Graduate 108: Moral Responsibility 02
Second entry in this series.
Gary Watson, "Two Faces of Responsibility". (1996)
[1] John Dewey offers a picture of responsibility that is tied to self-disclosure. "We are responsible for our conduct because that conduct is ourselves objectified in actions," he says. (Watson, 260) But this self-disclosure or "real self" view of responsibility has been criticized by such as Susan Wolf, who charges that such views (i) fail to take seriously the importance of normative competence and (ii) only capture a "superficial" kind of responsibility that belongs equally to animals and objects. According to Wolf, a sense of "deep" responsibility requires a reasons view (as opposed to a real self view) according to which "responsible agency consists in 'the ability to form, assess, and revise those values [i.e. those values that are taken as the root of one's self-disclosure] on the basis of a recognition and appreciation of… the True and the Good.'" (262) She insists that responsibility must involve accountability to some standard.
Gary Watson offers an alternative interpretation, according to which, the self-disclosure (or real self) view captures one crucial aspect of responsibility--namely, attributability--that is related, but ultimately distinct from accountability, proper. Along these same lines, he points out that moral accountability "is only part, and not necessarily the most important part, of our idea of responsibility." (263) He goes on to say, "In virtue of the capacities identified by the self-disclosure view, conduct can be attributable or imputable to an individual as its agent and is open to appraisal that is therefore appraisal of the individual as an adopter of ends." (263) Attributability and self-disclosure are captured in the aretaic face of responsibility.
[2] In order to help us distinguish between these two faces of responsibility, Watson introduces an illustration offered by Peter van Inwagen. Specifically, he points out how appreciating the distinction between attributability and accountability may deflate van Inwagen's accusation of inconsistency on the part of his 'colleague'. To attribute "shoddy" action to someone may well involve a kind of assessment or appraisal of that person's conduct. To hold that person accountable for his action involves something more--some further response to the agent. Watson writes:
"This point can be put in terms of the concept of blame. In one way, to blame (morally) is to attribute something to a (moral) fault in the agent; therefore, to call conduct shoddy is to blame the agent. But judgments of moral blameworthiness are also thought to involve the idea that agents deserve adverse treatment or "negative attitudes" in response to their faulty conduct. The former kinds of blaming and praising judgments are independent of what I am calling the practices of moral accountability. They invoke only the attributability conditions, on which certain appraisals of the individual as an agent are grounded. Because many of these appraisals concern the agent's excellences and faults--or virtues and vices--as manifest in thought and action, I shall say that such judgments are made from the aretaic perspective." (266)
These remarks strike me as potentially problematic. I am concerned by a move that seems to effectively (and, perhaps, artificially) prize apart the various elements of moral responsibility. Are the assessments of praise and blame really so distinct from the "practice" of moral accountability? The danger of separating them is that a sense of unreality can take hold of one or the other. There is already a strong tendency to treat systems of reward and punishment as purely conventional; and, of course, there is a basis for this. But there is a difference between 'convention' and 'arbitrariness' or 'unreality' or 'construction' that needs to be taken seriously, I think.
Watson does want to make clear, though, that both attributability and accountability are aspects of responsibility. Thus it is inconsistent to practice aretaic attribution while denying the notion or concept of responsibility. Also, he does retain, in his understanding of attribution, a sense of normative competence that answers the first charge, by Wolf, against the self-disclosure view of responsibility.
