Consider the following two cases of apparently altruistic helping behavior:
Broken Glass
Rob’s thirsty, and he sees a glass across the room. Since she’s closer to it than he is, Rob asks Pearl to hand him the glass so that he can pour himself some water. Pearl notices that the glass is broken, so she gets up and gets another glass that isn’t broken and takes the unbroken one to Rob instead. Having a functional glass into which he can now pour water, Rob is genuinely grateful to Pearl and expresses his gratitude by telling her that he appreciates her help.
Crying Child
In a daycare filled with crying children, Julie sees Maggie crying and inconsolable. She takes Maggie her favorite toy and sits with her, gently touching her and waiting with her until she feels better. Cynthia sees this, and she is very appreciative that Julie took care of Maggie, since she’s got two other crying children to deal with. Later, when she gets a free moment, Cynthia makes sure to thank Julie.
In these cases, it appears that it is appropriate for Rob and Cynthia to feel and express gratitude towards Pearl and Julie respectively. No doubt, there is some instrumental reason for this: by expressing their gratitude, Rob and Cynthia make it more likely that they are helped in the future. But I don’t think this fully explains why gratitude is the fitting response in this case; for independently of whether Rob and Cynthia stand to benefit from Pearl’s and Julie’s respective help in the future, there seems to be a weighty reason to feel gratitude in these situations that isn't grounded in consequentialist considerations. One might even say that it seems that Pearl and Julie deserve Rob’s and Cynthia’s gratitude.
This assessment, I think, is quite plausible given the fact that Pearl and Julie both seemed to recognize and respond to reasons for action and in so doing, revealed the laudable quality of their wills. (It might take some work to do so, but I think this point can be filled in quite plausibly along the lines suggested by either Nomy Arpaly (2003) or Julia Markovits (2010).)
Now, because Pearl and Julie each seem to deserve Rob’s and Cynthia’s respective gratitude, it seems possible to conclude that they are each morally responsible for their respective action. After all, praiseworthiness seems to entail responsibility since only morally responsible agents can genuinely deserve praising attitudes like gratitude, appreciation, and esteem. So with no obvious excusing conditions present, barring something that (putatively) undercuts moral responsibility for all agents (e.g., causal determinism--at least according to incompatibilists), who could doubt that Pearl and Julie are morally responsible for their action? [1]
But what if I told you that Pearl and Julie are just toddlers? [2] “Pearl” is a composite of three years old children discussed in Alia Martin and Kristina R. Olsen’s work in developmental psychology, and “Julie” is a composite of even younger children discussed in Carolyn Zahn-Waxler’s work. Knowing this, do you still think that Pearl and Julie are morally responsible agents who are praiseworthy for their actions?
If you accept the dominant view in the philosophical literature on moral responsibility, then you don't.
According to this view, defended in the recent literature by P. F. Strawson, among others (though its historical antecedents certainly go back at least to Adam Smith), the fact that an agent is a child exempts the agent from responsibility. [3] The very plausible thought here is simply that there is a suite of capacities that agents must possess if they are to be participants in our responsibility practices, and of course, all children lack these capacities. Consequently, they are not “in the ballpark” of morally responsible agency and so they are neither praiseworthy (or blameworthy) for what they do, nor are they genuinely deserving of gratitude or its expressions (or resentment and its expressions).
But is this a reasonable way of assessing Pearl's and Julie's responsibility for their respective actions?
Strawson himself seems to appreciate that this is a more complicated issue than might appear at first glance, but I'm not sure he (or those of us who have followed him in taking childhood to be an exempting condition) have learned the "right" lessons from these complications. Strawson notes, for example, that thinking that young children are exempted from responsibility doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t respond to children’s acts as if they were responsible for them. Such responses, he rightly claims, are the basis of their moral development and inculcation in the moral community:
[Parents of young children] are dealing with creatures who are potentially and increasingly capable both of holding, and being objects of, the full range of human and moral attitudes, but are not yet truly capable of either. The treatment of such creatures must therefore represent a kind of compromise, constantly shifting in direction, between objectivity of attitude and developed human attitudes. Rehearsals insensibly modulate towards true performances… In this matter of young children, it is essentially a borderline, penumbral area that we move in, (Strawson 2008, 20-21).
