Flickers of Freedom

5. Relational responsibility and (oppressive) gender roles.

What I have said so far implies that responsibility is relational. Why? Because we’re all implicated in joint rational projects (except for total social isolates), and rationality deficits in one social group tend to precipitate correlative, but asymmetrical, rationality deficits in other social groups. For example, implicit bias in privileged group members tends to induce stereotype threat in the least-well-off, as well as undermining the social roles realistically available to members of these groups.

To illustrate this in more concrete terms, we can look at how traditional gender roles impaired responsible agency in men and women (and trans folks, who were virtually erased from public discourse), by restricting the range of social roles available to each group. (I’m simplifying by talking as if there were three genders, though I believe that gender lies on a spectrum; however, since it’s not feasible to discuss every possible gender intersection). The traditional division of labour along binary gendered lines prevented each gender from achieving robust responsibility, but it also arguably gave rise, in certain cases, to group-specific cognitive deficits that impaired moral cognition in the affected group. For example, men’s almost total exclusion from care-taking roles may have negatively affected their emotional and social cognition, impairing an important component of responsible agency.

As Sharyl Sandberg has famously pronounced (2013), women are to this day expected to ‘lean in’ and work harder for the same credit and compensation as men for comparable work, because women also typically (still) do a majority of the domestic labour. Women also face such hurdles as workplace discrimination.

Naomi Wolf raised similar considerations in ‘The Beauty Myth,’ published in 1990 (republished in 2002). There, Wolf argues that (salaried) working women are responsible for ‘three shifts’: (1) paid labour, (2) domestic labour, and (3) beauty labour. Wolf continues that if women were emancipated from their secondary and tertiary ‘extra’ responsibilities, they would quickly outpace men in their academic and professional achievements, since women have been acculturated into working harder for less recognition and compensation. Now we’re (finally) starting to see Wolf’s prediction come to fruition, with women completing college at higher rates than men (Conger & Long 2010)—though they still earn less on the dollar due to resilient patriarchal norms. The reason for women’s higher academic achievement in the last 2.5 decades is largely, as Wolf predicted, because men are doing more domestic labour, creating a more equitable split of domestic duties. This allows women to focus more on their salaried careers. (One would also hope that women would be under less pressure to conform to Western beauty standards, but instead it appears that men are under more pressure to conform to a constructed masculine aesthetic. Nonetheless, this has had an equalizing effect on the paid workforce, levelling the playing field, regardless of whether it has been ultimately emancipatory).

Wolf’s example of women’s extra shifts helps to illustrate how responsibility is relational, in the sense that it depends upon everyone doing their fair share. When women are confined to the domestic sphere by artificially-imposed social structures and social expectations, they are not able to take on social roles that confer role responsibilities—responsibilities that women might want to cultivate, and that are valued by society (as evidenced by the higher remuneration typically attached to historically male positions). Until fairly recently in our history, women were only allowed to cultivate responsibilities related to the domestic sphere, providing a relatively ‘thin’ swathe of responsibility-constitutive capacities available to them.

Furthermore, women’s systematic exclusion from public life sustained false and mythical ideologies about such things as gender (binary), sex (equivalent to gender), the self (atomistic), and many other topics that have been criticized by contemporary feminist scholars. Women’s exclusion from public life thus impoverished the public discourse, and propped up oppressive falsehoods.   

Men, of course, were also harmed by patriarchy in many ways, including in their responsible agency (though of course they were socially privileged). Yet men were limited in the range of viable social positions and corresponding role responsibilities available to them under the binary gender paradigm and its associated social possibilities. By being barred (or exempting themselves) from the domestic sphere, men were also harmed in their capacity for care-taking, and perhaps in their ability to develop robust social and emotional capacities. It seems that these capacities are implicated in moral responsibility, since deficits in emotional empathy, for example, result in psychopathic traits, which are taken to be responsibility-impairing by many (see, e.g., Nelkin 2011). If so, then complete lack of acquaintance with care-taking may have negative affects on responsible agency.

In addition to being largely exempt from care-taking roles, most men grew up in a culture of toxic masculinity—a climate that normalized (even glamorized) rape, sexual assault, and other misogynistic aggressions and microaggressions. (Don’t forget that spousal rape was not a recognized legal category in all 50 states until 1992, and a vast majority of rapes still go unreported). It’s a reasonable conjecture that the lack of exposure to caretaking roles for the average mid-20^th-century cisgendered man, combined with saturation in a climate of toxic masculinity, may have had responsibility-impairing effects on many members of this social group—particularly those who were never exposed to alternate discourses. 

While things are improving in many respects, Donald Trump’s recent boast about sexually harassing women perfectly exemplifies how this attitude is a salient part of American culture. And Trump won the Presidency, notwithstanding his attitude towards women. One can only hope that this is the calm before the (feminist) storm.

I haven’t said anything about trans people, but it should go without saying that they have been disproportionately disadvantaged in many ways by the classic gender binary, including being practically erased from public discourse. Trans folks were thus very limited in the range of viable social roles that they could perform as their authentic selves; and they are still limited by negative attitudes and institutional discrimination to this day. When people consistently play an artificial role, this can cause significant psychological distress. Researchers recently found that when employees pretend to be happy at work, they suffer from increased insomnia, anxiety, depression, emotional exhaustion, and family conflict (Wagner et al. 2013). Imagine wearing a social mask all the time! Psychological distress is one of the paradigm factors identified by philosophers as impairing responsibility. So, the psychological cost of the gender binary on trans people has been (and still is) enormous, and the collateral effect on responsible agency can be very negative. (Though recall that responsible agency can be enhanced by privileged insight!)

