentional capacities or other elements that seem pertinent to the ability to form and sustain action on the basis of reasons. For example, people under conditions of scarcity may find that their attention and concern for personal needs is so great that it more frequently tends to swamp or distract from giving moral considerations typical weight in guiding action, even when the agent is aware of such considerations. 

I take it any standard reasons-responsiveness account can accommodate these sorts of cases. But I wonder if these capture all the cases, or potentially misdescribe the cases. Let’s focus on agents with ordinary capacities who lives in conditions of deprivation, and that such deprivation is no fault of their own. It seems plausible that at least some conditions of deprivation will be such that those agents will, with their ordinary capacities, be subject to vastly more opportunities for failure of that capacity. There are different ways the opportunities for failure being ramped up by contextual features. Here are some candidates: 

NO RENT: If you are not worried about being able to pay rent or make your mortgage payment, it will be easier to return the extra money the cashier accidentally gives you. But if you aren’t sure you will be able to keep your family from going homeless, it will be vastly more difficult to return that extra money the cashier accidentally gives you. As I’m imagining the case, the intrinsic capacities of the agent (to recognize and respond to reasons) are the same as yours and mine, but the circumstances strain those capacities more. If you have a sense that there is diminution of responsibility (and of course, one reply may be that you do not have that sense, you affluent bastard), it looks like it isn’t because the intrinsic capacities are defective, but because they are strained in circumstances like these. 

THUG LIFE: You and I aren’t regularly invited to participate in criminal endeavors (let’s suppose). But some people are because of where they live or other forces not easily under their control. Suppose everyone can resist the temptations of petty crime 99% of the time. By hypothesis, you and I are fortunate to live in places where we are invited to perpetuate such crimes on rare occasions (except sometimes, your program assistant encourages you to take the ream of office printer paper home). But some people in conditions of deprivation are subject to invitations for wrongdoing, say, 100 times more frequently. Over time, you and I will remain proud of our resilience to temptation. And, because we are Americans, we will condemn our peer who, with the same intrinsic capacity, is simply subject to temptation a great deal more frequently than we are. Yet, once the extrinsic factor is brought to my attention, at least this guilty liberal will wonder whether we should be so quick to blame our colleague subject to deprivation (recall: through no fault of her own). 

I’d love to hear what you think about any of this. Three points: (1) these cases are underdescribed, and one interest I have is the range of ways we might try to describe (or redescribe them) within the framework of broadly reasons-responsiveness accounts; (2) For what it is worth, I think we can develop a principled story about what some minimal threshold of effective capacity across contexts turns out to be, but it requires either re-thinking how we understand the capacities implicated in responsible agency or it requires an independent story about how to think about the functioning of capacities across unequal contexts of opportunities for failures of the capacity. That's one aim of the account of capacities in Building Better Beings, but I won't try to inflict that on you here because (3) There are surely other strategies lurking, and I'm all ears about what you are inclined to say about such alternatives. 

(also: h/t to Tadros and Lippke, whose work on deprivation and temptation in law has been one source of my thinking about these things). 

Comments

[John Fischer]

Manuel,

Very cool and interesting post, and I agree that we want our philosophizing to be as "green" as possible. I think you may be right that "standard" r/r theories don't quite get things right, although I'll have to think more about your cases. (btw, I'm getting ready to go to FSU, to which I'm looking forward, but I probably won't be blogging much over the next week).

My initial (and no doubt superficial) response: I don't think poverty in general makes one less responsible, but perhaps less blameworthy. It can affect one's capacities to identify reasons and/or react to them (as you point out nicely). Insofar as poverty makes it more difficult to identify and/or react to reasons, it may make one less blameworthy for doing bad things--but as long as one meets the threshold conditions for moral responsibility, one would still be fully morally responsible. Whether it is more perspicuous to think of moral responsibility as admitting of degrees or pushing the "degree" stuff into blameworthiness/praiseworthiness, I'm not sure, but that's the way I have been inclined to think about these things (but cf. Justin Coates' and Philip Swenson's very thoughtful article in Phil Studies, "Reasons-responsiveness and degrees of responsibility".