[3] At this point, he turns to consider Wolf's second charge--that the self-disclosure view is too "shallow"; that it does not yield a concept of responsibility that effectively distinguishes between the human case and the, merely, animal case. On this point, he brings in comments from Christian Crucius (1744) and says of them, "Two separate points are asserted in these passages--first, that so-called responsibility on the real self views is merely causal (and therefore ethically superficial); second, that what I am calling aretaic appraisals are simply descriptions of a thing's qualities and differ in kind from moral blame in the strict (deep?) sense. On the self-disclosure view, to blame someone for an outcome is to trace this effect to some fault (imperfection) in the thing. I want to dispute both of these points." (268-269)
The first assertion, Watson thinks, makes a category mistake. It takes issue with the self-disclosure view on the grounds of lack of control, which has more to do with accountability than with attributability. "The significant relation between behavior and the 'real self' is not (just) causal but executive and expressive." (270) Watson, moreover, emphasizes that attribution and aretaic appraisal are closely tied to practical identity. "To adopt an end, to commit oneself to a conception of value in this way, is a way of taking responsibility. To stand for something is to take a stand, to be ready to stand up for, to defend, to affirm, to answer for. Hence one notion of responsibility--responsibility as attributability--belongs to the very notion of practical identity." (271)
[4] Watson acknowledges that issues of control are relevant to the self-disclosure view, but insists that they are subsidary to those of attributability. "Control bears on responsibility only so far as its absence indicates that the conduct was not attributable to the agent." (272) The two are distinct and play different explanatory roles. "Consider the way in which hypnosis or brain-washing are thought to engender "motivation" for which the agent is not responsible. Whereas other views would explain this by appealing to the absence of control, the problem on the self-disclosure view is to explain how these processes undercut attributability." (272)
[5] Control does, nonetheless, play a significant role in our understanding of responsibility and, Watson will argue, in particular, our notion of accountability. We have already established that attributability may be distinguished from accountability without contradiction, but what more is involved in our idea of accountability? Why is control so much more an issue for accountability than for attributability? Watson says, "Because some of these practices--and notably the practice of moral accountability--involve the imposition of demands on people... they raise issues of fairness that do not arise for aretaic appraisal. It is these concerns about fairness that underlie the requirement of control (or avoidability) as a condition of moral accountability." (273-274)
Another way of capturing the difference is by distinguishing between holding someone to be responsible (attributability) and holding someone responsible (accountability). The latter emerges in a context of (appropriate) expectations, which, in turn, presupposes a capacity for control on the part of the agents. For instance, holding someone responsible for failing to execute an action that they are incapable of executing seems unfair. Along these same lines, punishing someone for failing to meet a standard that they are not capable of meeting also strikes as unfair. If the results are outside of one's control, then it seems unfair to hold one accountable (as through punishment) for those results. This unfairness, Watson thinks, arises just from considerations of the propriety of sanctions.
[6] He says, "Holding accountable... involves the idea of liability to sanctions. To be entitled to make demands, then, is to be entitled to impose conditions of liability. / Practices of holding accountable give rise to two questions. First, by what authority do we subject one another to sanctions? And, second, what kind or kinds of sanction are involved in a particular practice?" (275-276) The answers to these may differ from context to context, but Watson takes it as a general principle that "It is unfair to impose sanctions upon people unless they have a reasonable opportunity to avoid incurring them." (276) One may avoid a certain consequence within a context of rewards and punishments or one may avoid the context altogether. Keeping these in mind will, presumably, help to ensure the legitimacy of a given system of accountability and the appropriateness of the sanctions thereof.
[7] This begins to answer the question of what exactly separates the aretaic case from the accountability case. (Recall Crucius' second point in section [3].) Watson says that "accountability blame is a response to the faults identified in aretaic blame." (278) He also says:
"The aretaic sense seems to collapse any distinction between blaming and judgments of blame. In this sense, one is worthy of blame just in case the attribution of fault is warranted. 'S is blameworthy for C' stands to 'S's conduct is faulty' as ' "P" is true' stands to 'P'; judging blameworthy is virtually blaming. In the accountability sense, however, there is a difference." (278)
In the case of accountability, it is possible to distinguish between judging someone to be blameworthy and actually blaming them. The actual act of blaming, then, involves those responses and actions that we referring to as 'sanctions'. In a sense, too, the act of blaming, itself, is a kind of sanction, where blaming is taken to involve something like "indignation, resentment, and disapprobation". (278) This interpretation has its own problems, for one might wonder in what sense blaming could be taken as a sanction where that sense of indignation, etc. is not felt by the recipient. One might blame a person who is insensitive to feelings of indignation or one might blame a dead person for a past action (and they certainly cannot feel the sting of that blame).
