Flickers of Freedom

How to Better Conceive of Our Actions

For my last post I want to speculate about how to conceive well of our actions. So the question is: how can we become better persons by adopting certain strategies for thinking of our actions? We have all admonished ourselves saying things like “I should be kinder”, “I should be less selfish” or, even better, “I should try harder to be a good person”. What is striking about such exercises is how comparatively useless they seem to be. So what to do?

The problem that we face in our attempts at ethical self-improvement is the gap between the abstract characterization of our ideal self and the more concrete level at which we typically conceive of our thoughts and actions. To figure out whether an action counts as inconsiderate, for instance, requires some reflection. Suppose you’re running late to meet your friend. You had previously wanted to pick up your shirts at the drycleaners on the way. Now, it will make you even more late, thus keeping your friend, who is also a busy person, waiting. But you reason that your friend will wait, and so you drop by to pick up your shirts anyway, making you half an hour late. That is inconsiderate. Perhaps the thought did occur to you, but it was pushed to the side in consideration of the greater urgency of being efficient. After all, that drycleaner was almost on the way. Often moral shortcomings are of this sort: the thought that we are doing something inconsiderate, selfish, or unkind does occur to us, but somehow it is not accorded the importance that it may later seem to have. In a lot of these cases what helps—and you can try this out at home—is simply to pause and give yourself a brief moment to reconsider your actions.

For many of us, the bigger problem facing us is not that we do not accord the right importance to moral considerations, but the fact that we fail to see our actions as falling under a relevant moral description. Omission is often more of a problem than commission. How do we deal with that? Here it may be useful to set up a practice of self-reflection. I am reminded of the Stoics. Seneca says that he would meditate on his day every night before going to sleep. “What was well done” he would think, “what was poorly done”? Such nightly exercises get us in to the habit of seeing the actions that we perform under descriptions of moral importance. For instance, we may come to realize that there were some very good ideas in that paper we just rejected, because we were preoccupied with the faults that we found with it. Instead of pointing to these good parts in our report, we focused only on the negative. This is a failure of kindness, at the very least.

It is, of course, true that it can often be hard to look for moral shortcomings in our actions that we do not think we are subject to. It is unclear that taking a different perspective on our actions will invariably put us on the right track. Moral improvement, then, might require that we have some idea of our most likely shortcomings. We might sometimes catch ourselves thinking only of how what others do affect us. We might then make it a practice for a while to turn things around.

The more difficult cases are those where we experience what psychoanalysts would call ‘resistance’. Resistance might be the result of personal factors; we find some pattern of behavior particularly abhorrent and therefore refuse to see it in ourselves. It might also be the combined result of a cultural shift where certain attitudes are now regarded as highly unacceptable, and we are very sensitive about being “good”. We therefore ‘see’ the unacceptable behavior in others and not ourselves (projection), and so on. My hunch is that this is a common problem when it comes to sexism, racism, and other implicit biases. It is so obvious when others are racist, sexist, or elitist, but rarely do we catch ourselves being so.

Getting to the bottom of such failings is particularly difficult. And it is here that I think the greatest problem lies in being zero-tolerance type policies. The more unacceptable you make a certain type of thinking or pattern of behavior, the more likely ‘decent’ people are to resist seeing themselves as being involved in it. And so we will see no real change. Conversely, the more understanding you are, the less people are likely to try to change. Indeed, I suspect that an important element of implicit bias is resistance. If you minimize the severity of sexism or sexual harassment, we won’t see change, but if you maximize it you drive it underground. It is still there, but people deny engaging in it; even to themselves. And so we must navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of these two extremes. Part of the answer must be that we hold on to the good intention of reducing or eliminating behavior that is damaging to others, while at the same time being compassionate with ourselves. Some people find that certain meditative practices help towards that goal. I wish I had more time to explore these issues, but my month as guest blogger is up in an hour. I would welcome discussion on this point, however. But for now, thanks for the comments and discussion!