In a way, I think poverty works like manipulation. If someone manipulatively inculcates a strong but resistible urge to act in a certain way, I still think the manipulated agent can be responsible, but perhaps not (fully) blameworthy, insofar as it is difficult to resist the inculcated urge. Of course, some kinds of manipulation rule out responsibility entirely. Same with poverty. Difficulty of resistance, or difficult in identifying reasons, can be the result of poverty, screwed up up-bringings of various sorts (including religious ones, or atheist ones for that matter), or manipulation (of various sorts). These etiologies can issue either in no responsibility (if there is no suitable reasons-responsiveness) or diminished blameworthiness. It is interesting to me whether the complexity and nuances should be represented at the moment of responsibility or the moment of praiseworthiness/blameworthiness. (Of course, one could get even more taxonomically ambitious and distinguished between say judging someone blameworthy and actually blaming them in the sense of publically expressing the judgment and/or attaching a sanction or harsh treatment... It is possible that poverty mitigates [only or primarily] at this stage.)

Ok, it is klunky and no-doubt oversimplified theory, but I still love it!

See some of you folks soon in Tallahassee or perhaps New Orleans. And thanks, Manuel, for this challenging and thoughtful post.

[Robert Allen]

One should not be allowed to 'plead poverty' as a means of evading one's moral obligations, which are virtually always difficult to meet for one reason or another. You can never be too thin or too rich, they say. By the lowered standards suggested for adjudicating NR and TL, then, anyone can gin up a valid excuse for theft. Or, instead of NR just think of No Time, which plagues rich and poor alike. All but the mentally handicapped understand the (objective) difference between right and wrong and are capable of responding to moral reasons, intuiting their significance. Failure to aligns one's activities with that intuition is blameworthy regardless of one's circumstances, however dire, however much sympathy they warrant.

[V. Alan "Ph.D: Whitehead" White]

I really like your term for the conditions of anti-atomism as involving a wider "moral ecology." Inhabitants finding themselves in an inhospitable environment (biologically speaking) objectively have three options: succumb to it and die, luckily possess an adaptation that automatically permits survival, or possess adroit capacities that allow for the possibility of survival, but do not guarantee it. I take it the latter is the only relevant option for your thesis about deprivation with respect to a real ecology.

In extreme instances of deprivation and morality, there are actual cases that set at least the legal high bar. The William Brown (1843) was a life-boat US federal case that tried and convicted (with a wrist-slap) a first mate for throwing 14 passengers of an overloaded life-boat overboard under life-threatening conditions. The legal opinion was that the incident unfolded unfairly: only passengers were ejected and crew were favored. The court ruled that prior law of extreme deprivation provided the only fair rule: when a ship was stranded at sea and provisions ran out, lots were to be drawn for whom would be sacrificed for food for the others. The mate in Brown didn't use lots, but favoritism for crew over passengers.

Drawing lots for sacrifice as dinner. Now that's deprivation. But the rule of fairness by lot still applies, and even today makes some sense as a moral reaction to such extremity.

Except impoverished people may rightly see themselves as deprived, but not by uncaring forces of nature. By slashed food stamp programs, by closed emergency housing facilities, by increased policing of anti-pan-handling laws or other "enhanced public safety" measures, by incompetent administration of owed vet benefits, etc. etc. They may have a grudge, and a justified one in some real sense, since much of this is due to the politics of selfishness and pandering to the rich. Many poor people get the point of the Occupy movement. So they form intentions not merely of justification, but self-defense.

I'd say many intelligent poor people are not instances of (1) and not even (2), but see themselves as victims of larger forces working against them, and so justified in acting in their own best interests, irrespective of what mundane morality might think. So in these cases being "swamped" is not the issue. The issue is whether they are in fact justified in what they do in resisting those forces and acting in what they see as self-defense, and I think that is a real problem.

[Eddy "Degrees of Freedom" Nahmias]

Fascinating questions Manuel. May I use them as an opportunity to ask people (including you) a question that has come up here at Flickers in the past?

