Hi all. I recently wrote an entry in my personal blog on blame and Brock Turner. Since it's rather lengthy, I'm just going to post the introduction and a link to the full post here. All feedback is welcome.
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I’m going to write about a sensitive topic with some reservations and apprehensions, but I think that it’s a case worth addressing from a philosophical perspective. I believe it’s a case on which philosophers can shed light, and a case that we can learn from. As I’m sure you know, Brock Turner raped a 23-year-old woman whom he met at a party. He was convicted of three charges of felony sexual assault and sentenced to six months’ jail time and 3 years’ probation by Judge Aaron Persky. This case has elicited a very vocal blaming response from the public, which I think is eminently appropriate. But it raises some questions for responsibility theorists. The main one that I want to address is the relationship between individual and collective responsibility, or more specifically, the responsibility that an individual bears when he is a member of a broader social group, and his actions reflect the (implicit or explicit) values of the group. I also plan to reconsider what can count as responsibility-relevant group membership, to include participation in ‘mere aggregates’ such as rape culture. I think that assessing Turner through the lens of collective responsibility explains the force of our shared reaction in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. That is, I think that there is general consensus that Turner is blameworthy in a particularly strong way, and we can explain this reaction by considering his social position – specifically, his implicit affiliation with particular (loose) social groups.
Without saying too much about this, I take this analysis to be consistent with certain contemporary projects in responsibility theory, particularly Vargas’ emphasis of the ‘moral ecology’ (2013) – the social structures that enhance or limit moral agency. I don’t think that it’s possible to assess a person’s responsibility status without considering the moral ecology, since responsibility, properly understood, is a function not just of a person’s internal properties, but the dynamic interaction between those properties and the world. Individual responsibility, then, can’t be judged independently of person’s social context. While social factors can impair responsibility by cutting off deliberative possibilities (consider Wolf’s famous JoJo example [1986], or Beauvoir’s example of the cloistered sex slave living in a harem [1964]), I argue that social structures can also amplify a person’s blameworthiness if those structures enable antisocial behaviour by creating conditions of privilege.
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