Download Responsibility for Character

1
Responsibility for Character
It is common to think that adult humans are usually responsible for their character, e.g.
their generosity or selfishness,1 even though character begins in childhood under influences
for which one is not responsible. Can we become responsible for characters for which we
start out having no responsibility at all? One reading of this question is, What would it take
for a given agent to become responsible for his or her particular character? But I want to
explore the more basic question how the very notion of responsibility for character could
even be applicable to beings of our kind in the first place. One sort of skepticism about such
applicability is conceptual: if the concept of responsibility involves self-origination, then
perhaps the very fact that one starts life as someone’s child makes responsibility for one’s
character traits impossible. Other worries stem from the fact that at any point, one shapes
oneself only on the basis of how one already is. For one thing, shaping oneself may be largely
the unfolding of prior influences beyond one’s control. As we trace an agent’s history
backward from adulthood, we find at most a series of such shaping events, and so between
childhood and adulthood nothing accounts for any emergence in beings like us of fullblooded responsibility for character. And for another, the reflection by which one shapes
oneself goes on within a framework of more basic values or commitments, which may be just
as constraining and alienating as anything else in the psyche.
Against such skepticism, my view is that responsibility is applicable to beings like us
in virtue of the capacity for ‘critical distance’ from what one characteristically finds reasongiving. I argue first for a conception of responsibility—what I call a ‘threshold’ conception—
on which responsibility does not require responsibility for one’s starting-points. Next I argue
that responsibility becomes applicable to us with the developmental emergence of the said
capacity for critical distance. Finally, I argue that reflection within a ‘eudaemonist’
framework is structured and effective, without being constraining or alienating.
2
1. Responsibility for traits: clarifying the concept
Richard Kane argues that one is responsible for an action only if the explanation of
the action refers only to one’s intentional efforts of will and non-compulsory choosing.2
Galen Strawson holds that to be responsible for one’s character is to be ‘causa sui’, i.e.
responsible for character all the way down, apart from any antecedent external influence.3
Kane and Strawson both work with what they call the ‘ultimate’ conception of responsibility,
Kane affirming and Strawson denying that we can be ‘ultimately responsible’ for character.
Like Strawson, I think that humans cannot be ultimately responsible. But I also think
that this conception of responsibility is neither defensible nor the one that we commonly hold.
Suppose that Fred places a pile of bricks near a doorway, and that George places a pile of
bricks next to Fred’s. Suppose also that it takes the resulting ‘heap’ of bricks to block the
doorway. Who is responsible for blocking this doorway? On the ultimate conception, neither
of them. Fred is not responsible for blocking the doorway, and neither is George, since we
could not explain Fred’s blocking of the doorway without referring also to George’s actions,
and vice versa. The heap can be parsed into Fred’s bit and George’s bit, so each can be
responsible for his pile. But neither can be responsible for the heap, or for blocking the
doorway. This is a very odd result. Surely Fred and George as individuals bear some
responsibility both for the heap of bricks and for blocking the door. Even if we say that the
pair of Fred and George is responsible for blocking the door, it seems bizarre that neither
Fred nor George is even partially responsible for blocking the door, and that precisely
because they both are responsible. Even worse, if (as some hold) corporate responsibility
reduces to individual responsibility, then there could be no responsibility at all in such a case
as this. Moreover, what responsibility can be assigned to Fred or to George at all in this case
requires disaggregating the whole into the contribution of each, considered as a discrete,
independent part that is exclusively one’s own,4 but of course very many contributions to
3
joint effort are neither discrete nor exclusively one’s own. To be sure, it is a long-standing
puzzle how to assess individual responsibilities for joint efforts, but the ultimate conception
requires such solutions to be of just one type—disaggregation—and that type looks hopeless.5
For the same reason, the ultimate conception of responsibility clearly is not the one
that we commonly hold. Our common notion of responsibility is constituted in part by a firm
commitment to the intelligibility of joint responsibility, and of differing degrees of
responsibility, without necessarily disaggregating the cooperative efforts as the ultimate
conception would require. We do often think of persons as making themselves what they are,
but this is not say that we think persons make themselves ex nihilo and without assistance.6
I think that we commonly think of responsibility instead as a ‘threshold’ concept. On
this view, we might say that while Fred’s or George’s contribution to a joint effort makes his
responsibility a less paradigmatic case of responsibility than if he had made the whole heap
himself, still the involvement of each rises to a level that warrants ascription of responsibility.
Neither is ‘ultimately’ responsible, but each is responsible enough to be responsible in a bona
fide sense. In fact, one need be no less responsible in a case of joint effort than one would
have been if one had acted alone. Equally responsible agents need not be equally
paradigmatic cases of responsibility. Furthermore, our notion of responsibility does not
require all responsibility to be equal. If Fred had acted as the ‘ringleader’ in a conspiracy to
block the door, he may be more responsible than George for blocking the door, or than
himself in the original case. And while George’s responsibility need not equal Fred’s
responsibility as ringleader, George certainly can warrant the ascription of some degree of
bona fide responsibility. I shall not attempt to make the threshold conception any more
precise at present. I only wish to point out that it both avoids the problems that plague the
absolute conception and is far more reflective of the common notion of responsibility. It is
this ‘threshold’ sense of responsibility that will concern us now.