Why don't all just agree to treat moral responsibility (and, I'd suggest, free will) as coming in degrees? For instance, an agent is MR for outcome O to the extent that she possessed the capacities to control O and had the opportunity to exercise those capacities in bringing about (or failing to prevent) O. Then, all the work would get done in debating an analyzing how to fill in the relevant capacities for control and opportunities for exercising it (still plenty to debate, don't worry!).

Presumably, the sorts of cases Manuel describes would be explained in terms of the degree to which the agents had the relevant opportunities to avoid O (assuming we hold fixed their capacities).

[Mark Young]

I agree with John's initial reaction distinguishing responsibility and blameworthiness. But I don't agree that it's "taxonomically ambitious" to distinguish blameworthiness from punishment -- "publically expressing the judgment [of blameworthiness] and/or attaching a sanction or harsh treatment." In fact, I think it's taxonomically lazy not to make the distinction. I see this laziness in the tendency to argue against MR by citing the the US justice system -- that its manifest unfairness shows MR to be at best unfair and at worst impossible. It's as tho' the punishment we mete out is part of the law-breaker's responsibility. But I hold that we are responsible for how we treat law-breakers, and that we should try to respond in ways that are not themselves blameworthy. (Think /Unforgiven/.)

In the NR scenario, I also agree with Robert. Your situation warrants sympathy, but in no way reduces your responsibility or blameworthiness. But our reaction? In this case we should probably just express our judgement that what you did was wrong, and make you return the money.

In the TL scenario I see nothing wrong with condemning the thug. I'd say that our pride in our resilence is misplaced, and that it'd be wrong for us to judge him less resilient and treat him more harshly for it. But so long as he is still reasons responsive we can judge the quality of his responses to his reasons. Unless his alternatives were even more dire, his decision was blameworthy. "I resisted the other 99 times" is in no way a reason for him not to resist this time, and so in no way reduces his responsibility. The way we do respond to him reflects *our* quality of reasons responsiveness. It should be determined by our forward-looking reasons -- what is the response that best serves our (morally valid) goals. Perhaps his moral ecology would play a part in our decision (hopefully by making us do things to reduce the number of people in such an ecology), but it is *our* blameworthiness (not his) that it plays a role in.

[Mark Young]

It occurs to me as I reread it that

//try to respond in ways that are not themselves blameworthy. (Think /Unforgiven/.)//

might make it sound like those people's reactions were not blameworthy. Quite the opposite (for most of them).

[Neal Tognazzini]

Hey Manuel,

Great cases. One way to think about them is along Scanlonian lines, so that although the agents in your cases cross the minimal threshold for attributability, and although they perform impermissible actions, the meaning of those actions is altered by the moral ecological facts, and thus (since blameworthiness and blame are tied to meaning rather than permissibility) the the way we respond to those agents should be different from the way we respond to agents who are in less ecologically unlucky circumstances.

The sorts of cases you propose feature moral ecological facts that somehow restrict or impair an agent's capacities, even if those capacities are still intact enough to cross the relevant threshold. But I'd be curious also about moral ecological facts that lead us to temper blame without affecting the capacities of an agent. For example, even if the agent's capacities in No Rent aren't literally strained, it may be that we as a moral community simply don't think that it is reasonable to have the same expectations of people in those circumstances. (This thought might connect naturally with the Scanlonian thought about meaning, of course.)

[Neal Tognazzini]

Forgot to mention: Erin Kelly has a great paper on this issue called "What is an Excuse?". It's chapter 13 of the Blame anthology Justin Coates and I co-edited for OUP.

[Ben Mitchell-Yellin]

Hi Manuel,

Interesting post (as was the one before it).

For what it's worth, I am inclined to respond along the same lines as John. But I am happier than he is to distinguish between blameworthiness and blaming responses and to locate some of the requisite sensitivity to circumstances with respect to appropriateness of the latter. This would, I believe, contrast with your official (as in published under the auspices of OUP) position. Let me try to explain why I am attracted to the alternative proposal.