Moreover, since trans people are still marginalized within mainstream discourse, society is losing out on valuable sources of enlightenment and objective knowledge—knowledge that could enhance our collective responsibility. The recent Women’s March—also colloquially called the ‘pussy march’ in response to Trump’s sexist remarks—was highly commendable (I was there); but some trans women pointed out that symbolically associating women’s rights with a part of cisgender female anatomy is both marginalizing to some trans women (non-binary, pre-operative, etc.), and reminiscent of the reductionist/biological view of gender that poststructural feminists have rightly militated against. Although the pussy rhetoric was clever and possibly galvanizing, it’s worth listening to these voices from the margins, and ensuring that we don’t lapse back into an essentialist sex-gender conflation. If we exclude trans voices, in other words, we (to that extent) impoverish feminist discourse and exclude valuable allies, limiting the movement’s social efficacy and justificatory backing. Only by including every valid perspective can we achieve the robust rationality that supports relational responsibility as I understand it.

(I am indebted to Rachel Williams at Washington University in St. Louis for brining some of these considerations to my attention. You can read her blog, transphilosopher, here). 

2. Responsibility, rationality, and collaboration

Much of the philosophical literature on responsibility revolves around conceptual issues: what is responsibility? Is it a capacity, a suite of capacities, a trait of persons, a privileged subset of a person’s mental states? I don’t hope to resolve these debates here—maybe they’re irresolvable, if there turns out to be insufficient evidence on either side. What I do hope to accomplish here is to shift the focus of the debate in a different direction— away from a focus on the internal properties of persons, which are supposed to be constitutive of responsible agency, toward a focus on the environmental, public, or ‘ecological’ factors that cause, support, and arguably co-constitutive those capacities—a view that I call ‘methodological externalism,’ as opposed to ‘methodological internalism.’ I use these terms to distinguish two separable, but not entirely distinct, approaches. One focuses more on the internal states of agents—things like the structure of an agent’s desires or the robustness of an agent’s values—and the other focuses more on the social conditions in which an agent comes to have and exercise those capacities or structures.

Before proceeding, I should say something about what I take responsibility to be. We can demarcate the literature into two camps: the character view, on which responsibility is a matter of the agent’s deep self or most robust character traits, and the control view, on which responsibility is a matter of an agent’s control mechanism or capacity to respond to reasons. This is a popular way of systematizing the literature (see, e.g., Levy 2014). Rather than decide between these views, I’m going to assume that they both get something right: responsibility has something to do with character and something to do with control. But I will also focus on what I take to be a common thread between these views: they both tie responsibility to rationality. As Susan Hurley argues (2013), both models of responsibility—perhaps all models—presuppose that responsible agency consists of or is constrained by rational agency. If an agent is acting either against her own instrumental reasons (reasons she takes herself to have), or against her own substantive reasons (reasons she objectively ought to care about), then she is, to that extent and in that capacity, responsibility-impaired. For example, if someone is shopping compulsively and spending inordinate amounts of money on commercial products, he is rationality impaired and, by the same token, responsibility impaired. Put differently, the compulsive shopper is acting ‘out of character’—his compulsion is not part of his deep self; and he lacks control over his compulsive urges. His compulsion is ‘shallow’ and relatively uncontrollable, and this is in part because it is a rational defect.

I should also clarify out the outset that responsibility, as I understand it, is not simply a capacity or a mental state—although it is typically described in singular terms, which can be misleading. (In particular, it can lead one to assume that responsibility is a zero-sum proposition, rather than a spectrum concept, consisting of multiple parallel, largely independent mechanisms, rather than a monolith). I take responsibility to be “a suite of capacities,” as Vargas puts it (2015: 201), or a cluster of entangled mental states, as Sher describes it (2009). This leaves open the possibility that a deficit in one responsibility-constitutive capacity/state could leave intact or even enhance other, parallel responsibility-constitutive capacities/states. To give a simple example, having a mental health disability could impair one’s ability to function in certain areas of one’s life, while enhancing one’s artistic capacities—as often happens. This seems to have been the case for Van Gogh, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was hospitalized several times (Schindeler 1935), and yet managed to produce esteemed expressionistic artworks until his death. It seems perfectly coherent to say that Van Gogh was praiseworthy (and thus responsibility-apt) for his artistic accomplishments, even if they were completed while he was in a psychotic state that impaired some of his basic functional abilities. 

In a similar vein, a member of a disadvantaged social group could be impaired in her ability to secure a job due to epistemic insecurity or material obstacles, and yet be responsibility-enhanced in terms of her ability to understand and appreciate the social factors that undermine her own agential capacities. This is what is called ‘epistemic privilege’ by feminist social epistemologists, and it refers to special epistemic authority on certain matters, as conferred by one’s social position. Often, social oppression engenders epistemic privilege vis-à-vis the social structures and mechanisms that support and sustain a privileged class, while oppressing historically disadvantaged groups. This might be especially salient to the victims-survivors of social oppression. In this case, the individual might be impaired in certain facets of her responsible agency by her context, while responsibility-enhanced by that same context in terms of her ability to grasp, appreciate, and critique dominant social paradigms. In this way, responsibility—conceived of as a set of dissociable capacities—can be something of a double-edged sword. 

One of the implications of seeing responsibility as tied to rationality, I will argue in what follows, is that responsibility turns out to be relational, just because rationality is relational. More specifically, our rational interests are interpersonal interests—they are served by collaboration in pursuit of our joint projects. To give an example, if I’m interested in being a responsible philosopher, I will read as much relevant literature as possible. This includes literature by underrepresented groups. If I ignore this literature, I’m acting in such a way as to undermine my own rational self-interests, particularly my interest in producing objective research. At the same time, I’m undermining the career prospects and visibility of members of underrepresented groups, i.e., I am undermining their rational interests. Hence, when I undercut my own rational interests, I undercut those of other people by the same stroke. By acting irrationally, I am undermining my deep-seated values, and failing to respond to objective reasons that I ought to care about—that is, I am responsibility-impaired on both standard views. This is because, when I undermine my own rational interests, I thereby undermine my prospects for responsibility. And I undermine the possibility of ideal rationality, and responsibility, in the entire group.

Now, this example is about ‘philosophical agency’—arguably a kind of epistemic agency; but epistemic agency is also, I think, moral, in that it has robust moral implications. If you manifest implicit biases (by acting in a discriminatory way), you are also, by the same token, acting in a morally objectionable way. Epistemic flaws often have moral consequences, and are in this sense morally significant. Thus, while it is possible to conceptually distinguish epistemic reasoning and moral reasoning, they are, in fact, interrelated: moral reasoning is undermined by epistemic deficits such as implicit bias, and are served by (what Miranda Fricker calls) ‘epistemic virtue’—sensitivity to a person’s character. Unfairly discrediting someone on the basis of identity prejudice is an epistemic error, but it is also a moral infraction.