Conceiving of (Our Own) Actions as Wrong

Last week, I talked about sex and gender discrimination and harassment as an example of a type of culpable action that is widespread, but generally thought to be culpable. I suggested that we can think of sexism as a type of affected ignorance. Back in my student days some male philosophers made it known that they thought that women were not suited to do philosophy. I once responded to an op-ed in one of the biggest Danish newspapers that claimed that there were no female philosophers (ca. 1995). The author regularly served as an external examiner in the philosophy department at the University of Copenhagen. The author of the op-ed maintained that preoccupation with fertility and children stood in the way of women being philosophers. Clearly this person would have no issue with me describing his views this way. He might, or might not, agree to being called sexist. He might disagree because ‘sexist’ is a negative loaded term. He would, however, not have any difficulties agreeing with the tenets of sexism. The one difference would be that rather than agreeing that sexism is a false view and that he is morally culpable for holding it, he would maintain that women’s unsuitability for philosophy is just a fact of life. His attitudes and actions are culpable because although he disagrees with us, there is plenty of evidence around him to the contrary. He could, for instance, have picked up Elizabeth’s Anscombe’s Intentions or Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. His ignorance is affected.

In the case of affected ignorance, there can be a good deal of agreement between those who are sexist and those who believe that sexism is wrong in how to describe the sexist person’s attitudes and actions. But the case of sexism that is most common in academia today is not of this kind. No one in their right mind would say that women are unsuited for their field of study because of fertility preoccupations. They would not even think it. Indeed, most male professors I know think of themselves as feminists. It is therefore somewhat striking that this surge in consciously avowed feminism has not translated into significant improvement for women. The problem seems to be that although people think of themselves as feminists, they have implicit sexist attitudes, and these attitudes result in discriminatory behavior. Two questions interest me in this context. First, how do we hold people responsible for what they do not know that they do? What kind of account of responsibility will do the work here? Second, what should we do as individuals to become aware of our own unconscious biases and, thus, safeguard against them?

Lets start with the first question. It is typical for accounts of responsibility to maintain that agents can only be responsible for an action if they are epistemically connected to it, and its likely consequences, in the right way. Most commonly, it is thought that we must know, or have conscious access to, what we are doing. But we are sometimes held responsible for neglecting doing what we should be doing, and so an expansion of the epistemic condition to something like “an agent is only responsible for an action if he knows or can reasonably be expected to know the facts concerning his action” is required. But how do we flesh out this reasonableness claim?

I think our ability to adopt different perspectives, and therefore to relinquish our own and take up that of another, is central to responsibility, and is a good way of fleshing out the reasonableness idea. As responsible agents we are expected to be able to take a perspective on ourselves and our actions that is not our own. It may be the perspective of a person affected by our actions or of a neutral third-person observer. If we manage to take this distance from ourselves and, therefore, our own conception of our action, we may reach a more socially, morally, or interpersonally relevant understanding of what we are doing. From the point of view of others, our own conception of our action is of limited use. It may highlight that we are not malicious, and so in that sense it is relevant to how we are evaluated. But responsible agency implies that we understand that although we may own our actions, we do not have authority over the kind of actions they are. Maintaining that a woman’s fertility is an obstacle to her thinking philosophically is sexist whether or not I think of it as sexist. Any action that we perform can fall under many different descriptions. Many such descriptions are morally irrelevant. If, however, there is a moral proscription and we can see, when we adopt other perspectives on our action, that it does or might fall under it, we are surely responsible. Moreover, if we fail to reflect on the nature of the action that we are about to perform, we are also culpable. Of course, the degree to which we are culpable will be relative to the severity of the offense and to the cognitive hardship involved in reaching the relevant description.

There are two features of this approach that I like. The first is that it highlights the importance of perspective taking not just when it comes to understanding others, but when it comes to understanding ourselves. Our motives for action are often obscure and there is plenty of room for self-deception when it comes to the nature of what we do. Philosophers have recognized this for a long time (cf. Kant). Self-understanding is not a simple matter of introspection, or of feeling identified with one thing or another. It also involves taking a third-person perspective on oneself. Doing so places us solidly within the community of others, and lift us out of our sense of specialness. The second feature I like is related to this more communal or, if you like, impersonal aspect. To truly understand ourselves and to truly be responsible agents we must be able to see ourselves as an other. This helps bring out other descriptions of the action. From an early age we interpret our children’s actions to them. For instance, we may blame Paul for hurting his sister when he was merely thinking of his action as “getting my toy back” (as long as he is able to understand that he was hurting his sister and that hurting others is wrong). This type of moral education is a life-long process, where we become the heirs to our parents’ and peers’ interpretations. How to morally educate ourselves is the topic of the next blog.