To begin with, an "atomistic" view that has suitably lenient conditions on morally responsible agency has the virtue of counting more of us morally responsible more often than a view that tightens the conditions according to circumstances. I consider this a virtue because I think it is desirable to be considered a morally responsible agent. One is a member of the club, so to speak. Of course, membership has its risks. Only members of the m.r. club are appropriately targeted with resentment and other forms of nasty blaming responses. But it is a select group, made up of those deemed capable of manifesting a particularly robust form of agency. And I think it is desirable to be able to (and to be recognized to be able to) manifest this form of agency (however specified). I don't see that this desirability varies according to circumstance.

So that's a consideration in favor of a suitably lenient atomistic view. No doubt it is defeasible. Now consider what the distinctions between (i) m.r. agency, (ii) judgments of moral blameworthiness and (iii) moral blaming responses can do by way of handling your NR case. (I think that similar things can be said about TL.)

My sense is that this case is "volitional-capacity impairing": the person who is unsure of being able to keep his family under shelter is distracted by the project of providing a roof. He is less likely, because of his poverty, to attend to considerations that do not promote this end in deciding what to do. This may affect the quality of will with which he acts when he fails to return the extra change. Perhaps the reasons for which he keeps the money, given the reasons he had to return it, do not display all that poor of a quality of will--after all, he was just trying to do right by his loved ones. Thus, he may not be appropriately judged morally blameworthy. Alternatively, it may be the case that, though he displays ill will in not returning the money and so is appropriately judged morally blameworthy for doing so, there are reasons not to react in any of the ways characteristic of moral blame. Thus, it may be better not to hold him responsible by blaming him.

The idea is that the above distinctions allow us to explain why and how our blaming practices should sensitive to circumstances in the ways suggested by NR. But if this is right, then it seems that we do not need to go circumstantialist in order to handle the cases. Given the above consideration in favor of a suitable atomistic view, I think we have the beginnings of an argument against circumstantialism.

Now, please set me straight.

[Ben Mitchell-Yellin]

I see now that I have posted my comment that Neal basically beat me to it. What he said.

[Robert Allen]

Alan is right. Under conditions of extreme deprivation- think a natural disaster- taking food from a store would be morally permissible; it would not be theft, but something akin to self-defense. It has nothing to do with 'diminished capacities', however. Desperation is the mitigating factor.

But speaking of self-defense, I would be thrilled if one of my colleagues would help me demonstrate that I'm not succumbing to casuistry in the following scenario, kind of a fantasy:

Capitalist Bastard: I'm taking my nightly stroll through the park when I spot a wallet on the ground. Fully intending to return it to whichever cash-strapped neighbor has dropped it, I am shocked to discover that it contains 10K$ and belongs to the local CB. 'I ain't giving it back to that guy,' I say to myself. 'He'll just use it to inflict further pain and suffering on the honest working people of this community, including my own family. Capital has no other use. I might just as well return a firearm to a known assassin. No, I'm going to keep this little weapon just in case I have to defend my family against the layoffs he's proposing.'

A legitimate claim of self=defense or not?

[Neil]

Hackman and Farah have a number of papers on the effects of socioeconomic status on the brain. Bottom line: there is a dose dependent relation between SES and executive function, especially working memory (and therefore IQ) and self-control. That is that the poorer you are, the less developed the frontal regions of the brain are, and this does not just show up with extreme poverty: it is significant even ordinary American poverty. The causal mechanisms are numerous, but stress is a major mediator. Publications available here:

http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~mfarah/selected-publications/index.html

[V. Alan "I Should Have Just Gone to Bed" White]

Neil--

Thanks so much for that. I found this remark apropos:

"It is important to note that the identification of structural correlates of SES does not in
any way imply that these SES differences are innate or unchangeable. Indeed, an emerging body of research demonstrates that structural brain measures (Draganski & May, 2008; Ilg et al., 2008; Keller & Just, 2009; Rosenzweig, 2003), including cortical thickness (Haier, Karama, Leyba & Jung, 2009) can be changed by environmental experience. It is our hope that identifying specific structural phenotypes that vary with socioeconomic status will lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms contributing to SES-disparities in health and achievement, and ultimately, will be used to design more effective policies and interventions that reduce these disparities."

