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). 

4. The reactive attitudes

Another prominent locus of responsibility discourse is Strawson’s theory of the reactive attitudes. Strawson is one of the most influential contemporary responsibility theorists, being a central catalyst for mainstream compatibilism. On Strawson’s view, responsibility is an interpersonal practice in which we deploy (feel or express) the reactive attitudes, consisting of approbation, praise, disapprobation, resentment, indignation, and the like (1963). Michael McKenna defends a more specific, situated version of Strawsonianism, on which the reactive attitudes are part of a conversational practice with three paradigmatic stages: (1) a moral contribution, in which someone perform a morally-relevant action, (2) a moral address, in which someone deploys the reactive attitudes, and (3) a moral accounting, in which the addressee responds, explaining or accounting for her actions (2013). McKenna’s view situates Strawson’s theory within a two-person conversational exchange. The stages of this exchange often include the familiar speech acts of: accusing, blaming or praising someone; accepting responsibility, apologizing, or offering amends; and offering an explanation, excuse or justification. 

This is a helpful elaboration of Strawson’s model, as it gives responsibility a concrete form and helps us to understand what Strawson meant when he described responsibility—somewhat ambiguously—as an ‘interpersonal practice.’ McKenna’s explanation is a step in the right direction, I think, in that it clarifies the context in which responsibility takes place (a two-person dialogue), and the some of the discursive forms that our reactive attitudes and responses often take.

But this is only part of the context, surely. McKenna’s account describes a two-person exchange, but says nothing about broader social conditions in which the exchange takes place. It’s reasonable to think that EI could affect our ability to participate in our roles as moral addressors and moral accounters in a rational way—a way that enhances, or at least preserves, the responsible agency of the conversational partners. We might, for example, deploy the reactive attitudes on the basis of implicit or explicit bias in a climate of EI, or respond to blame in biased ways. If so, then our epistemic climate impairs the proper functioning of our moral conversations—it prevents them from proceeding in a fair and constructive way. 

We can bring this into relief by homing in on the second and third stages of McKenna’s conversational model, and situating them against a background of EI.

1. In the moral address stage, addressors might unfairly underestimate the moral standing of disadvantaged group members due to implicit bias. They might also deploy the reactive attitude in discriminatory and punishing ways, if they are explicitly biased. In either case, there will be a tendency to excessively blame and criticize disadvantaged group members compared to other people. There will also be a tendency to reject or discount the moral accounts of members of disadvantaged groups, since EI tends to result in ‘testimonial injustice’—the unfair discrediting of people’s testimony on the basis of the demographic attributes and social scripts about those attributes. Testimonial injustice includes biased responses to the testimony constitutive of a moral accounts—accounts that testify to one’s innocence, that respond defensively to unfair blame and censure, and so on. Testimonial injustice can prevent the moral addressor from responding appropriately to the moral account of disadvantaged group members. It can also operate in the inverse way, prompting the person to overestimate his own credibility and moral worth.

2. In the moral accounting stage, stereotype threat and low self-regard might inhibit the performance of members of disadvantaged groups, in their role as moral accounters; for example, it might prevent them from providing confident rebuttals to misplaced blame, or assertively defending their moral standing in the face of unfair and biased recriminations. (This is obviously not a necessary effect of EI, but it is something to watch for if we want to be responsible moral accounters). In addition, stereotyped individuals may not receive proper uptake (or due credit) from others for their moral accounts due to EI effects. By contrast, privileged group members are more likely to have high epistemic confidence, enabling them to defend their moral standing more effectively—perhaps too effectively: given too much epistemic confidence, one might be tempted to deny apt blame and censure.

These considerations show how EI can affect our moral conversations in biasing and responsibility-impairing ways. The cognitive effects of EI can place negatively stereotyped groups in a position of relative disadvantage in moral conversation. This is a kind of ‘moral-conversational disenfranchisement, which we should be cognizant of if we want to be responsible (rational) members of moral conversation.  