I should also clarify that moral responsibility, as I understand it, is related to our various social roles. Being a responsible philosopher, teacher, friend, co-worker, citizen, parent, teacher, etc., is part of what it means to be a morally responsible person. Impairments in any of these ‘role responsibilities’ thus constitute impairments in moral responsibility, or some facet(s) of morally-responsible agency. It’s hard to even fathom what it would mean to be a responsible moral agent independent of these roles, since being a moral agent just means being an agent embedded in a social network with various social roles—roles that generate responsibilities. Impairments in morally-relevant ‘role responsibilities’—those that have significant consequences for others—thus equate to impairments in moral responsibility.  

Now, I’ve said that responsibility is tied to rationality, and rationality is relational. This is, in part, because rationality is a cooperative enterprise. Or, as John Doris puts it, optimal human reasoning is facilitated by cooperation (2015). This is perhaps most obvious when we think of global projects like preventing catastrophic climate change. No one person can make a substantive difference to the state of the global climate—which prompts Walter Sinnott-Armstrong to provocatively declare that ‘no one’ is responsible for climate change (2010). But if no one is responsible for climate change, that can only be because everyone is; and it is only by cooperating (e.g., introducing laws and regulations and social practises) that we can make an appreciable difference. If there is a cataclysmic climate disaster (as there is forecast to be if global temperatures increase by 2 degrees C compared to pre-industrial levels—1.2 degrees C more than the current temperature), we will all be impaired in our responsible agency, since we will either be killed, or geographically displaced, or otherwise encumbered by burdens that we didn’t previously face, which potentially undermine our ability to perform our familiar role responsibilities—as citizens, parents, workers, etc. The environmental case brings into relief how our rational interests are intertwined: we need to cooperate on large-scale, international environmental projects to ensure the continued survival of the species. If we fail in this particular joint project, we will all be responsibility-impaired at best, and dead at worst. So, this joint rational project is, at the same time, a responsibility-preserving project.

This is a big-picture example, but small-picture scenarios also illustrate the relational nature of responsibility. For example, without healthy interpersonal relationships, we cannot develop the capacity to function in any role responsibility whatsoever—we become quite anti-social. This is demonstrated, for example, by Harry Harlow’s inhumane experiments on monkeys (hopefully never to be repeated): Harlow showed that when monkeys are isolated from all social contact, they become anti-social and psychotic (Blum 2002). When re-introduced to other monkeys after a year, the social isolates were patently disturbed, incapable of playing, and two of them starved themselves to death. Similar psychological disturbances can be observed in prison inmates placed in solitary confinement—which ironically makes them more antisocial and more likely to recidivate (Grassian 1983). Attachment theory builds on this work, showing that children whose primary care-givers are unresponsive and insensitive tend to develop ‘insecure attachment’ (anxious, avoidant, or disorganized), which impairs their ability to have healthy adult relationships (Bowlby 1982, Ainsworth et al. 1978). Individuals with anti-social personalities and severe social deficits will not be particularly effective at taking on and adequately fulfilling their role responsibilities—in other words, they will be very substantially responsibility-impaired. Their social deficits may incite them to harm members of the general community, either be being freeloaders or positively harming others. A salient example of an antisocial agent is the psychopath, who suffers from deficits in cognitive empathy, making him extremely dangerous. Canadian psychologist Robert Hare says that psychopaths comprise only 1% of the human population but commit half of all violent crimes (2007: 18). These crimes can drive innocent victims into lives of self-harm, criminality, and mental illness (e.g. PTSD). That is, psychopaths’ harmful actions can deprive others of responsible agency. While some psychopaths are (according to Hare) untreatable, others (‘secondary psychopaths’) may respond to treatment; and many violent offenders are non-psychopathic, and more responsive to treatment. We have an interest as a society in rehabilitating offenders’ responsibility status (if possible), not only for their own sake, but to protect the responsibility-constitutive capacities of others. And we have a responsibility to incarcerate violent offenders who do not respond to treatment—those constitutionally incapable of responsibility—to protect the responsible agency—and other dimensions of agency and wellbeing—of others. 

This explains how social deficits impair rationality. On the other side, socializing enhances rationality—and hence responsibility. For instance, collaborating with others on reasoning tasks tend to improve problem-solving outcomes (e.g., Laughlin 1965; Davis 1969; Maier 1970; Hill 1982; Shwartz 1995—cited in Doris 2015). Collaboration, in other words, enables us to be optimally rational. In turn, collaborating helps us to be optimally responsible, since it helps us to reason effectively and objectively (in a non-biased way) about problems that threaten our responsible agency. For example, if I am trying to decide how to address a student with putative behaviour problems in such a way that I am able to serve the rest of the class and the students’ interests at the same time—which is not an easy matter—it might serve me to consult with the student, the university’s counselling and disability services centre, and other relevant people, before coming to a decision about how to address the issue. Collaborating with the right people can help me come to a responsible decision in the matter—a decision that enables me to fulfil my role-responsibility as a teacher, in a way that also enhances the student’s responsible agency and preserves the baseline rate of responsible agency in the class.

Collaboration is thus good for responsibility. But not just any kind of collaboration is helpful, and this is important to note. First of all, we should collaborate with the right people—people who are implicated in the problem or have relevant expertise. But aside from this matter, we also want the collaborators to have the right demographic status and the right mindset—a point that should not be overlooked. Just saying that ‘collaboration enhances rationality’ is a misnomer, since some groups are incapable of cooperating and respecting each other’s contributions. We now know, on the basis of multiple research project on workgroup problem-solving, that demographic diversity within the workgroup’s composition improves the group’s performance on cognitive tasks. Early research, however, found exactly the opposite: that diversity decreased reasoning efficacy. This is because the early research failed to control for intervening process variables, such as the attitudes or ‘mindsets’ held by the group members. More modern studies, supported by comprehensive literature reviews, find that diverse group composition predictably improves reasoning outcomes, but only if certain group dynamics are in place—factors such as low ‘subcategorization’ (e.g., implicit bias), high cooperative interdependence, and high ‘diversity mindset’ (i.e., an appreciation of the value of diversity) (Kippenberg & Schippers 2007). This research lends support to the claim that collaborating can serve our responsible agency, as per the teaching example above, but we should be mindful to collaborate with the right people under the right epistemic conditions—conditions of receptivity to everyone’s epistemic authority. 