This empirically-based "hope" the authors end the article with is compatible with a thesis that many negatively-disposed SES people "get" (despite thinned prefrontal tissue) that they might be justified in self-interested behavior that is not considered morally typical because they understand that at least some large-scale immoral circumstances serve to disadvantage them. The fact that these same circumstances make such epistemic appreciation less likely (thus reducing responsibility in another way) only makes assessment of the disadvantaged more complex and poignant.

[Neil]

Hi Alan,

An important caveat on changing the structural correlates: earlier intervention is far more powerful than later and far more likely to succeed. There has recently been a reassessment of the head start program, showing that it is more effective than most supporters had hoped. OTOH, blaming people for acts that are made more likely by social conditions which those who punish are themselves (indirectly) responsible seems to me to subject the blamed to a double dose of unfairness.

[Manuel "Moral Ecologist" Vargas]

Thanks for all the wonderful and helpful replies. This has been very helpful. I’ve got to run in a moment, so I’ll just post a general reaction now, and come back later to try to say a bit about some of the more particular issues that many of you have raised.

One issue here has to do with the slipperiness of vocabulary, and confusion about the different ways in which we tend to use the word responsibility (plea to the larger literature: let’s stop adding to “senses of responsibility” and start using different words to distinguish what we are on about!). On this matter, I tend to follow John and others in thinking that we can distinguish between a question about agency (what I call responsible agency) and a question about blameworthiness (what I call blameworthiness).

One potential difference between my view and John’s is that I tend to think we lose and regain responsibility quite a bit as we cross contexts. (I’m impressed, in part, by thinking about work in social psychology, but nevermind that here.) So, part of my interest here is thinking about the kinds of cases that put pressure on our having responsible agency or not in a context. The potentially interesting thought is (given certain specifications of capacity) that in some sense the agent’s capacity goes unchanged—we’ve got the same mechanism, as John might say—but the status of “is a responsible agent” shifts. I tend to think of NO RENT cases as potentially like that. (But if you don’t like that case, then think about the kind that Al White points to.)

To be sure, it depends on how you carve up the capacities. If something like motivational “oomph” is part of the capacity specification, then you should think there is a different capacity at work in NO RENT cases than in run-of-the-mill cases; if motivational force doesn’t figure in your specification of the capacity, then NO RENT cases look like responsible agency but there is the interesting practical feature that under real-world conditions, agents pervasively in NO RENT-like situations will behave as though they have much less effective capacities for responding to moral reasons. Indeed, we could probably construct scenarios in which such agents have revealed dispositions (given their context) to act in ways behaviorally identical to non-responsible agents (in non-deprived contexts). That’s not, by itself, an argument one way or another, but it strikes me as an interesting possible outcome.

Apart from the responsible agency question, there is also the blameworthiness question and the various ways of parsing that. I’m inclined to think moral ecology matters here, too, and like lots of folks, I think this is a natural place to put degree talk. What’s interesting about THUG LIFE, for my purposes, is that it doesn’t work by putting motivational stress on an agent’s intrinsic capacity. For agents in THUG LIFE cases, they can resist the motivational stress just as well as we can. So, we need another account of what generates the exculpatory element in whatever degree it operates.

[Robert Allen]

Manuel,

In 'carving up capacities,' we must consider the following cases (and others like them): A performer who cancels a series of shows because of personal problems; A bright pupil suddenly bored by his studies; A world class athlete who has lost interest in his sport; A romance out of which the ‘spark’ has gone. In each one, there is an agent suffering from a motivational deficiency: due to lack of initiative, he cannot bring himself to perform hitherto routine tasks. ‘I can’t go on this evening’, ‘I can’t do any better in school’, ‘I can’t compete like I used to’, ‘We can’t see each other anymore’- all of these seem to be legitimate claims of inability. But being hamstrung conatively entails neither a loss of skill nor opportunity. Thus, the above agents were able to act differently according to Humean accounts of free agency.

Yet we do say things such as, ‘She could have gone on tonight’ or ‘He should be doing much better at his studies’ or ‘He appears to be in great shape’ or ‘They needn’t have split up’. The problem is, it’s not clear that the individuals at whom these remarks are directed are, all things considered, ‘up to’ engaging in their former activities. Such remarks may only be our way of alluding to the fact that there is more to being able to accomplish something than having the required skills and opportunity, or attempts to instill initiative, so that the dormant skills can be exercised. (Indeed, they could be regarded as drawing attention to the fact that, though the person in question is free according to Humean, behavior oriented views, ultimately they are limiting themselves because of their decision making, mental activities.)

