Copyright © Matthew Talbert 2016
The right of Matthew Talbert to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8058-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8059-0 (pb)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Talbert, Matthew.
Moral responsibility : an introduction / Matthew Talbert.
pages cm. – (Key concepts in philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-8058-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-8058-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-8059-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-8059-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Responsibility. I. Title.
BJ1451.T345 2016
170–dc23
2015016785
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
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For Elizabeth
I'd like to thank Emma Hutchinson and Pascal Porcheron at Polity (as well as the anonymous reviewers they engaged) for their advice on my book proposal and comments on my manuscript. I'd also like to thank Caroline Richmond for her fine work copy-editing the manuscript. John Martin Fischer and Dana Nelkin were kind enough to look over portions of the manuscript, and I thank them for that. Over the years, many people have helped me to develop some of the ideas that I present here; of these official and unofficial teachers, I'd particularly like to acknowledge John Martin Fischer, Pamela Hieronymi, Dana Nelkin, David Shoemaker, Angela Smith, and Gary Watson.
This book introduces the concept of moral responsibility (as it is used in contemporary philosophy) and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with holding people responsible for their behavior. Among the most important and familiar of these practices are moral praise and moral blame. Praise and blame depend on moral responsibility in the sense that people are open to these responses only if they are morally responsible for the behaviors for which they are praised or blamed. Typically, a person is open to blame only if she is morally responsible for behavior that is wrong (or bad) and she is open to praise only if she is morally responsible for behavior that is right (or good).
Interestingly, while a person isn't blameworthy or praiseworthy unless she is morally responsible, it does seem possible to be morally responsible for behavior that is neither right nor wrong and is thus neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy. This last claim may seem strange: How can someone be morally responsible for twiddling her thumbs or for ordering Pepsi instead of Coke if there's nothing morally interesting about these behaviors?
Despite the initial peculiarity, we should allow for the possibility just described because what really seems to matter for moral responsibility is not that a person's action is either right or wrong but rather that the person is related to the action in a certain way. We might think, for example, that a person's action needs to belong to her in a particular way, or that she needs to have exercised a certain sort of control over the action, in order to be morally responsible for it. Philosophers debate the precise nature and form of the relational requirements that apply to moral responsibility, but in general it doesn't seem that fulfillment of these requirements depends on an agent's behavior being either right or wrong. We should allow, then, that, regardless of whether an agent's behavior is good, bad, or indifferent, she can be morally responsible for that behavior as long as she bears the right relation to it.
Of course, we won't be much concerned in this book with moral responsibility for indifferent behavior. Indeed, we won't even be that much concerned with moral responsibility for praiseworthy behavior. In this book, as in most philosophical treatments of moral responsibility, our focus will tend to fall on moral responsibility for bad behavior: that is, on blameworthiness. Why do philosophers focus on moral blame? Part of the reason is that most philosophers assume that praise and blame are symmetrical and that the kind of relation that one must bear to a bad action in order to be blameworthy for it is the same kind of relation that one must bear to a good action in order to be praiseworthy for it. This assumption has been questioned (Wolf 1980, 1990; Nelkin 2011), but, if it is right, we learn something about praiseworthiness when we uncover the conditions that apply to blameworthiness. Of course, by this logic, philosophers might as well focus on praiseworthiness as on blameworthiness, and yet that's not what happens.
The deeper reason for philosophers' disproportionate interest in blame is that there is often more at stake in cases of blame than in cases of praise. To be blamed for something – to be subjected to another person's scorn and recrimination, to be avoided, ostracized, or punished – can be extremely unpleasant and even dangerous. It follows that we ought to make sure that we blame people only when they deserve it, and this means that we need to have a reasonably well-developed understanding of what makes a person blameworthy and what excuses a person from blame. On the other hand, while it may in some sense be unfair or unjust to praise a person who does not deserve praise, it is typically not unpleasant or harmful to be the target of undeserved praise. Since we seem to have less interest in avoiding inappropriate praise than we do inappropriate blame, it's perhaps natural that philosophers have spent more time thinking about what it takes for a person to be a fair target of moral blame.
Before getting into debates about what it takes for a person to be morally responsible for her behavior, it will be helpful to consider the many different – and potentially confusing – ways that English speakers employ talk of “responsibility.” I address this issue in roughly the first third of chapter 1. The rest of that chapter introduces readers to debates about the compatibility of free will and determinism. The literature on moral responsibility can't be cleanly disconnected from the literature on free will. However, since this book attempts to focus on the former topic, I try at the end of chapter 1 to distinguish the questions about moral responsibility with which I will be concerned from questions about free will. In chapter 2, I outline some general approaches to moral responsibility and introduce concepts and distinctions that will be useful for understanding the debates described in subsequent chapters; I also identify the approach to moral responsibility that I personally favor and to which I will often return in this book. In chapter 3, I turn to the question of whether a person's social context or bad luck can undermine her moral responsibility. It's here that we encounter arguments for skepticism about moral responsibility for the first time. In chapter 4, the focus is on the way that psychological impairments might (or might not) undermine moral responsibility. Finally, chapter 5 considers recent debates about how a person's awareness of the consequences and moral status of her actions can affect her moral responsibility. In this final chapter, we encounter additional grounds for skepticism about moral responsibility.
When readers finish this book, they should have a good sense of how contemporary philosophers approach the subject of moral responsibility and, indeed, will be in a position to begin to form their own conclusions about what's required – in terms of ownership and control of actions, psychological capacities, and moral knowledge – for a person to be held morally responsible for her behavior. I also hope that readers begin to see how the various debates about moral responsibility fit together. To this end, I close each chapter with concluding remarks meant to highlight its themes and to relate these themes to earlier discussions. Finally, in order to guide future reading and research, I include at the end of each chapter brief suggestions for additional reading.