Are the folk historicists about moral responsibility?

ABSTRACT

Manipulation cases have figured prominently in philosophical debates about whether moral responsibility is in some sense deeply historical. Meanwhile, some philosophers have thought that folk thinking about manipulated agents may shed some light on the various argumentative burdens facing participants in that debate. This paper argues that folk thinking is, to some extent, historical. Across three experiments, a substantial number of participants did not attribute moral responsibility to agents with manipulation in their histories. The results of these experiments challenge previous research indicating that folk thinking is not historicist. Furthermore, perceptions of reduced free will, but not of a change in personal identity of the agent, account for the attenuation of moral responsibility when the agent was manipulated. To the extent that folk thinking is relevant to philosophical debates about the nature of moral responsibility, the results helpfully illuminate the dialectical burdens facing competing conceptions of responsible agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Free will
• moral responsibility
• compatibilism
• experimental philosophy

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Alfred R. Mele, Ryan M. McManus, and two anonymous reviewers at this journal for their helpful feedback on this project and manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. For the purposes of this paper we will understand determinism as “the thesis that there is at every moment exactly one physically possible future” (van Inwagen, 1983, p. 3).

2. Consider the following historical concept ‘sunburn.’ Suppose there are two people with skin burns that are qualitatively indistinguishable. Now imagine that one of these burns was caused by exposure to the sun, whereas the other was produced by a heating lamp. We would only call the former a sunburn because it must be connected to some causal history that traces back in time to an event involving the person’s exposure to the sun. Historicists claim that the concept moral responsibility is similar to sunburns with respect to historical properties.

3. McKenna (2012) points out that the important dispute between historicists and non-historicists concerns whether there is any historical criterion for directly free (and responsible) action. Some acts gain their status as free (or responsible) in virtue of a direct exercise of certain abilities by the agent at that time. Other acts gain their status as free (or responsible) in virtue of the proper kinds of causal relations to prior direct exercises. The former are identified as directly free and responsible acts, whereas the latter are indirectly free and responsible acts.

4. In the “no manipulation” group, 2.9% disagreed, and 1% neither agreed nor disagreed with attributions of Sally’s moral responsibility.

5. In the “manipulation” group, 58% disagreed, and 9.3% neither agreed nor disagreed with attributions of Sally’s moral responsibility.

6. In the “no manipulation” group, 3.9% disagreed, and 1.9% neither agreed nor disagreed with Sally’s deservingness of punishment.

7. In the “manipulation” group, 53.7% disagreed, and 13% neither agreed nor disagreed with Sally’s deservingness of punishment.

8. In the “no manipulation” condition, 2.2% neither agreed nor disagreed, and 3.7% disagreed with Sally’s status as morally responsible in light of her history.

9. In the “manipulation” condition, 9.5% neither agreed nor disagreed.

10. Schwenkler, J. (2017). How Do the Folk Think of Seeing? Unpublished manuscript.

11. Roy Baumeister (1999) offers the following definition of self-concept: “the individual’s belief about himself or herself, including the person’s attributes and who and what the self is” (p. 247). Given this definition, we might think that agents that undergo radical changes are not the same person in the self-concept sense, because they no longer have the same attributes that make up who and what the self is.

12. Another point worth mentioning is that it appears that only deterioration in one’s character or values severs the link of numerical identity. Subjects that read vignettes involving improvements in one’s character or value in the experimental studies stated above claimed that the agent was the same person. We suspect that if subjects are told a similar story about no manipulation (cruel) Sally who had nice values implanted via the psychologists and subsequently performed good acts (e.g., giving to charity), we would not be inclined to praise her for what she does. If the evidence on personal identity is correct, most people would still claim that Sally is the same person (because her character improved).

13. Someone might complain that there remain crucial differences between Sally across groups with respect to her past character. Sally exerts effort to mold herself into a good person in the experimental group, whereas Sally becomes a bad person in the control group. The current literature suggests that prior intentions (Pizarro et al., 2003), prior effort (Bigman & Tamir, 2016), and prior character (Nadler, 2012; Nadler & McDonnell, 2011) matter in responsibility and blame attributions. From an experimental control perspective, it would benefit our design to make equal the agents’ histories on these dimensions. However, controlling for these influences was not possible given the philosophical scenarios focused on in this paper (viz., the examples historicists have presented as evidence against non-historicism). We needed to test intuitions in response to cases where a manipulated agent’s character was radically reversed (from good to bad) by psychologists, and the manipulation resulted in their being a near psychological duplicate of the non-manipulated agent described in the control group. Thus, the radical reversal examples required differences in past intentional action and direction of character change so that the agents described in both control and experimental groups could be near psychological duplicates after the radical reversal manipulation. The details about an agent’s past efforts matter for moral responsibility according to historicists but not according to their opponents. The non-historicist will deny that these past efforts matter with respect to an agent’s moral responsibility. Keeping these historical differences in our stories allows us to test for whether folk thinking is, to some extent, historicist.

14. In the “no manipulation” group, 4.7% of participants rated her as not responsible and 2.3% were undecided.

15. In the “manipulation” group, 12.2% of participants were undecided.