4
2. Responsibility for Traits and Adulthood: The Importance of Critical Distance
2.1. Responsibility and development. Does the threshold conception help the case for
responsibility for traits? Not necessarily. Consider this famous passage from John Rawls:
It is one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that we do not deserve our
place in the distribution of natural endowments, any more than we deserve our initial
starting place in society. The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that
enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is also problematic; for his
character depends in good part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for
which he can claim no credit. The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases.7
It seems clear that on Rawls’ view we do not deserve our character because we are not
responsible for it in the right way, since our character (including the willingness to make
effort) has a history that begins with things that merely happened to us.8
Now Rawls holds that while people cannot be responsible enough that institutions
should be designed to give people what they deserve, they can be responsible enough to
deserve within just institutions.9 Rawls therefore holds a threshold conception of
responsibility.10 But Rawls remains skeptical about responsibility for traits, evidently given
something like the following picture of human development: we are not responsible for our
formative experiences in childhood, and between childhood and adulthood there comes
nothing—not even efforts to guide oneself—that renders us responsible for ourselves in
anything but a necessarily diminished or compromised sense. Consequently the notion of
responsibility for character should at least be handled with some suspicion. Is that true—do
childhood beginnings necessarily make adult responsibility for character suspect?
This type of case against the notion of responsibility for traits works by showing that
one is not responsible at one’s starting-point, so that one’s responsibility at any subsequent
point is therefore necessarily diminished. Dependence at any stage in the series diminishes
responsibility at every subsequent stage, because what one is like at any point in one’s history
is a product of one’s history prior to that point. So at no point can one ‘break free’ of that
history to emerge as uncompromisingly responsible. This argument assumes that in order to
5
become responsible, there must be some occasion on which one makes some effort to reflect
or reform, and breaks free enough of one’s history to emerge newly responsible. It assumes,
that is, that there must be some point at which one acquires this new responsibility. The
argument also assumes that to be responsible one must bring it about oneself that one is
responsible. If at first these assumptions seem true, notice that each of them merely asserts
that those features of a person in virtue of which one is responsible could not arise naturally,
as a part of normal human development. Not every change takes place at a point,11 and in
particular developmental changes usually do not. And of course no one is responsible for how
one develops by nature. Yet without these two assumptions, a lack of responsibility at some
stage need not necessarily diminish responsibility at every subsequent stage.
I argue that responsibility for character is not responsibility for the causal history of
character, but a function of the critical distance from character that is made possible by the
development of certain reflective capacities. On this view, responsibility for character
becomes applicable as part of normal human development, and—just like most
developmental events—it cannot be traced to any distinct point in that development.
2.2. Critical distance. Many philosophers have argued that the human capacity for
responsibility is somehow tied to the human capacity for reflection, and I shall discuss some
of these below.12 But I think the relevant tie is not between responsibility and reflection as
such, but between responsibility and the critical distance from oneself that reflection can
make possible. Part of having a character trait is characteristically to find certain things
reason-giving—i.e. to act and react through an appreciation of the normative force one
characteristically assigns to some range of considerations—and reflection can give critical
distance from character understood as one’s characteristic reasons.13 On my view, the
emergence in development of this capacity for critical distance makes the notion of
responsibility for character traits generally applicable to adults of our species.14
6
Consequently, the emerging ‘reflective capacities’ I have in mind are those by which
one has and reflects on one’s reasons, both for what one does and for what sorts of things one
takes to be reason-giving. Like all living things, humans have a characteristic mode of living,
and in humans this is an active, intelligent way of living in which we shape and direct our
rationally, i.e. according to reasons.15 It is with reference to this mode of living that we
understand the normal development of practical reason,16 which involves the capacity to
reflect on what one does—including what one believes, how one acts, how one reacts,
etc.17—in terms of one’s reasons for doing those things. It also involves the capacity to reflect
on one’s reasons in terms of one’s further reasons, since humans act for reasons, even in the
act of finding something to be a reason. Responsibility for character stems not from reflection
on reasons for reasons itself, but from the critical distance from one’s characteristic reasons
that such reflection can make possible. This possibility will extend even to characteristic
reasons that one has not acquired consciously or deliberately, but perhaps from socialization
and other forms of causal history,18 since such reasons still count as reasons for which we act.
In reflection, the question is not primarily how one has come by one’s reasons, but what
reasons one has reasons to adopt now.19
Before describing the tie between critical distance and responsibility, we must
characterize critical distance, if only roughly. Fortunately, the notion of critical distance is by
now familiar among philosophers, due in no small part to Rawls’ discussion of the principles
of justice to which he argues our considered judgments, in reflective equilibrium, commit us.