Would we blame any of them for failing to meet our expectations? Is there not a loss of self-control attendant upon conative failure? Are they not all bound to fail, despite their skills and the opportunities presented them, until they are once again driven to succeed? If so, we should not prescind from an agent’s motives in determining whether or not he can act otherwise. Sans the proper motivation, one may be stuck with acting as one is, extant skills and opportunities notwithstanding.

One might treat the above agents as impaired. I have been assuming that their problems are purely psychological, to be distinguished from (say) laryngitis, a concussion, or arthritis. Perhaps, though, their motivational deficiencies cause a temporary loss of the cognitive/motor skills that make up their competencies, or at least render their exercise physically impossible? The problem then becomes the existence of motivational deficiencies in regards to others actions that are shunned, such as my refusal to disappoint my wife by purchasing the wrong paper towels. For, there appears to be no principled way to distinguish between those mental states entailing impairments and those that leave our skills intact and workable. All motives place limits on what we can do. An agent’s strongest desire interferes with his ability to do things contrary to securing its object, making him no less incapable of other accomplishments than those now lacking an interest in or averse to former pursuits. My desire to please my wife makes the ‘won't’ in ‘I won’t buy the plain towels’ akin to ‘would never’, making the whole sentence an expression of inability: to wit, ‘I would never do such a thing; I am simply incapable of it’.

It seems, then, that our motives are not only relevant to what we will do, but what we can do as well. There is an all things considered sense of ‘can’ according to which lack of initiative entails an inability. One may appeal to it to justify one’s unwillingness to blame another agent for his failure to do something or accept responsibility for one’s own failures. If lacking competence or an opportunity constitutes a valid excuse for inaction, then inadequate motivation should as well.

[Manuel "It is almost beer o'clock" Vargas]

John: I think we agree about a lot of this: responsible agency has a threshold of satisfaction in order to be responsible and that the blameworthiness/praiseworthiness issue comes in degrees (that’s the view I defend in BBB, likely influenced by your view in R also, what you highlight as the “taxonmically ambitious” move of distinguishing between blaming judgments (blame 1) and reactions (blame 2) is something I explicitly invoke in BBB (pp. 116-121), so we are surely fellow travelers on these matters). One thing that’s interesting about the THUG LIFE case, though, is that it doesn’t work via the the thought that it is “hard to resist” in the sense that the actual capacity is subject to an unusually high degree of motivational pressure in a given instance. Instead, the motivational element isn’t particularly powerful, just frequent enough that lapses become way more likely.

Robert: I’m not convinced that lowering the bar means eliminating the bar, or that lowering the bar in one place means eliminating it everywhere, but I do accept your intended reductio. But I regard it as an interesting possibility! That is, I suspect we underestimate the way in which time pressures screw up our capacities for moral responsibility (see p. 342 and surrouding of Clark et al’s Decomposing the Will volume).

Al: I think you are probably right about how those in circumstances of deprivation sometimes see themselves when they commit acts of ostensive wrongdoing. I’m not sure how far away this is from just having a view about the moral or political impermissibility of THUG LIFE. That is, one might think the duty of a state or a society is to ensure that people live in conditions that support various values, including freedom and right action. One way to think that there has been a failure in the organization of the political order just is to think that one occupies a class or social context disproportionately subject to THUG LIFE effects. If one regards the political order as having failed in that way, then this may be one source of the sense of having a justification for the ostensive wrongdoing that one does.

Eddy: For those of us who accept a threshold view on the agency side of things (see above), I’m not sure whether your suggestion is a different way of saying the same thing, or a deeper disagreement about how to handle degree talk. I take it that all of us are comfortable with degree talk somewhere. But maybe I wrong about that.