This suggests that blaming is, in certain contexts, itself, not a kind of sanction. Or it might suggest that sanctions are not the best (most fundamental) way to think about blame. Indeed, the account offered in this paper of the relationship between accountability, sanctions, fairness, and blame seems to me deeply problematic. [8] Watson acknowledges that it is very incomplete, but the problems lead me to wonder if the account should not be rejected altogether. He writes on the point of avoidability:
"Our earlier discussion led to the thought that people can be fairly subject to demands and their concomitant sanctions only if they had reasonable opportunities to comply. Indeed, Glover suggests that an appeal to justice of this kind can explain 'all the excuses' relevant to responsibility: 'We think it unfair to adopt an attitude of disapproval towards someone on account of an act or omission, where this was something outside of his control.' Assuming, again, that 'it is disagreeable to be disapproved of,' Glover takes this thought to derive from the principle that we do not deserve to suffer what we cannot avoid. Whether or not this generalization about excusing conditions is entirely defensible, it brings out something that many wish to say in particular cases." (279-280)
But we have already seen that the disagreeability/suffering condition does not work in cases of blaming the dead or those who are otherwise insensitive. The very idea of blaming being appropriate only where it is appropriate to inflict a certain kind of pain (namely, disapproval) on a person seems oddly backwards. I think part of this approach has to do with a description of moral accountability that is rooted in reactive attitudes (see Peter Strawson) rather than in moral properties; that is why these problematically exceptional cases are rearing their heads.
[9] But returning to the distinction between the aretaic and accountability cases, Watson cites as another instance of its explanatory utility the case of "blaming the victim". We can recognize action as arising from a person's character in such a way that he is responsible for it in the aretaic sense; but we can also recognize that his character was formed (at least in part, if not substantially) by forces that are or were outside of his control, prompting us to question whether he should be held accountable in the full sense. But again, Watson's explanation strikes me as curious and potentially problematic: "What gives rise to our "pity" are concerns about fairness. Facts about his formative years give rise to the thought that the individual has already suffered too much and that we too would probably have been morally ruined by such a childhood. What is inhibited by these concerns is accountability blame." (281) But is it really considerations of fairness? What does it mean to have suffered too much? What is the standard of measure? Again, I am concerned that a model of accountability that is based on whether or not it is appropriate to punish (which seems to be the main focus) may be fundamentally flawed.
[10] Interestingly, Watson seems to recognize this asymmetry. He describes Susan Wolf's position as follows: "Responsible agency is the capacity to respond to relevant reasons. If you do respond to relevant reasons (thereby acting well), you will have exercised that capacity, and be praiseworthy, even if you could not (say, psychologically) have done otherwise. But if you (psychologically) cannot respond to relevant reasons, you thus lack the capacity in question and are not blameworthy. Incapacity therefore undercuts blame but not praise." (282-283) Watson thinks that his attributability/accountability distinction helps to explain the appeal of Wolf's view.
But there is a second asymmetry that may be even more telling. "Like most writers on this subject, I began by talking about the connections between responsibility and praise and blame but became preoccupied with the negative case. We seem to have a richer vocabulary of blame than of praise. This slant is not due solely to mean-spiritedness. At least part of the explanation is that blaming tends to be a much more serious affair; reputation, liberty, and even life can be at stake, and understandably we are more concerned with the conditions of adverse treatment than with those of favorable." (283) Is this right? I think that Watson's description may be accurate, but should it be so? I am concerned just that grounding our account of accountability primarily in terms of the negative case may be fundamentally misguided. That is a point that would require development elsewhere, but I think it may speak to many different kinds of views of moral responsibility that have developed in recent history. I suspect that it reflects a special preoccupation with behavior control and regulation in a world where that seems so desperately necessary.
[11] Watson has attempted offer a rebuttal to critiques (like those of Susan Wolf) of real self views of responsibility. He has done so by identifying the self-disclosure (real self) view as only one of two faces of responsibility--aretaic or attributability. The other face is the accountability face of responsibility. Keeping these distinctions in mind, he is able to offer accounts that uphold many of our moral intuitions.