Critical distance offers the possibility of taking a new view of one’s situation from within
one’s situation. That view cannot be ‘neutral’ or independent, but that is why critical distance
is important and interesting: it offers some objectivity from within a subjective viewpoint.20
Where critical distance can be gained, it offers a way of considering one’s values critically
while reflecting one’s considered values, requiring no viewpoint other than one’s own.21
7
Consequently, critical distance tends to be piecemeal, as usually we can subject to
serious scrutiny few serious judgments at a time, relying on the rest as a more or less stable
background, as in reflective equilibrium.22 Still, when we reflect on some serious judgment,
practice, or attitude, we are usually aware of its connections to others, and so even the
stability of the ‘background’ is only ‘more or less’, and the critical distance we take from one
judgment tends to spill over along its boundaries. Critical distance is also ‘personalized’,
since reflection goes on against a background that is of course one’s own. We do not have to
suppose that people can step out of their own perspective to take seriously the fact that people
really do find new ways of seeing things, ways that they might actually try out. Again, the
capacity for such reflection is part of normal human rationality. It is the capacity to respond
reflectively to everyday experiences: the teaching of others, the example of others, the
discovery of new alternatives, our own internal conflict, the consequences of our choices.23
Moreover, such a capacity requires little sophistication, if any. Reflecting on reasons for
reasons is nothing extraordinary, but a part of every normal adult human life.
2.3. Can critical distance be effective? Critical distance is an opportunity to reassess
oneself, and it is in virtue of this capacity for reassessment that responsibility for character is
applicable to our kind, since the opportunity to reassess oneself is the opportunity to take
responsibility for oneself. In that case, the bare fact that character begins in childhood would
not compromise responsibility for character. The question, then, is whether humans can gain
critical distance from characteristic reasons, and so become responsible for character. We
may worry that although we do reflect on ourselves, this cannot offer genuine critical
distance, because even such reflection is no more than the unfolding of how we already are.24
And we may worry that even if we can gain critical distance at some level of reflection, the
framework within which that reflection goes on may be constraining and even alienating, so
8
that critical distance will be too localized for responsibility to emerge in any but a similarly
compromised fashion. I shall consider the first worry now, and the second in the final section.
Does the fact that we judge our reasons ‘from within’ them necessarily diminish and
compromise critical distance from our characteristic reasons? That depends on what agents
are like. Agents incapable of effective critical distance must be genuinely incapable of
suspending commitment to reasons so as to reflect on them. E.g. a quick-tempered person
may be incapable of seriously entertaining the idea that insulting behavior, say, does not give
one a reason for anger.25 Likewise, such agents must also be immune not only to one-off
prompts to reflect on and suspend their reasons, but also to the cumulative effect of repeated
prompts.26 Finally, such agents must also be immune to feedback of all sorts: from any source,
even those one respects or trusts, and even when one’s reasons come into conflict with other
reasons, including reasons that are common and immoveable, such as one’s reasons to secure
food and shelter, not to mention love and companionship.
Agents who fit this description exist, but not merely because their reflection starts
within their character. To say that we are all agents of this type is to say that the very fact that
critical distance must take place within a framework has already ruled out the possibility of
any real critical distance at all. More than that, it is to jeopardize the very notion of our
having characteristic reasons, since to be moved to act for considerations from which one
cannot take critical distance is to be moved without a reason. To act for a reason is to act
from recognition of the normative force of some consideration favoring the action, and were
we beings who could not genuinely assess the normativity of such considerations, our
motivations to action, whatever they would be, would not be reasons. So if reflection were by
its nature incapable of generating genuine critical distance, we would not have reasons in the
first place. Rather, agents who are incapable of critical distance are so not just in virtue of
having a framework,27 but because of the particular framework that they have—or rather, that
9
has them in its grip. And the more one is such a person as that, the less one is an appropriate a
target for the ‘reactive attitudes’ in the first place.28 Having a starting-point for which we are
not responsible is no obstacle to becoming responsible. The obstacle is a starting-point which
leaves us incapable of critical distance from ourselves.
3. Critical Distance, Frameworks, and Responsibility
The fact that our character traits begin in childhood, and thus when we lack
responsibility for their beginnings, does not necessarily compromise adult responsibility for
character traits, since the development of adult reflection affords critical distance from one’s
reasons, and such critical distance makes the notion of responsibility for character applicable
to normal adult humans.29 But the worry about the lack of responsibility in childhood may
rest on the deeper worry that while we can have reasons on which we can reflect, still that
reflection must always take place within some framework, and it may be that genuine critical
distance from that framework itself is not possible. Since the ultimate conception of
responsibility is, I have argued, untenable, the worry is not merely that reflection may operate
on principles that we have not constructed ourselves. Rather, the worry is that we may not be
capable of any critical distance from those principles, and thus at the most fundamental level
we may be in the grip of the very framework that makes reflection possible.
The role of a framework in practical reasoning is central in those accounts of
responsibility that Susan Wolf has called ‘deep self’ or ‘real self’ accounts.30 Philosophers
like Harry Frankfurt, Gary Watson, and Charles Taylor disagree over the nature of our
reflective framework and its role in an account of responsibility, but they agree both that
reflection takes place within a framework of serious values, and that that very fact helps the
case for responsibility.31 Put most simply, the idea is that one can be responsible for those
features of one’s psyche that one has not originated, by ‘taking responsibility for’ and
‘identifying with’ those features, and that one does so through embracing those features at the
10
deeper level of the self. But given the risk of unfreedom with respect to one’s reflective
framework itself, ‘deep self’ views may not help the case for responsibility after all. As Wolf
has argued, the problem with ‘deep self’ accounts of responsibility is that one’s deepest
values and commitments may be just as alienating as any other. So in identifying a person’s
‘deep self’, we may be identifying no more than the fixed points in whose grip the person is.
