Flickers of Freedom

Agents, Mechanisms, and Self-Deception

Hi everyone--here is a last post for January before I pass the baton to Derk. Thanks again to Thomas and to all of you for such thoughtful and interesting contributions--the whole experience has been terrific, and you’ve given me much to continue to think about!

One very influential approach to responsibility seeks to understand it in terms of reasons-responsiveness.  But there are a variety of ways of understanding reasons-responsiveness, and these include mechanism-based views and agent-based views.  So, for example, on Fischer and Ravizza’s mechanism-based approach, one is responsible when one acts on one’s own moderately reasons-responsive mechanism.  Without getting into the subtle details of their account, we can understand a mechanism to be reasons-responsive in general as follows: if the mechanism on which one acts were to operate, then in some set of worlds in which there were sufficient reason to do otherwise, the agent recognizes the reason and does otherwise.  Here it is the mechanism on which one acts that is reasons-responsive in the first instance.  In contrast, on an agent-based account, an agent is responsible for an action if the agent herself is reasons responsive.  (Reasons responsiveness on the part of an agent can be cashed out in different ways, including as having the ability to respond to reasons that there are in the situation.)  Much has been said about the contrast between these two different approaches, but having recently been thinking about self-deception, I’d like to come at it here from perhaps a slightly different angle. 

Consider a case that allows for an agent to be reasons-responsive even when the agent does not act on a reasons-responsive mechanism (understood as above).  Suppose that a woman deceives herself, coming to believe that her son is not abusing his own children, for example.  Suppose the mechanism on which she forms the belief--or collects her evidence--is a motivated biasing mechanism.  Supposing that the biasing mechanism is not reasons-responsive (or does not meet the requisite threshold level of reasons-responsiveness), then the self-deceiver will not be responsible on the mechanism-based view.  In contrast, on the latter view, it is not exonerating that a non-reasons-responsive mechanism is operating.  What matters is whether the agent could have either prevented that mechanism from operating, or instead put another into action.  Since there is good intuitive support for the idea that self-deceivers like this woman can be responsible, does the case of self-deception provide support for the agent-based approach to responsibility?   

Friendship and freedom

Happy Martin Luther King Day to all! 

Here are a few questions about different ways friendship and freedom might be related.  Does friendship (among other relationships we value) require freedom?  There are several ways one might take friendship and freedom to be related.  One way of seeing the connection is this: friendship must be entered into, or given, freely to either be true friendship or to be a friendship that is valuable.  Robert Kane suggests this possibility in the Significance of Free Will (see Derk Pereboom, “Free Will, Love, and Anger,” for an argument on the other side). Another is that relationships like friendship involve a kind of caring and disposition to “take things personally” (as Seth Shabo, inspired by Peter Strawson, puts it in “Where Love and Resentment Meet”) such that a friend is susceptible to the reactive attitudes and so presupposes whatever freedom is required for responsibility on the part of one’s friend.  A third way begins with a related, but distinct, claim about the nature of friendship, namely, that special obligations are partially constitutive of, or supervene on, or are generated by friendship.  And if obligations require the ability to fulfill them, and if having such an ability requires a kind of freedom (or an important component of freedom), then friendship entails this kind of freedom (or an important component).  Are the premises in this third line of reasoning plausible--one about the nature of friendship, the other about its implications for a kind of (or component of) freedom?  Does it stand and fall with the second?  

Difficulty and Degrees of Blameworthiness and Praiseworthiness

Theories of responsibility are often presented as giving necessary and sufficient conditions for responsibility, or blameworthiness in particular.  But we also often talk about people being more or less blameworthy, or more or less praiseworthy.  What factors affect our attributions of greater and lesser blameworthiness and praiseworthiness?  One dimension seems to be that of difficulty--e.g., how hard was it for you to avoid wrongdoing?  Another related dimension is the extent of sacrifice that would be required to avoid wrongdoing.  And similar considerations seem to underlie our attributions of more and less praiseworthiness--e.g., in supererogatory actions, but also in cases in which people do what they ought to do but where doing so is really hard or requires a lot of sacrifice. 

Sorting out what we should say about degrees of blameworthiness might affect our theories of responsibility in a variety of ways, too.  I’ll start here with just a few general observations and questions.  For example, when it comes to praiseworthy action, it might be assumed that doing something praiseworthy requires the ability to resist a temptation to do otherwise by acting badly, but perhaps we can rightly attribute great praiseworthiness on the grounds that the praiseworthy action is difficult to do or that it requires great sacrifice instead even if one could not have given in to temptation. 

Or take blameworthy action.  Is there room in extant theories of responsibility to capture the dimension of difficulty?  Can they be easily extended to account for degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness?  Or do they need supplementation? 

In general, what are the factors that make actions more or less blameworthy, and more or less praiseworthy? 

Blameworthiness and Wrongness

Happy 2013 to all!  Thanks so much to Thomas for this great opportunity, and I look forward to your input.  I thought I’d ease into the new year by asking for your thoughts on the following thesis and intuitions about an example.  Here is the thesis:

If one is blameworthy for an action then one ought not have done it. 

Here is an example that might seem to challenge the thesis: you and I are taking an exam next to each other, and I’ve brought only one pencil while you have brought 20.  Mine breaks, and I look over to you with a pleading face.  You just shake your head at my lack of planning and go back to work.* 

Is it appropriate for me to blame you in this case?  

Did you do anything wrong, or anything you ought not have done? 

If your answers are “yes” and “no,” then we seem to have a counterexample to the thesis.  I’m inclined to defend the thesis on the grounds that you really ought to have loaned me your pencil, despite my lacking any right to it.  But I realize that not everyone shares this view.  Thoughts welcome. 

*Thanks to David Shoemaker for the details of the case, and attribution to Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Michael McKenna for related cases. 

Featured Author: Dana Nelkin

Greetings and Happy New Year to all of the readers of Flickers of Freedom!  Thanks to not only the contributors and readers of the blog but also our inaugeral Featured Authors (namely, Fischer, Smilansky, and Mele), 2012 was a great year for blogging about agency and responsibility here at Flickers.  Fortunately, a number of other top scholars have agreed to be part of the new monthly series in 2013--including this month's Featured Author, Dana Nelkin.  Professor Nelkin is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California San Diego.  Her research interests range over moral psychology, ethics, the intersection of ethics and the law, biomedical ethics, and psychology.  Her articles have appeared in journals such as Philosophical Studies, Analysis, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, and The Philosophical Review.  She recently published Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (2012). So, hopefully, everyone will read Professor Nelkin's posts as eagerly as I will and participate actively in the ensuing discussions.  

p.s.  Because of the holidays, Professor Nelkin may not kick things off until a bit later in January.  So, keep checking back in!

 The upcoming schedule for the Featured Author series is below the fold.