In other words, with young children, we rehearse and encourage them to act in this or that fashion (and not in some other fashion) as a way of teaching them about the import of others’ demand for good will or reasonable regard. These rehearsals, however, eventually become the “real deal,” and so, from Strawson’s point of view, the general practice of engaging with our children in this way might be ultimately justified.
But although this all seems right, what’s especially striking here is that while Strawson is sensitive to the possibility that young children’s agency can be “essentially a borderline” case of responsible agency, Strawson nevertheless insists that young children are not capable of being (appropriate) objects of the “human” attitudes (i.e., the reactive attitudes, which is a class of attitudes that includes gratitude, resentment, esteem, indignation, etc.).
There’s a tension here, though. For if we take seriously Strawson’s claim that young children are a borderline case, then it would seem plausible to think that even if they were not apt targets for the full range of human reactive attitudes, they could be apt, deserving targets of (at least) some of these attitudes (maybe the whole range of human attitudes isn't all that important to our humanity as such). [4]
However, Strawson seems to ignore this implication, and he just proceeds, despite his cursory acknowledgement of the complexities of these issues, as if being the appropriate object of these human attitudes is an all or nothing matter. Perhaps this isn't surprising given his subsequent claim that, “the punishment of a child is both like and unlike the punishment of an adult,” (Strawson 2008, 20). After all, in the ideal case, the punishment of children only mimics certain features of the punishment of adults, while lacking the expressive punitive force of full-fledged punishment. But it’s precisely the expressive force of punishment that seems to make it an inappropriate response to children, and so you might thereby think that the same would be true for any of punishment’s negative analogs (e.g., rebukes, censorship, etc.) or positive counterparts (e.g., rewards, praise, etc.).
Of course, punishment, along with the punitive attitudes it expresses (e.g., resentment and indignation), is just one (rather extreme) feature of our moral responsibility practices. There is conceptual space, then, for thinking that an agent—yes, even a child—could be the proper (i.e., deserving) object of some of the human attitudes even if she is not deserving of all such attitudes. [5] And since Pearl's and Julie's actions are a (small) expression of humanity at its best, I see no reason to doubt that they are worthy of our gratitude.
[1] Only MR skeptics, presumably; cf. Pereboom (2001).
[2] For a helpful introduction to some of this literature, see Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, New York, NY: Crown Publishers (2013), especially Chapter 2. For more detailed accounts of the children in question, see Alia Martin and Kristina R. Olsen’s “When Kids Know Better: Paternalistic Helping in 3-year-old Children,” Developmental Psychology, 49.11. (2013): 2071-2081. See also Carolyn Zahn-Waxler’s work on the origins of empathy. For a representative selection of her work on this topic, see Ariel Knafo, Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, Carol Van Hulle, JoAnn L. Robinson, and Soo Hyun Rhee, “The Developmental Origins of a Disposition Toward Empathy: Genetic and Environmental Contributions,” Emotion 8.6. (2008): 737-752.
[3] P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, New York, NY: Routledge (2008): 1-28. For more on Strawson’s account of exempting conditions, see Gary Watson, “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme,” Agency and Answerability, New York, NY: Oxford University Press (2004): 219-259. Of course, Strawson is hardly alone on this point, and though not many address it explicitly, I know of no one who denies Strawson’s claim that young children are exempt from moral responsibility.
[4] This point seems very important to me, but I don't know quite how to develop it.
[5] A promissory note: if it looks like I've just claimed that the conditions on praiseworthy and blameworthy actions are not symmetrical, it's because I have. I hope to defend this claim (though, as we'll see, I do not think the asymmetry is located in the same place the Wolf (1991) and Nelkin (2012) have suggested) in an upcoming post.
//[Y]oung children’s agency can be “essentially a borderline” case of responsible agency[....]