To conclude this section: I submit that our rational goals are social goals, and thus relational goals. And responsibility is a function of effectively pursuing these rational-social goals—hence responsibility is relational. We cannot be ideally responsible, across the full panoply of our role responsibilities, if we shun others, discriminate against others, find ourselves (due to bad luck or by choice) in conditions of social isolation, deprivation, and social injustice, or if we destroy the planet or decimate the earth’s resources. While cataclysmic climate change will undermine our responsible agency in deep, potentially irreparable ways, more intimate harms, like discrimination, can also hamper our prospects for responsible agency.

One of the main implications of seeing responsibility as relational is that we all have an interest in distributing resources and care in such a way as to enhance the responsibility of every member of society, perhaps especially the least well-off, because responsibility-deficits do not remain isolated and cloistered: they spread around. There are no ‘gated communities’ for responsible agency: we’re all in the same boat.

One potential objection to this view is that a total recluse could be responsible, in spite of being completely socially isolated. I think that this is impossible: there is no responsible social isolate. This is because the social isolate is not capable of taking on social roles constitutive of responsibility; he is capable, at best, of a very limited range of capacities: perhaps obtaining food and shelter and feeding himself, but not much else. This person cannot obtain responsibility as I envision it. He is far from being able to acquire what I have been calling ‘ideal responsibility,’ viz., a range of context-sensitive social capacities that respond reliably to environmental cues. Moreover, I suspect that the complete social isolate is a fiction—though one that we are familiar with from the myth of the ‘state of nature’ and Romulus and Remus raised-by-wolves myths. In reality, humans evolved to live in societies. Hence, every real human being depends on community, and the products of joint efforts, for survival. Underestimating this fact can be deadly. The naïve and unfortunate John McCandless trekked into Alaska with nothing but a bag of rice, and summarily died of food poisoning (as described in ‘Into the Wild’ by Krakauer: 1993). Every successful ‘survivalist’ depends on human agricultural and manufactured products to survive in isolation; thus, even if they remove themselves from human society, they depend on the proceeds of this society for survival in the wild. But these wilful social isolates are not, on my view, as robustly responsible as members of society.

Now, one might alternatively object that philosophers already (tacitly?) take responsibility to be relational, so I’m not making a substantive point. But if they do, then why do so few responsibility theorists talk about relationships and social structures, and their impact on responsibility—aside from the many ‘nefarious neuroscientist’ examples?

In what follows, I intend to shed a spotlight on the role of the social in responsible agency. I will focus in particular on epistemic justice (and lack thereof).

Relational Responsibility: Introduction

 

I’m going to post a series of blog entries that argue that responsibility is relational. What does this mean? It means, first and foremost, that responsible agency depends upon responsibility-conducive social relationships and structures. These structures include conditions of epistemic justice—conditions free from pernicious stereotypes. Epistemic injustice (EI) impairs the capacities implicated in responsible agency (responsibility-constitutive capacities) in people living in these epistemic conditions. It undermines these capacities in privileged and disadvantaged groups alike, albeit (often) in different ways. In privileged group members, EI tends to induce implicit and explicit biases that prevent people from making rational responsibility attributions; and in disadvantaged group members, it tends to induce stereotype threat and to impose material disadvantages that prevent people from exercising responsibility to the fullest possible extent, and from effectively defending themselves against misplaced blame and censure. EI also undermines the confidence with which we can hold people responsible, since it contaminates the epistemic background against which we make responsibility attributions. This means that our reactive attitudes can only be, at best, weakly justified. In these ways, EI undermines our responsible agency, and creates inequalities our shared set of responsibility practices. 

A quick note: I’ve been working on relational responsibility for some time now, but the ideas in these posts were to some extent influenced by talks given at the ‘Extended Responsibility’ workshop that I organized at the Practical Justice Initiative at the University of New South Wales in November of 2016. The speakers were Alicia Coram, Paul Formosa, Katrina Hutchsion, Catriona Mackenzie, and Gualtiero Piccinini. Catriona Mackenzie is working on a relational account of responsibility, and Katrina Hutchison is writing about oppression and how it affects our responsibility practices, and these ideas happen to intersect with some of my own.

 

Plan Rationality

I have been discussing a planning agent’s self-governance, both at a time and over time. To begin this third and final post (though of course I’d be pleased to respond to further queries/challenges) I’d like to back up a bit. The planning theory behind these models of self-governance supposes that a planning agent’s practical thinking is guided by norms of synchronic plan consistency and means-end coherence, as well as by a diachronic norm of stability of intention. And it sees these as norms of practical rationality. But this can seem puzzling. First, we don’t think ordinary desires need to be consistent or means-end coherent. What is special about intentions and plans? Second, these norms may seem simply to favor forms of, in the words of Niko Kolodny, psychic tidiness. But why think such tidiness is a big deal?

It seems plausible that a general disposition to conform to these norms as an aspect of one’s planning agency will have significant benefits, especially given the important coordinating roles of our plans. But what we have learned from J.J.C. Smart is that an inference from a pragmatic defense of a general disposition of thought to a claim of irrationality in the particular case is fraught. So we need at least to supplement such a two-tier pragmatic strategy.

These questions in normative philosophy have implications for descriptive/explanatory philosophy of action. The thought (championed by Joseph Raz and Niko Kolodny, and anticipated by Hugh McCann in the 1980s) that these norms are a “myth” would tend to undermine our confidence that structures of planning – as understood within the planning theory – are basic for our descriptive/explanatory philosophy of action.

