The illusion of the relevance of difficulty in evaluations of moral responsibility

ABSTRACT

A common intuition is that the more difficult it is for someone to do the right thing, the more praiseworthy she is for succeeding and the less blameworthy she is for failing. Here, I call this the ‘Difficulty Thesis’ and argue that the Difficulty Thesis is false. In Section 2, I briefly describe what I mean by ‘difficulty’ and the Difficulty Thesis. The Difficulty Thesis has strong prima facie appeal, however, why exactly difficulty is morally relevant remains an open and interesting philosophical question. I discuss this briefly in Section 3. Then, in Section 4, I argue that the Difficulty Thesis is in fact false. That is, difficulty is not relevant to degrees of praise- and blameworthiness. In Section 5, I offer several explanations for why many are fooled by the illusion of relevance of Difficulty. I argue that difficulty is, at best, an imperfect heuristic with regard to evaluations of praise- and blameworthiness. I also argue that while difficulty is not relevant to praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, difficulty is relevant to practices of praise and blame. I conclude, then, that the Difficulty Thesis ought to be rejected.

KEYWORDS:

• Difficulty
• moral responsibility
• praiseworthy
• blameworthy
• degrees of responsibility

Acknowledgements

The author thanks John Brunero, Josh DiPaolo, Daniel Immerman, Nabina Liebow, Violet Spencer, an anonymous referee at Inquiry, and audiences at the Central States Philosophical Association and American University Philosophy and Religion Department for exceptionally useful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I take this example from Bradford (2015, 34).

2 See Nelkin (2016, 357).

3 In fact, any attempt to talk about difficulty in abstract terms will produce a contradiction. For example, we would be forced to say that dunking a basketball is both easy and difficult – easy for Lebron James, but objectively difficult. This fact would make it impossible to in turn evaluate the praiseworthiness of his action as the action would be both difficult and easy. Or, it would force us to choose one of the two criteria – subjective or objective difficulty. I am suggesting that the Difficulty Thesis means to capture subjective difficulty.

4 Much recent philosophical attention to the nature and role of difficulty has been in the context of better understanding achievements. For example, in her book, Achievements – which investigates the nature and value of great achievements – Gwen Bradford argues that difficulty is a necessary component of achievement. Achievements, she claims, are “competently caused by difficult activities” (2015, 26). Naturally, Bradford devotes an entire chapter of her book to the nature of difficulty and much has been written since about whether and how overcoming difficulty establishes achievement. See, for example, Hassan (2015); Arpaly (2016); Dunkle (2019); Forsberg and Skelton (2020); Hirji (2019); and von Kriegstein (2019).

5 Nelkin also hosted a lively discussion on the topic on the ‘Flickers of Freedom’ philosophy blog in January 2013. Contributors included: Robert Allen, Gwen Bradford, Justin Capes, Chris Franklin, Matt King, Michael McKenna, Al Mele, Dana Nelkin, Derk Pereboom, Chandra Sripada, David Shoemaker, Bruce Waller, and Allen White.

6 There is also ample literature on the moral relevance of difficulty with regard to moral issues such as demandingness, capacity, and moral luck. See, for example, McElwee (2022) (on difficulty and demandingness), Piovarchy (2021) (on difficulty and capacity), and Hartman (2019) (on difficulty and moral luck). The Difficulty Thesis is distinct from these various issues – having to do solely with degrees of praise- and blameworthiness – and thus while these other works might intersect with the Difficulty Thesis, they are not directly devoted to its investigation.

7 See also, for example, Robbins, Alvear, and Litton (2021).

8 While the Difficulty Thesis is itself quite intuitive, explanations of the thesis are less so. This makes sense, on my view, insofar as, I argue, the Difficulty Thesis is in fact false.