If practical reasoning must operate within some sort of framework, then it remains to
be shown that we are not in the grip of this framework. Even if ‘having a reason’ implies that
one is not in the grip of that reason, it does not follow that we have reasons at the level of the
framework of reasoning.32 The challenge for a view such as mine, then, is not simply to
identify a type of practical reasoning at an interesting psychological depth, but to explain how
that type of practical reasoning can give beings like us critical distance from reasons, without
our being in the grip of those points that such practical reasoning takes as fixed.
It is true that fixed points give practical reasoning its framework, since one can
formulate and reflect on reasons only by taking as given certain fundamental facts about
oneself. The real problem, however, is not that those points are fixed, but that they may be
constraining. But notice that these points need not be facts about oneself in particular, but
facts about oneself as the kind of being one is. In that case, these fixed points do not lock one
into a parochial perspective. On the contrary, they open up a perspective that is salient for the
kind of being one is. So the real challenge is to articulate the notion of reflective fixed points
that are both (a) sufficiently formal that they would not be mere particular biases that could
hold one in their grip, and (b) sufficiently informative that taking them seriously could allow
for genuine, substantive reassessment of one’s characteristic reasons.
Readers of Aristotle will recognize the structure of this demand, since Aristotle too
seeks a specification of our ‘final end’ (telos) that is both formal and informative, as a point
where more objective reflection can begin. As Aristotle recognizes, it is our nature33 to have,
11
to seek, and to need reasons for our actions, choices, and beliefs, and even for our emotions
and desires. Aristotle also recognizes that we reflect on our reasons for these reasons, and he
understands that reflection as ultimately carried out within a framework made possible by the
notion of a final end, that is, a reason for which no further reason need be sought, and which
can potentially organize and unify our other goals and reasons, should we reflect on them that
far.34 This final end, Aristotle argues, is eudaimonia, often rendered as ‘happiness’ or
(perhaps better) ‘flourishing’, and generally used interchangeably with ‘living well’.35
One advantage of this specification of the final end, Aristotle says, is that it is broad
enough to capture the basic concept of a final end shared among the various schools of
thought that offer widely diverging descriptions of it.36 Some people say that flourishing
comes from business and money-making, he says, and some that it comes from pleasure and
enjoyment, but all are agreed that the point of offering such a description is to get a better
understanding of what flourishing involves. But while there is broad agreement, Aristotle
says, that the final end is a flourishing life, that construal of the final end also brings with it a
number of constraints that are formal, yet informative enough to adjudicate between these
many competing descriptions of flourishing.37 The problem with a money-making account of
flourishing, Aristotle says, is not the content of that account, but the fact that the good life
depends on what I do and what sort of person I am, while a money-making life is too
fundamentally bound up with my circumstances. Such a life could simply be given to me; it
doesn’t involve my agency and my character—it doesn’t involve me—in the right way. Those
circumstances are also much more unstable than I need the basis of the goodness in my life to
be. And of course money-making is not a sufficiently ‘final’ kind of goal, since money is
always for the sake of something else. For all these reasons, reflection even at the formal
level both demands and facilitates reassessment of taking money-making as a reason for
12
organizing one’s life, given that a final end should unify one’s other goals, and keep one from
being too dependent for one’s flourishing on external circumstances.
So one’s reason to live a good life as a whole can be a framework for reflecting on
one’s other reasons, that is both informative enough to be pertinent to reflection on one’s
reasons, and formal enough to leave us free to reflect for ourselves. Of course, to say that
such a framework is informative is not to say that it settles all questions, or should.38
Responsibility does not require that reflection on one’s reasons must take every reasonable
person to the same conclusions.39 All we require is a framework for gaining critical distance
from our reasons, without being held in the grip of the fixed points that constitute the
framework. On a eudaemonist account of the fixed points of reflection, those fixed points do
not make reflection unfree, but salient for the kind of being that is doing the reflecting.
Conclusion. We have identified the capacity for critical distance from one’s
characteristic reasons as what makes the notion of responsibility for character appropriate to
normal adult human beings. And in such normal adult human beings, critical distance is
gained within a reflective framework that, so far from keeping one in its grip, sets one free to
reflect in a way that one can make one’s own. To be sure, several further issues remain in
thinking about the relation between critical distance from characteristic reasons on the one
hand and responsibility for character on the other. One concerns character traits like
indolence, which can block self-construction because of the very sort of trait that it is.
Another concerns whether one’s moral luck in having been better prepared than others for
self-construction compromises one’s responsibility for such self-construction and its results.40
I cannot address these issues here, but even so it seems sufficiently clear that the human
capacity for reflection on reasons for reasons makes us responsible enough that the general
notion of adult responsibility for traits should come out from under any cloud of suspicion.
13
Works Cited
Annas, J., The Morality of Happiness (Oxford, 1994).
----------, ‘Virtue Ethics: What Kind of Naturalism’, in S. Gardiner, ed., Virtue Ethics, Old and New (Cornell,
2005).
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. D. Ross, revised by J. L. Ackrill & J. O. Urmson (Oxford, 1980).