Responsibility & Perspective

Yesterday I went to my university’s Title IX training. We were taught about everything from not to rape our colleagues to how to deal with a student who comes to us because of discrimination, harassment, or violence related to her/his sex/gender. I found the particulars of how to deal with students in distress very helpful. I did, however, wonder about raping and stalking advice. I imagine that not a single audience member found the advice useful. If someone had, that would itself be sign of something deeply troubling. One might debate the wisdom of dating colleagues or telling off-color jokes in the workplace, but no one in their right mind would defend rape or stalking. A cynical person would suspect that the training was mainly for legal purposes should the university be sued. But what’s even better than having a good defense if you’re sued? It is not getting sued in the first place. So I’m assuming that the point was at least partially to provide some actual training.

Leading off training with rape and stalking is unhelpful, we can all agree. It overshadows what are most likely to be problems in the workplace: sexual harassment and discrimination based on sex or gender identity. The stories we were given were either historical—so seemingly irrelevant to current practices—or vague. One guy would regularly make sexist comment in the workplace, which was a cubicle-like environment in which such comments were widely overheard. What exactly did this guy say? No idea. And this was not the point of the example either. The point was to encourage us to report on each other. For the person who found the sexist comments insidious were not any of the female workers, but the only other guy in the office. The lesson seemed to be this. Even if you are not bothered by something your colleague says, others might be and it is your responsibility to make sure that they are not by reporting him or her. Needless to say, there are all kinds of concerns about this: loyalty to your colleagues, paranoia about being scrutinized, and so on.

So what about providing training that at least also sensitivizes us to things that we might do that we find relatively innocent, but that others would find troubling. I suppose the presenter thought she came close when she said “it’s OK to ask one of your colleagues out, but if you do it every day for months, or you keep making reference to it, it could count as stalking”. Fine. That’s at the same level of helpfulness as to be told not to stalk people. Which is to say, not useful at all. At no point was any real effort made to identify what sorts of behaviors were sexist or discriminatory. It was assumed that such identification was unproblematic and therefore the employees could be left with the entire responsibility for discerning what behavior counts as sex/gender harassment or discrimination.

I find this troubling for a variety of reasons. The greatest challenge we all face is recognizing that actions that we think of as well meaning, or at least neutral, others regard as offensive, hurtful, or sexist. As awareness of sexist practices and discrimination issues has risen, the main instances of sexism in the workplace are likely to be sexism or discrimination that is not thought of as sexism or discrimination. The challenge, then, is not just to get people to report her actions, but to get her to re-conceptualize what she does. Let me give you an example of what I mean. I personally do not mind being complemented on how I dress by colleagues. But other people do, and not just women. I had dinner with an academic once who complained that he felt harassed by his (female) dean who frequently complemented him on his dress. Perhaps the dean was flirting with him. I do not know. But it is perfectly possible that she simply noticed that he was nicer dressed than your average male academic and commented on it without reflecting on how he would feel about being so complemented. In fact, because prototypical cases of harassment are male on female, it may never have occurred to her that he could feel harassed by her. This is not to say that the main problem that we are facing is men being harassed by women. But I think it is a good example of how we might all end up in situations where our own conceptions of what we do differ radically from the other person’s conception. As a women, I know that I am acutely aware of discrimination from men, but I rarely worry that I do things that my male colleagues would find disconcerting. It is easy to become complacent about our actions because we do not conceive of ourselves as the kinds of person who would harass or discriminate against others.

This issue of responsibility for actions that we conceive of in a way very different from how others might conceive of them is something that has concerned me for a while. As I think I mentioned in my intro-post, I am impressed with Plato’s observation that no one knowingly does wrong. If that is right, simply telling someone that he did wrong or punishing him for it, may not have the desired effect, which is for the person to recognized his wrongdoing, repent, and reform. I’ve been told by many working in the prison system that many or most prisoners feel unjustly treated and do not really believe that what they did was wrong. Perhaps it was justified by the exigencies of the situation, perhaps the other person deserved what they got, and so on. But surely we punish, in part, in order to make the person aware that he did wrong. So what to do?

This question ties into the larger question of what the epistemic condition on responsibility is. In other words, what knowledge must an agent have in order to be responsible for her actions. (For simplicity, I assume that if you are responsible for acting wrongly, you are also culpable for it.) Everybody can agree on the limiting cases. A person who flips a switch which ignites a house killing everyone inside is not responsible for killing these people if she had no reason to think that flipping this switch would cause such an event. On the other hand, the instigators of the Rwanda genocide, who orchestrated the event with the intent of exterminating the Tutsis in Rwanda, are clearly responsible for their actions. Most of bad or evil acts lie somewhere between these extremes. People debate, for instance, whether the slave holders of yore can be held responsible for their actions. Focusing on slavery in Ancient Greece, I have argued that people were, in fact, responsible (and culpable) for doing so because there was an inferential route from values that they had to the belief that slavery is wrong (“Values, Sanity, an Responsibility” in D. Shoemaker (Ed.): Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Vol. 1).

