Flickers of Freedom

Winding Down

Well, it seems like I just took up the reigns, and here we are at the end of the month already! I want to again thank Thomas for the opportunity, and for everyone who participated. It can be hard to stay up with the activity on blogs, especially during the term, when other responsibilities are demanding our attention. But I think it’s a testament to the value of this venue (and Thomas' hard work) that Flickers remains consistently active, and, at least for me, keeps calling me to check in on it when I should be grading.

Cheers!

What is blame?

I started off the month asking about the desiderata for a theory of MR. Having gotten stalled by other things this week, I realize my time as Featured Author is growing short. So I thought it time to at least get in one more big picture post.

What the heck is blame? On the one hand, when I reflect on the matter, it seems so obvious it’s a notion embedded in a wide variety of our moral practices, I have no trouble recognizing people blaming each other, and engaging in various activities, like giving excuses, justifications, apology and the like.

But when I set out to just say, succinctly, what blame is, I’m far less confident. And I haven’t been entirely won over by extant views. So this final post is a chance to explore a bit what blame should (or must?) look like.

What I’m particularly interested in is examining what conditions would have to hold for A to count as blaming B. Though I don’t have my own set of conditions pinned down quite yet, I do think there are some guiding thoughts that bear consideration. While I think everything I say is true, I’m also interested (obviously) in whether folks agree, and even more so why they disagree.

First, it’s clear that blame can be private. A can blame B without B’s knowing it; indeed, without anyone knowing it. Relatedly, blame need not have any overt manifestations. It also need not be expressed. While we often do so, and there are probably good reasons to do so in lots of cases, it’s not necessary. I can blame you without interacting with you.

Second, blame need not be very conative. At least, A can blame B without getting angry or feeling very much. (Must blame include feeling at all?)

Third, blame need not be an activity. A may blame B over a course of a week and yet not be doing anything continuously over that period that counts as the “blaming”. A might experience a flash of anger or resentment, she might reflect on the triggering transgression, or she might even, say, shout at B when their paths cross. But these are not exhaustive of her blaming B, since she doesn’t fail to blame B in between each of those episodes.

Finally, blame does make some practical difference. That is, if A blames B, then A cares, in some sense, both about the offense and she takes it to be relevant to her regarding or interacting with B. Failing to having any practical uptake would leave A believing B to be blameworthy, but failing to go further and actually blame them.

Ok – do those claims sound plausible? Have I made a glaring omission? A terribly misguided inclusion?

Paying One's Debt to Society

Since we're talking about blameworthiness over time, and since punishment came up, I thought I'd post a question about retributive justifications of punishment. On one familiar metaphor, convicts are 'paying their debt to society'. This is perhaps most often used once one has served one's sentence -- they have paid their debt. But it seems to me this is an inapt metaphor for a variety of reasons. Here I'll pursue just one line of thinking. (Hopefully its connections to the previous post will be apparent.)

Suppose we could inflict a given punishment over the course of an afternoon. So, D is sentenced to 15 years in prison for manslaughter. But instead of heading to prison, D ends up in an Experience Machine – he is to have the experience of 15 years in prison, but in real time, only 15 hours will pass. Would such an arrangement satisfy general retributive desiderata?

On the one hand, D will suffer in much the same way as under our current penal system. But there will be some new benefits:

1. We can control, to some extent, D’s experience, thus shielding him from some of the brutality present in modern prisons. (We can abolish prison rape, e.g.). Moreover, the risk that prisoners interact to reproduce criminal ventures on the inside, or plan future criminal schemes or develop criminal networks while serving sentences, could equally be eliminated.
2. Currently, a prisoner would have lost 15 years of their life and would have significantly reduced prospects for living a meaningful life once released. Under the imagined scheme, the rest of their life would still be available for meaningful projects.
3.  There would, of course, be logistical advantages. To house 3 inmates for 15 years each requires space enough for three. Under the imagined scheme, we could stagger administration of sentences and cover the same three inmates in half a week.

 The question then is whether under the imagined scheme we would be giving criminals their just deserts. And if not, why not?

 

Blameworthiness Over Time

I want to transition now to discussing the nature of blame and blaming. To begin with, let's consider a 'puzzle' about blameworthiness. It begins with a question: When does someone stop being blameworthy (BW) for something? There are only two answers to this question. First, BW eventually runs out/dissipates/expires. We can usefully call this the expiration date view (though this is an approximation). The second possible answer is that BW never expires.

