Edmundson on Morality Without Responsibility
William A. Edmundson (Georgia State Law School) has posted Morality Without Responsibility on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Morality as we know it seems inextricably involved with notions of responsibility, desert, and blame. But a number of philosophers (e.g., Pereboom, G. Strawson) have concluded that responsibility in the desert-supporting sense rests upon metaphysical presuppositions that are unsatisfiable whether or not determinism is true. Some of these philosophers go on to argue that we ought - morally ought - to discard the idea of moral responsibility. Is this proposal coherent? Could morality intelligibly be practiced in a way that dispenses altogether with praise, blame, resentment, and desert - the concepts that constitute what we understand as holding agents morally responsible for their deeds? I distinguish three aspects of moral practice, which I term “naming,” “shaming,” and “blaming.” Of the three, only the last, blaming, implicates the idea of moral - as opposed to merely causal - responsibility. I defend what I term the “Enlightened View” that accepts naming and shaming as essential to morality, but holds blaming to be inessential. I distinguish the Enlightened View from the “Abolitionist View” that holds blaming to be not merely inessential to morality but undesirable and unworthy. Crucial to the defense of the Enlightened View is an account of moral guidance restricted to the devices of naming and shaming. This discussion uncovers a very weak sense of blame and desert implicit in the practice of morality - one too weak to require any major qualification of the Enlightened and Abolitionist Views. I conclude by defending the Enlightened View against the charge (by e.g. Smilansky) that it would diminish our conception of ourselves as persons.
And a bit from the text:
The Enlightened View is a conceptual thesis, not an empirical one. It is a proposal about what to count as a moral community or practice. It states that blaming is not a necessary element of moral practice. It does not deny that moral practices may in fact be mixed up with blaming. Therefore it is not refuted by an anthropological catalog purporting to show the universality of blaming. On the other hand, the Enlightened View could make a stronger case for itself by instancing cultures that dispense with blaming yet do so without disintegration or barbarism. Making such a case is complicated by two facts. The first is that moral and merely causal responsibility are easily confused. There is more to moral responsibility—in the desert-implicating sense—than mere causal responsibility (Hart 1968) and attributability (Watson 1996; Scanlon 1998, ch. 6). Causal responsibility, by which I mean only the practice of identifying persons, acting as such, as causes of certain outcomes, may have an importance untied to desert, merit, retribution and the rest of the blaming apparatus (as an innocent typhoid carrier may, for example, be causally responsible for another’s illness; or an innocently stupid person may be responsible for an accident). Upon careful examination, what may turn out to be universal is the practice of assigning causal responsibility, rather than the practice of assigning moral responsibility.
Highly recommended. Edmundson's work is illuminating and careful.