One of the obstacles to seeing that what we are doing is wrong is what Michele Moody-Adams calls affected ignorance. Affected ignorance is a form of bad faith. Our actions, practices, or forms of life may involve doing things that we could easily come to know are wrong. For instance, the evils of factory farming are widely known, and yet most consumers continue to eat factory farmed meat (although I put effort into not doing so, I am no exception). Most people know, or at least suspect, that by illegally downloading music, they deprive the creators of that music a way of making a living off their production, but do so anyway. These are probably the two most prevalent cases of affected ignorance now. They they are typically accompanied by a range of justifications that are often surprisingly poor (‘if it were wrong, it wouldn’t be that easy’, e.g.). Affected ignorance is culpable ignorance.

One possibility, then, is that people who sexually harass others are ignoring what they are doing. They omit subjecting their actions to the sort of scrutiny that would make it clear to them that they are, in fact, engaged in practices that, by their own lights, they disagree with. The question now is how to deal with this kind of affected ignorance. There is an argument that this type of affected ignorance can effectively be dealt with by fines, reprimands, and other disciplinary action. In general, affected ignorance is in place because the person believes—perhaps at a less than conscious level—that it is in her interest not to recognize that what she is doing is morally culpable. Actually punishing people will result in changing their incentives. In other words, what you want is for people to stop thinking it is in their interests to ignore the fact that they engage in harassment or discrimination.

I doubt that this is the most common form of harassment and discrimination. For in these cases we typically do not disagree with the classification of what we do  as “eating factory farmed meat”, “having slaves”, or “illegally downloading”. Our disagreement is with the moral claim that what we are doing is wrong. In the first case, we may defend ourselves by pointing to the great effort and expense avoiding factory farmed meat would involve (perhaps), and in the other we may point to the perversity of the music industry (not music itself, of course). The problem with Title IX issues is more likely to be that we do not see what we do as discriminating or harassing.

In the next blog, I will talk more about conceiving of what we do under morally relevant descriptions. But because this is probably already too long for a blog post (this is only my second time blogging), I end here.

Some Autobiographical Notes to Start

I trace back my philosophical interest in responsibility to when I started working on psychopathy. During my postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis, I came across Shaun Nichols’ work on psychopaths and the rationalism-sentimentalism debate. It struck me that psychopaths are hardly rational; certainly not practically rational, which was the kind of rationality Kant was concerned with. When I started looking at the experimental data I found that psychopaths have a range of attention deficits that affect their ability to make good decisions. And so I wrote a paper outlining psychopaths’ decision-making deficits and explaining how they might affect their moral judgments (Moral Unreason: The Case of Psychopathy). I concluded that psychopaths speak in favor of neither sentimentalism nor rationalism in ethics. For what it’s worth, I still think that is true, and I have found more empirical evidence to support that idea. It was this work on psychopaths and the rationalism vs. sentimentalism debate that seriously got me interested in psychopathology and moral psychology. That work was also the reason Walter Sinnott-Armstrong later invited me to participate in an APA session on psychopathy and legal responsibility. After much research into the insanity defense, I concluded that psychopaths are responsible for their actions because their madness is their badness. They are indistinguishable from people who simply do not care about morality (The Mad, the Bad, and the Psychopath).

The work I did on psychopaths and their legal responsibility opened my eyes to the importance of thinking about both moral and legal responsibility. I initially focused on legal responsibility and the insanity defense, since that is a pretty well defined area, at least if you compare it to the sprawling and multi-faceted moral responsibility debate. One advantage to focusing on legal responsibility is that the law assumes that compatibilism is true, and so the responsibility of ordinary people cannot be unmoored by incompatibilist arguments. Another advantage is that real-life cases promise to give us an account of responsibility that is relevant to our world and our moral practices. We should not put too much stock in our intuitions about far-flung examples, e.g. of complete mind control, and we should be careful that such cases do not unduly influence our theories about real-world responsibility.