Audi, R., ‘Responsible Action and Virtuous Character’, Ethics 101, 1991, pp. 304-21.
----------, ‘Acting for Reasons’, in A. R. Mele, ed., The Philosophy of Action (Oxford, 1997).
Frankfurt, H., ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, in G. Watson, ed., Free Will, 2nd ed. (Oxford,
2003).
Ginet, C., ‘Reasons Explanation of Action: An Incompatibilist Account’, in A. R. Mele, ed., The Philosophy of
Action (Oxford, 1997).
Glover, J., The Philosophy and Psychology of Personal Identity (Allen Lane, 1988).
Harman, G., The Nature of Morality (Oxford, 1977).
----------, ‘Practical Reasoning’, in A. R. Mele, ed., The Philosophy of Action (Oxford, 1997).
Homiak, M., ‘On the Malleability of Character’, in C. Card, ed., On Feminist Ethics and Politics (University
Press of Kansas, 1999).
Hursthouse, R., ‘The Virtuous Agent’s Reasons: A Reply to Bernard Williams’, in R. Heinaman, ed., Aristotle
and Moral Realism (Westview, 1995).
----------, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 1999).
Kane, R., ‘Two Kinds of Incompatibilism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, 1989, pp. 219-54.
----------, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford, 1996).
Korsgaard, C., ‘Aristotle on Function and Virtue’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 3, 1986, pp. 259-79.
Kupperman, J., Character (Oxford, 1991).
Levy, N., ‘Are We Responsible for Our Characters?’, Ethica 1, 2002, pp. 115-32.
Moody-Adams, M., ‘On the Old Saw that Character is Destiny’, in O. Flanagan and A. O. Rorty, eds., Identity,
Character and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology (MIT, 1990)
Moriarty, J., ‘Desert and Distributive Justice in A Theory of Justice’, Journal of Social Philosophy 2002, pp.
131-43.
Nagel, T., ‘Moral Luck’, in T. Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1979).
Rachels, J., ‘What People Deserve’, in Can Ethics Provide Answers? (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971).
Sher, G., ‘Effort, Ability, and Personal Desert’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1979, pp. 361-76.
----------, ‘Blame for Traits’, Nous 35, 2001, pp. 146-61.
Smith, M., ‘A Theory of Freedom and Responsibility’, in G. Cullity and B. Gaut, eds., Ethics and Practical
Reason (Oxford, 1997).
Strawson, G., ‘The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility’, in G. Watson, ed., Free Will, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2003).
Strawson, P., ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in P. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment (Methuen, 1974).
Taylor, C., ‘Responsibility for Self’, in G. Watson, ed., Free Will, 1st ed. (Oxford, 1982).
Trianosky, G., ‘Natural Affection and Responsibility for Character: A Critique of Kantian Views of the Virtues’,
in O. Flanagan and A. O. Rorty, eds., Identity, Character and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology
(MIT, 1990).
Wallace, R. J., ‘Reason and Responsibility’, in G. Cullity and B. Gaut, eds., Ethics and Practical Reason
(Oxford, 1997).
Watson, G., ‘Free Agency’, in G. Watson, ed., Free Will, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2003).
White, S., The Unity of the Self (Cambridge 1991).
Wolf, S., ‘Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility’, in F. Schoeman, ed., Responsibility, Character, and
the Emotions (Cambridge, 1987).
----------, Freedom within Reason (Oxford, 1990).
Notes
1
I shall confine my discussion to character traits, although a fuller discussion of traits would consider skills and
talents as well. It is important to keep this point clear, since, as Gregory Trianosky (1990: 95) points out,
questions of one’s responsibility for a trait matter more in our estimation of a person’s character traits (e.g. one’s
benevolence) than in other sorts of traits, such as ‘dexterity in business’, to use Hume’s phrase. Moreover, I
shall consider only those character traits in virtue of which one characteristically finds certain things to be
reason-giving. Such a focus of scope shall be necessary in an essay of modest length, but is still broad enough to
include such character traits as the virtues, at least as Aristotelians have understood them (see esp. Rosalind
Hursthouse (1995)).
14
Kane (1989: 231f, 225f). Although Kane has less to say about responsibility for one’s character, he does seem
to recognize that his commitment to an absolute conception of responsibility will apply there too, holding that
‘everyday’ actions resulting from character are free ‘insofar as we were responsible for forming our character
and motives in the past by making free choices that did satisfy’ such conditions (1989: 252, emphasis in
original).
3
Strawson (2003); see also Thomas Nagel (1979: 35). Since Strawson refers to such a state of responsibility as
being ‘truly responsible’ for one’s traits, he holds that one is either responsible all the way down, or not
responsible in any bona fide sense. ‘Nothing can be causa sui, and in order to be truly morally responsible for
one’s actions one would have to be causa sui, at least in certain crucial mental respects.’ Strawson (2003: 226).
4
So too argues Nagel (1979: 26, 28, 34).