In addition to these direct effects, EI might undermine our moral conversations in more insidious ways. Specifically, it might undermine the ‘epistemic warrant’—the degree of justification or authority—that every single one of our moral claims has, including our reactive attitudes and moral accounts, viz., the central constituents of moral conversation. Why is this? We can explain this phenomenon by reference to standpoint epistemology (see, e.g., Harding 2015, Longino 2001, Potter 1993), which holds that our knowledge claims are epistemically underwritten not only by our individual beliefs and attitudes, but also by the background assumptions shared by our culture—the total network of beliefs and attitudes held by everyone with whom we share a form of life. This means that flaws in our epistemic environment—such as pervasive negative stereotypes and social scripts—undermine the epistemic warrant of our knowledge claims, including (but not restricted to) our moral knowledge claims, i.e., our claims about what is morally the case. Hence, when we claim that S is blameworthy or S is excused from responsibility or what have you, we must treat this is a mere moral belief or opinion, not a piece of moral knowledge. We must, in other words, be modest in our moral claims, and amenable to revising those claims in light of new information. One way of increasing the justification of our moral claims is to be vigilant about the role of cognitive distortions in our conversations—but this won’t give us moral knowledge. To be truly confident, we need to fix the flaws in our collective discourse. We need to reject the harmful stereotypes, subtle biases, and exclusions that we encounter on a regular basis. 

Notably, there are ways of indirectly controlling and remediating implicit biases, which have received extensive research—methods such as counter-stereotypical exposure and implementation intentions (see Kelly et al. 2010). Privileged people are arguably blameworthy for failing to use these methods to improve their moral profile (Holroyd 2012). But on the other hand, these methods are of limited immediate efficacy and questionable long-term efficacy. In a climate of epistemic injustice, implicit bias is practically inevitable, even for the most reflectively scrupulous among us. It is a dangerous mistake to think that meticulous self-examination will inoculate us against implicit bias. While we out to try to be critically reflective and vigilant about the role of implicit biases and other cognitive distortions in our moral reasoning, this doesn’t exhaust our moral responsibilities. We also need to take substantial measures to improve the quality of our public discourse.

Biased responsibility practices are not only unfair to the disadvantaged parties, but harmful to the entire moral community, since discriminatory treatment tends to alienate disenfranchised groups—those who are not getting the moral credit they deserve—and alienation in turn tends to create subcultures of disaffected individuals who reject the prevailing social contract. This is one of the reasons that EI undermines our relational responsibility—it deters some people from participating in moral conversations at all, or participating in good faith; and it also excludes the people who have the most epistemic insight and authority vis-à-vis our flawed social discourses and institution—the people we most need to contribute. When we exclude people from moral conversation, we undermine our moral culture.

Interestingly, ethical theorists tend to suppose that most people are already and at all times recognized members of the moral ingroup, or ‘moral community.’ This includes Strawson, who takes for granted that most people are subject to the ‘participant stance,’ with only a few ‘deranged’ people falling outside of the moral community as we know it. Similarly, Scanlon says that morality includes all “suitably motivated” individuals (1998: 189), meaning those willing to cooperate in the social order; and he seems to think—though I could be wrong—that most people are interested in cooperation, and are also given a seat at the table and treated as equal contributors. There is, in any case, no discussion about how some people’s speech counts for more than others in our public discourse and public understandings. Rawls took a completely different tack, assuming that only landowning white males were fit to be contractors in the original position; and Kant similarly included only White males in the sphere of moral reasoning. In the real world, our moral-conversational practices may superficially purport to be open to everyone, and grounded on fair and impartial principles, but that’s not how they work. In reality, these practices resemble Kant’s and Rawls’ Eurocentric worldview more than we might like to admit, inasmuch as landowning White males still contribute disproportionally to public discourse, and receive more credit, trust, and respect than they deserve (in general). This is because EI functions in such a way as to favour historically privileged groups—those who were previously regarded as the only moral agents, or at least the paradigm case. This radical ignorance is a predictable effect of a high degree of EI. As Fricker points out, EI creates disparities in our social interactions, representing some people as moral credible and socially valuable than others; since moral conversation is a social interaction, it is not immune from the structural inequalities that beset our broader social interactions. 

To eliminate stratification in the moral community, we need to work to eliminate the biases and unjustified assumptions that (still) play a role in our responsibility system.

