The Mental Basis of Responsibility

Walter Glannon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351729772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2002: This book is an analysis of the ways in which mental states ground attributions of responsibility to persons. Particular features of the book include: attention to the agent's epistemic capacity for beliefs about the foreseeable consequences of actions and omissions; attention to the essential role of emotions in prudential and moral reasoning; a conception of personal identity that can justify holding persons responsible at later times for actions performed at earlier times; an emphasis on neurobiology as the science that should inform our thinking about free will and responsibility; and the melding of literature on free will and responsibility in contemporary analytic philosophy with legal cases, abnormal psychology, neurology and psychiatry, which offers a richer texture to the general debate on the relevant issues.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The concept of responsibility has been of central importance in Western thought since Classical antiquity. In contemporary debate, responsibility is the domain where metaphysics, epistemology, moral and legal philosophy, philosophy of mind, and (increasingly) neurobiology converge. Such notions as free will, the relationship between the brain and the mind, right and wrong, and liability and punishment all figure in our attributions of responsibility to persons. The capacity of persons to be responsible for their behavior and to justifiably be held responsible by others is one of the factors that confers value on our lives. Without the concept of responsibility, such pervasive practices as praising and blaming, rewarding and punishing, would be meaningless, as would the rational and moral agency that is fundamental to our nature as persons.

In this book, I examine the respects in which our mental states and events form the basis of ascribing moral and legal responsibility to individual persons for their actions, failures to act, and the consequences of these actions and failures. Much of the work on moral responsibility in the last twenty years has focused on the metaphysical, or freedom-relevant, conditions of responsibility. These include factors both internal and external to moral agents. The relevant internal factors include the cognitive ability to form intentions and respond to moral reasons, as well as the volitional ability to express intentions and moral reasons in choices and actions. The relevant external factors include the modal notions of possibility and necessity and the ontology of propositions and states of affairs. These external factors have figured prominently in discussion of causal determinism and how it bears on free will and responsibility. But insufficient attention has been paid to the epistemic, or knowledge-relevant, and affective, or emotional, conditions of responsibility. One of my aims is to show the moral importance of these epistemic and affective conditions. More specifically, I will demonstrate that responsibility requires the capacity to have and respond to beliefs about the circumstances of action and the likely consequences of what we do or fail to do.¹ Furthermore, I will demonstrate that responsibility also requires the capacity to have and respond to emotions, given that emotions influence, and are influenced by, beliefs. In addition to reasons, beliefs and emotions play an essential role in moral reasoning.²

What matters in assessing whether we are and can be held responsible is not primarily whether we have the power to render propositions true or false, or to cause states of affairs to obtain. Accounts that focus on these are inadequate because they often ignore the persons who are constituents of these propositions and states of affairs, as well as the fact that persons have needs, interests, and rights. This gives these states of affairs a normative content that cannot be captured by metaphysical accounts alone. Nor can an examination of actions as mere physical events or bodily movements satisfactorily explain how they came about, which in addition requires an appeal to the motivational states and thus the psychology of persons. What matters more in assessing responsibility is how we respond to beliefs and emotions, how we form and respond to reasons, how we form intentions, and whether we can express these intentions in choices and actions. The contents of our mental states are influenced by the social environment in which we deliberate and act. In general, though, responsibility is more a function of conditions internal to us than it is of conditions external to us.

Although my main concern is not with free will as such, any discussion of responsibility presupposes some account of free will. Persons cannot be responsible unless they choose and act freely, in some specified sense of ‘free’. I propose that the conception of free will required for responsibility be broadly construed to include not only volitions, or decisions (choices) to act, but also the desires, beliefs, emotions, reasons, and intentions that issue in, or are obstacles to, actions. With an ancestry traceable to Aristotle, most philosophers agree that having free will implies that our choices and actions are ‘up to us’.³ But they disagree on the meaning of this phrase, and this disagreement is behind the stalemate between those who take human freedom to be compatible with different forms of determinism and those who take freedom and determinism to be incompatible. I take ‘up to us’ to mean the capacity to form or respond to mental states and events that we identify as our own and to express them in actions. Significantly, this does not imply the ability to choose and do otherwise than we in fact do, a position that will be discussed and defended in the chapters that follow.

