Against Moral Responsibility

Chapter 14. Creative Authorship without Ultimate Responsibility

14 When we give up belief in moral responsibility, we must give up the belief that blame and punishment can be justly deserved, which is a great bene fit—or so I claim in the following chapters. But even if one is convinced that rejection of justly deserved blame and punishment is a gain, a strong sense may remain that loss of ultimate responsibility is a grievous loss. Two philosophers who are among the most profound and insightful proponents of moral responsibility—Robert Kane and Saul Smilansky—would certainly feel the loss. They might respond, “Set aside the whole question of blame and punishment; we think it’s valuable, you think it’s harmful, but ignore that for the moment; concentrate on what else would be lost if we lose the ultimate responsibility that underpins just deserts.” Kane insists that the loss would be significant: “If I am ultimately responsible for certain occurrences in the universe, if the only explanation for their occurring rather than not is to be found in my rational will, then my choices and my life take on an importance that is missing if I do not have such responsibility” (1985, 178). Smilansky warns: Illusion is a buffer from threats to our self-conceptions and family relationships on the level of the meaning of our lives. If the ultimate perspective [of moral responsibility denial] is allowed to poison the appreciation of past concern and effort, or the acknowledgment of fault for past deeds or omissions, it is not only our functioning within families which can be harmed, but the very significance of our relationships and the value we achieve for ourselves within them. . . . Awareness of the ultimate inevitability of any level of functioning . . . darkens our fundamental ways of appreciating ourselves and others. (2000, 177; see also Smilansky 2005) The sense of loss that is of genuine concern to Kane and Smilansky (and many others) is not one that I share, so I am tempted to be dismissive: get over it. We’re not gods, we didn’t make ourselves, we’re not ultimately Creative Authorship without Ultimate Responsibility 258 Chapter 14 responsible, and I didn’t fulfill my youthful dream of being the starting quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, but I learned to deal with that reality, and it’s not so bad. I might (in my arrogance) be tempted to go further: you are suffering from an unwillingness to give up the autarchic fiction described by Freudian psychoanalysts. Infants initially believe that they are omnipotent (or at the very least, totally self-sufficient); this autarchic fiction is shattered by the discovery that they are dependent—that is, not in total control. That loss of the autarchic fiction is a traumatic experience that we must struggle to repair. Most of us make the repairs and move on, but some philosophers never cease their quest to recover omnipotence and ultimate responsibility. But even if I found Freud plausible (and I don’t), the discovery of a psychological cause for this ultimate responsibility quest would do nothing to prove its illegitimacy. In any case, such a dismissive attitude is hardly justified. After all, the concern raised by Kane and Smilansky is profound and important. Neither is motivated by a deep desire for retributive justice; they are not moved by desire for personal glory (if they are, then they stumbled into the wrong career path); and certainly, neither harbors a megalomaniacal passion to be apotheosized into deity status. Yet they are committed to the claim of and need for ultimate responsibility (even if Smilansky believes that the need can be fulfilled only through the embrace of illusion). The fundamental longing seems to be something like this: a desire to make a special unique impact on the world, a desire to contribute something more than the sum product of one’s causal history, a wish to be someone who is—for better or worse—something other than what is ground out by the wheels of one’s causal destiny. What We Accomplish Some of the great souls of history—King Solomon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, Albert Camus—have felt the force of this fundamental longing to accomplish something that transcends the causal powers that shaped us; that I do not reveals the poverty of my imagination rather than my superior insight. So this is a concern that should be addressed, however inadequately. We do not have the ultimate responsibility that is a necessary condition...