Moral Responsibility

Christopher Cowley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317547105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

How and to what degree are we responsible for our characters, our lives, our misfortunes, our relationships and our children? This question is at the heart of "Moral Responsibility". The book explores accusations and denials of moral responsibility for particular acts, responsibility for character, and the role of luck and fate in ethics. Moral responsibility as the grounds for a retributivist theory of punishment is examined, alongside discussions of forgiveness, parental responsibility, and responsibility before God. The book also discusses collective responsibility, bringing in notions of complicity and membership, and drawing on the seminal contemporary discussion of collective agency and responsibility: the Nuremberg trials.

1 Defining Retrospective Responsibility

DOI: 10.4324/9781315729831-2

Part I will deal with the backward-looking kind of responsibility for acts in the past. Part II will then examine the forward-looking kind, most associated with roles. Let us recall the paradigmatic situation of the child spilling the milk. The mother enters the room, sees the milk, and instantly knows what happened in the past, and also knows that the child did it. She holds him responsible. And yet this way of phrasing it is ambiguous, for it suggests that she saw the situation and then held him responsible. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that she saw his responsibility directly within the situation. Indeed, although the spilling took place in the past, and the spilt milk and overturned cup are here in the present, there is a sense in which the spilling itself is still “in” the spilt milk and overturned cup, here in the present. This might sound odd, so in the first section of this chapter I need to say more about the general notion of the past being in the present, and about what it means for human beings to live in time. This background will turn out to be essential for understanding the nature of retrospective responsibility, which I will then attempt to define in the second section.

The Past and the Present: Time, Human Lives and Agency

It is certainly tempting to think that only the present “really” exists. The past existed, to be sure, but now it is dead and buried. The past led to the present, past events caused present states of affairs, some present objects grew out of past versions of themselves – that is all clear. But what we have in front of us is the present state of affairs and the present object. We can infer facts about the past based on present evidence, as historians and detectives do, we can reconstruct what ‘must have’ happened, but we can never know for sure.

I will call this the “historical” picture, and I will take it to be intuitively plausible among many philosophers and laypeople alike. “We’ve got to let bygones be bygones”, “We mustn’t let the past poison the present”, “It’s all over, you’ve got to move forward now” – these are familiar expressions, and good advice in any number of situations. On the other hand, I think this picture is not only simplistic, but also leads to some counter-intuitive problems. The most obvious problem is this: why on earth should we care about the past if it no longer exists? Why should we worry about where we were born and grew up? Why should it matter what Bloggs said or did to me yesterday?

In contrast, I propose a more nuanced account which I will call the “present perfect” account, named after the English tense used in the expression “Have you ever worked in high finance?” This is to be distinguished from the simple present (“Are you working in high finance?”) because the work took place in the past. But more interestingly, it is also to be distinguished from the simple past (“Did you work in high finance during the boom years?”), where the enquiry has to do with placing the event in a sequence of remembered personal and geopolitical events, with more or less clear causal relations between events. Despite the misleading content of the enquiry, the present perfect is very much a present tense. It asks: how are you now different because of your work in high finance during the boom years? Indeed, the present perfect is not necessarily interested in when exactly you worked in high finance, merely that it is an experience which might have shaped your thoughts, shaped your character, and shaped your understanding of the world. My question implies my belief that the experience is still “in” you in this way.

There is an ambiguity about this “in”. The historical account has plenty of room for experiential memories in you, as one kind of evidence of the past among others. But when I ask you whether you have worked in high finance, I am not asking you to consult your memory as you would your diaries from that period; I am asking something about you, here and now, and how you think you might have been changed in a deeper way than merely acquiring new memories. Are you now wealthy as a result of your work? Do you understand better than the rest of us the background to the political stories in the newspapers? And most pointedly of all: do you feel any shame or responsibility now about your direct involvement with a culture that led to the ruin of so many people?

Of course I accept that there are situations and contexts when one has to move on from the past. But here is my point: the very advice to you to move on presupposes that the past still has a grip on you. This grip is more than a mere memory or a reminiscence, it suggests unfinished business lingering into the present. The wound I see in your flesh before me does not lead me to infer a past stabbing. Your grief does not lead me to make a reasonable guess that someone close to you has recently died – I can see the stabbing in the wound, and I can see your friend’s death in your face. I want to say that the stabbing and the wound are conceptually (non-accidentally) linked: in thinking about the latter, I am also thinking directly about the former.