Suppose that someone acts wrongly today, and is responsible for doing so. I take it they are BW. We can use any account of BW we like. Maybe they acted on reasons-responsive mechanism, the action expressed an ill quality of will or was expressive of their whole self, or was agent-caused in the presence of robust and genuine alternatives, or came from wholeheartedly endorsed desires or other mental states for which one was ultimately responsible, etc. In short, suppose they satisfy your favorite account’s sufficient conditions on BW.

So, I take it they are BW for x. But surely they are still BW for x tomorrow. And the next day. And next week. Indeed, because what explains why they are BW for x is that they meet the sufficient conditions on BW with respect to x, they will indefinitely satisfy those very conditions with respect to x. Another way to say the same thing is that on each subsequent day, what makes it true that they are BW is the same (past) fact.

And so, it seems to me there is no expiration date on BW. Thus, the BW are interminably so. Once BW for x, one is always BW for x.

On its own, this result might not pose too much difficulty. Our pasts are littered with such facts (e.g., it will always be true of me that I was born in Virginia). But consider that the BW just are those that are worthy of blame. But if the BW are interminably BW, then they are interminably worthy of blame.

I take it that that there are independent worries about blaming another indefinitely for some transgression. Perhaps this can be justified with really serious offenses, but nothing about interminable blameworthiness has so far required the wrong to be a serious one.

So, if it is the case that, generally, one cannot blame indefinitely, but the BW are indefinitely worthy of blame, then we have a puzzle. How can it be that they are worthy of blame and yet we cannot blame them indefinitely?

I’m less interested here in my ‘solution’ to the puzzle than what others make of it. (Another instance of my favoring brevity.) Just to give the puzzle some grip, however, notice that it puts *some* pressure on accounts in which blame is a form of sanction, since sanctions are obviously objectionable if delivered indefinitely.

Related articles

Desiderata for a theory of responsibility

Blameworthiness and Wrongdoing

Symmetry and Responsibility

Blameworthiness and Wrongdoing

In thinking about what our theories of moral responsibility should be about, I’ve also been thinking about responsibility’s connection to moral theory. Here’s just one such connection that interests me.

Here’s a naïve view about the relation between blameworthiness and wrongdoing. BW = responsibility + wrongdoing. Or, less substantively, wrongdoing is required for BW. I call it naïve, not because I think it’s false, but because it is relatively simple and obvious (though not obviously true).

The naïve view is not particularly popular, though. A standard view, perhaps *the* standard view, regarding excuses characterizes them as considerations that eliminate or mitigate responsibility for wrongdoing. On the standard view, an excuse shows that, though what was done was wrong, the agent is not responsible (or not *as* responsible) for doing so (see, e.g., Austin, “A Plea for Excuses”).

But I don’t think the standard view can be right as a general account of excuses. I have, roughly, three reasons for thinking this. First, there is a range of excuses in which the standard view gets the wrong result. It says the action is wrong but it isn’t. Second, it generates very substantive, and potentially worrisome, moral commitments. Third, it fails to get something right about the connection between wrongdoing and agency. In the interests of space, I’ll only go through the first of these, but I’m happy to discuss the others in the comments.

 

Symmetry and Responsibility

I said that not only did I think a theory of moral responsibility should account for both BW and PW, but I had an argument to that effect. Well, it’s time for that argument. Or, more accurately, it’s time for me to say a bit more about why I think BW and PW are importantly related, and why the responsibility relation explains that relation. But the argument also allows me to say something about why I constantly ‘equivocate’ between talk of responsibility and talk of moral responsibility. Plus, the argument *also* serves as a critique of Strawsonian approaches to responsibility, a la Wallace, who take facts about the appropriateness of holding responsible to be explanatorily prior to facts about being responsible. So you’re getting great value here.

There is a popular approach to explaining moral responsibility that begins with our practices of holding each other responsible. On this approach, our practices of holding agents responsible are explanatorily prior to the fact of their being responsible: “[i]t is not that we hold people responsible because they are responsible; rather, the idea…that we are responsible is to be understood by the practice [of holding responsible]” (Watson “Limits of Evil”, 258; his italics).