[I]t would seem plausible to think that even if they were not apt targets for the full range of human reactive attitudes, they could be apt, deserving targets of (at least) some of these attitudes[....]//
Yes. Children (even young ones) are responsible for their (voitional) actions. However, due to non-culpable ignorance, they are not responsible for nearly the same range of the consequences of their actions. And likewise due to non-culpable ignorance, they are not deserving of the full range of reactive attitudes that apply to (competent!) adults. The same rules of responsibility apply to children as to adults, but the child's circumstances are distinctly different than those of most adults, meaning that the application will differ markedly. Children are ignorant and accident-prone, and it is only in that sense that they are "less responsible" -- responsible /for/ less than non-ignorant and more capable (older) people are.
The mistake, as I see it, is to see "responsibility" not merely as a precondition for "desert", but as being coextensive with it. Thus we take "not deserving to be punished/blamed for X" to mean "not responsible for X", and "not deserving as much punishment for X" as being "less responsible for X". Responsibility, as I see it, is entirely about the actor. Desert, in spite of being attributed to the actor, is primarily about the re-actor. To say that A deserves R is to say something about the appropriateness of someone else doing/giving R to A (or of taking/withholding R from A). The difference between reacting to a child and reacting to an adult is not founded in differing amounts or kinds of responsibility for their actions, but in the appropriateness of those reactions to that actor.
For example, the response to kindness from a child should be even warmer than response to the same kindness from an adult. And not just because we are training the child to be kind. The adult knows that kindness is (or should be) repaid with kindness, and such knowledge mitigates not their responsibility for the kindness shown, but only the warmth of our reaction to it. The child is (presumably) free of such knowledge, and so acting from purely altruistic motives, and so deserving of more warmth in our response, even tho' they are exactly as responsible for their action as the adult is.
The same reasoning, contraposed, shows why responses to children's misbehaviour should be less warm than responses to corresponding behaviours of adults (and older children). Same rules of responsibility; same rules of reaction; differing circumstances leading to differing results.
Posted by: Mark Young | 10/07/2014 at 10:24 AM
I'll do you one better, Justin. I'm inclined to say that certain non-human animals may be responsible for what they do, indeed praiseworthy for what they do, so long as they are able to entertain certain representations. So, supposing that dolphins know they are saving the sailor's life, I'm inclined to think they could be praiseworthy for that, though, of course, there would be no direct point in actually praising them.
Posted by: Matt King | 10/08/2014 at 03:40 PM
Hi Justin-
I'm super sympathetic to the basic view here. I've even expressed my affection in print! Check out /Building Better Beings/ pp. 229-230, where I explicitly note that the account there suggests that children and non-human animals may be responsible in some cases, in light of some considerations. (I've likely been influenced by conversations with Matt King about related stuff, so h/t to Matt!!)
Maybe relevant: in a paper draft that responds to a great paper by these Coates and Swenson dudes, I explicitly defend the view that children can be responsible in "patchy" ways—w/r/t to some considerations and not others. Partly, this follows out of the "circumstantialist" approach of the picture of responsible agency in the book. Very sorry if I haven't already sent it to you, and happy to do so.
In short, yes, and I think the "patchiness" of blame in kids (and maybe non-human animals) has the shape that it has because kids (etc.) may be able to adequately self-regulate in light of some considerations, and not others, and when those considerations are live then they are responsible agents with respect to those considerations in those contexts.
Posted by: Manuel "Endlessly Self-Promoting" Vargas | 10/08/2014 at 07:53 PM
Mark that's an interesting point about desert being about the reactor. I take it that what you're claiming is that desert, which many folks take to be a three part relation between an agent, his action, and the thing he deserves in response is actually a four part relation between an agent, his action, the thing he deserves in response, *and* who it is that's providing that response. This would certainly make sense of objections to blame along the lines of "I don't deserve that from you."
But why not think that responsibility has this fourth element built in as well?