My response begins with two ideas: (i) Intentions and plans have distinctive coordinating, organizing roles in our individual and social lives. In part because of these roles, they help constitute where the agent stands, and so play an important role in self-governance (as discussed in my first post). (ii) The rationality norms at issue track conditions of a planning agent’s self-governance: plan inconsistency or means-end incoherence normally baffle a planning agent’s synchronic self-governance; and certain kinds of plan instability normally baffle a planning agent’s self-governance over time.

I argued for this claim about the synchronic norms in a 2009 essay. The idea that a diachronic norm of intention stability tracks conditions of diachronic self-governance is more difficult. Here I think we need to be prepared to adjust our formulation of the norm in the light of our account of a planning agent’s diachronic self-governance. Nevertheless, one idea that will emerge, given our approach to diachronic self-governance, is that the shuffling between non-comparable options discussed in the first post will be in violation of a diachronic norm that tracks conditions of diachronic self-governance.

But now we need to ask: How does the claim that these norms track conditions of self-governance – call this the tracking thesis -- show that they are norms of practical rationality?

Here again some might be tempted by talk of the constitutive aim of agency and try to argue that this aim is self-governance and that this explains why norms that track self-governance are norms of practical rationality. However, as I said earlier, this seems to overburden our descriptive and explanatory understanding of our agency. But then how does the tracking thesis explain why these are norms of plan rationality?

My tentative answer (sketched in a forthcoming paper and a forth-existing essay) is that it does this as part of an overall and reflectively stable understanding of these norms, an understanding that is available to a reflective planning agent. A planning agent who reflects on the basic norms that guide her plan-infused practical thinking would see the tracking thesis as part of the best explanation of those norms.

This explanation would involve the following ideas: (1) The tracking thesis shows that these norms do not merely track mere mental tidiness. (2) The tracking thesis articulates an overarching commonality across these norms, a commonality in light of which they make more sense. (3) The tracking thesis shows that if (a) one has a normative reason in favor of governing one’s own life, then (b) if one has the capacity for relevant self-governance, this reason transfers to a reason in favor of conformity to the norms in the particular case. (4) A conclusion I reached in my second post is that the end of diachronic self-governance is essential to the general exercise of a planning agent’s capacity for diachronic self-governance. So, suitably generalized, the tracking thesis supports the claim that the presence of the end of diachronic self-governance is itself enjoined by diachronic plan rationality. (5) Given this end, and the plausible assumption that diachronic self-governance is a good thing, a planning agent with the capacity for diachronic self-governance will have a normative reason in favor of diachronic self-governance, and so in favor of the involved synchronic self-governance. (Here I assume that the idea of a normative reason that is germane to these reflections of a planning agent will involve both a connection to her ends and the desirability of those ends.) (6) So given this end, (3)(a) is true. (7) In this way the tracking thesis supports (3)(b), and thereby the claim of a reason of self-governance to conform to the cited norms. (This is a response to John Broome’s and Niko Kolodny's question about whether there is reason to be rational.)

My idea, then, is that a planning agent who reflects on the basic norms that guide her plan-infused practical thinking would see the tracking thesis, together with (1)-(7), as part of the best explanation of these norms. It remains possible for her to reject this entire package. But then she would not be in a position to defend in this way central modes of practical thinking characteristic of her planning agency. In the absence of some other defense, she would then be under pressure to give up these modes of thinking -- though this is something she has pragmatic reasons not to do, and is also unlikely to be something she can do simply at will.   Short of this, however, she is in a position to see that her plan-infused practical thinking can be embedded within a framework that is available to her and that provides support for the application of the cited norms to particular cases, support that is over and above (but compatible with) pragmatic support for relevant general modes of thinking. So it will be reasonable – even if not strictly inescapable -- for her to retain her plan-infused practical thinking and its associated norms as part of this framework. So we need not worry that these norms are reflectively unstable in a way that would challenge the planning theory.

And – in closing – let me again thank Thomas Nadelhoffer for making it possible for me to try out these ideas on this blog.

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Willpower and the End of Diachronic Self-Governance

In this second post I want to reflect on issues about willpower in light of my sketch, in my previous post, of an approach to a planning agent’s self governance over time. (In the background is Holton 2009.)

Suppose you know you will be tempted to drink a lot at tonight’s party. Since you now think that would not be a good thing to do, you now form the intention to stick with one drink at the party. You know, however, that at the party your judgment will temporarily shift and you will at least initially judge that it would be better to have many drinks – though you also know that if you did give into this temptation you would later regret that.

If you stick with your prior intention there will be an important continuity in intention; in contrast, if you give into temptation there will be a break in this intention continuity. This suggests that such willpower may be a form of diachronic self-governance. However, continuity of prior intention helps constitute a planning agent’s diachronic self-governance only given synchronic self-governance at times along the way. But if your judgment shifts at the time of the party it seems that sticking with your prior intention would not be a case of synchronic self-governance: given the judgment shift, where you stand at the time of the party seems to favor drinking more.

Is there an end of the agent’s that favors relevant intention continuity and thereby can help re-shift her standpoint at the time of the party back in favor of stopping with a single drink, as she had intended? This would open up the possibility that sticking with the prior intention is indeed a case of synchronic self-governance, and so also potentially a case of diachronic self-governance.

What end? We don’t want to appeal simply to an end of intention continuity. (An idea along these lines is in work of Jordon Howard Sobel and Wlodek Rabinowicz.) Such an appeal would face a diachronic version of a worry (from Niko Kolodny) that we are simply appealing to a kind of mental tidiness. A natural proposal, instead, is to appeal to the end of diachronic self-governance itself – where that is not merely a matter of mental tidiness. This end would potentially help support willpower in the face of temptation, since such willpower would involve a continuity of intention that is itself a potential element in diachronic self-governance. And given the support from this end, the agent’s standpoint at the time of the party might well shift back into favoring willpower in a way needed for synchronic self-governance (and so for diachronic self-governance).

Indeed – as Sarah Paul has emphasized in conversation -- problems of temptation, and related problems about procrastination, pervade our lives. This supports, by way of a kind of inference to the best explanation, the conjecture that the presence of this end of diachronic self-governance is a central element in ubiquitous cases of a planning agent’s diachronic self-governance.