Despite all that can be said for this practice-based model, I am attracted to a different picture of responsibility. On this approach, it is the fact of being responsible which is explanatorily prior and upon which our practices of holding others responsible should depend. Call this the prior-fact model.

Here I just want to sketch an explanatory virtue of the prior-fact model. What I’ll claim is that it explains a range of cases that involve considerations that undermine blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, which the practice-based model, whatever its other merits, has difficulty in explaining.

 

Desiderata for a Theory of Responsibility

I’m constantly struck by how often talk of moral responsibility becomes talk only of blameworthiness. I think blameworthiness (BW) and praiseworthiness (PW) are intimately related, lying on opposite ends of a spectrum, and both bearing an important relation to responsibility. It seems to me a desideratum for a theory of responsibility that it gives an account of both. When I see accounts that exclude PW (e.g., Wallace; Darwall), I think the omission counts against such theories.

Some disagree with this, for they don’t think BW and PW are closely related. If someone like me thinks responsibility must be about both and someone else thinks it should be about BW alone, then we are more likely to talk past one another. More to the point, if we can’t agree on what it is we’re trying to give accounts of, then it’s hard to see how we can compare our theories fruitfully.

All this led me to wonder whether we could agree on a set of desiderata for a theory of moral responsibility. This would seem to have lots of benefits. Evaluating theories requires having some stable points of reference. To say that Theory A is preferable to Theory B means that it does better in some respect. It might be simpler, but with the same explanatory power as its competitors. It might be broader, explaining more of the domain. But if we can’t even agree on what needs explained, we will have more and more difficulty ensuring that our competing theories are proper competitors.

So, what are the desiderata for a theory of moral responsibility? Should it capture both BW and PW? Should it justify punishment or retributive conduct? Must it reference ‘free will’? Must it require ‘control’?

In short, is there anything an account must explain in order to count as a theory of responsibility? Anything the failure of which to explain would give us grounds to reject the view?

My Plan

First off, I’d like to thank Thomas for the opportunity to be part of this series. I’ve been blown away by the great posting and discussion, and gratified to see so many junior folks working on such interesting projects.

As my bio mentions, I’ve written about manipulation arguments, desert, consciousness as a condition on responsibility, tracing, and negligence. I’m happy to talk about past work in discussion, and might reference some of it in passing. But my plan this month is to talk about the rather speculative questions that I’ve been thinking about recently. They range from broad inquiries into the nature of blame and theory-building to moral elements of our responsibility practices to some particular puzzles regarding punishment and blame that have been bugging me. My aim will be to keep posts reasonably short, and then clarify as needed in response to comments. There’s a fine balance to be struck, to be sure, but I’ll be erring on the side of brevity (or trying to at any rate). Feel free to throw this post back in my face should I stray too far in the next few weeks.

I plan to be active in responding to comments and questions. But my teaching schedule this term means that MWF will be very busy so it will likely take me longer to reply those days. Tuesdays and Thursdays, by contrast, will find me neurotically checking for comments. I hope to cover a fair bit of ground, but I intend to play it by ear. I, for one, am looking forward to it!

First (substantive) post to come tomorrow (Tuesday)!

Passing the Torch!

It's once again that time of the month where the torch is passed from one Featured Author to the next. But first, I want to thank Marcus Arvan for doing such a great job last month. He certainly gave me lots of food for thought! Being the Featured Author is a lot of work. And I greatly appreciated the admirable effort put forth by Marcus--who gave me newfound reasons for pestering my students with the possibility that they might be living in the Matrix! After a month of posts about everything ranging from quantum physics to Kant, I have lots to think about moving forward.  

In the meantime, it's time for our next Featured Author to take his turn in the spotlight--namely, Matt King. Here is his bio:

I work on ethics, particularly the philosophy of agency and action, and the philosophy of law. After some time traveling the country on temporary visiting gigs, I found a more permanent home as an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I've published on negligence, manipulation arguments, tracing cases, and desert. My current work is focused on the nature of blame, the ethics of blaming, and understanding character.  

Two recent papers published by Matt that will be of interest to the readers of Flickers of Freedom are:  (a) "The Problem with Manipulation", and (b) "Two Faces of Desert".

That said, please join me in welcoming Matt to the Featured Author fray here at Flickers of Freedom!  I look forward to yet another month of stimulating discussions!