I'm not sure I completely share your intuitions about "warmness" of response. It's true that adults can appreciate how being nice will affect them for the better in the long run. And Kant might be right that given this, we can never be sure that we aren't self-deceived about our motives, since it's always epistemically possible that whenever we take ourselves to be acting from the motive of duty, we're actually being moved by self-interest. But I think a lower level of credence concerning it's X's concern for me and not his concern to benefit himself in the long run to be sufficient for a warm response. So I suspect that many adults deserve pretty warm responses.
Posted by: Justin Coates | 10/09/2014 at 08:23 AM
Justin,
I believe it's possible to hold that so-and-so deserves such-and-such without committing to there being any person who has the moral standing to deliver such-and-such to that so-and-so. In that sense I think I disagree that desert should be modeled as a four-part relation. On the other hand, it's also possible to hold that your wife deserves an apology *from you* -- that no other person can give her what she deserves. If that can't be modeled by a three-part relationship, then so much the worse for three-part relationships.
What I mean by "desert is primarily about the re-actor" is that, while morality is a guide to acting, desert is a guide to reacting. Desert is an aspect of morality, and partakes of its whole structure. Does a moral obligation have four relata? A moral permission? If so, then it'd be appropriate to model desert the same way. But I'd rather remain agnostic about how it's modeled. (Or rather, I'm a pluralist -- all I care about is that the model does a good job of giving suitable answers.)
Responsibility, on the other hand, is not about other people at all. You can't be (so far as I know) morally responsible for X *to* anyone, *for* anyone, *from* anyone, or *by* anyone. You just *are* responsible for X. That fact may have consequences for how other people may or should react to you -- and those consequences are what we're talking about when we talk about desert -- but the responsibility itself is merely "for X".
As for the warmth, I'm not entirely sure *I* agree with what I said :-). Nevertheless, I'm leaning toward the conclusion that it is sometimes appropriate to give fulsome praise to a child for an act that would not merit fulsome praise to an adult. Not for the consequences (a better-behaved child), but because adults *should* carry out that act (and should know that they should), whereas children would not know that they should do it, and cannot reasonably be expected to know that they should do it, and so for them it is super-erogatory (if I understand that term correctly). The adult is responsible for meeting a moral obligation, but the child is responsible for an act beyond what she's obliged to do.
Posted by: Mark Young | 10/09/2014 at 10:25 PM
Matt,
Very cool! It's nice to know I'm not completely out there on this.
The dolphins case is a nice one. I think I was convinced of something similar when I read Frans de Waal's *Peacemaking Among Primates*.
Posted by: Justin Coates | 10/12/2014 at 10:51 AM
Manuel,
I read a manuscript draft of BBB, but it looks like I need to check out the real thing. I also want to get my hands on the latest version of that paper you were talking about. Do you think that young children's "patchy" responsibility also extends to deserved blame (or some more minimal forms of blame)?
Posted by: Justin Coates | 10/12/2014 at 10:55 AM
Mark
I agree with you that desert is part of morality, but I'm not sure that means how we model it must be symmetrical with how we model other parts of morality, like obligation.
I'm also not sure that responsibility "is not about other people at all." I'm with Strawson in thinking that our notion of being responsible arises in the context of ordinary human relationships, and this gives it what Darwall has called a second-personal character. Now maybe that's not the sense of "about other people" that you had in mind, but it seems relevant to me.
A related thought is that independently of the *responses* that I might be open to in light of my actions, I lose a grip on just what it is to be "responsible for X" simpliciter. I think this is what pushes folks to characterize that relationship in terms of desert, fittingness, propriety, etc.
However things come down, this is all very helpful.
Posted by: Justin Coates | 10/12/2014 at 11:06 AM
Justin,
My point is that it's not the *particular* responses (what you deserve) that make you responsible; it is merely that you *are* open to responses. The *particular* responses will differ based on what it's morally appropriate to expect from you, and thus (I say) responsibility should not be characterized in terms of desert, nor in terms of what's a fitting or appropriate response.
Posted by: Mark Young | 10/14/2014 at 11:17 AM