5
It seems deeply problematic that this conception of responsibility is out of sorts with joint responsibility for
shared activities and projects, especially since the sharing of activities and projects is so much of what makes
them important in our lives, and is often valued for its own sake, as it is between friends. Thanks to [XXX] for
this point. Moreover, Michele Moody-Adams (1990: 127-9) argues compellingly that both the development and
the change of character is highly social and cooperative. It seems to me beyond question that the very existence
of anything that could be called a ‘self’ in a human being must be the result of joint effort. No wonder that Nagel,
who evidently works with the absolute conception, says that ‘The area of genuine agency, and therefore of
legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless point. … Eventually nothing
remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger
sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised.’ (1979: 35, 37)
Consequently, our ‘basic moral attitudes’ are threatened ‘when we see how everything we do belongs to a world
that we have not created’. (1979: 38)
Perhaps for such reasons, Kane has moved away from glossing ultimate responsible as a form of sole
responsibility:
‘Being responsible for any sufficient reason’ of one’s action does not mean the agent has to be the
complete or sole cause of the sufficient reason. If a sufficient reason for a present action consisted of a
combination of antecedent circumstances and laws of nature, including character traits and motives of
the agent, then to be responsible for it, the agent only has to be responsible for some of the antecedent
circumstances, character traits, or motives that would have made a difference to the present action, had
they been different. The agent must be responsible for these conditions’ not being different than they
are. … What is not allowed by [ultimacy] is that the action have a sufficient reason such that there is
nothing the agent could have ever voluntarily done that would have made it different than it is. (Kane
(1996: 73f)
Nonetheless, what I have argued are the two most problematic features of the notion of ultimate responsibility
still remain. (1) On Kane’s view, responsibility still seems to require disaggregation into what one is solely
responsible for. Kane argues that one can be responsible for how one is, even when other factors have
contributed, insofar as how one is can be traced to certain ‘self-forming actions’ (including omissions) for which
one has ‘sole authorship’ and thus can claim ‘underived origination’ (Kane (1996: 74-80).) And so (2) for Kane
the question of responsibility is a still a question of responsibility for origins, which he tackles on two fronts. (a)
Kane (see 1996: chapters 8-10) argues that agents are responsible for actions and traits by making the agent an
originator in virtue of ‘self-forming willings’: acts of will that are undetermined by one’s reasons in advance of
choosing, but are explained by one’s reasons when they are chosen (and are such that, if one had chosen the
other alternative(s), those would have been similarly explained, as well). Moreover, (b) Kane (1996: 181) argues
that that there is in fact prior responsibility in childhood, and that this contributes to responsibility in adulthood.
6
Strawson (2003: 215-18) and Kane (1996: chapter 6) each argue that the absolute conception is central to our
common understanding of responsibility. But while they succeed in showing that we commonly think that
people construct themselves, I do not think that they show that we think people construct themselves in the way
the absolute conception requires. As Harry Frankfurt (2003: 336 n. 10) says, ‘There is a difference between
being fully responsible and being solely responsible’ (emphasis in original), such that an agent can be fully
responsible for something without being solely responsible for it.
7
Rawls (1971: 104).
8
The tie between desert and responsibility is encapsulated in James Rachels’ (1997: 180) statement that ‘if
people were never responsible for their own conduct … no one would ever deserve anything’. See also Jeffrey
Moriarty (2002: 134). It is tempting to suppose that Rawls holds that no one deserves anything (Rachels (1997:
181) seems to suggest this), but Rawls argues only that no one is deserving of superiority in traits. See George
Sher (1979) for careful discussion of the comparative nature of the desert claims that Rawls seeks to undermine.
Nor does Rawls abandon the notion of deserving. On the contrary, Rawls says that ‘the more fortunate have a
claim to their better situation’ when they have done ‘what the system announces that it will reward’, so long as
2
15
that system is ‘a just system of cooperation as a scheme of public rules’; Rawls (1971: 103; see also 137, 140).
See Moriarty (2002) for an excellent discussion.
9
Rawls (1971: 103, 313f). In point of fact, Rawls speaks in these passages of entitlements rather than deserts.
However, his point is not merely that just institutions reward what they announce they will reward, but that their
doing so satisfies what is a legitimate expectation of reward given what those institutions have announced. His
point, then, seems to be the preservation of a sense of one’s getting what one deserves, in this special sense. See
also Moriarty (2002).
10
Moreover, Rawls holds that responsibility comes in degrees because responsibility can be shared: while
character ‘depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which [one] can claim no
credit’ (Rawls (1971: 104); see Moriarty (2002: 136)), for Rawls this does not show that no one is responsible
for his character at all. Likewise, a contributor to a research project may have some responsibility for the project,
but it can be open to dispute whether he or she is responsible enough for the project to warrant joint authorship.
I thank [XXX] for the example. Note that the fact that the threshold conception is much closer to our common
notion of responsibility is an especially important point for Rawls, who explicitly ties his case to our considered
beliefs about desert and, I take it, responsibility.
11
See also Moody-Adams (1990: 128f), who objects to such an assumption regarding the process of taking
responsibility for oneself.
12
In particular, I shall consider the views of Frankfurt, Gary Watson, Charles Taylor, and Susan Wolf, who
argue in different ways that responsibility stems from our ability to align our actions with some sort of deeper
values, broadly speaking. I shall leave aside other ways of connecting responsibility to reasoning, such as the
view that action done for a reason is ‘free’ or ‘voluntary’ in some sense (see Robert Audi (1997: 93f) for
discussion; see also Carl Ginet (1997)), as well as the view that ‘Reason’ is a transcendent force in virtue of
which one is free (see Strawson (2003: 225f) for discussion).
