The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility

Abstract

IntroductionPeople who have thought long and hard about the requisites for moral responsibility are still in deep disagreement. While some feel strongly that determination of choices and actions by causes outside the agent's control undermines responsibility, i others think that what is relevant is how that action relates to the agent at the time of choice, not how the agent came to be such that she chose the way she did.ii And many disagree about whether luck of various kinds is compatible with moral responsibility and to what extent responsible actions must be fully determined by rational deliberation.iii As we will see, some of the most important arguments supplied in these controversies are effective insofar as they lead us to focus on certain aspects of the cases discussed at the expense of others: to focus on the agent's motivation and deliberation as a cause of the action, or to focus on elements of luck or the existence of prior causes. Some of these arguments tend to provoke skepticism about moral responsibility as they elicit intuitions undermining our ordinary ascriptions of responsibility; other arguments have the opposite effect. what to think about moral responsibility if we were clearer about why we react the way we do to these arguments, and why our reactions vary. To this end, we will do three things. THE EXPLANATORY COMPONENT OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY 2First, we will present and motivate a psychological hypothesis about judgments of moral responsibility, a hypothesis according to which such judgments are a species of explanatory judgments.Second, we will show how this model can account not only for factors that affect the degrees to which we assign moral responsibility in ordinary life, but also for the sometimes contradictory judgments that people make in response to two of the most important skeptical arguments in the philosophical debate. Put briefly, the model can account for these phenomena because explanatory judgments are relative to explanatory interests and perspectives, and because explanatory perspectives are affected by changes in focus.Finally, we will suggest that the perspective relativity of responsibility judgments has important methodological consequences for the debate about moral responsibility. Ultimately, it provides support for judgments of responsibility that rely on everyday perspectives while undermining those that rely on perspectives induced by skeptical philosophical arguments. The three components of moral responsibilityThere are two reasons to take the psychological hypothesis that we will propose here seriously. The most important reason, ultimately, and the one that we will focus on throughout most of this paper, is that the hypothesis explains both everyday responsibility judgments and judgments made in response to philosophical arguments. The other reason is that we can expect something like it to be correct given the role that judgments of moral responsibility play in our lives. The latter, etiological, reason is more speculative, but since it also serves to in...

Explaining (Away) the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

“…But that's significantly different from being blamed for the death of the victims. 23 Björnsson 2011;Björnsson and Persson 2012;Björnsson 2014b;Björnsson and Pereboom 2015. 24 Arpaly 2003;2006;McKenna 2012;Arpaly and Schroeder 2014.…”

Traditional and Experimental Approaches to Free Will and Moral Responsibility

“…Nahmias et al 2007). More generally, Gunnar Björnsson and Karl Persson (2012; have argued that a variety of results from experimental studies (as well as the appeal of various philosophical arguments) can be accounted for if we (a) understand responsibility judgments as judgments attributing an explanatory relation between the agent's motivational structure and the object of responsibility, and (b) take these explanatory judgments to be selective and sensitive to explanatory interests and perspectives in much the way that everyday explanatory judgments are. Both the abstract-concrete variation and the hypothesized dependency on explanatory perspectives raise difficult methodological questions.…”

“…Based on the hypothesis that subjects take responsibility to be undermined when they understand the agent from an explanatory perspective in which the agent's deliberation is a mere dependent variable (Björnsson and Persson 2012;, he predicted that if subjects were prompted to see the agent's behavior as dependent on this nonagential cause, this would undermine attributions of responsibility to roughly the same extent as the introduction of an intentional manipulator. This was indeed the case: in a study involving 416 subjects, the infection undermined attributions of free will and moral responsibility to the same degree as indoctrination cases of intentional manipulation.…”

“…Björnsson and Persson (2012; argue that the ordinary notion of moral responsibility is itself an explanatory notion, such that to take an agent to be responsible for an event (an action or outcome) is to see the event as explained in a normal way by the agent's motivational structure (roughly, the agent's quality of will, or reasons-responsive mechanisms). More specifically, Björnsson and Persson argue that subjects who take determinism to undermine moral responsibility are those for whom the explanatory perspective of ordinary folk psychology is overshadowed by a deterministic perspective in which human agency is a mere dependent variable.…”

Denial of Responsibility and Normative Negation

“…24 This is by no means the standard theory. When judgments of responsibility are kept separate from responsibility or concepts of responsibility, they are usually considered non-normative; for example, judgments of responsibility are considered explanatory by [5,4]. Anderson ([1, §3.1] and p.c.)…”