Before closing, I’ll anticipate an upcoming discussion by noting that, on Strawson’s view, when we unfairly morally appraise someone, we (technically) objectify the person by failing to respond to the person’s quality of will. Strawson says that the reactive attitudes must respond to the target’s quality of will. We can suspend or modify these attitudes if the person is either temporarily or permanently cognitive impaired—for instance, cases of hypnosis or severe cognitive disability. If I am right that we often (intentionally or unintentionally) morally appraise people on the basis of extraneous factors, such as EI or the cognitive effects of EI, as opposed to homing in on the person’s actual quality of will, it appears that we often modify the reactive attitudes for no good reason. In some cases, we might illegimately ‘take the objective attitude’ toward the person, although the person is not, in fact, morally incapacitated—we are just treating the person as if he were. In other cases, we might illicitly blame someone, modifying the reactive attitudes in a punitive way.

By thinking about responsibility against the backdrop of EI, we pinpoint characteristic ways in which our responsibly attributions can, and often do, go wrong.

I will expand on these points in post #6.

Related articles

4. The reactive attitudes - Flickers of Freedom

3. Responsibility & epistemic injustice

There is a prodigious literature on responsibility, most of which emphasizes the internal properties of persons constitutive of responsible agency. We can call this approach ‘internalism,’ in contrast to ‘externalism’ (see previous post). Internalism is reflected, for example, in debates about whether character or control is the proper locus of responsible agency. These debates tend to focus on embodied internal properties (reflective states, values, virtues), and sometimes a limited range of exogenous factors. The most salient example of the latter are direct neural interventions, like nefarious neurosurgery, counterfactual brain implants, and brainwashing. While I don’t want to deny that these are interesting and constructive discussions, there’s a broader range of situational factors that we can explore—factors that operate on the agent’s responsibility-constitutive neural states less directly, but might have equally significant effects on these states. 

One of the problems with focusing on direct neural interventions in discussions of responsibility is that these interventions are actually fairly useless, given the current state of cognitive neuroscience. The range of realistic moral neuro-interventions is (at this time) very limited. We cannot do personality-altering neurosurgery, for example. We also cannot very effectively enhance a person’s moral psychology with pharmaceuticals. In spite of some transhumanitsts’ optimistic claims about ‘moral neural enhancements’ (e.g., Paul Zak), existing examples of these interventions, like oxytocin nasal spray and transcranial magnetic stimulation, are not very effective at inducing moral traits (properly understood). Oxytocin boosters, for example, are ambivalent in their effects, producing both positive effects (trust) and negative effects (outgroup bias); are relatively weak at modifying the targeted personality structures; and are sensitive to a person’s background psychology, meaning that they sometimes produce trust but sometimes don’t. Some people are categorical distrusters, resistant to the effects of oxytocin. These considerations are meant to show that we cannot simply enhance ‘moral agency’ by intervening in neural states with pharmaceuticals and other interventions. What we can do, given sufficient political will and organization, is address social and situational factors that hinder the acquisition of responsible agency.

Some philosophers have begun to pursue this line of research (externalism), focusing on the moral landscape. Notably, Manual Vargas discusses the ‘moral ecology,’ or set of moral considerations in a given culture that underpin responsibility (2013), and Susan Hurley writes about the importance of the ‘public ecology’ (2011). These approaches mark a methodological shift away from internalism, toward a more sociological and anthropological analysis. Hurley and Vargas are both interested in (i) how public policies and practices inform our collective uptake of responsibility, and (ii) how we can best intervene to improve these structures. They are both, as far as I can tell, consequentialists and pragmatists, interested in altering the moral landscape in positive ways. Their work addresses such ‘ecological factors’ as psychiatric discourse, advertising, and political campaigns, and how these things either scaffold or sabotage our responsible agency.  

I wish to expand on this discourse by focusing on another aspect of the moral ecology: namely, epistemic injustice (EI). EI, as Miranda Fricker describes it (2007), refers to an epistemic climate in which pernicious social stereotypes and social schemes give rise to systemic discrimination against historically disadvantaged social groups—groups like women, African Americans, and the queer community. One of the vehicles for EI identified by Fricker is ‘testimonial injustice,’ which occurs when someone fails to give another person the credit or trust that he deserves. For example, if a police officer distrusts someone’s testimony because the person is African American (as often happens), he is enacting testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007: 1).