Gary Watson, "Two Faces of Responsibility". (1996)
[1] John Dewey offers a picture of responsibility that is tied to self-disclosure. "We are responsible for our conduct because that conduct is ourselves objectified in actions," he says. (Watson, 260) But this self-disclosure or "real self" view of responsibility has been criticized by such as Susan Wolf, who charges that such views (i) fail to take seriously the importance of normative competence and (ii) only capture a "superficial" kind of responsibility that belongs equally to animals and objects. According to Wolf, a sense of "deep" responsibility requires a reasons view (as opposed to a real self view) according to which "responsible agency consists in 'the ability to form, assess, and revise those values [i.e. those values that are taken as the root of one's self-disclosure] on the basis of a recognition and appreciation of… the True and the Good.'" (262) She insists that responsibility must involve accountability to some standard.
Gary Watson offers an alternative interpretation, according to which, the self-disclosure (or real self) view captures one crucial aspect of responsibility--namely, attributability--that is related, but ultimately distinct from accountability, proper. Along these same lines, he points out that moral accountability "is only part, and not necessarily the most important part, of our idea of responsibility." (263) He goes on to say, "In virtue of the capacities identified by the self-disclosure view, conduct can be attributable or imputable to an individual as its agent and is open to appraisal that is therefore appraisal of the individual as an adopter of ends." (263) Attributability and self-disclosure are captured in the aretaic face of responsibility.
[2] In order to help us distinguish between these two faces of responsibility, Watson introduces an illustration offered by Peter van Inwagen. Specifically, he points out how appreciating the distinction between attributability and accountability may deflate van Inwagen's accusation of inconsistency on the part of his 'colleague'. To attribute "shoddy" action to someone may well involve a kind of assessment or appraisal of that person's conduct. To hold that person accountable for his action involves something more--some further response to the agent. Watson writes:
"This point can be put in terms of the concept of blame. In one way, to blame (morally) is to attribute something to a (moral) fault in the agent; therefore, to call conduct shoddy is to blame the agent. But judgments of moral blameworthiness are also thought to involve the idea that agents deserve adverse treatment or "negative attitudes" in response to their faulty conduct. The former kinds of blaming and praising judgments are independent of what I am calling the practices of moral accountability. They invoke only the attributability conditions, on which certain appraisals of the individual as an agent are grounded. Because many of these appraisals concern the agent's excellences and faults--or virtues and vices--as manifest in thought and action, I shall say that such judgments are made from the aretaic perspective." (266)
These remarks strike me as potentially problematic. I am concerned by a move that seems to effectively (and, perhaps, artificially) prize apart the various elements of moral responsibility. Are the assessments of praise and blame really so distinct from the "practice" of moral accountability? The danger of separating them is that a sense of unreality can take hold of one or the other. There is already a strong tendency to treat systems of reward and punishment as purely conventional; and, of course, there is a basis for this. But there is a difference between 'convention' and 'arbitrariness' or 'unreality' or 'construction' that needs to be taken seriously, I think.
Watson does want to make clear, though, that both attributability and accountability are aspects of responsibility. Thus it is inconsistent to practice aretaic attribution while denying the notion or concept of responsibility. Also, he does retain, in his understanding of attribution, a sense of normative competence that answers the first charge, by Wolf, against the self-disclosure view of responsibility.
