Abstract
According to Dewey, we are responsible for our conduct because it is “ourselves objectified in action”. This idea lies at the heart of an increasingly influential deep self approach to moral responsibility. Existing formulations of deep self views have two major problems: They are often underspecified (for example, they rely heavily on metaphorical language), and they tend to understand the nature of the deep self in excessively rationalistic terms. Here I propose a new deep self theory of moral responsibility called the Self-Expression account that addresses these issues. The account is composed of two parts. The first part answers the question, What is a deep self? Theorists have tended to favor cognitive views that understand the deep self in terms of rationally formed evaluative judgment. I propose instead a conative view that says one’s deep self consists of a distinctive kind of pro-attitude, cares, and I provide an account of cares in terms of their distinctive psychological functional role. The second part answers the question, When does an action express one’s deep self? I criticize the agentially demanding conditions set out in existing views and propose a more minimalist alternative. I show that the Self-Expression account handles issues that bedeviled traditional deep self views, including how to explain moral responsibility for spontaneous, out of character, and weak-willed actions.
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Notes
Assume that the addict did not knowingly get himself addicted in the first place. Without this stipulation, then the case concerns not direct responsibility, but rather the complex issue of derived responsibility. This latter sense of responsibility applies when an agent A’s, some prima facie responsibility-undermining factor F is present, and the agent in some appropriate way (e.g., responsibly, knowingly, and intentionally) brought F about. When these conditions obtain, the agent is said to be responsible in a derived sense for A-ing. Unless otherwise explicitly noted, it is direct responsibility, rather than derived responsibility, that will be my exclusive focus throughout this article.
This way of formulating a deep self theory makes expression of the self necessary for moral responsibility but not sufficient—additional criteria must also be satisfied. A standard view is that there is also an epistemic requirement for moral responsibility. For example, if a person is ignorant that there is a kitten snoozing behind his car, and if he is completely non-culpable for his state of ignorance, then if he unfortunately backs his car over the kitten, then he is not morally responsible for the kitten’s death (see Fischer and Ravizza 1998, p. 13). I agree with the standard view that moral responsibility requires meeting certain epistemic conditions. My position, however, is that these epistemic conditions are already fully built in to a deep self theory’s requirement of self-expression. That is, an agent’s A-ing can’t express himself unless the agent satisfies certain epistemic requirements with respect to his A-ing. Thus, there isn’t a separate freestanding epistemic requirement that one must meet over and above the requirement of self-expression. This is a large and complex topic, and so I develop this position in detail elsewhere.
See Scanlon (1998), Arpaly (2003), Smith (2005, 2008), Sher (2009), and Buss (2012). Of note, while Scanlon, Arpaly, and Smith use language that is superficially consonant with the deep self approach, and others often interpret them along these lines, I believe their views in fact resist easy categorization. Among other things, these theorists don’t draw a deep versus surface distinction, and I believe that any full-fledged deep self view requires this distinction.
See Strawson (1962).
Dewey discusses the connection between moral responsibility and one’s self, understood as one’s conception of the good, in Dewey (1957), especially chapter 3. Hume discusses the relationship between responsibility and character in Treatise, bk. 11, Pt. 111, sec. 2. In Nicomachean Ethics, Magna Moralia, and Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle proposes slightly different versions of a theory that morally responsible agency requires a cause that is internal to the agent and expresses his character. See Meyer (2011), especially chapter 4, for a helpful discussion.
Watson (1975).
Watson’s model of the psyche is actually more nuanced (for example, it incorporates a role for values in addition to the activities of the valuation system). My interest is less in his specific model, but rather the general strategy of dividing the psyche in terms of motivational and valuational activities as a way to understand the deep self.
In his later writings, Frankfurt arrived at a similar view that caring involves commitmental higher-order motivation:
When we care about something, we go beyond wanting it. We want to go on wanting it, until at least the goal has been reached. Thus, we feel it as a lapse on our part if we neglect the desire, and we are disposed to take steps to refresh the desire if it should tend to fade. The caring entails, in other words, a commitment to the desire (Frankfurt 2006, pp. 18–19).
The cognitive view of the deep self says that the deep self is constituted by a certain class of evaluative judgments. The care-based conative view currently under discussion says that the deep self consists of a class of pro-attitudes, namely cares, which exhibit a syndrome of effects, one of which is to dispose the person to form care-concordant evaluative judgments. The two views might seem superficially similar, but there are a number of ways in which they in fact differ. First, the cognitive view places all elements of the relevant class of evaluative judgments within one’s deep self. The care-based view allows that many evaluative judgments don’t bear any connection to the deep self, namely those that don’t bear the right dispositional tie to one’s cares. Second, notice that dispositions might not ever be realized—they can be defeated by a mask or fink or antidote. Thus the care-based view is consistent with a person’s caring for X and, due to the operation of a defeater, failing to make the relevant evaluative judgments regarding X, even in idealized epistemic circumstances (see also footnote 17). A third respect in which the two views differ is in how they handle conflict within one’s deep self. I take up this idea later (see Sect. 4.3).