While Fricker does not describe the cognitive mechanisms through which EI operates, good candidates seem to be: negative implicit biases, which are relatively automatic and unconscious prejudices toward vulnerable social groups (e.g., implicit racial bias, implicit gender bias, implicit disability bias); negative explicit biases, which are conscious prejudices toward these social groups; stereotype threat, i.e., the tendency to conform to negative stereotypes about one’s social group, impairing performance on certain tasks, though not competency; and low self-regard, which is a negative (perhaps conscious) self-conception that similarly impairs task performance. I see these mechanisms, which flourish in a climate of EI such as ours, as responsibility-impairing, insofar as they impair rationality—the ability to grasp and appreciate another person’s epistemic and moral character, to give others the credit they deserve, to respond appropriately to other people’s moral testimony, etc. As I will argue, these cognitive distortions can interfere with our shared moral practice, or ‘moral conversation’ as McKenna calls it (2013), by preventing us from holding people responsible in a rational way—a way that responds to their epistemic and moral attributes—and taking responsibility for ourselves in a rational way.

When we discredit or disvalue others due to the cognitive effects of EI, we exhibit and entrench responsibility-deficits in our own moral psychology, and in the same stroke, we harm the target’s responsibility status, either directly—by limiting the person’s social role options—or indirectly—by lowering the quality of public knowledge. When we harm public discourse, we deprive ourselves of epistemic justification for our reactive attitudes, making our moral attitudes, at best, weakly justified. We can never, that is, hold someone responsible with any confidence.

I’ll expand on the first part of this claim first: our responsibility deficits harm other people’s responsibility status.

Suppose that a hiring committee is seeking the most qualified candidate for an opening in the company, and they make their selection on the basis of implicit racial bias rather than merit, as per the famous Bertrand & Mullainathan study (2014). They select the best applicant out of the candidates with stereotypical Anglo-Saxon name, rather than the best applicant, full stop. The committee members in this scenario are acting irrationally by their own lights, since they are explicitly committed to hiring the best candidate (full stop), and have (as per the study) even advertised a commitment to employment equity. Since they are acting against their rational values and commitments, as well as on the basis of a relatively uncontrollable, automatic, and unconscious cognitive state (implicit bias), they are responsibility-impaired as members of the hiring committee. At the same time, by choosing an Anglo-Saxon candidate, they are preventing a more qualified candidate, from a socially disadvantaged group, from achieving her rational goals. If she cannot find equivalent work elsewhere, she is responsibility-impaired by virtue of not being able to attain a role responsibility that she finds valuable, and that society values.

(This is what happens when there is a ‘glass ceiling’, or social and material obstacles, barring certain social groups from obtaining jobs with certain role responsibilities; the person’s range of responsibilities are artificially circumscribed, and thus her responsibility-constitutive capacities are not as robust or expansive as they could be).

Now suppose that the hiring committee is explicitly biased against stereotyped social groups. Are they rationality impaired? Yes, but not in their instrumental rationality (their means-end reasoning). In this case, they are impaired in their substantive rationality—they cannot (due to their cognitive architecture) act in a manner that serves their substantive interests, both as business people and as moral agents. In our society, companies benefit from hiring the best candidate for the job from a range of demographic backgrounds, and society benefits from demographic diversity within companies (combined with positive diversity mindset ad other positive epistemic conditions). Thus, the company, and the broader society, would be served by a moral objective (less racist) hiring choice. Moreover, the hiring committee, as moral agents, would be better moral agents if they remediated their racist explicit beliefs and values; thus, they would be more morally responsible if les racist. For these reasons, explicit racism also impairs the agent’s responsibility. 

Job applicants from stereotyped social groups may also be responsibility-impaired by EI, if they exhibit stereotype threat—as tends to happen in this type of climate. Supposing that job applicants for a certain job were subject to stereotype threat, they would be responsibility-impaired in the sense that they would be prevented from exhibiting their competency on relevant tasks, such as the interview, and thus they would be less likely to get the job. Manifestations of stereotype threat tend to undermine one’s ability to demonstrate one’s character profile in public contexts, and to control one’s performance on relevant tasks, so in these regards this cognitive state is responsibly-impairing on the traditional models. It can also be responsibility-impairing on my view if it prevents one from obtaining role responsibilities that one is capable of exceling in, only because of stereotype threat effects.