This suggests that the end of diachronic self-governance is essential to the general exercise of the capacity for such self-governance. And since diachronic self-governance essentially involves synchronic self-governance at times along the way, it is plausible to infer that this end of diachronic self-governance will induce an end of synchronic self-governance. So an end in favor of synchronic self-governance will also be an element in the general exercise of the capacity for such self-governance.

Some may think that the end of self-governance is a kind of necessary, constitutive end of agency quite generally. But this seems to me to overburden (to borrow a term from Barwise and Perry) our descriptive and explanatory understanding of our agency: there are just too many cases of our agency that seem not to involve guidance by that aim. The connection to an end of self-governance instead goes by way of our model of self-governance over time. Further, it is interesting to note that to get to this result we needed to go beyond a focus on synchronic self-governance and turn to diachronic self-governance.

Would this model of a planning agent’s diachronic self-governance entail that sticking with one’s intention to drink the toxin, in Gregory Kavka’s case, is in the same way a candidate for diachronic self-governance? Not if we are careful in our formulation of the model of self-governance over time. In the temptation case one anticipates later regret at giving into the temptation. So the discontinuity of intention involved in giving into temptation is a discontinuity both with earlier resolution and with expected later assessment. In contrast, the discontinuity of intention involved in abandoning, when the chips are down, the prior intention to drink toxin is only a discontinuity with earlier intention – at least on the plausible assumption that one expects that would later be glad that one did not drink the toxin. We need to be careful to understand the intention-continuity aspects of diachronic self-governance in a way that tracks this difference.

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Self-governance Over Time - Flickers of Freedom

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Self-governance Over Time

Thanks to Thomas Nadelhoffer for his kind invitation to participate in this blog.

I’d be pleased to discuss any questions/challenges to work I have done in the philosophy of action. But to get the ball rolling let me frame a question that concerns an agent’s self-governance over time.

In the background is my Frankfurt-inspired approach to a planning agent’s self-governance at a time (or anyway, during a short temporal interval). [Details are in my 2007 collection of essays, my 2010 APA Address, and a forthcoming reply (available on my web page) to a recent critique from Christopher Evan Franklin. Some of the first part of this post is drawn from that reply.]

Following Frankfurt, I suppose that an agent’s self-governance involves a relevant practical standpoint, one that consists of attitudes that help constitute where she stands on certain practical issues. When this standpoint appropriately guides, the agent governs. In central cases of self-governance (1) certain attitudes play roles in the agent’s psychic economy such that their guidance constitutes the agent’s direction of action; and (2) this guidance involves practical thinking and deliberation in a way that qualifies this agential direction of action as, in particular, a form of agential governance. There is self-governance when both these conditions are satisfied in a coordinated way.

I then propose that we specify the roles in (1) by appeal to attitudes that, as a matter of function, help constitute and support the continuities and referential connections highlighted in broadly Lockean theories of personal identity over time. What is needed to satisfy both (1) and (2) are structures of attitudes that play, as a matter of function and in a coordinated way, both Lockean diachronic roles and central roles in deliberation and practical reasoning.

The next point is that relevant plan states satisfy these dual design specifications. Plan states have it as a characteristic function to constitute and support Lockean cross-temporal ties. And plan states are potential inputs to practical reasoning. This will include deliberation in which one weighs various considerations. Such weighing is commonly shaped by policy-like attitudes in favor of giving certain considerations certain weights in deliberation. And such policies about weights will frequently be in part higher-order and concern how to treat relevant desires in relevant practical reasoning.

Such policies of weights are plan states that are suitably general. Their content involves the idea of treating a consideration as a reason/as having weight; and they may be associated with certain evaluative judgments. But they need not in general involve corresponding inter-subjectively accountable evaluative judgments.

This gives us a preliminary model of a planning agent’s synchronic self governance, one that highlights guidance of thought and action by a standpoint that involves relevant plan states, including policies about weights. Such plan-infused guidance is guidance by plan attitudes that play, as a matter of function and in a coordinated way, both Lockean cross-temporal roles and roles in deliberation and practical reasoning. Finally, in order to ensure that the agent is not conflicted about relevant policies in a way that baffles self-governance, we appeal to another Frankfurtian idea, the idea of wholeheartedness or satisfaction.

Putting these ideas together, we say that when relevant policies about weights -- policies that are frequently in part higher-order, and policies with which the agent is satisfied – guide, and the agent’s relevant structure of plans is appropriately consistent and coherent, then the agent governs in the relevant domain. These are, roughly, non-homuncular sufficient conditions for a planning agent’s self-governance at a time.  

And my question is: how can we best extend this to a model of a planning agent’s self-governance over time?

My initial proposal (sketched in a forthcoming paper and a forth-existing essay for a Routledge Handbook on Practical Reason) is that a planning agent’s self-governance over time involves her self-governance at times along the way together with relevant inter-connections between these forms of synchronic self-governance. What inter-connections? Here I think that we can appeal to the inter-relations between planning attitudes that are characteristic of planned temporally extended activity. These will include relevant continuity of intentions over time, relevant cross-references between intentions at different times, relevant mesh between sub-plans at different times, and relevant interdependence between intentions at a given time and past intentions and/or expectations of future intentions.

Further, I think that these cross-temporal intra-personal continuities, interconnections, inter-dependencies, and mesh between plan states over time will be importantly analogous to the inter-personal inter-connections of plan states that are characteristic of inter-personal shared intentional activity, as I understand it in my 2014 book. In this way we support the suggestive metaphor that in diachronic self-governance a planning agent is ‘acting together’ with herself over time. On this approach, then, a planning agent’s self-governance over time involves her self-governance at times along the way together with forms of intra-personal diachronic intention continuity, inter-connectedness, interdependence, and mesh that are analogous to inter-personal inter-connections characteristic of shared agency. (A fuller formulation of this idea would need to take into account that, given the hierarchical structure of plans, there can be such interconnections at a higher level despite a breakdown in interconnection at a lower level.)