[3] At this point, he turns to consider Wolf's second charge--that the self-disclosure view is too "shallow"; that it does not yield a concept of responsibility that effectively distinguishes between the human case and the, merely, animal case. On this point, he brings in comments from Christian Crucius (1744) and says of them, "Two separate points are asserted in these passages--first, that so-called responsibility on the real self views is merely causal (and therefore ethically superficial); second, that what I am calling aretaic appraisals are simply descriptions of a thing's qualities and differ in kind from moral blame in the strict (deep?) sense. On the self-disclosure view, to blame someone for an outcome is to trace this effect to some fault (imperfection) in the thing. I want to dispute both of these points." (268-269)
The first assertion, Watson thinks, makes a category mistake. It takes issue with the self-disclosure view on the grounds of lack of control, which has more to do with accountability than with attributability. "The significant relation between behavior and the 'real self' is not (just) causal but executive and expressive." (270) Watson, moreover, emphasizes that attribution and aretaic appraisal are closely tied to practical identity. "To adopt an end, to commit oneself to a conception of value in this way, is a way of taking responsibility. To stand for something is to take a stand, to be ready to stand up for, to defend, to affirm, to answer for. Hence one notion of responsibility--responsibility as attributability--belongs to the very notion of practical identity." (271)
[4] Watson acknowledges that issues of control are relevant to the self-disclosure view, but insists that they are subsidary to those of attributability. "Control bears on responsibility only so far as its absence indicates that the conduct was not attributable to the agent." (272) The two are distinct and play different explanatory roles. "Consider the way in which hypnosis or brain-washing are thought to engender "motivation" for which the agent is not responsible. Whereas other views would explain this by appealing to the absence of control, the problem on the self-disclosure view is to explain how these processes undercut attributability." (272)
[5] Control does, nonetheless, play a significant role in our understanding of responsibility and, Watson will argue, in particular, our notion of accountability. We have already established that attributability may be distinguished from accountability without contradiction, but what more is involved in our idea of accountability? Why is control so much more an issue for accountability than for attributability? Watson says, "Because some of these practices--and notably the practice of moral accountability--involve the imposition of demands on people... they raise issues of fairness that do not arise for aretaic appraisal. It is these concerns about fairness that underlie the requirement of control (or avoidability) as a condition of moral accountability." (273-274)
Another way of capturing the difference is by distinguishing between holding someone to be responsible (attributability) and holding someone responsible (accountability). The latter emerges in a context of (appropriate) expectations, which, in turn, presupposes a capacity for control on the part of the agents. For instance, holding someone responsible for failing to execute an action that they are incapable of executing seems unfair. Along these same lines, punishing someone for failing to meet a standard that they are not capable of meeting also strikes as unfair. If the results are outside of one's control, then it seems unfair to hold one accountable (as through punishment) for those results. This unfairness, Watson thinks, arises just from considerations of the propriety of sanctions.
[6] He says, "Holding accountable... involves the idea of liability to sanctions. To be entitled to make demands, then, is to be entitled to impose conditions of liability. / Practices of holding accountable give rise to two questions. First, by what authority do we subject one another to sanctions? And, second, what kind or kinds of sanction are involved in a particular practice?" (275-276) The answers to these may differ from context to context, but Watson takes it as a general principle that "It is unfair to impose sanctions upon people unless they have a reasonable opportunity to avoid incurring them." (276) One may avoid a certain consequence within a context of rewards and punishments or one may avoid the context altogether. Keeping these in mind will, presumably, help to ensure the legitimacy of a given system of accountability and the appropriateness of the sanctions thereof.
[7] This begins to answer the question of what exactly separates the aretaic case from the accountability case. (Recall Crucius' second point in section [3].) Watson says that "accountability blame is a response to the faults identified in aretaic blame." (278) He also says:
"The aretaic sense seems to collapse any distinction between blaming and judgments of blame. In this sense, one is worthy of blame just in case the attribution of fault is warranted. 'S is blameworthy for C' stands to 'S's conduct is faulty' as ' "P" is true' stands to 'P'; judging blameworthy is virtually blaming. In the accountability sense, however, there is a difference." (278)
In the case of accountability, it is possible to distinguish between judging someone to be blameworthy and actually blaming them. The actual act of blaming, then, involves those responses and actions that we referring to as 'sanctions'. In a sense, too, the act of blaming, itself, is a kind of sanction, where blaming is taken to involve something like "indignation, resentment, and disapprobation". (278) This interpretation has its own problems, for one might wonder in what sense blaming could be taken as a sanction where that sense of indignation, etc. is not felt by the recipient. One might blame a person who is insensitive to feelings of indignation or one might blame a dead person for a past action (and they certainly cannot feel the sting of that blame).
