Choosing freedom: basic desert and the standpoint of blame

Abstract

One can think of the traditional logic of blame as involving three intuitively plausible claims: (1) blame is justified only if one is deserving of blame, (2) one is deserving of blame only if one is relevantly in control of the relevant causal antecedents, and (3) one is relevantly in control only if one has libertarian freedom. While traditional compatibilism has focused on rejecting either or both of the latter two claims, an increasingly common strategy is to deny the link between blame and desert expressed in (1). While I think there is something right about many of these accounts of blame, I deny that the logic of blame can be divorced from the logic of desert. On my view, blame does have a conceptual connection to desert, but its justification is practical rather than theoretical, as the libertarian condition is a matter of adopting a stance towards a person rather than having a belief about her and the “true” causes of her action. I argue that blame fundamentally requires interacting with a person from the participant perspective and that the participant perspective, understood in terms of second-personal address, involves an ontological commitment to freedom.

Keywords:

• blame
• constructivism
• free will
• moral responsibility
• Darwall
• Strawson
• desert

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kelly Becker, Endre Begbe, Sam Black, Ishtiyaque Haji, Mark LeBar, Tristram McPhersan, the editors, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper

Notes

On other senses see, e.g. Watson (1996) and Shoemaker (2011).

Scanlon writes that “to blame a person is to judge him or her to be blameworthy and to take your relationship with him or her to be modified in a way that this judgment of impaired relations holds to be appropriate” (2008, 128–9). To me, the added act of modifying one's relationship seems to blur the boundary between the attitude of blame and the expression of that blame.

Discussion of this condition – specifically the significance of manipulation for compatibilist accounts of free will and responsibility – is at the forefront of much of the contemporary literature. See, e.g. Haji (2009), Mele (2008), Pereboom (2008), Vargas (2006).

I will say more in Section 5 about how I understand the relevant kind of libertarian freedom. Here, I use the term simply in contrast to compatibilist freedom.

If libertarian freedom is understood as the kind of freedom required to ground ultimate responsibility, then Galen Strawson's (1994) “basic argument” can be read as the view that such freedom is impossible, given that ultimate responsibility is impossible.

Cf. Watson: “… incompatibilists … will insist on an essential historical dimension to the concept of responsibility” (1987, 274–5). Nonhistorical compatibilists include: Berofsky (2006), Frankfurt (1971, 1975), McKenna (2004, 2012), Watson (1999), Wolf (1987).

Cf. Scanlon: “[T]he point of judgments of right and wrong is not to make claims about what the spatiotemporal world is like. The point of such judgments is, rather, a practical one: they make claims about what we have reason to do” (1998, 2).

Out of respect for the privacy of these individuals, I have changed their names, as I treat them in the following discussion more as characters in a fictional narrative than as actual persons. I do not think this lessens the force of the example, as I agree with Nussbaum (1995) on the significance of literature and other forms of fictional narrative for moral reflection. That it is drawn from a documentary merely adds to the realism of the example.

Frankfurt does not commit himself to the view that acting “of one's own free will” (i.e. in accordance with one's second-order volitions) is a necessary condition for moral responsibility, but he does seem to take it to be a sufficient condition: “[the willing addict's] will is outside his control, but, by his second-order desire that his desire for the drug should be effective … he may be morally responsible for taking the drug” (1971, 20). But if it is the fit between one's first and second-order desires that confers responsibility, then the absence of such a fit would seem to entail that blame is not appropriate.

Part of the problem with Dennett's discussion is that he blurs the distinction between the legal and moral. One could plausibly argue that the law is essentially general, whereas morality is essentially particular; hence there may be legal grounds for accepting an arbitrariness that would be morally unacceptable. Thanks to Mark LeBar and Kelly Becker for helpful discussion on this point.

E.g. Fischer and Ravizza (1993). Cf. Zimmerman (2001, 521).

Cf. Korsgaard: “to hold someone responsible is to adopt an attitude towards him rather than to have a belief about him or about the conditions under which he acts” (1996a, 188).

For a recent defence of the importance of the reactive attitudes, see Wallace (2011) and Wolf (2011).

See Note 2 on Scanlon's distinction between blameworthiness and blame.

Ishtiyaque Haji argues for a similar conclusion (2012, 190–4).

Rawls (1980, 543). This kind of respect is what Darwall has elsewhere termed “recognition respect” (1977).

Cf. Enstrom: “As spontaneously efficacious, practical thinking is a type of desiderative representation in which the self-consciousness distinctive of conceptual representation belongs to the representation's very efficacy, to the striving constituting it as desire” (2009, 29–30).

This approach to the study of freedom or “conscious will” is best illustrated in Wegner (2002).

E.g. Lance and White: “It should be clear that it is treatment of an individual, rather than treatment of a performance (whether a speech act or some other act), that is primary in our view … A performance may be exempt from a canonical inference procedure for any of a number of reasons, but once we begin treating individuals as subject to the canonical inference procedures, a performance of their will have to be exempted for a reason” (2007, 13).

It also puts my view in the camp of those like Wallace (1994) who take moral responsibility to be a normative issue.