An apt example is along lines discussed by John Broome (2001), though I will use an example from Sartre. Sartre’s young man decides to stay with his mother, though he sees the conflicting considerations of family loyalty and loyalty to the Free French as non-comparable. A little later he reconsiders. Since the considerations remain non-comparable, there seems no barrier to his newly deciding in favor of the Free French. But yet a little later he reconsiders and … Does nothing stand in the way of his shuffling between his mother’s house and the Free French office?

While this is not a complete answer, we can note that on the proposed, initial model of a planning agent’s self-governance over time, a case in which the young man retains his prior intention is a candidate for being a case of diachronic self-governance. In contrast, a case in which the young man abandons his prior intention and newly decides in favor of the Free French will violate a condition of diachronic self-governance. And these differing verdicts about diachronic self-governance are compatible with the recognition that the relevant considerations continue to be non-comparable.

To deepen this we would need to consider cases of potential willpower in the face of temptation. (Holton 2009) Might the continuity of intention involved in such willpower help constitute a form of diachronic self-governance? I plan to turn to this issue in my next post.

Paternalism and Consent

This is going to be my last substantive post for the week. Huge thanks to Thomas and the broader Flickers community for the opportunity, it’s been a blast!

I started this week’s blogging with a problem for certain hierarchical theories of autonomy. If we are only autonomous when our desires/actions align with some higher order attitude, then it looks like paternalism will be less prevalent, and consent much harder to come by, than typically thought. Akrasia is a paradigm example of the kind of mismatch between higher and lower order attitudes that hierarchical theories will treat as non-autonomous. Yet we typically think it’s paternalistic to intervene in akratic actions, and that (absent other considerations) akratically given consent is still valid.

The theory I’ve been sketching over the course of the week can avoid this problem. Decisions, I claim, have authority of their own, even when they fail to align with other elements of the agent’s psychology. This provides a simple and straightforward explanation of the connection between autonomy, paternalism, and consent. It does, however, raise difficulties of its own. It’s those difficulties I’ll be focusing on today.

In my last post I talked about the problem of manipulation. To recap, the problem is that if the agent’s values, beliefs, decisions etc are merely the product of manipulation, the agent shouldn’t be considered autonomous with respect to them. My solution was to note that such agents would have low autonomy because many of their values, beliefs, decisions etc would clash with other of their core attitudes: for instance, a policy of only treating as reasons considerations that are true. What’s distinctive about this solution is that it doesn’t deny the authority of the values, decisions etc that are the product of manipulation; it just suggests that their presence lowers the agent’s autonomy because they clash with other elements. It’s this continued authority that needs to be accounted for when thinking about consent and paternalism.

Both consent and paternalism are responsive to the authority of the agent’s decision: consent is only valid if the agent has the authority to grant it through her decision; more straightforwardly, paternalism is wrong because the agent’s decision to act has authority. When an agent is otherwise competent, informed, and free from coercion, we typically take decisions to consent and to act to be authoritative. We do this even when the agent is deciding akratically, suggesting that those decisions don’t need to be fully autonomous in order to be authoritative. What, though, if the agent’s decision to consent/act is the product of manipulation?

It might be tempting to say that, for whatever reason, the agent’s decision cannot have authority if it is the product of manipulation. That’s the temptation I’m hoping to resist. That doesn’t mean, though, that I think manipulated consent is fully valid; or that intervening in manipulated action is fully paternalistic.  The reason is that, while the agent’s decision has authority, so too do the rest of her values, policies, etc.

Most of us, I suspect, have some kind of standards concerning when our decisions should be granted authority, even if not fully articulated. For instance, I don’t think my drunken decision to send an angry email should be respected; if someone’s in a position to stop me, they should. I do, however, think my drunken decision to eat a kebab on the way home should be respected; how dare anyone presume to tell me what to eat! I’ll call such standards policies (even though they don’t neatly fit with what Bratman calls self-governing policies). They are policies concerning the authority I take my decision to have, under certain conditions.

In order to head off a potential misunderstanding at the outset: I am not suggesting that these policies trump the decisions themselves; that because I have a policy denying authority to certain decision, those decisions then lack authority. Instead, I am suggesting that these policies have authority alongside the decisions themselves. If we then make one of these decisions, we have placed ourselves (and others) in a bind – there is nothing we can do, or that they can do, that will fully preserve and respect our autonomy. Whatever happens, some element with authority has been overridden. 

What should we say, then, about consent and paternalism under conditions of manipulation? Exactly the same thing, I think, that we should say about consent and paternalism when the agent is akratic. In each case, the agent’s decision retains authority – to prevent her from following through would be to frustrate/disrespect her autonomy. However, the agent’s policies also have authority – if she has a policy denying the authority of an akratic or manipulated decision (in the relevant circumstances) then granting her consent, or failing to intervene in her action, will also frustrate/disrespect her autonomy.

When we’re deciding whether to intervene, or whether consent has been validly given, I don’t think it’s helpful to focus on whether or not the agent’s decision is autonomous. I think it’s more fruitful (and more accurate) to ask how we can respond so as to best preserve/respect the agent’s autonomy, acknowledging all the while that whatever we do will involve some costs: some aspect of the agent’s autonomy will be frustrated.

Why is this fruitful? A key reason, I think, is that it brings to our attention an analog of what Judith Jarvis Thomson calls ‘moral remainder’. If we assume that the manipulated agent’s decision has no authority, then there is no autonomy-related harm done to her if we override that decision, or refuse to grant her consent. On my approach, by contrast, we are forced to acknowledge the ways we are – albeit justifiably – overriding something that actually has authority. In thinking about how we engage with agents at the margins, such as the mentally ill, I think this sensitivity has much to recommend it.

Addiction

Over the last couple of posts I’ve been sketching an account of autonomy that locates the ‘self’ of self-governance in a range of elements or processes, rather than trying to pinpoint a single authoritative center. Going forward, I’ll try to motivate this approach by seeing how it fares when brought to bear on a series of different applications. Today I’ll focus on addiction; in my next post I’ll talk about oppressive socialization; and I’ll wrap things up with a discussion of paternalism and consent.