13
In R. Jay Wallace’s (1997: 324) phrase, ‘reasons for action just are considerations that have deliberative
significance’. As Michael Smith (1997: 307f) notes, brainwashing makes one immune from responsibility not
by making one incapable of acting on one’s desires, but by giving one desires that are ‘beyond revision’,
diminishing ‘the capacity an agent has rationally to evaluate alternative hypotheses’. Motivating forces that are
beyond our capacity for rational reflection are not reasons for which we act. See also Sher (2001: 151), who
characterizes vice as a lack of responsiveness to (some range of) moral reasons.
Now although critical distance is here understood as critical distance from what one characteristically
finds reason-giving, we should not suppose that critical distance is gained only by reasoning. (See Marcia
Homiak (1999: 66-72).) Nonetheless, I shall focus on practical reasoning here for two reasons. One, it is
important to distinguish between critical distance from one’s character and critical distance from one’s
characteristic reasons, since reflection on the fact that one has a certain character trait is not yet to reflect on
one’s reasons as these are bound up with that character trait. And two, the nature of practical reasoning raises its
own questions about responsibility, as we shall see below.
14
Putting the issue this way is deliberately ‘Rawlsian’, since Rawls argues that reflective equilibrium allows us
to gain critical distance from our attitudes about justice, while starting from those very attitudes. See Rawls
(1971: § 4).
15
This idea dates back to Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE) I.7, 1097b22-1098a20, and is prominent in the
work of contemporary philosophers like Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse (see esp. Hursthouse (1999:
chapters 8-11)); see also Julia Annas (2005) for critical discussion of this idea. It is important to see that
although Aristotle discusses characteristic human activity as the human ‘function’ (ergon), this idea need not be
teleological (as neo-Aristotelian naturalism shows), or rely on questionable analogies with artifacts (see Gilbert
Harman (1977: 14-17) for critique of such analogies).
16
See Aristotle, Politics I.13, 1260a14.
17
According to Aristotle (see NE I.13), humans are ‘theoretical’ reasoners needing reasons to believe, and
‘practical’ reasoners needing reasons to choose, act, feel, and desire. (Aristotle explores the virtues of theoretical
and of practical reasoning in NE VI. See also Harman (1997) for discussion of general overlap between
theoretical reasoning (‘what to believe’) and practical reasoning (‘what to intend’).)
18
As Strawson would put the point, when one has not ‘consciously and explicitly chosen to be the way one is,
mentally speaking’. See Strawson (2003: 213; see also 220f).
19
Rawls himself recognizes this fact about reflection: rational agents, he says, don’t simply take their current
desires and aversions as given, but scrutinize them by examining how they have been acquired, so as to
determine what reasons, if any, they have for those desires and aversions, as they consider what plan for their
lives they have reason to adopt now. Such reflection is about how to move forward, and even when it looks at
how we have become as we are, this is primarily because we need to know whether we have reason to go on
being as we are. This is so even—or rather, especially—when reflection reveals that a merely causal history has
made me as I am now. Rawls (1971: § 64). Likewise, as Taylor (1982: 111) has said, part of personhood is the
16
ability to ask ‘Do I really want to be what I now am? (i.e. have the desires and goals I now have?) In other
words, beyond the de facto characterization of the subject by his goals, desires, and purposes, a person is a
subject who can pose the de jure question: is this the kind of being I ought to be, or really want to be?’ Taylor
connects this sort of query to Frankfurt’s (2003) notion of the ‘capacity for reflective self-evaluation’. See also
Audi (1991: 309).
20
This notion is captured famously in Neurath’s analogy of sailors repairing their boat at sea, mending and
replacing some parts while the others keep the whole boat afloat.
21
See Rawls (1971: 19-22).
22
See also Stephen White (1991: 201ff), and Joel Kupperman (1991: 54-8), who also cites Jonathan Glover
(1988: 135, 136, 179).
23
As Homiak (1999) astutely notices, the sorts of things that prompt character change, and that enable the
capacity for it, are often highly social in nature.
24
As we have seen, Strawson (2003: 214) argues that ‘both the particular way in which one is moved to try to
change oneself, and the degree of one’s success in one’s attempt at change, will be determined by how one
already is as a result of heredity and previous experience’. Even Strawson allows that we can reflect selfconsciously; his worry is not that such reflection is impossible, but that it is not effective with respect to
acquiring responsibility for the self on which one reflects. See Neil Levy (2002) for both sorts of worries.
25
It may also be worth noting that traits from which one can be incapable of critical distance need not be bad
traits. A person with an extremely mild temper, e.g., may be just as incapable of reflecting on that trait, of seeing
positive feedback to this trait as a reason to endorse it, etc. One must come to ‘own’ good traits as well as bad,
and in either case the inability to do so may suggest lack of responsibility for those traits.
26
For, as Kupperman (1991: 57) points out, ‘we generally can control our immediate reactions to changes in
circumstances and how we act on various particular occasions, and these cumulatively do have a lot to do with
changes in character.’