I am not saying that the past still exists somewhere or “some-when”. Rather, it is a mistake to think of the present as logically separate from the past such that, in principle, anything could have happened five minutes ago and we could only make a better or worse guess on the basis of fallible rules of evidence. According to the historical account, there is no real objection to the radically sceptical possibility that the universe came into being five minutes ago, together with all our false memories of what happened before then. My present perfect account must reject that possibility as inconceivable, given how much we are invested in the past, and how much of our lives we live out through the past, into the present, and indeed into the future.

The idea of conceptual links between the present and the past is also important for our understanding of human beings. Part of our understanding of what a human being is, here and now, is that he has led a life through to the present moment. At the very least, he is “from” somewhere, speaks a particular language, has family and friends somewhere in the world, such that his relationships with those family and friends and with that place necessarily stretch far back from the present. In short: he has a story, a story that can in principle be told about how he got from there to here, from then to now. Even when the individual’s physical and mental characteristics change through time, for example between the ages of five and twenty-five, it still makes sense to say that the earlier and later individuals are merely different stages of the same person, tracing a single path through space and time.

There is a second-order aspect to this identity through time. Just as an individual human being develops through time, so too do his relationships with certain family members and friends. Each relationship has a beginning, a progression, certain defining events, a story. In the same way that the individual’s past is in his present, the relationship’s past is in its present. Think of how an act of betrayal, if it does not end the relationship, will inevitably colour the subsequent course of it.

I have been stressing the temporal aspect of our understanding of other human beings. There is another aspect that has been much more central to philosophical enquiry, and that is the aspect of agency. Human beings not only experience the world, they act in it: they hit things, push things, launch things, create things, but they also say things and write things, all of which disrupt the natural course of events. And more importantly, they tend to act for reasons. Sometimes the reasons for an individual’s action will be obvious to an observer; sometimes the agent will have to give his reasons in order to make his action intelligible. The agent’s and the observer’s sensitivity to reasons also works across time. When we meet another human, we do not simply wonder what has happened to him but also what he has done, and – if not immediately obvious – why he has done it. We assume that the agent can in principle give an explanation or an account: in that sense the default attitude of one human being to another is to assume accountability, a word that is normally used in institutional-hierarchical relations, but is wider in its basic meaning. For reasons to work as reasons in making present or past actions intelligible, a great many understandings have to be shared among individual human beings, understandings about why people do things. There is still room for disagreement about the “real” reason, about whether the reason was a “good” one or not for performing a certain action, and there is plenty of room for stubborn bafflement despite one’s best imaginative and sympathetic efforts; but these are exceptions to the general assumption of mutual intelligibility guiding all our relationships past and present.

The Blame Game

It is against this background – the lingering past and mutual human intelligibility – that the “blame game” between accuser and accused makes sense. I am deliberately using the term “game” to emphasize two thoughts: that the practice of blaming is governed by rules, and that the rules govern both people’s involvement. In this section we shall examine the game more closely, using a classic example from our favourite Whodunnit. The body of Miss Scarlett lies in the drawing room with a knife in her back, and Miss Marple is on the case. She interviews witnesses, she gathers evidence and murder weapons and alibis, she charts movements and eliminates suspects, she discovers motives, and ultimately points the finger at … Colonel Mustard. So far, she is doing no more than seeking the cause, and the finger pointing involves holding Mustard causally responsible. It is only when Mustard is duly arrested, formally charged, and confesses to the crime that questions of moral responsibility begin. After all, Mustard might say no more than that he did not and could not have done it, and he might be able to introduce more evidence and testimony of which Miss Marple was unaware. But Mustard confesses, and the blame game begins. The first step is the accusation. The second step is the defendant’s response. The third step is the court’s assessment of this response, and a final decision about the defendant’s responsibility. The fourth step is the punishment.

There is a question here about the difference between moral responsibility and legal or criminal liability, but I am going to ignore this for now – the legal context is useful to examine, precisely because of its highly formalized nature. But the blame game takes place in all manner of informal contexts as well, from children spilling milk to football teams losing to adults divorcing; it is an essential part of both casual and intimate human relationships. Indeed, as Garrath Williams persuasively argues (2013), we first learn the concept of responsibility and blame within the context of the family and of early friendships: the practice of one person holding another responsible takes place against a background of two people who already share responsibility for one another’s lives, thus giving one the “standing” to blame the other. In contrast, blame by a non-friend or non-family-member can be more easily deflected as “none of their business”.