Harry Frankfurt famously drew a distinction between what he called the willing and the unwilling addict: while the willing addict wants her desire for the drug to lead her to take the drug, the unwilling addict doesn’t want her desire for the drug to lead her to take the drug. Because the unwilling addict does not have the will she wants, Frankfurt claims, she is unfree.

Frankfurt’s early work fits with the general approach I talked about earlier – it picks out an element or process that is supposed to speak for the agent, and hence ground her autonomy. In Frankfurt’s case, that element is a second-order volition; for Bratman it is a self-governing policy. In either case, what we are doing is checking to see whether the element or process that speaks for the agent authorizes the motivating desire.

While this approach allows us to acknowledge the different degrees of autonomy exhibited by different addicts, I don’t think it goes far enough. Because it only recognizes one source of authority in the agent, it fails to take note of the  range of different ways in which an addict can be unwilling, as well as the possibility that these different kinds of unwillingness might compound.  

Autonomy and Authority

In yesterday’s post I suggested that it’s a mistake to pick out a single element or process of the self as authorized to speak for the agent. Today I’ll say a bit more about the multiple sites of authority I think underpin autonomy. Future posts will try to make good on the claim that understanding autonomy in this more diffuse way provides better resources for thinking about other domains within which autonomy is appealed to, such as moral responsibility and paternalism.

Before heading down that path, it’s worth pausing to reflect on why the search for authority is so important. The heart of the concept of autonomy (at least as I’m using that term) is self-governance. If an agent is to be self-governing, then there must be something analogous to governance taking place – something has to play the role of laws or commands, directing the agent. Moreover, those laws or commands have to in some way emanate from the agent herself, otherwise autonomy collapses into heteronomy. [I’m taking a lot of this for granted - if there are Flickerers who disagree I’d be very keen to hear from you!]  

Since I think it’s a bit grandiose to suppose that human agents do much in the way of giving ourselves explicit commands, I’m looking for something more psychologically basic to play this role. Basically, I’m looking for any element or process within the agent that has authority over the agent – not necessarily in the sense of ‘speaking for the agent’, as Bratman puts it, but in the sense that the agent has some kind of pro tanto obligation to heed the demands made by that element or process. I think the element Bratman picks out – policies about what to treat as reason-giving in practical deliberation – clearly fit this bill. Such policies have authority for an agent, they create pro tanto obligations for the agent to deliberate in accordance with them, and she is less autonomous to the extent that she fails to do so. Where I differ from Bratman – and from many others – is in thinking that a wide array of elements and processes also fit this bill, and that none of these elements or processes trumps the others.

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of the kinds of elements or processes that I think also have authority, and hence also have to be cohered with if the agent is to be (fully) autonomous: values; beliefs; practical deliberation; and intentions.

I’ll start with a closer look at the first two, since they share with Bratman’s policies the feature of being part of what Korsgaard calls an agent’s ‘practical identity’, and hence forming part of the agent’s point of view. [A lot of details are being glossed over here – I’d be happy to share the book-length version with anyone who’s interested!]

Responsibility and Epistemic Confidence

 

Today I’m going to argue that responsibility can be undermined by lack of epistemic confidence.

Many responsibility theorists are interested in specifying the capacities implicated in responsible agency, and there are many fairly coarse-grained proposals, such as reasons-responsiveness (Fischer 2006, 2012), sanity (Wolf 1986), and consciousness (Levy 2014). These theorists also write about deficits that may (or may not) impair responsibility, such as addictions, compulsions, and psychological disorders. There’s no consensus on whether any of these deficits suffices to impair responsibility full stop, thereby underwriting an ‘excuse’ for misconduct. But those who discount these deficits often assume a zero-sum notion of responsibility.

I like to think of responsibility as a spectrum concept rather than a threshold condition. If responsibility lies on a spectrum, deficits like addictions and psychological disorders may impair responsibility to one degree or another, depending on the particularities of the case. This seems to me to be a useful and illuminating way of thinking about responsibility. I’m also open to thinking that these ‘deficits’ can enhance responsible agency in certain cases, following Nietzche’s adage of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes your stronger’; but I think that in many cases these conditions are responsibility-undermining, if for no other reason that that they can make it difficult to navigate a society that doesn’t provide adequate accommodations.

In any case, today I’m going to write about a pretty fine-grained capacity that I think is required for the highest degree of responsibility, and the absence of which impairs responsibility to some extent—perhaps a very great extent, depending on the case. This capacity is epistemic confidence. I’m not going to select a specific notion of responsibility; instead I’ll simply follow Frankfurt (1987) and Strawson (1963) in supposing that responsibility is closely tied to personhood concepts (particularly reasoning competency and dignity), and with this in mind, I’ll discuss how severe deficits of epistemic confidence can impair our capacity to be persons in the fullest sense.

What is epistemic confidence? Miranda Fricker (2007) describes it as the capacity to be a knower: someone who has knowledge. When we know something (psychologically speaking), we not only have a belief, but also confidence in that belief. Descartes famously described knowing as conditional upon absolute certainty or indubitability: confidence is the psychological maker of genuine knowledge, the metacognitive state that distinguishes knowledge from mere belief. While indubitability might seem like an exorbitant standard, it’s reasonable to think that some sense of certainty or resolution is definitive of the experience of knowing. Bernard Williams (also speaking psychologically) describes the process whereby beliefs become knowledge as a “steadying [of] the mind,” in which we solidify our beliefs, not only by reflecting on and endorsing them (as Descartes thought), but by conferring with other people and receiving corroboration or validation (2002: 192, cited in Fricker 2007: 52). 

The acquisition of knowledge is thus an interpersonal process. When others validate our beliefs, it helps raise them to the status of knowledge, and when they dismiss our beliefs (and this dismissal resonates with us), it undermines our confidence in them. If people dismiss too many of our beliefs, this can give rise to a global confidence deficit, undercutting our ability to make resolutions and construct an identity for ourselves, in Frankfurt’s sense of ‘identity.’ Frankfurt saw personal identity as the set of a person’s decisive endorsements—the mental state that we identify with and can stand behind.