9 See Nelkin (2016) for a more in-depth exploration and evaluation of each of these hypotheses.

10 Here is the fuller relevant passage: ‘The common thread in each of these proposals is that they each get their appeal in light of the following thought: how responsible you are for what you’ve done depends on how difficult it was for you to comply with legitimate normative expectations. To wit: if it’s easier for me to do the right thing, then I show worse quality of will for doing the wrong thing than I would if it had been hard to comply with legitimate norms. That’s what explains why I’m more blameworthy in the former case than I would’ve been in the latter. Or, if I’m ignorant of some important moral fact, but it would have been very hard for me to have come to the truth, then I am less blameworthy for acting wrongly than if I could have very easily arrived at the moral facts but didn’t concern myself to do so. Similarly, if circumstances make it harder for me to control myself in the way that’s expected of me, then I seem to be more praiseworthy for doing the right thing precisely because in so doing, I overcame a significant difficulty’.

11 Note, too, that most of the accounts above focus exclusively on blameworthiness. My analysis also differs from these insofar as I am equally concerned with difficulty and evaluations of praiseworthiness.

12 Bradford (2017) comes closest to a full rejection of the Difficulty Thesis: ‘But the contention I will defend is this: in cases when S’s ignorance is indeed blame-mitigating, it is not in virtue of the difficulty per se. Difficulty on its own does not mitigate blameworthiness’ (181). Instead, Bradford argues, blameworthiness is mitigated by ‘effort-requiring features (ERFs)’ (184). But the distinction between difficulty and ERFs is not particular clear on Bradford’s account, and at times it sounds like Bradford does think difficulty is morally relevant, when it results from the correct ‘ERFs’: ‘Some ERFs are themselves relevant for moral responsibility. It’s not the difficulty per se, but it’s the source of the difficulty for the particular agent that shapes their blameworthiness’ (187). Furthermore, it seems that in appealing to effort-requiring features (which determine difficulty), Bradford simply relocates the same question facing the authors above: when is difficulty relevant and why? Except that Bradford is now speaking in terms of effort-requiring features: ‘What is it that distinguishes ERFs [aka the cause of difficulty] that do not mitigate blameworthiness from those that do?’ (187). The blurriness of the boundary between difficulty and ERFs, and the fuzziness of Bradford’s ultimate conclusion about the Difficulty Thesis, are manifested in her concluding paragraph: ‘Earlier I said that there was nothing special about difficulty per se that relieves responsibility, yet it turns out that looked at in another way, there is: namely that it is built out of the same material as our overall exercise of agency. When in limited supply, it comes at a high cost when expended in one area rather than another. With a better understanding of difficulty, we can explain why difficulty appears to mitigate blameworthiness in some cases rather than others’ (196). For these reasons (in addition to the focus exclusively on blameworthiness), I find Bradford’s analysis fails to succeed as a straightforward and outright rejection of the Difficulty Thesis (which, I grant, may not necessarily be her intention).

13 See also, Mason 2019 (151, n. 6).

14 See Angela Smith (2012) and (2015) for what I think are compelling arguments against the distinction.

15 See, again, authors from above, such as Bradford (2017); Guerrero (2017); Tierney (2019); and Hartford (2022).

16 See Julia Markovits (2010) for a similar worry about attempting to measure the depth of concern by ease or difficulty. Nelkin also critiques the idea that difficulty reliably tracks depth of concern (2016). I find both critiques compelling.

17 See also Faraci and Shoemaker (2014) and Nelkin (2016) for a similar point.

18 One could explicitly include difficulty in the evaluation – perhaps adding effort to the rubric. This, however, is to assume rather than defend the Difficulty Thesis and will run into the problems I raise in Section 3 here.

19 I leave open what would motivate this: it could be simply a prudential concern (e.g. I want Jared to be kind more often) or otherwise ethical (e.g. Jared’s increased kindness will produce greater good in our meetings, be more caring for our vulnerable faculty, provide more exemplary modeling for our new hires, etc.). Perhaps some combination or even all these considerations are relevant.

20 Importantly, I am not making the move that I dismissed above – namely arguing that difficulty is relevant in some senses of moral responsibility, but not others. Instead, I am fully rejecting difficulty as relevant to evaluations of moral responsibility, while suggesting it might have moral relevance elsewhere.