Benn-Ding the Rules of Resentment

Benn’s interesting paper on the moral significance of psychopaths brings to our attention the problem raised so clearly by Elliott in a previous issue of this journal, when he asked about the grounding of moral attitudes in relation to personality disorders (1994). Elliott drew to our attention Wittgenstein’s ploy of considering the incommensurable attitudes we employ in our dealings with things as distinct from people. Benn, on the basis of Strawson’s contrast between objective and reactive attitudes, poses the same problem and asks whether psychopaths should be considered to fall into quasi-mechanistic and therefore non-moral modes of being as a result of some incapacity in the faculties of interpersonal sensibility that most of us share.

Benn warms up by considering the debate between natural kind theorists about psychiatric disorders and those who opt for a more “nominal kind” view. What is at stake here could be crudely put by crediting natural kind theorists with the claim that natural kinds, when correctly identified, “carve nature at its joints,” or tell us about the world independent of human knowledge of it, the world of nature as it is in itself. This view is generally contrasted with any view that argues that such things as psychiatric disorders are humanly produced constructions that we have put onto a world of phenomena as we experience them. A lot turns on this distinction because the idea that one has identified a natural kind carries a presupposition that once one has identified the kind in question, investigating it further will lead one to see how the natural or biophysical world has produced it. Thus, if mammals are a natural kind, for instance, then we might set about investigating how their distinctive features have been produced within the animal kingdom. For a disease fitting this model one might go about trying to find the impersonal pathophysiological processes which lead to its occurrence—for instance, one might notice that cervical cancer is linked to viral infection of the female genito-urinary tract. On the other hand, if we decide that a process is a nominal kind, then we need look no further than linguistic practices in investigating it. We will, on that basis, try and look for its origin in certain social or discursive practices where the condition is named and commonly provokes interests.

However, many philosophers believe that such a clean divide in the furniture of the world is, in general, not to be had. Many features of events only present themselves to suitably interested human beings, but are real nonetheless and cause effects in the world of nature. Psychological conditions are prominent candidates for this ambiguous role (as Ian Hacking has noted, 1996). The belief that it is “hip to be cool” has a clear behavioral effect on a number of young people; the idea that one shares something with all people sharing one’s own nationality also has a widespread effect. But we can see immediately that these are human productions or artifacts. The thing is that they change people and, because they are deeply ingrained and acted upon, they must change the microprocessing shape of people’s brains. Thus we ourselves are products not only of unaided nature, but also of what has been called “second nature” (McDowell 1994), the domain of human activity in which our young are raised and molded according to our own practices. With psychiatric disorder as with other aspects and conditions of the human psyche, therefore, we are faced with no clear divide between “natural kinds” and “nominal kinds.” It is against this ambiguity that we could reformulate the question about the extent to which psychopaths are caused to act by factors over which they do not have control, and the extent to which engaging them with our normal, normative practices is therefore liable to be justified and effective (only for a consequentialist are those two things the same).

Benn appears at one point to be angling for metaphysical justifications and chides Strawson for his (Humean) evasion of the issue. But if we consider that all our categories and classifications are, à la Hume...