On the other hand, the hiring committee might underrate the applicant’s interview performance, if they harbour implicit biases toward the person’s social group, as often happens in climates of EI. (This is why applications are becoming increasingly anonymized, at least in responsible institutions that are committed to real employment equity). Bias against certain social groups can directly impair the responsibility prospects of those groups by barring them from valuable role responsibilities, and it can also indirectly harm their responsibility status by perpetuating harmful stereotypes—stereotypes that induce implicit bias, stereotype threat, and other cognitive states that typically manifest in responsibility-harming ways.

This discussion illustrates how EI tends to undermine responsible agency in members of different social groups in (characteristically) differential patterns. Namely, EI undermines the responsibility of those in positions of privilege by making them susceptible to negative implicit and explicit biases, and it undermines the responsibility of members of disadvantaged social groups by making them susceptible to stereotype threat and low self-regard (generally speaking). EI-based cognitive distortions also undermine our collective responsibility by tainting the public discourse, perpetuating pernicious stereotypes that reinforce EI. In a climate of EI, we cannot be confident that we are gauging people’s responsibility—particularly, that we are blaming and praising people—rationally, given that rationality-impairing cognitive distortions are pervasive and inescapable. So, we can only tentatively, or weakly, hold people responsible—at least until we repair the flaws in our epistemic climate. An attitude of moral uncertainty and epistemic humility is presently forced on everyone—particularly privileged individuals—by EI.

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.

Related articles

Self-governance Over Time - Flickers of Freedom

Doxastic Self-Control

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.

Related articles

Self-governance Over Time - Flickers of Freedom

Doxastic Self-Control

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.

Free Will Beliefs and Psychiatry

I was just contacted by a psychiatrist in Turkey who wants to translate The Free Will Inventory into Turkish for some research he is planning to conduct. His work is based on this piece he sent me:

Weisman de Mamani AG, Gurak K, Maura J, Martinez de Andino A, Weintraub MJ and Mejia MG. Free Will Perceptions and Psychiatric Symptoms in Patients with Schizophrenia. J Schizophr Res. 2015;2(2): 1011.

 

Download Fulltext-schizophrenia-v2-id1011

 

Here is the abstract:

This pilot study is the first to examine the relationship between free will perceptions and psychiatric symptoms in 32 patients with schizophrenia. Participants were interviewed using the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale to assess  symptom severity and the Free Will Subscale of the Free Will and Determinism Scale to assess free will perceptions. As hypothesized, a moderately strong association was found between greater free will perceptions and less severe total psychiatric symptoms. When examining symptoms broken down into positive, negative, and affective type, it appears that the relationship was only significant for positive symptoms. While the associations for negative symptoms and affective were in the expected direction, the effect sizes were small and nonsignificant. A content analysis was also conducted to examine qualitatively how patients conceptualize the construct of free will and its role in coping with their own mental illness. Most patients (74.1%) appeared to endorse at least some degree of free will in managing their illness. At first pass, results of this study suggest that holding a free will perspective may mitigate psychiatric symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. However, it is possible that less severe symptoms lead to a greater sense of free will. Future longitudinal research is needed to replicate the link between free will and psychiatric symptoms and to clarify the direction of the associations.

It is an interesting pilot study--even though they used a scale for measuring free will beliefs that we criticize in our paper on The Free Will Inventory (namely, the Free Will and Determinism scale by Rakos et al.). Minimally, this is more fodder for thought for those who are interested in the psychological and practical upshots of believing in free will (whether good or bad).

p.s. On a related note, I have been working with a team for the past few years to develop a Portuguese version of FWI. We have finally validated the scale--which provides some preliminary evidence that the beliefs picked out by the scale may be cross-culturally stable. We should have a write up (in English) of our efforts and findings soon. In the meantime, let me know if you're interested in translating, administering, and validating FWI in another language!

Free Will and Neuroscience Redux

Via Massimo Pigliucci's  (CCNY/CUNY) Plato's Footnote:

Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It

by Andrea Lavazza (Centro Universitario Internazionale, Arezzo, Italy)

I found this to be a great overview of much recent research as well as a fascinating proposal for an empirically based indexing of degrees of free will.  It's lengthy but worth a read.

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!]