[Manuel "Make Mine St. Bernardus Abt 12" Vargas]

Mark: Thanks for the remarks. My comments above should make it clear that I agree with you about the taxonomical issue. I like the position you sketch, and I think it is a very defensible way to sort the terrain in this domain. I admit that I’m partly moved by views that lots of other folks have no reason to accept. In particular, I’ve got a view about the teleology of responsibility, namely, that it has to do with getting people to track moral considerations. I worry that if there are moral ecologies that systematically disadvantage people in virtue of their social identities (by subjecting them to massive amounts of temptation, for example) that we lose “buy in” by those folks on shared norms of praise and blame that help foster moral considerations-sensitive agency. THUG LIFE sometimes looks like one of those cases, to me. To put it crudely, I’m inclined to think normative capacities are only “apt” or appropriately bases for normative evaluations in certain conditions. When those conditions are vastly different, it feels like there is some normative pressure to rethink the costs that are born by folks who have to live with capacities being made to work under atypical conditions. That said, for folks who don’t share my picture, I think your reaction here is probably the right one.

Neal: See my remarks above about why NO RENT might be construed as a case leaving capacities intact. But even if you build in motivational elements, so NO RENT does count as capacity-diminishing, then I’d lean on THUG LIFE. There, it seems to me, there isn’t any strain on the capacity as people would ordinarily characterize the agent’s capacity. On the Scanlonian meaning point, I hadn’t thought about it that way before. That’s an interesting idea. It makes me wonder if Scanlon and I are talking about the same basic phenomenon in different terminology.

Ben: I’m less inclined to be zero-sum about the atomistic vs. circumstantialist view. Something may not be a minus in the atomistic column without thereby becoming a minus in the circumstantialist column. Anyway, I take the circumstantialism stuff to be partly driven by worries about situationism. And, so far as I know, no atomistic account yet has a really good story about what to say about those cases. That said, I think the emendations you and others have suggested are probably the right way to handle NO RENT. I’m not yet persuaded that they handle THUG LIFE (unless, of course, one has Mark’s reaction, which strikes me as reasonable, but not my own). How are you thinking the atomist should handle that case?

Neil: That's a nice bit of evidence. I take it that at this point, there is fairly widespread evidence poverty significantly impacts on cognitive abilities in various ways. It is always good to have a citation on hand, though!

Robert @ 10/11/13: These are great worries. But they aren’t mine here, and I’m going to mostly ignore 'em in the present context. Why? I think they take us too far afield. Still, I take your worry sufficiently seriously that I've tried to write about it, saying how I think about unexercised capacities and motivational failures. As fond as I am of that account, I was hoping to use this thread to talk about something else. Here, I’m just taking it as a given that there is some way (mine or someone else’s) for adequately drawing the relevant distinctions about motivation and capacity. In the event that you are genuinely interested in why someone (who doesn’t already have your views) might think this can be done in a way that doesn’t obviously collapse into a “no blameworthiness anywhere” view, take a look at ch. 6-7 of BBB. I’m confident you will find a good deal to disagree with in that account. But in the interest of trying to keep the discussion focused, let’s think of the present discussion assuming that we can adequately draw most of the familiar “capacitarian” or reasons-responsiveness distinctions (whether on the grounds I like, or on some other account out there) and the proceeds to ask whether, given the tenability of that presumption, there are cases that sort in unusual ways once we consider questions of moral ecology. I get that you think that you think that once we open the ecological can of worms, that we can’t make the standard distinction about being responsible despite a lack of motivation. Consider your concern duly noted.

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

I take it that one of the central problems for folks who want to hold that agents in cases like NO RENT and THUG LIFE have diminished responsibility is that if we think things through to their logical endings, it forces us to make choices about punishment theory we may not have realized we would have to make. Minimally, these types of cases force retributivists to think more carefully about their stories.

Here's why: Often, real world cases involving NO RENT and THUG LIFE involve individuals who are more "dangerous" for the reasons Neil identified earlier. And while their often neural-based impulsivity and deficits in control can sometimes be improved with training, treatment, and rehabilitation, their deficits are real for all that. So, what do threshold theorists say at the punishment stage of trials: You could say that owing to the deficits, they are *less* responsible than their non NO RENT and non THUG LIFE cohorts. But then you will be dispensing lighter sentences to the more dangerous. You could, on the other hand, find them *more* responsible, but then it looks like, from the standpoint of desert, you are punishing people more harshly who have less control (often through no fault of their own).