This suggests that blaming is, in certain contexts, itself, not a kind of sanction. Or it might suggest that sanctions are not the best (most fundamental) way to think about blame. Indeed, the account offered in this paper of the relationship between accountability, sanctions, fairness, and blame seems to me deeply problematic. [8] Watson acknowledges that it is very incomplete, but the problems lead me to wonder if the account should not be rejected altogether. He writes on the point of avoidability:
"Our earlier discussion led to the thought that people can be fairly subject to demands and their concomitant sanctions only if they had reasonable opportunities to comply. Indeed, Glover suggests that an appeal to justice of this kind can explain 'all the excuses' relevant to responsibility: 'We think it unfair to adopt an attitude of disapproval towards someone on account of an act or omission, where this was something outside of his control.' Assuming, again, that 'it is disagreeable to be disapproved of,' Glover takes this thought to derive from the principle that we do not deserve to suffer what we cannot avoid. Whether or not this generalization about excusing conditions is entirely defensible, it brings out something that many wish to say in particular cases." (279-280)
But we have already seen that the disagreeability/suffering condition does not work in cases of blaming the dead or those who are otherwise insensitive. The very idea of blaming being appropriate only where it is appropriate to inflict a certain kind of pain (namely, disapproval) on a person seems oddly backwards. I think part of this approach has to do with a description of moral accountability that is rooted in reactive attitudes (see Peter Strawson) rather than in moral properties; that is why these problematically exceptional cases are rearing their heads.
[9] But returning to the distinction between the aretaic and accountability cases, Watson cites as another instance of its explanatory utility the case of "blaming the victim". We can recognize action as arising from a person's character in such a way that he is responsible for it in the aretaic sense; but we can also recognize that his character was formed (at least in part, if not substantially) by forces that are or were outside of his control, prompting us to question whether he should be held accountable in the full sense. But again, Watson's explanation strikes me as curious and potentially problematic: "What gives rise to our "pity" are concerns about fairness. Facts about his formative years give rise to the thought that the individual has already suffered too much and that we too would probably have been morally ruined by such a childhood. What is inhibited by these concerns is accountability blame." (281) But is it really considerations of fairness? What does it mean to have suffered too much? What is the standard of measure? Again, I am concerned that a model of accountability that is based on whether or not it is appropriate to punish (which seems to be the main focus) may be fundamentally flawed.
[10] Interestingly, Watson seems to recognize this asymmetry. He describes Susan Wolf's position as follows: "Responsible agency is the capacity to respond to relevant reasons. If you do respond to relevant reasons (thereby acting well), you will have exercised that capacity, and be praiseworthy, even if you could not (say, psychologically) have done otherwise. But if you (psychologically) cannot respond to relevant reasons, you thus lack the capacity in question and are not blameworthy. Incapacity therefore undercuts blame but not praise." (282-283) Watson thinks that his attributability/accountability distinction helps to explain the appeal of Wolf's view.
But there is a second asymmetry that may be even more telling. "Like most writers on this subject, I began by talking about the connections between responsibility and praise and blame but became preoccupied with the negative case. We seem to have a richer vocabulary of blame than of praise. This slant is not due solely to mean-spiritedness. At least part of the explanation is that blaming tends to be a much more serious affair; reputation, liberty, and even life can be at stake, and understandably we are more concerned with the conditions of adverse treatment than with those of favorable." (283) Is this right? I think that Watson's description may be accurate, but should it be so? I am concerned just that grounding our account of accountability primarily in terms of the negative case may be fundamentally misguided. That is a point that would require development elsewhere, but I think it may speak to many different kinds of views of moral responsibility that have developed in recent history. I suspect that it reflects a special preoccupation with behavior control and regulation in a world where that seems so desperately necessary.
[11] Watson has attempted offer a rebuttal to critiques (like those of Susan Wolf) of real self views of responsibility. He has done so by identifying the self-disclosure (real self) view as only one of two faces of responsibility--aretaic or attributability. The other face is the accountability face of responsibility. Keeping these distinctions in mind, he is able to offer accounts that uphold many of our moral intuitions.
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