Concurrent Session 4a: Real Complexities of Moral Responsibility

Chair: xxx(University)

Tragic Responsibility: Are We Held Accountable for Inherited Privilege?

Kevin M. DeLapp
Converse College
Spartanburg, USA

Many analyses of moral responsibility presuppose some version of the dictum that ‘ought-implies-can,’ with the alleged implication being that an agent may only properly be held morally responsible for things which she could control. By contrast, I argue in defense of a separate form of ‘tragic’ moral responsibility according to which it is legitimate to hold an agent personally responsible even in cases wherein wrong-doing could not be avoided. To substantiate this thesis, I appeal to empirical studies related to inherited racial privilege, which I take to represent a context in which moral harm is inflicted despite being unavoidable. My view is that there are persuasive phenomenological reasons to claim that beneficiaries of such privilege ought to feel personally, morally culpable; and that, furthermore, this phenomenology is best explained by broadening our concepts of moral responsibility to accommodate such ‘tragic’ cases. In this way, I intend my paper to offer empirical support (with certain modifications) to the frameworks of theorists such as Bernard Williams, Patricia Greenspan, and Christopher Gowans who have similarly argued for embracing an understanding of responsibility which subverts the ought-implies-can principle. In particular, I argue that my position has important implications for the traditional deontic category of supererogation which the abovementioned frameworks have under-appreciated. Leveraging the case-studies about inherited racial privilege permits us to accommodate an otherwise unpalatable messiness in the moral domain. The virtuous person is marked by sensitivity to such messiness and takes responsibility for it even when it cannot be avoided.

Skepticism Concerning Moral Responsibility: Stultification and Other Infirmities of the Imagination

Paul Sheldon Davies
Department of Philosophy
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, USA

This paper is concerned with the following conflict. On the one hand, various philosophers (Wolf 1990, Wallace 1994, Fischer and Ravizza 1998) have argued that our everyday practices of ascribing moral responsibility are justified relative to a certain alleged capacities of the human self, especially our alleged responsiveness to reasons. On the other hand, various theories in the BCN (behavioral, cognitive, neural) sciences appear to cast doubts upon our everyday practices of moral ascriptions. This conflict generates several questions, two of which I endeavor to answer in this paper:

1. How, exactly, does progress in the BCN sciences generate warranted doubts concerning our everyday practices of moral ascription?

2. Given those doubts, why are so many theorists reluctant to abandon or alter our everyday practices of ascribing moral responsibility?

Between the Metaphysics and Attribution of Moral Responsibility: Proceed With Caution

Manuel Vargas
Philosophy
University of San Francisco
San Francisco, USA

The aim of this talk is to make vivid the following thought: the interpretation of virtually any experimental data on moral responsibility will help itself to a (perhaps implicit but certainly) contested picture of moral responsibility. Or, to put it bluntly, if you want to make any philosophically interesting claims about your data, you better not be naive about the fact that you are presuming a contentious view about the metaphysics of moral responsibility. To motivate this claim, I will provide a quick tour of what we do and don’t know about the metaphysics of moral responsibility, and I will offer some concrete examples of how different presumptions about these things have affected the interpretation of experimental data. 

I start with some points of relative convergence in the philosophical literature, including: the idea that there are distinct notions of responsibility; that we can distinguish between cases of original and derivative responsibility; that responsibility assessments may pull apart from assessments of other varieties including aretaic, distributive, and overall moral states of affairs; and that there is a difference between being a responsible agent, being blameworthy for some action, and being blamed.  

I then highlight some matters on which issues remain unsettled or contested, including: whether being responsible involves some interesting notion of capacity or ability; disputes regarding the relationship of moral responsibility (whether its nature or referent) to our ordinary practices and judgments of moral responsibility; the epistemology of high level normative properties; and growing disagreements about the varieties of genuine threats to moral responsibility.  

I then sketch two different packages of commitments on the matter of the metaphysics of moral responsibility, and use these distinct packages to illustrate how substantive presumptions about moral responsibility have structured the interpretation of data in concrete ways, as exemplified by a recent exchange between Doris, Woolfolk, and Darley (2006) and Vargas (2009). 

I conclude with a plea for humility on all sides when considering experimental data.