Power and moral responsibility

Abstract

Our moral responsibility for our actions seems to depend on our possession of a power to determine for ourselves what actions we perform – a power of self-determination. What kind of power is this? The paper discusses what power in general might involve, what differing kinds of power there might be, and the nature of self-determination in particular. A central question is whether this power on which our moral responsibility depends is by its nature a two-way power, involving a power over alternatives or a freedom to do otherwise. Criticism is made of various attempts to understand self-determination in one-way terms, whether as a capacity for rationality (McDowell) or as a form of voluntariness (Frankfurt). It is argued in particular that Frankfurt's arguments to show that moral responsibility does not depend on a freedom to do otherwise beg the question against his opponents.

Keywords:

• moral responsibility
• freedom; rationality
• voluntariness
• action
• blame

Notes

For further account of why English-language philosophy has come to view the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists as a conceptual problem, and for argument why the problem may not be conceptual after all, see Pink (forthcoming b).

For historical accounts of this practical-reason-based model of agency, and of Hobbes's opposition to it and of the profound impact of this opposition on subsequent moral theory, see Pink (2004a, b, 2005, 2008b).

In What We Owe to Each Other Scanlon explicitly identifies moral responsibility with rational criticizability, and takes blame to be just one form of general rational criticism:

• ‘…“being responsible” is mainly a matter of the appropriateness of demanding reasons … ’ (Scanlon 1998, p. 22).

  But not is not obvious that Scanlon's view of responsibility is the same as McDowell's. One difference between McDowell and Scanlon is that McDowell wishes, as he emphasised to me in a recent conversation, to retain the idea that exercising the capacity for reason involves the exercise of a power to determine things for oneself, so that responsibility for the exercise of reason is a responsibility for the exercise of such a power. It is not clear that this element of self-determination plays any real part in Scanlon's theory of blame and responsibility. Hence McDowell's appeal here to the exercise of freedom – a power that, as he also emphasised to me, he views as not inherently two-way, even if he would not rule out some forms of freedom taking two-way form.

Note again Klein's characterization of freedom as no more than a ‘Could-have done-otherwise condition’ on moral responsibility.

As discussed in the introduction to Widerker and McKenna (2003).

Robert Kane endorses what he calls ‘a powerful intuition’: ‘we feel that if a Frankfurt-controller [such as Black] never actually intervened throughout an agent's entire lifetime, so that the agent always acted on his or her own, then the mere presence of the controller should not make any difference to the agent's ultimate responsibility’ (Kane 1996, 143). But what is crucial is the implications of that presence for the agent's power. If Black is not only intent on preventing the agent from acting otherwise, but is fully able to prevent him from so acting, and if (as is supposed) Black's presence equipped with such an intention and such a power over the agent is enough to imply the agent lacks all power to act otherwise, then that may be very relevant to the agent's ultimate responsibility. It will be relevant if the agent can determine his actions for himself only through exercising an inherently two-way power to act otherwise.

For further argument for the non-voluntariness of decisions and intentions, and for the consequence that any freedom of will or direct control specifically over our decisions cannot imply their voluntariness, see Pink (2004c, 2008a, forthcoming a, c).