There is a further claim that one might make: The truth of these evaluative judgments—that is, judgments that something is good, that it is valuable, and that there is a reason to pursue it—depends on the contents of one’s cares. For example, whether Paul does in fact have a reason to cultivate his operatic talent, one might claim, depends on whether he cares about being talented at opera. A person who does not care in any way about being talented at opera does not have a reason to promote her operatic talent. This second thesis is about the nature of certain evaluative facts (in particular, it is a version of the Humean theory of normative reasons), and it is distinct from my main claim, which is about the nature of caring. Theorists who defend the centrality of caring for understanding the deep self are likely to endorse both claims, i.e., the thesis that caring entails dispositions to form certain judgments about the evaluative facts as well as the thesis that these facts themselves depend on the contents of one’s cares. I wish to keep these claims separate, however. It is the former claim that is relevant, as my aim here is to characterize the nature of cares.
These ideas are insightfully developed in David Shoemaker’s “Caring, identification, and agency” (2003).
This way of linking the deep self to one’s cares uses a direct strategy. There is a direct conceptual tie, it is claimed, between the syndrome of dispositions associated with cares and one’s fundamental self. Another plausible way to link cares with the deep self relies on an indirect strategy: Cares, perhaps only contingently, support some property X, where X is not part of the syndrome that characterizes cares. It is then argued that any state that plays this role with respect to X is part of one’s deep self. One version of the indirect strategy comes from Agnieszka Jaworska, who in turns derives key premises from Michael Bratman. Jaworska argues that cares help sustain certain forms of cross-temporal continuities and connections, which on a broadly Lockean theory of personal identity are the basis of the agent’s enduring identity over time. She then invokes Bratman’s influential claim (Bratman 2000) that any state that plays this role in sustaining cross-temporal continuities and connections must necessarily belong to the person in precisely the way that is characteristic of elements of the deep self. See Jaworska (2007) for a detailed exposition of the steps of this argument. The direct and indirect strategies are interlinked and ultimately complementary. I believe both will figure into a comprehensive defense of the claim that one’s deep self is constituted by one’s cares.
This distinction is based on Agnieszka Jaworska’s related discussion of ontological versus psychological senses of internality. See Jaworska (2007).
Importantly, for a mental state to be a care, it must possess the syndrome of dispositions discussed in Sect. 3.1. It is consistent with a person’s possessing these dispositions, however, that they are not actually manifested in a person’s psychology—for example, a person has not actually exhibited commitment to the care, made care-concordant evaluative judgments, or experienced emotions tied to the fortunes of the cared-for thing. This reflects a general truth about objects defined by their dispositional properties. For example, a poison is something that, when ingested, disposes the person to die. If Smith ingests some compound P that is a poison, but subsequently takes an antidote so he does not die, P does not thereby cease to be poison. Objects retain their dispositional properties in the presence of antidotes, masks, finks, and other kinds of “defeaters” that prevent the dispositions from being manifested (see Cross 2011). So too in the case of cares; a person can care for some thing even if the syndrome of dispositions that defines what it is to care for that thing are, owing to the presence of defeaters, never actually manifested.
Frankfurt provided a number of different accounts of the conditions under which an agent endorses, or is identified with, a motive. I am focusing here on Frankfurt’s earliest model, most clearly articulated in Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person (Frankfurt 1971).
Some philosophers defend tracing conditions for moral responsibility: A person is morally responsible for her spontaneous non-deliberative conduct because at some prior time she chose to develop or maintain the psychological mechanisms that are the basis for this conduct. Tracing has been persuasively criticized by Vargas (2005) [but see Fischer and Tognazzini (2009) for a response]. In my view, in addition to Vargas’ critiques, the problem for tracing approaches is not whether they can extensionally capture our pattern of responsibility judgments; tracing conditions tend to be sufficiently vague and flexible that they usually can. The problem is that the bases for responsibility judgments that they specify seem incorrect (again, even if extensionally adequate). That is, when we assess whether someone is morally responsible for spontaneous conduct—for example, spontaneously and unthinkingly using a racial slur—the conditions in the remote past adverted to in tracing accounts seem to play no role in these assessments. What matters for moral responsibility is that the person’s conduct is expressive of her self in the here and now. Relatedly, some may argue that to be responsible for the conduct flowing from one’s self, the person must be responsible for shaping the contents of her self. Elsewhere, I raise doubts about whether responsibility for one’s self is in fact possible. See Sripada (under review, sec. 2.7).
I discuss the Huckleberry Finn case in more detail elsewhere, see Sripada (in press).
The first two examples are loosely drawn from Jaworska (2007).
I am interested in formulating an account of moral responsibility that captures responsibility for both actions in the traditional sense (i.e., intentional actions) as well as various forms of spontaneous conduct such as noticings, attendings, and emotings. To aid exposition, going forward I use “action” throughout in an inclusive sense that encompasses both intentional actions as well as these various forms of spontaneous conduct. For emphasis and clarity, I sometimes still occasionally say “actions and spontaneous conduct”, even though according to my usage, the former subsumes the latter.
