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ABSTRACT
Difficulty is often treated as blame-mitigating, and even exculpating. But on some occasions difficulty seems to have little or no bearing on our assessments of moral responsibility, and can even exacerbate it. In this paper, I argue that the relevance (and irrelevance) of difficulty with regard to assessments of moral responsibility is best understood via Quality of Will accounts. I look at various ways of characterising difficulty – including via sacrifice, effort, skill and ‘trying’ – and set out to demonstrate that these factors are only blame-mitigating where, and to the extent that, they complicate ascriptions of insufficient concern. Matters become more complex, however, when we turn to difficult circumstances that seem to generate such objectionable attitudes. This is arguably the case with epistemic difficulty and certain instances of moral ignorance. Here I argue that certain difficult circumstances diminish the sense in which false moral beliefs are genuinely revelatory of the agents who hold them. In particular, I draw on the distinction between difficulty that generates objectionable attitudes, and objectionable attitudes that generate difficulty. I argue that the former, but not the latter, can plausibly be viewed as blame mitigating, and that this would apply to (limited) cases of moral ignorance.
Acknowledgements
This paper arose (very belatedly) from my doctoral research, and I am much indebted to my doctoral supervisors and examiners for their input. Thanks also to the journal reviewers for very helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 There have been various ways of construing what qualifies as the relevant quality of will (Cf. Schoemaker 2013).
2 Nelkin (Citation2016, 361).
3 Nelkin (Citation2016, 361 & 362).
4 Cf. Guerrero (Citation2017, 207); Nelkin (Citation2016, 361–362).
5 Cf. Nelkin (Citation2016); Bradford (Citation2015, Citation2017); Guerrero (Citation2017); von Kriegstein (Citation2019); Tierney (Citation2019).
6 Rosen (Citation2014, 84).
7 Rosen (Citation2014, 84).
8 My gratitude to a reviewer at Philosophical Explorations for both this point and this example.
9 These roles needn’t always be acquired voluntarily. Take, for instance, the relationship of adult children and their elderly parents, or what we owe as an expression of sufficient concern in rescue cases such as the child drowning in the pond.
10 Bradford (Citation2017, 184).
11 von Kriegstein (Citation2019, 54).
12 Note that she could have cared even less than Peter’s father, but unlike that case her failure doesn’t provide us with evidence of this lack of concern, we are therefore more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.
13 On Bradford’s account difficulty (understood as effort) mitigates responsibility because of the opportunity costs involved. Where the effort-requiring features “involve something such as a character trait that reflects badly … on the agent,” she sets the threshold for the efforts necessary to mitigate blameworthiness at a higher level, in a way which “resonates with some versions of quality of will accounts.” Cf. Bradford (Citation2017, 186) (note 8). See also the discussion on Abby and Bella in Nelkin (Citation2016, 368).
14 Guerrero has suggested that Bradford’s effort view should be supplemented with the notion of skill-based difficulty. (I will return to Guerrero specifically on epistemic difficulty, and “difficulty trying” in the following section).
15 The agent-relativity of difficulty is a central feature of Bradford’s account. Von Kriegstein argued that this should be supplemented by an agent neutral account of difficulty (his focus, however, mostly concerns difficulty in relation to achievement, rather than in relation to moral responsibility). Cf. Bradford (Citation2017, 185) and von Kriegstein (Citation2019).
16 Guerrero (Citation2017, 209).
17 Provided the relevant incapacitation does not generate exemption on the basis of non-agency, as in the case of young children.
18 Guerrero (Citation2017, 201).
19 Rosen (Citation2003, 72); Rosen’s Italics.
20 Guerrero (Citation2017, 212).
21 Cf. Harman (Citation2011, Citation2022); Arpaly (Citation2003, Citation2015); Talbert (Citation2013).
22 Cf. FitzPatrick (Citation2017, 33); Rosen (Citation2003, 73); Rudy-Hiller (Citation2018, 29).
23 This seems to be corroborated by experimental work. Cf. Faraci and Shoemaker (Citation2014, Citation2019).
24 Felix resembles Arpaly’s case of “Edward” (Arpaly Citation2015, 153).
25 Jan Willem Wieland has also suggested that cases like Samuel provide counterexamples to the Constitutive Argument, indicating that you can “have a good will and yet still act from moral ignorance” (Cf. Wieland Citation2017). Although Wieland does not draw on difficulty explicitly in making his case, it seems related to his position that morally ignorant agents are potentially exculpated where “the moral truth is not accessible enough.”
26 Many thanks to Christopher Bennett for suggesting this point.
27 Lelyveld (Citation1986, 304).
28 Cf. Harman (Citation2011, Citation2022).
29 Thank you to a reviewer at Philosophical Explorations for raising this point.
30 Cf. Smith (Citation2005).
31 I have explored the implications of such cases at greater length elsewhere (Hartford Citation2019).
32 A Quality of Opportunity position (such as the one Nelkin advances) cannot distinguish between Felix and Samson (who, after all, had the same opportunities). Nelkin, however, briefly considers whether her position can dovetail with Quality of Will accounts: “the quality of will one manifests in a given situation is itself determined by what one does and why, given one’s opportunities. While this is very different from an understanding of quality of will simply in terms of the strength of the desire on which one acts, say, it also seems to me not wildly out of place to think that there is a notion of quality of will that is measured in these terms. At the same time, it suggests that it can’t be understood independently of opportunity.” (372–373). I think there is intersection with my objectives here, given my insistence that circumstances have bearing on what is revealed about quality of will.
33 Nelkin (Citation2016, 360) citing Arpaly (Citation2003) and Arpaly and Schroeder (Citation2014).
34 Nelkin (Citation2016, 360–363).
35 Nelkin (Citation2016, 363).
36 Nelkin (Citation2016, 364).
37 Cf. Arpaly and Schroeder (Citation1999, 171): “When a person behaves unusually under the influence of alcohol, one may think that she is not herself, but one may equally think that her true self is revealed at the fall of her inhibitions.”
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Anna Hartford
Anna Hartford is a writer and researcher based in South Africa. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cape Town and a research fellow at the Unit for Social and Political Ethics at Stellenbosch University.