27
See Moody-Adams (1990: 127f), who argues persuasively that formative experiences are ‘a condition of the
possibility of responsible agency’, since human social interaction both shapes ‘our constitutive ideals and
purposes’ (consider the ends that those ‘raised’ in the wild would be incapable of), and gives a framework of
parameters within which choice can be made. However, Moody-Adams points out that these influences are not
like other factors (e.g. ignorance, coercion) that constrain responsibility, since one can overcome the limitations
of the former by ‘self-evaluation and self-correction’.
28
I.e. at least where those incorrigible traits are concerned. The notion of ‘reactive attitudes’ stems of course
from Peter Strawson’s seminal (1974).
Levy (2002) argues that since the ‘truly bad’ person is incapable of effective reflection in these sorts of
ways, that person is not responsible for his or her traits. I think Levy and I shall disagree over his analysis of the
‘truly bad’ person, but not over what an agent would have to be like to be incapable of critical distance from,
and thus of responsibility for, character.
29
This is not to say that critical distance alone suffices to make any given individual responsible for a particular
character trait, since critical distance is where character construction only begins. My aim has been to show that
character construction does have a beginning, from which one can take responsibility for one’s character.
30
See Wolf (1987), (1990: chapter 2).
31
Frankfurt (2003) argues that responsibility stems from the capacity of persons to transcend ‘first-order’
desires, and to formulate the ‘second-order volition’ that one have a certain desire, and that it be from that desire
that one act. Frankfurt argues, then, that persons can be responsible because of their capacity to reflect in a
structured way, moving ‘back’ reflectively from one’s momentary desires to a perspective on them from one’s
more fundamental commitments. Likewise, Watson (2003) has argued that responsibility requires the capacity
to reflect against the backdrop of one’s considered ‘values’, and to align one’s motivations with those values.
And Taylor argues that at the deepest level we reflect in terms of fundamental ‘evaluations’ which are unchosen
in the sense that they take a definite shape only as we articulate them for ourselves (Taylor (1982: 122-6), and
thus ‘shape our sense of what we desire or what we hold important in a certain way’ (1982: 123).
32
This problem will infect even Wolf’s (1990) ‘reason view’, on which the feature of human persons in virtue
of which the notion of responsibility is applicable to them, is the capacity to act from right reason. But of course
right reason operates within a framework, and so the skeptic’s question is whether that framework is compatible
with our being responsible for the course or results of our reasoning. It is perhaps for some reason such as this
that Taylor (1982: 124) argues that when we arrive at our deepest volitions and values, we had better not arrive
at something that is already fixed for us and which is beyond our revision. Likewise, Rawls (1971: 20) says that
‘even the judgments we take provisionally as fixed points are liable to revision’. Even so, the question will
remain whether even one’s basic but as yet ‘unarticulated’ evaluations may have one in their grip, a grip from
which even ‘articulation’ and ‘revision’ cannot release one.
17
33
As noted above, Aristotle believes that what is distinctive of human nature and activity is our ability to shape
and direct our activity by reason, that is, to live ‘an active life of the element that has a rational principle’; see
NE I.7, 1097b23-1098a20, the so-called ‘function argument’. For a good discussion of this argument, see
Christine Korsgaard (1986), who understands the force of this argument to be the view that the fulfillment of our
capacities for practical rationality is what makes us fully human. Accordingly, Aristotle says, good human
activity is ‘the good and noble performance of … activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle’
(NE I.7, 1098a13-14), which is action done in accordance with human ‘excellence’, or virtue.
34
See NE I.1-2. For a discussion of a final end as an end that unifies and organizes other ends, see Annas (1994:
chapter 1) and references.
35
See NE I.4-5. We can recognize with Watson (2003: 346) the ‘fiction’ of the assertion that people generally
do display the level of hierarchy and structure within their goals and reasons that such reflection would make
possible. But the point of Aristotle’s talk of the systematization of one’s goals and reasons under eudaemonist
reflection is, I think, rather to elucidate the structure of that sort of reflection.
36
See NE I.4-5.
37
This is the notion of formal constraints on the concept of eudaimonia, which Aristotle introduces in NE I.5
and develops more fully in I.7.
38
Even Aristotle, who argues that the formal constraints on flourishing pick out a unique conception of
flourishing (activity in accordance with excellence, provided with adequate external goods, NE I.10, 1101a1416), does not seem to think that the formal constraints close all debate on what flourishing is. In fact, his own
view is not so much concluded as proposed: ‘Why then should we not say that …’.
39
Con. Smith (1997: 316) who argues that ‘Reflection can confer a special status on a desire only if the desire
so formed is special relative to that reflective process. But the only way in which desires could be special
relative to a reflective process is if, on the basis of such reflection, agents would all converge on the very same
desires’. This is so, Smith argues, because without this ‘rationalistic gloss’ on reflection, ‘the desires agents end
up with after reflection are function of the desires they actually have to begin with, the desires they were caused
to have by the forces of socialization and enculturation that made them what they are’. The notion of critical
distance from one’s reasons within a eudaemonist framework for reflection shows that this dichotomy is a false
one.
40
For Rawls’ view about indolence, see esp. Sher (1979), Rachels (1997: 180-6). For questions of moral luck,
see esp. Nagel (1979), as well as Rachels (1997: 182f).