Free will should be understood as a capacity that spans a continuum. At one end are choices and actions that we perform automatically, without any conscious awareness, simply doing what we want to do in an unreflective way. At the other end are actions that are beyond our control, as in the loss of motor control of bodily movements in severe cases of Tourette’s syndrome, the deluded beliefs of psychotic patients such as schizophrenics, or the inability of patients with advanced Alzheimer’s disease or other types of severe dementia to form or respond to reasons at all. In these cases, cognitive or volitional impediments at one stage in the pathway leading to action are strong enough to undermine free will. In between these two extremes is where most cases of moral agency fall, and where we possess free will and are responsible to varying degrees. The degree to which we have free will depends on whether and to what extent there are impediments at one, some, or all of the cognitive, affective, and volitional stages in the pathway leading to action. Ultimately, though, we care about free will because we care about responsibility. We inquire in what sense or to what degree persons choose and act freely because we want to establish the grounds on which persons can be responsible for their behavior.

Another prominent feature of the philosophical literature on responsibility has been the emphasis on practical reason in persons’ capacity for reflective self-control, deliberation, and decision-making. I take this emphasis to be Kantian in the sense that Kant maintains that the requirements for moral understanding and moral motivation are based on practical reason alone. A significant part of my discussion is a critical response to Kantian accounts of responsibility.⁴ These are inadequate because they fail to appreciate the extent to which emotions such as fear, joy, sympathy, love, shame, and revulsion influence our prudential and moral reasoning and action. The Kantian position is untenable because it mistakenly assumes that reason functions in its own sphere, independently of emotion. Some might claim that reason or cognition can accommodate emotion in the sense that rational intervention into our affective life is essential for human agency. But this suggests that emotion is a mere instrument governed by reason. On the contrary, emotion is essential to the process of practical reasoning. Emotion and reason are interacting and interdependent mental faculties that are grounded in interacting and interdependent regions and systems of the brain. These include, but are not restricted to, the limbic system, which is where emotions originate, and the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex, which ground the planning and executive systems in human agency.⁵ The feedback loop between the limbic system and the frontal lobes at the neurobiological level has a corresponding feedback loop between emotion and reason at the mental level. There is a two-way interaction between cognition and emotion; each modulates the other.

What I have just said requires at least a brief explanation of the relationship between the mind and the brain. The desires, beliefs, emotions, intentions and choices of our mental life are higher-level emergent properties of lower-level physical properties of the brain. Consciousness and other forms of mentality emerge from a hierarchical ordering of increasingly complex levels of integrated neural activity. Todd Feinberg calls this a compositional or ‘nested’ hierarchy, in the sense that elements composing the lower physical levels of the hierarchy are combined within higher levels, including the mind that emerges at the top of the hierarchy.⁶ The integration of the physical and the mental is part of a human organism’s purposive function to generate meaningful, intentional behavior. Because it is nested, the mentality that emerges at the top of the hierarchy is not separate from but is interconnected with the physical levels from which it emerges.

Still, this does not mean that the mind is reducible to, in the sense of being completely explained by, the physical properties of the brain. The third-person perspective of examining the structures and functions of the brain cannot account for the first-person perspective of feeling pain, feeling depressed, or experiencing other emotions. Various psychopathologies have neurological causes that can be located in various parts of the brain through such techniques as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans. But these cannot represent what it is like to experience these states from a subjective point of view. Although our mental states causally depend on the normal functioning of certain brain structures and systems, the subjective nature of these states makes the mind phenomenologically, or qualitatively, irreducible to the brain.⁷

Given the relation between the mind and the brain that I have just spelled out, I will adopt the following position. Although it will be implicitly assumed that mental states causally depend on physical states in the brain, it is when things at the mental level go awry that we need to appeal to the underlying neural substrate of mentality. Otherwise, describing and explaining the causal antecedents of our choices and actions in psychological terms alone will be enough for a satisfactory account of responsibility. Still, analysis of some psychopathologies can contribute to a deeper understanding of when persons can and cannot be responsible. In some of these cases, reference to their actual or likely neurobiological underpinning can elucidate why we hold them responsible or excuse them from responsibility for their behavior.

Some of the groundwork for the idea that emotions are essential to moral responsibility has been laid by P.F. Strawson in his account of the ‘reactive attitudes’.⁸ These include self-regarding attitudes like pride and regret, and other-regarding attitudes like praise and blame, gratitude and resentment. Strawson argues that these attitudes, not whether all of our actions are determined by natural laws and the past, are the key to understanding moral responsibility. But while these attitudes are part of the set of attitudes that can influence our practical reasoning, more forward-looking attitudes such as empathy and sympathy are necessary as well. Strawson’s list of morally relevant attitudes is incomplete because it includes only the capacity for backward-looking attitudes resulting from actions or omissions. Moreover, Strawson fails to emphasize that the reactive attitudes can influence practical reasoning about action by being among the foreseeable consequences that go into our deliberation about acting. They should not be confined to judgments about responsibility after we act. This requires an account of how emotion interacts with cognition in deliberation and choice before action. Nor does he offer an explanation of how these attitudes originate and are sustained. This requires an appeal to the neural correlates of emotion in the limbic system, as well as an explanation of how they interact with the neural correlates of cognition in the frontal lobes. In the light of the discussion of emotions and their role in responsibility, it seems more appropriate to label the attitudes of which Strawson speaks as ‘responsive’ rather than ‘reactive’. They are more dispositional mental states than occurrent mental events, the sort of attitudes that we respond to deliberatively rather than react to spontaneously. While in principle it is consistent with Strawson’s account, my account provides a supplementary framework that includes all of the relevant attitudes necessary for a satisfactory account of responsibility.