Behind the accusation against Mustard are three crucial assumptions, and Mustard’s response may then involve showing that at least one of these assumptions is false, and therefore that he is not, or not fully, morally responsible, even if he remains causally responsible. These three assumptions are the Capacity assumption, the Understanding assumption and the Control assumption. ¹

The Capacity assumption

In order to take part in the blame game, the defendant needs to have sufficient mental capacity to understand the accusation and the possibility that it might be inaccurate or incomplete in relation to his own memories, to understand the nature and quality of the act he is accused of committing in the past, and to understand his options in terms of available defences. In addition, if he is to be condemned and punished, he has to be able to understand the punishment as punishment for the crime which he committed; without such an understanding, he will not experience the criminal justice procedure or the punishment as anything other than arbitrary power.

There are two main categories of defendants lacking capacity – the mentally ill and children. I have already said in the Introduction that I would not discuss the mentally ill (and the “insanity defence”). I will have more to say about children, but clearly a child can reasonably be held morally responsible under blame game rules for offences of increasing severity as he or she ages. A five-year-old should be able to understand and learn from Mum’s terrible scowl. At what age a child can understand the particular evil of murder is a controversial question. In one notorious case involving the murder of the English toddler James Bulger in 1993, the two perpetrators were considered sufficiently mature to be held morally and criminally responsible at the age of ten years. Most jurisdictions seem to place it at twelve or fourteen years. Anyway, for the moment I am talking about an adult of sound mind named Colonel Mustard in developing a paradigm case.

The Understanding assumption

In accusing Mustard of murder, the judge is assuming that Mustard understood enough about the situation and about what he was doing in response to that situation. More specifically, the accusation assumes that the best description, from Mustard’s own perspective, of the act he was intending to carry out was “murder”. The Understanding assumption overlaps with the Capacity assumption because the defendant needs to understand a lot about death and pointed objects and the vulnerable spots on the human body in order to commit murder; and he needs to understand that murder is a bad thing. But Mustard can also be assumed to understand that the person whom he was killing was indeed Miss Scarlett, and not someone else.

The Understanding assumption forms the basis of a first class of “defences” against the accusation; that is, the accusation is made, and then the defendant can explain that, in fact, he did not realize what he was doing, or if he did realize it, he did not understand it was wrong. We will examine the nature of defences, below.

The Control assumption

Mustard is assumed to have had the power and freedom, and to know he had the power and freedom, to perform or refrain from performing the act in question. Mustard was therefore in control of the act. In fact the Control condition could be construed in a way that would include the Understanding assumption: for it is only when I understand what I am doing that I can be said to fully control it. However, it will be clearer for my purposes to keep the two conditions apart. Once again, denying the Control assumption is the basis for a number of different defences against the accusation: one can say that one was “forced” to do the action, for example. ²

Defences

Before we go on, I want to again stress how ordinary all this is in non-detective-novel situations. As observers, we make causal and moral responsibility attributions all the time, without thinking. It is very rare that we stop to dwell on the three assumptions – usually it takes a mere glance at the situation to accept that such-and-such a person is morally responsible. And for society and relationships to work with any sort of complexity, these common and finely tuned responsibility attributions have to work quickly and reliably. As children we learn the rules of the blame game, slowly and painfully, every time we spill the milk or thump our little brother. It is only against this background obviousness that more complicated cases and problems can even make sense, let alone be resolved.

In the same way as accusations are very ordinary, so too are defences. “Defences” is a legal word, and it comprises anything that can be said in one’s favour as a response to the accusation. The two main categories of defences are excuses and justifications. The most common defence is the excuse of the honest mistake. This is perhaps less easy to imagine in the case of a fatal stabbing, so consider instead the crowded tram. The tram lurches, and I collide with my neighbour. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to”, I say quickly. This involves an acknowledgement of causal responsibility for the discomfort that my neighbour suffered, but a denial of moral responsibility or blameworthiness, for I did not have the intention to harm him, did not know that the tram would lurch just at that moment, and I had taken reasonable precautions against the known risk that the tram would lurch. Or imagine an ordinary justification: I am engrossed in something, and do not notice a mosquito landing on my arm and beginning to suck. You come over and swat my arm. I look up, astounded at this gratuitous act of sadism; you point at the dead mosquito and flick it off. Instantly my indignation disappears and is replaced by mild gratitude. What seemed cruel turned out to be kind. And here is the thing: most of the time, that expression of an excuse or justification is enough to resolve the matter, and both parties move on in their lives. Too much attention at the law courts and philosophy seminars can blind one to this essential ordinariness!

Let us now distinguish between an excuse and a justification more systematically. Both can be offered to deflect blame, in part or in whole, while accepting causal responsibility for an act. But the deflection is fundamentally different in form. Sometimes these two categories will overlap; sometimes the same words uttered by the agent can function as either or both an excuse and a justification. The trick is to distinguish them by examining the intention, or inf...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I. Retrospective responsibility
• II. Prospective responsibility
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index