Like-Minded: Externalism and Moral Psychology

4. Rethinking the Reactive Attitudes: Attributing Moral Responsibility

4 Rethinking the Reactive Attitudes: Attributing Moral Responsibility This chapter is about the capacities required to attribute moral responsibility to ourselves and others. Suppose that someone does something nice for you. Flushed with gratitude, you thank the person for her benevolence. What are the cognitive capacities required for you to praise someone in this manner? Suppose that you steal from your neighbor. Your neighbor discovers this and flies into a rage, inveighing against you as a bad person. What cognitive capacities underlie such condemnation? This topic should be familiar, but it is overlooked in recent moral psychology. It is familiar both because of the regularity with which we attribute moral responsibility and because of some classic philosophical work on the subject. This chapter focuses on P. F. Strawson’s account of the attribution of moral responsibility. Strawson’s 1962 essay “Freedom and Resentment” provides a starting point for many discussions of moral responsibility.1 Nevertheless, this topic is rarely treated as an important part of an account of our core moral-psychological capacities. It barely appears in recent empirically informed books about moral psychology. John Doris addresses it a bit in chapter 7 of his 2002 book Lack of Character, but mainly in terms of what it is to be responsible. That is, Doris does not address the capacities by which we attribute moral responsibility to each other. Experimental philosophers have taken a look at this subject in connection with the concepts of freedom and responsibility. Perhaps this relative neglect is understandable. We reason about attributions of moral responsibility, so it may be reasonable to think that studies of moral reasoning subsume moral responsibility. It is easy to assume that seeing someone as morally responsible is no different, psychologically, from seeing someone as a human, or a person, or a neighbor, or a baker. That is, it is easy to assume that seeing people as morally responsible is only one way of characterizing people 112 Chapter 4 among many other psychologically equivalent ways, and that this particular way of seeing people may be captured by studies of moral judgment. However, Strawson’s work gives us reason to question such subsumption of moral responsibility under other topics. Strawson draws our attention to the psychological richness of attributions of moral responsibility. He presents the attribution of moral responsibility as drawing on affective capacities and on capacities for interpersonal interaction. Its psychological richness makes this topic a good one for direct treatment within empirically minded examinations of our moral psychology. Understanding this psychologically rich territory cannot be done by philosophy alone; it requires the empirical resources of psychology. This topic has not yet received a definitive interdisciplinary treatment. I will not give it one in this chapter. However, I will draw on recent work in both psychology and empirically minded philosophy in pursuit of more modest aims, which are to sharpen our view of the psychological capacities required by our practices of attributing moral responsibility and to develop a hypothesis about the extent to which these capacities are realized in wide psychological systems. This discussion takes us through deep waters via a circuitous route, but this is apt for doing justice to the psychological richness of moral responsibility. 4.1 The Wide Moral Systems Hypothesis and Attributions of Moral Responsibility Here is a look at the structure of the discussion that will follow and at the view I will eventually defend. My foil in this chapter is a reconstruction of Strawson’s position that I call the Tempting View. Those who take that position hold that having feelings of certain kinds is both necessary and sufficient to attribute moral responsibility. The feelings in question are located within the physical boundaries of individual agents. I will examine the sufficiency claim and the necessity claim of the Tempting View, and will find both claims wanting. In place of the Tempting View, I will offer a view of attributions of moral responsibility with four tenets: The feelings emphasized by Strawson are indeed important to attributions of responsibility, but having such feelings is neither necessary nor sufficient to make such attributions Rethinking the Reactive Attitudes 113 We attribute moral responsibility in various ways, using diverse psychological capacities. Some of these capacities are locationally wide. The psychology of attributions of moral responsibility has a thin unifying thread in our mind-reading capacities. Mind reading is necessary for attributions of moral responsibility. This...