I have been impressed with the difficulty that some theories have holding people responsible for their actions if they have views about what is right or wrong that differ from ours. What, for instance, do we say about the person who wants to kill his daughter, who has been raped, to erase the shame on his family? (To make it simpler, lets imagine he lives in the West.) Some theories of responsibility would exonerate him because he could not help having the moral outlook that he does. Similarly, such theories claim that holding people from different historical eras responsible for their actions also makes no sense. The problem with such views, I have argued, is that they seem to suppose that we can only ever be held responsible for doing things that are wrong by our own lights. But, as Socrates once said, nobody ever knowingly does wrong. Our account of moral responsibility, then, cannot reasonably rely on people knowingly doing wrong or right. We have to allow that people can be mistaken, negligible, or wrong, in ways that are culpable.

This is where I thought an account of responsibility that relies on the notion of ‘inferential routes’ has a lot of power. If there is an inferential route from someone’s beliefs, values, etc. to knowledge that what she is doing is wrong, and it was not too onerous to follow, then we can hold her responsible. Moreover, if she does not know what she is doing is wrong and she does not possess beliefs or values from which there is an inferential route to such knowledge, but she could acquire such knowledge, beliefs, or values without too much hardship given her environment and her mental condition, she can also be held responsible. This is, I argue, the best interpretation of the epistemic condition on responsibility, at least when it comes to moral intransigence. Choosing to ignore that what one does is wrong or simply disagreeing with one’s community about what is morally right or wrong cannot excuse.

Thinking about responsibility for acting under the influence of biases or situational factors—such as racial or gender stereotypes or subject to the situational effects (such as the bystander effect)—made me realize that knowing what we are doing under a relevant description cannot be a condition on responsibility. Most would agree that people who discriminate against, say, women because they are women are culpable for doing so. However, the more we know about such cases, the more certain it seems to be that the person is unaware of thinking that the person is less qualified, say, because she is a woman. How, then, do we account for our intuition that people are culpable for such acts of discrimination? Since many of the influences that we can be culpable for acting under the influence of have little to do with our character or our identifications, accounts that rely on these features being central to responsible agency won’t work. Instead, I argue that to be responsible, agents must have the capacity to know what they do, but not necessarily, or even primarily, in a direct, private, first personal, or introspective way. There is no need for the agent to be directly aware of her action under a relevant description. Rather, it is the ability to conceive of our action from a perspective other than our own that is central to responsibility; to know what we do as from the outside.

This is it by ways of introducing myself. I’ll be back!

Passing the Torch!

The time is once again upon us when we thank one Featured Author and welcome another.  So, first, let me thank Sarah Paul for an interesting month of blogging. From the relationship between rationality and alienation and the relevance of doxastic self-control to action theory, Sarah discussed some oft neglected topics that were a nice break from some of the more common issues we discuss when it comes to free will and moral responsibility.  As is always the case when we have someone do a stint as Featured Author, I was amazed anew with how much rich and illuminating work is being done when it comes to human thought and agency! So, thanks once again to Sarah for contributing her part to making this blog an interesting place for philosophical discussion.

That said, I would now like to welcome this month's Featured Author--Professor Heidi Maibom. Heidi is a Professor of Philosophy at The University of Cincinnati's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. She has published widely in action theory and moral psychology. Here is a description of her work in her own words:

My research focuses on folk psychology and moral psychology. Folk psychology is our practice of thinking of one another in terms of what we think, feel, want, and so on. The question is how we do this. Do we use something like a theory of psychology or do we imagine being in others' shoes? I think we do both, only when we imagine being others, we become motivated by what they want. Nevertheless, many of our social skills are probably largely the same as many other animals', even though they don't think about thoughts, feelings, etc.

 

I am also interested in what makes us moral. Does morality requires a certain level of intelligence or rationality, or perhaps an ability to feel empathy or sympathy? By looking at immorality in ordinary people and psychopaths, we can figure out what goes wrong when we fail to do what is good or right. We can then determine the moral responsibility of mentally ill people, and understand the psychological basis of morality in us all.

I've taught courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, moral psychology, and philosophy of artificial intelligence & cognitive science, but I'm also interested in ancient Greek philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of science.

She will have more to say about her previous and current research projects in her first post. I have closely followed her work on empathy, psychopathy, and moral psychology which is one of the reasons I am so excited to have her as this month's Featured Author here at Flickers of Freedom. So, please join me in welcoming her. It ought to be another fun and illuminating month!