Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments

"This is an important point. While I think it would be too much to say that the free will problem is just the problem of moral responsibility, they are intimately connected. Free will stretches beyond the problem of responsibility, since it touches on our conception of ourselves as creators, individuals and so on but the issue that really matters to us is the problem of our agency in relation to our moral accountability. This is why Wallace’s book is particularly interesting. As the title suggests, Wallace is drawing on a tradition that emphasizes the importance of moral sentiments for understanding this issue. The approach he takes follows that of an influential paper by Peter Strawson, an Oxford philosopher, called “Freedom and Resentment.” The approach here is to begin with an understanding of what it is to hold somebody responsible, where holding somebody responsible is understood as a matter of entertaining certain distinctive kinds of emotions towards them. Those emotions presuppose certain kinds of beliefs about them, and then we try to understand what it is for them to be responsible, by properly understanding the emotions involved in holding people responsible. So we get a better insight into the conditions of responsibility, by examining their foundation in these attitudes and practices. The philosophical jargon is ‘reactive attitudes.’ We have a certain set of expectations or standards or norms, concerning what we expect of one another in terms of our inter-personal dealings. These have ethical or normative significance for us. When people violate these norms we respond negatively to them. We hold them to those standards. What’s crucial here is that these aren’t just intellectual judgments. We must not, in Strawson’s language, over-intellectualize our responses here. It’s not like failing an exam or getting a math problem wrong – it goes deeper than that. Our responses in these circumstances are hardwired into our moral psychology. We respond emotionally and have hostile responses in those cases where these moral norms are violated. Yes, Strawson doesn’t start with the impersonal moral case, but with the personal reactive attitudes, where it’s an injury or a harm done to us. If you step on my toes accidentally, it might hurt me, and I might think, “please be more careful.” However, if I think you’re jumping on my toes and aiming to hurt me then, obviously, I will get much more upset. What it shows us — and this is the Strawsonian side, that can be traced back to philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith — is that we should start, not from some high order of moral principle or philosophical theory, but from a simple truth about human moral psychology . The relevant starting point of these investigations is that we actually care about certain kinds of attitudes and intentions that other human beings show us, just as we naturally care about our appearance, intelligence, abilities, physical prowess, and so on. Moral reactive attitudes are concerned with a particular dimension of our attributes or qualities, namely the set of attitudes and intentions and the values we manifest in dealing with each other. What’s interesting about this general approach is that it moves away from simple conceptual analysis — what concepts mean, what their logic is and how they’re related to each other — and tries to provide a better informed and more realistic moral psychology. His model is something like this: reactive attitudes should be understood in terms of expectations. Expectations are simply standards or norms about what we may or may not do. These expectations lay down our obligations. Where those obligations are backed by moral reasons — which concern our relations to each other in social life, so that we can cooperate and trust each other — they ground our reactive attitudes when violations occur. In several respects, Wallace defends a fundamentally Kantian view of morality. When moral obligations are intentionally violated we blame people, and blame is naturally connected with our retributive disposition to punish or sanction them in some form. This understanding of our moral psychology has to do with the interconnections between expectations, obligations and blame. It’s perhaps a weakness of this view that it leans entirely on the reactive attitudes that are all essentially negative or hostile responses to violations of moral expectations. Wallace goes on to explain that to understand our stance of holding responsible we need a theory of excuses and exemptions. As in familiar legal cases, there are certain circumstances where people appear to violate our expectations, but then we realize that they were either ignorant of the situation, or they did it accidentally, or there was some other relevant consideration indicating that although an injury occurred, the harm done was inadvertent and therefore the expectation was not strictly violated. Voluntariness and intention are essential here in triggering or occasioning our reactive attitudes. There is another important consideration that we must also take note of. Clearly, there are individuals who we see as appropriate targets of reactive attitudes or moral sentiments and some who we don’t. How do we draw that borderline? How do I decide whether an individual I’m dealing with is someone who should be included or excluded? What if, for example, it’s a crazy person or a child? This is where Wallace, again, like Dennett and Fischer, brings his own particular model of rational self-control. He tries to give a naturalistic account of rational self-control which can serve as a plausible theory of exemptions for reactive attitudes. He certainly offers a powerful compatibilist theory. The picture he rejects is the one that runs deep and is still there, the view that responsible choice depends on genuine alternatives or open possibilities. Wallace rejects that. He thinks someone makes a responsible choice as long as she has a general disposition or capacity to recognize reasons and may be motivated by them. Although it is true that in some circumstances an individual might fail to recognize reasons or fail to be motivated by them, we should remember that someone who has the capacity to speak a language may also make a grammatical slip. Nevertheless, we still have the expectation that they will speak in an appropriate, literate manner and we hold them to these standards. When they make a slip we catch them out and respond to them and correct them. In the case of our reactive attitudes, the people we target are the people with the relevant general capacity or disposition. They might make a slip that has an explanation but if it was willful or intentional, then we can hold them to those standards and we will react to them accordingly. We will blame them."