This suggests, at least to me, an odd tension within retributivism--namely, it seems ill-equipped to deal with real-world sentencing. If one is a consequentialist about punishment, cases like this are easier since you already have theoretical mechanisms in place to justify giving longer sentences to the more dangerous (on those grounds alone). But a retributivist, on the other hand, has a hard time making these discriminations. Of course, if you had a threshold view whereby anyone above a certain threshold is *fully* responsible, that's fine as far as it goes. But then you're forced to ignore the difference between someone with a 75 IQ and someone with a 125 IQ (or someone who steals food out of hunger rather than for fun). Or so it seems to me. Either way, retributivists have never done well with ecological (or biological) accounts of crime. In either case, the mitigating that seems to follow for certain individuals has to be denied by the retributivist. To me, this looks like a reductio since the discriminations are real and they ought to matter when it comes to real-world sentencing.

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

p.s. I think Eddy's "degrees of responsibility" model is going to have the same problems when it comes to desert and sentencing. Presumably, what you want to say about some of these individuals is that they are less responsible and hence less deserving of punishment. Yet, here again, many of those deemed less responsible will, for the very same reasons, be more potentially dangerous. So, you will either find yourself punishing the more dangerous less harshly (if you're a pure retributivist) or you will find yourself punishing the less deserving more harshly (if you trend towards consequentialist justifications). I would suggest simply giving up the notion of desert altogether, but that is a story for another day... For now, the focus is on those who would hold onto desert while trying to take on board what we're learning about the sources of crime.

[Robert Allen]

The danger posed by those deficits do not entail a problem for retributivists, Tom. They can simply hold that in such cases incarceration is for the sake of rehabilitation and public safety, removing altogether the element of punishment, which is reserved for normal cases. Even if it's not exactly 'funishment' if removing someone from society is being done for the lawbreaker's own good and living conditions are not harsh AND the criminal himself is made aware of his blamelessness and our desire to help him, then he is not being punished.

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

Bob,

The retributivist can only shield himself if it turns out that most of the people who get caught up in the prison industrial complex are not NO RENT, THUG LIFE, etc. Given that estimates suggest that anywhere from 40-70% (if not higher) of convicted felons can be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (and another 10-20% of violent felons can be diagnosed with psychopathy), you wouldn't have many people left to punish. That would be a sad day for folks who think the whole point of the punishment system is to dispense desert, no? As for your alternate, non-punishment, preventive detention model, that sounds great to me. It just doesn't sound like the sort of model a retributivist would go for (lest there be no one left to properly punish). So, while you say it poses "no problem," I am unconvinced. I take it the retributivist wants and needs there to be lots of "normal cases," but you won't get many once you follow all of the bio-social rabbits down their respective holes. Or so it seems to me...

[Manuel "Bio-Social Mole" Vargas]

Hi Thomas-

I share your worries about what this means for retributive punishment. In many ways, I think the issue is clearer there than it is on the moral responsibility side of things. Even if we thought there is some room for blame of the moral variety (and whether there is, of course, depends on what one thinks blame is and what the justification is for engaging in it), it looks to me like a prima facie problem for retributive theories of punishment if some citizens are getting subjected to coercive state power in no small part because of conditions that the state could ameliorate.

Also, "bio-social rabbits" is awesome.

[Neil]

Just how bad is poverty for brain development?

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine"

http://articles.philly.com/2013-07-22/news/40709969_1_hallam-hurt-so-called-crack-babies-funded-study

[V. Alan "I Was a Teenage Free Will Zombie" White]

Neil--

My take from that piece is that is it difficult to assess whether "crack-babies" are actually as disadvantaged as has been cast by previous reports, and thus the disadvantage of poverty may be only worse as opposed to more typical comparative groups after all. So it seems the piece is more critical of the "crack-baby" claim than any particular assertion about the relative harms of poverty, though it does not detract from the claim that poverty is disabling overall.