In an insightful article, Levy notes limitations in previous attempts to understand the expression relation (Levy 2011). He proposes an alternative that says expression involves an attitude’s causing an action “in the right sort of way,” adding “there is a nonaccidental and direct relationship between the content of the action and the agent’s actual attitudes” (p. 248). In my view, Levy’s proposal is suggestive but ultimately underdescribed. One wants to know more about the nature of this direct and non-accidental connection between actions and the attitudes they express. The Motivational Support account of the expression relation that I propose might very well be thought of as an answer to Levy’s challenge to propose a more adequate account of expression than thus far has been on offer.
See Smith (1987).
See Railton (2014) for a lucid, philosophically-focused discussion of this point.
What psychological facts determine the ranking of motivational attitudes within a prioritization? For example, in the case of the Partying Father, in virtue of what features of his psychology can it be truly said that the father prioritizes partying over the interests of his daughter? My very brief answer is that the relevant facts have to do with the functional role properties of the respective motivational attitudes that participate in the prioritization, that is, the syndrome of dispositions with which these attitudes are associated. Unfortunately, space does not permit a more detailed discussion of this important topic.
Elsewhere, I provide a more detailed defense of the view that manipulation, when it undermines moral responsibility, does so by severing the expression of the manipulated agent’s self in her actions (see Sripada 2012).
To be clear, what I mean is that expressing one’s self is itself not an action (unlike endorsing one’s motives), though of course one of the relata of the expression relation is an action.
Matt King and Peter Carruthers have argued that Real Self views of moral responsibility (what I am here calling deep self views) are committed to the agent’s meeting strong consciousness requirements. They further argue that current work in cognitive science suggests these consciousness requirements aren’t likely to be met, thus perhaps undermining this family of views (see King and Carruthers 2012). Their critique applies, however, to versions of deep self views that have an agentially demanding endorsement-based approach to expression. The minimalist account of expression I have proposed as part of the Self-Expression account allows actions with a non-conscious etiology to be self-expressive. Thus these results from cognitive science, should they prove to be correct, shouldn’t be taken to undermine all deep self views. I discuss relations between conscious awareness, moral responsibility, and deep self views in more detail elsewhere, see Sripada (in press).
See Wolf (1993, pp. 58–59).
See Frankfurt (1978, p. 160) for a description of a case along these lines.
Elsewhere, I provide a comprehensive defense of the claim that the Willing Addict is morally responsible for his drug-directed actions. See Sripada (under review).
John Martin Fischer has proposed an influential “control-based” view of moral responsibility, see Fischer (1987) and Fischer and Ravizza (1998). On his view, the main criterion for moral responsibility, simplifying a little bit, says: A person is morally responsible for A-ing if, holding fixed the mechanism that actually issues in action, across a suitably broad range of counterfactual scenarios in which there is sufficient reason to do otherwise than A, the person would do otherwise than A. While Fischer’s view and the traditional “could have done otherwise” views are in some respects different, there is also a key thing that they have in common: they both require an ability to do otherwise. The key difference is that on Fischer’s view, the relevant ability is understood in terms of certain modal properties of the mechanism that actually issues in action, while on traditional views, the relevant modal properties belong to the agent [see Franklin (2014) for a lucid discussion of this point]. It is notable, and perhaps not surprising, that many of the same counterexamples to traditional “could have done otherwise” views appear to apply equally well to Fischer’s view. In particular, it is implausible that the Jealous Director, Wolf’s swimmer, or Frankfurt’s Willing Addict have control in Fischer’s sense over what they do, so Fischer’s view has trouble explaining why they are morally responsible for what they do. Fischer sometimes calls his view an “actual sequence view” [see, for example Fischer and Ravizza (1998, p. 53)]. I am uncomfortable using this terminology to describe his view because his account employs a counterfactual test that is, in the end, highly similar to that employed in traditional “could have done otherwise” views. In contrast, views built along the lines of the Self-Expression account don’t employ a counterfactual test, and hence it is more natural to refer to these as “actual sequence views”.
To be clear, I am not claiming that people care about their flaws, for example, that they care about being vindictive. Rather, the claim is that flaws such as vindictiveness have problematic cares and priorities as core elements.
The mosaic, impure conception of the deep self reflects, I believe, our folk psychological understanding of how the self is structured. To illustrate, here is historian Thomas DeFrank speaking about Richard Nixon: “He had demons. I mean I remember Jerry Ford once said to me Richard Nixon was 90 % a good person—there was 5–10 % of his persona that was bad and at times the bad just simply overwhelmed the vast majority of the good Nixon. And it usually came in situations … where he felt like he had been screwed his entire life by his political enemies and it was time for payback.”
Or some other kind of reflectively formed state, such as one’s second-order volitions (see Fischer 2012).
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation. Versions of this paper were presented at the Science of Ethics Workshop (Ann Arbor, MI, June 2012) and at the University of Maryland (College Park, MD, March 2013). Thanks to Sarah Buss, Peter Carruthers, John Martin Fischer, Alfred Mele, Edward Nahmias, David Shoemaker, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Angela Smith for very helpful comments.
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Sripada, C. Self-expression: a deep self theory of moral responsibility. Philos Stud 173, 1203–1232 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0527-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0527-9