Against Moral Responsibility

"In the fifth book I’ve selected, Waller’s Against Moral Responsibility , one of the sources he appeals to in support of his scepticism about moral responsibility is data coming from neuroscience. This reflects a wider trend in philosophy, which is to be better informed and more deeply integrated with advances in empirical science and to use these resources to help us understand philosophical problems. To a certain extent, this approach cuts in the opposite direction from Williams, who employs a more humanistic understanding of philosophy, as informed by history and literature. However, neuroscience is very influential in the philosophy of free will right now, as are certain kinds of psychological experiments that aim to debunk our confidence that we are agents making conscious choices and in control of ourselves. The gist of Waller’s book is that we aren’t really responsible at all, because the kind of control that we think of as essential to responsibility is illusory. His principal argument in support of this conclusion is that we are vulnerable to luck, but another layer of his scepticism relies on neuroscience data — and, as you say, Libet is really the major figure here. While we may have a conception of ourselves as conscious agents making choices, the empirical data that Libet has provided claims to show that it is not the conscious self that decides but prior events in the brain. It can be shown experimentally that the brain has already settled how we will act several hundred milliseconds prior to our awareness of making any conscious choice. This supports a seemingly sceptical position about the role of conscious choice, on which responsibility seems to rest, since how we will act is already settled prior to the occurrence of conscious choice itself. The conscious agent, it seems, is not really in charge of conduct. A related but distinct strategy we should mention here is what’s called the “situationist objection.” This draws not so much on neuroscience as on advances in social psychology. Here again there are some seemingly embarrassing experiments. For example, in one, a coin is left in a phone booth and some people are left to find it. Shortly after this a person drops a book in front of them. Will they come and help pick up the book or not? The experimental data suggests that those individuals who just found a coin in the phone booth are much more likely to help than those who didn’t. The conclusion drawn from this is that what we do depends not so much on our particular character – whether we are kind, helpful, and so on – but on the particular situation or circumstances we happen to find ourselves in. More specifically, seemingly trivial or irrelevant background conditions, such as finding a coin, can greatly influence what we actually do. What matters to conduct is primarily a function of the specifics of our situation and not our character. Exactly, and I suppose you could put people into a bad mood by having an unpleasant smell and then they will behave in less pleasant ways due to factors they may not even be aware of. Again, the conclusion here is that we lack the sort of control we generally think is necessary for moral responsibility. One response to this, which Waller does not endorse, but philosophers like John Doris do suggest, is that for the purposes of responsibility we should aim to control our situation. For example, if I know that when I go to parties I drink too much, and when I drink too much I behave in ways that I subsequently regret, I should avoid going to parties where heavy drinking is going on. This is a better strategy than trying to abstain or limit how much I drink at the party. In general, if I am more aware of these situational factors I will be in better control of my conduct. Right. He allows that there are various weak or feeble versions of moral responsibility that compatibilists may propose. They want to lower the bar, to accommodate their naturalism by making responsibility less robust or less demanding. This is just a kind of verbal trick as Waller sees it. What is in question is the genuine article of real, robust moral responsibility. This involves a commitment to moral desert, which sustains our retributive attitudes and practices, particularly punishment. According to Waller, the crucial question is can we vindicate this more robust understanding of moral responsibility? Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Another aspect of Waller’s book, and a major concern of his, is that he thinks there’s a view that this sort of scepticism implies a kind of pessimism which supposes that it would be terrible if we’re not really, truly responsible. Against this view Waller argues that, on the contrary, these illusory beliefs about robust moral responsibility propel us into all kinds of rather nasty and unnecessary social practices, almost all of which we are better off without. These views also encourage us to remain ignorant of the relevant causes that make people commit crimes. Instead of investigating and identifying these causes, the responsibility system, simply punishes people or aims to cause them grief, which doesn’t solve anything. Scepticism offers us a way out of this mess, as Waller sees it. Abandoning the responsibility system is a basis for optimism not pessimism. You have to believe, on this view, there’s some sense in which we can live without the reactive attitudes we are considering. One question right up front is, ‘Is this even psychologically intelligible?’ One way to appreciate the difficulties here, by analogy, is to imagine that someone suggests that, ‘Being afraid is an unpleasant state of mind, you’re far better off being purely rational in assessing a threat or a harm and not allowing yourself to get upset about it.’ We ought to stop feeling fear or ever becoming afraid. You might imagine, for example, a soldier in a threatening situation might try this exercise. At least one problem we face here is that it is extremely implausible to suggest that people can just step away from responses of these kinds, even when they have practical reasons for doing so. Much the same seems to be true of our reactive attitudes. Suppose someone harmed your child, willfully, in a very cruel way. Would you be able to live your scepticism? Waller says it’s an ideal we can aspire to, but I am psychologically sceptical about that. And even if it was psychologically possible, there’s the further question of whether or not it would be desirable, for just the reasons you’re suggesting. There may be significant costs in terms of the sorts of pressures we exert on each other to conduct ourselves in ethically desirable ways. However, on Waller’s view, these are costs we must be willing to pay since our reactive attitudes and practices are unfair and unjust, whatever social benefits we may derive from them. The strategy being advanced here is not that we don’t care about what we do or how we act. Clearly if a wild animal came into a room and harmed a child, that would be awful. What we do in cases of this kind is to figure out why this happened and try to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. We might do the same with crime or any other sort of nasty, unpleasant action. The right approach, on this view, is to see the bad conduct as a natural event and to correct it, rather than just striking back. This is true even in first person cases, such as the one you have described involving Wittgenstein. Suppose Wittgenstein reflects on his own character and conduct in this situation. According to Waller’s sceptical view, there’s no point in saying ‘Oh my goodness I really deserve to suffer and feel horrible guilt about this conduct.’ Instead, given his troubled background and complicated personal life and relations, we might be able to come up with some sort of explanation for his bad temper and violent treatment of the child. The crucial thing is for the agent involved to learn why he acted this way and to change himself accordingly. All of this is consistent with having standards that say ‘This is undesirable conduct, this is something that is wrong.’ But being wrong and being morally responsible are two different things. We want to prevent wrong conduct in the same way that we want to prevent all kinds of other unpleasant things that occur: illness, hurricanes, fires. Ethical behaviour that fails our standards is not something we should be emotionally responding to in a retributive manner. We should aim to understand its roots, its causes, and try to improve things in the future. It may be argued that this is a vulnerability for the sceptical position – although, as I have explained, Waller wants to resist this objection. Nevertheless, we need to be able to distinguish between our relations and responses to sharks and to people, given that people possess abilities and capacities that sharks lack. Obviously, for example, the shark doesn’t have any reactive attitudes of a kind that people are liable to, much less any capacity to see themselves in relation to relevant kinds of moral expectations or any ethical self-understanding. Compatibilist considerations along these lines certainly help to explain why we don’t respond to sharks and people in the same way. I’ve got a small puppy right now. I sometimes have strong reactive attitudes to him, like “That damn dog has eaten my book!” I know this is unreasonable but at times it’s hard to switch off. We do, at times, have unreasonable reactive attitudes. What seems extreme about the radical sceptical view is that it aims to extend this reasoning to all cases – including all human action and agents. In my view there is a kind of dishonesty or bad faith involved in this outlook because it involves ignoring very relevant and important distinctions between people and animals, or even adults and children, and why it is important and necessary to respond differently to them. In those cases where the individuals you’re dealing with understand ethical responses, and their basis in moral concerns and norms, our emotional responses not only seem appropriate, they are essential to showing that we take morality seriously and place appropriate value and emphasis upon it in our practical lives. The sceptic thinks we can make do without these responses – and that we are even better off without them – but I am unpersuaded by this. One interpretation of the neuroscience data is that our experience of conscious choice is all just epiphenomena – with no real causal traction in the world. Whatever is going on in our conscious states, the real, operating causal forces are brain states that we’re not even aware of. I have to confess that I don’t get as excited about these findings and interpretations as many of my colleagues do. Nevertheless, these findings do raise genuinely interesting and important questions about the nature of deliberation and choice. How we understand all this in relation to data about what’s happening in the brain when these activities are going on is both scientifically and philosophically very interesting and challenging. Having said this, too often scientists, and those who follow closely behind them, draw strong philosophical conclusions, with great confidence, which it is not obvious that they are entitled to. The extreme sceptical conclusion, for example, which is now rather fashionable, strikes me as naïve because it generally turns on a particular model of what freedom and responsibility are supposed to involve, namely a spooky metaphysical self that is making conscious choices and in doing so interrupts the course of nature. It may well be that the data provided does debunk or discredit problematic models of this kind. However, for more sophisticated, and in particular naturalistic compatibilist models, it is not clear to me that this data is so problematic at all. For example, it isn’t going to surprise compatibilists, who are committed to naturalism, that our choices and actions have causal antecedents in physical processes that can be traced back prior to those choices and actions. That’s something that compatibilists as far back as Hobbes, if not before him, have long been committed to and acknowledged. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think there’s a tendency, in the present spirit of our times, to think that science is going to provide us with a fundamental ‘epiphany moment’ – which will suddenly clear the air and reveal our illusions on this subject. Perhaps people are looking for this because they see it as both exciting and decisive: ‘Here’s an experiment that shows – proves – that there is no free will and that we’re not responsible after all!’ To my mind this is all much too quick because it generally turns on rather superficial and implausible conceptions of what we’re actually committed to with respect to these matters. Waller’s response to these concerns is not without its own set of distinctions. He is careful to emphasize, for example, that we may have natural forms of freedom, while still insisting that these do not serve to ground or justify what he takes to be the responsibility system. Even allowing for these qualifications, he remains sceptical about our existing commitments and practices. With regard to these he wants to say, ‘Of course there’s a lot of things that we once believed that have turned out, on examination, to be wholly illusory and mistaken. We used to believe in ghosts, that the sun went around the earth, and so on. This is just part of the process of scientific advance.’ In the same way, Waller suggests, our thinking and attitudes concerning moral responsibility also need a Copernican revolution. Roughly speaking, that is my, perhaps unfashionable, view. Williams is, of course, a hugely influential figure, but he doesn’t represent the main trajectory of contemporary philosophy, which is now heavily focused on the interpretation of science-based findings. Generally speaking, Williams is sceptical about the dominant effort to turn philosophy into a handmaiden of science, except in those specific areas that call for this. The overall view that I find most plausible and truthful about our human situation is that — contrary to the sceptical view that we just considered — we can defend a robust understanding of both freedom and responsibility, that can be provided in entirely naturalistic terms. However, what’s interesting about the sort of view Williams describes, which goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, is that this does not serve to vindicate an easy optimism about the human condition. On the contrary, understanding our situation in these terms grounds a pessimism that is rooted, not in the sceptical thought that we aren’t really free and responsible, but in a more difficult and subtle truth about our predicament, which is that while we may well be free and responsible agents, we nevertheless remain vulnerable to luck, contingency, and aspects of fate in the exercise of moral life itself. It is our awareness of this that we find uncomfortable and tend to resist. Most available theories in the free will debate seek, in various ways, to evade this pessimistic conclusion. Although this understanding of our predicament as human agents may not be one we find comfortable it is, nevertheless, the most truthful interpretation."