Few philosophical discussions of moral responsibility offer satisfactory conceptions of both personhood and personal identity through time. The capacity to integrate reason and emotion is equivalent to reflective self-control over our mental states and events that cause our actions. This reflective self-control is what makes us persons capable of being and being held responsible. With respect to personal identity, when we hold a person responsible at a later time for an action performed at an earlier time, we ordinarily assume that the person we hold responsible is numerically identical with the person who performed the action. One and the same individual persists from the earlier to the later time. Responsibility requires a conception of personal identity consisting of psychological connectedness between mental states and continuity of one and the same body and brain. But the connections between mental states weaken with the passage of time, suggesting that both personal identity and responsibility diminish over time. I address this problem by offering a pragmatic conception of identity that is formulated against the background of our normative practices of praising and blaming, punishing and rewarding persons. This requires only a low threshold of psychological connectedness that can accommodate the loss of memory of past deeds. On this conception of personal identity, diminished psychological connectedness does not imply diminished responsibility. Furthermore, assuming that a person is able to foresee the likely consequences of acting freely, in some cases he can be responsible at a later time even when there is psychological disconnectedness between earlier and later mental states and psychological discontinuity between earlier and later selves.

Many philosophers have argued that alternative possibilities of choice and action are necessary for persons to be responsible for their choices and actions. We must have the ability to do otherwise in order to be responsible. If causal determinism is true, however, then we cannot choose or do otherwise because natural laws and events in the remote past jointly determine a unique future. I argue that alternative possibilities are not necessary for moral responsibility. In doing so, I call into question the plausibility and desirability of libertarian incompatibilism. This theory says that if causal determinism is true, then we cannot do otherwise. But moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise. We do hold people responsible for their behavior. Therefore causal determinism must be false. Instead, I argue that what matters in assessing responsibility for particular actions is how we form and respond to desires, beliefs, reasons, and intentions and how we express intentions in actions. It is the actual causal role that these mental states play in what we actually do, not what we could do or might have done, that matters for responsibility. Insofar as the sort of control I just outlined does not require alternative possibilities, causal determinism is of no consequence for us. In the final analysis, whether causal determinism is true or false is irrelevant to rational and moral agency. While I agree with Harry Frankfurt, John Martin Fischer, and others that responsibility does not require the ability to choose and do otherwise, my account differs from theirs in that it holds that the requirements for responsibility are less strict than what they and other compatibilists typically have assumed.⁹

The basic worry about causal determinism is that, by ruling out alternative possibilities, physical laws make our behaviour predictable. But physical laws are too complex to predict whether or how we will act. The idea that free will is an illusion because our behavior is predictable is itself an illusion based on a mistaken understanding of the physical laws and their influence on the relation between brain and mind.¹⁰ We can talk about brain-generated mental states and events causing our actions without having to worry about nomological necessity or the alleged predictability of our behavior. For this reason, we should replace physics with biology, specifically neurobiology, as the science that should inform our thinking about free will and moral responsibility.

There are two issues that warrant concern because they could undermine free will and responsibility. The first is that neurobiological dysfunction in the brain may cause pathological mental states that impede autonomous choice and action. The second is that factors in our social environment, such as an abusive or neglectful upbringing, may lead to pathological mental states that impede autonomous choice and action as well. This roughly can be called social determinism, and it raises the question of how an agent can be morally responsible in the face of a causal process that traces back to social factors beyond the agent’s control.¹¹ In both instances, the causes of our actions, in important respects, may be beyond our control. And if they are beyond our control, then we cannot be responsible for what we do or fail to do. I will discuss cases in which neurobiological and social factors do, and do not, excuse persons from responsibility.

There are six features of the book that distinguish it from other works on moral responsibility: (1) attention to the agent’s epistemic capacities, especially beliefs about the foreseeable consequences of his actions and omissions; (2) attention to the essential role of emotions in prudential and moral reasoning, and the idea that emotion and cognition are inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Concept of Responsibility
• 3 Normative Competence
• 4 Personhood, Personal Identity, and Responsibility
• 5 Cognitive Control and Content
• 6 The Freedom We Need to Be Responsible
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index