Reactive Commitments

Abstracta, 2014

Philosophy has recently been presented with, and started to take seriously, sociological studies in which our 'folk concepts' are elaborated. The most interesting concepts studied are moral concepts, and results have been achieved that seem to sharply contradict the speculation of philosophers and to threaten the very way in which moral philosophy has been done in the past. In this paper, I consider these results and then sketch a version of a reactive attitude theory that allows for a genuine sense in which our intuitions about responsibility may be incoherent in a certain sense but without making moral reasoning radically contextual.

The Journal of Ethics, 2016

In his influential paper, ''Freedom and Resentment,'' P. F. Strawson argued that our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible and related reactive attitudes (such as blame, resentment, indignation, and moral approval) were wholly ''internal'' to the practices themselves and could be insulated from traditional philosophical and metaphysical concerns, including concerns about free will and determinism. This ''insulation thesis'' is a controversial feature of Strawson's influential paper; and it has had numerous critics. The first purpose of this paper is to explain my own reasons for thinking that our practices of holding responsible cannot be entirely insulated from incompatibilist concerns about freedom and determinism. The second purpose is to argue that these incompatibilist concerns are in fact legitimate concerns: There are sound reasons to believe that our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible do require at least sometimes in our lives that we must be capable of acting freely in a manner that is not determined. I defend this thesis by spelling out why I believe various compatibilist strategies attempting to show that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism fail to show this. In the course of this critique, a general theme will emerge: In order to do full justice to our ordinary practices of holding persons responsible and the freedoms thus involved, one must distinguish between different types of freedom, and in particular, between freedom of action and freedom of will.

In this paper, I present and defend a novel version of the Reactive Attitude account of moral blameworthiness. In Section 1, I introduce the Reactive Attitude account and outline Allan Gibbard's version of it. In Section 2, I present the Wrong Kind of Reasons Problem, which has been at the heart of much recent discussion about the nature of value, and explain why a reformulation of it causes serious problems for versions of the Reactive Attitude account such as Gibbard's. In Section 3, I consider some ways in which Gibbard might attempt to avoid the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem. I argue that all of these ways fail to achieve their aim and further contend that the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem cannot be solved in a sufficiently convincing manner by the widely used method of making ad hoc distinctions among kinds of properties, kinds of attitudes, and kinds of reasons. In Section 4, I sketch my own version of the Reactive Attitude account of moral blameworthiness and show that it simply avoids the Wrong Kind of Reason Problem rather than attempting to solve the problem on a piecemeal basis.

The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd ed., Robert Kane, ed. Oxford University Press. Pp. 199-220.

Throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century, the free-will debate was largely concerned with the question of what kind of freedom was required for moral responsibility and whether the kind of freedom required was compatible with the thesis of determinism. This issue was itself addressed primarily with reference to the question of how freedom is related to alternative possibilities and what the relevant analysis of “could have done otherwise” comes to. The discussion of these topics made little advance on the basic strategies and positions already developed and defended on either side of the compatibilist/incompatibilist divide in the preceding two centuries. When P. F. Strawson’s published his seminal article “Freedom and Resentment” in 1962 the dynamics of this debate were fundamentally altered. This is true both in respect of Strawson’s general methodology, which demands a more empirically informed approach, and in terms of his core conceptual framework, which identifies a different set of considerations and issues at the heart of this debate. In particular, whereas the traditional or classical debate focused on the problem of (moral) freedom, Strawson directed his attention to the role of moral sentiments or “reactive attitudes” as the key to understanding and resolving the core problems lying at the heart of this debate. This essay is devoted to a critical assessment of Strawson’s project and an analysis of the current debate concerning its prospects.

The main focus of moral theories has long been the ethics of rules and principles. However, another very different ethics complements and competes with it in American society. This chapter provides a theoretical framework for that ethics, locating it within the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition and supporting its claims with data from the cognitive and behavioral sciences. That framework is a complex dynamical systems approach to a moral situation. A systems approach locates a moral action in an agent's attunement to the complex of relationships among particular persons at a particular time when a choice takes place. A skillful moral judgment aims through its action to conserve such community building values as trust, respect, kindness, forgiveness, compassion, and generosity. In current society "responsibility" is the central concept used to discuss this relational ethics, in the forward-looking sense of "taking responsibility" in an evolving situation. The passive sense of "being held responsible" for violating a rule is very different. Since interpersonal relationships are the central variables in this moral system, the argument starts with a discussion of the social ontology of an interpersonal relationship and proceeds to its moral dimensions. This supports the description of the relational ethics framed in terms of prospective or active responsibility. Because this ethics is based on relations between persons rather than between parts within a person the traditional problem of a free mind moving a mechanical body is not applicable. An alternative metaphysics is proposed, based on the philosophy of George Herbert Mead and the research of Daniel Kahnemann. The final section illustrates how moral judgments look in a systems approach and considers systemic evil. The proposed theory is an extension into interpersonal relationships and morality of recent embodied enactive approaches to mental activities.

2008

In strawson's "Freedom and resentment", the idea of the reactive attitudes is used to provide a corrective for an over-intellectualised picture of moral responsibility and of the moral life generally. but strawson also tells us that in reasoning with someone our attitude towards them must be reactive. taking up that thought, I suggest that strawson has provided us with a corrective for an over-intellectualised picture of rationality. Drawing on a Wittgensteinian conception of the relation between thought and its expression, I argue that participation in a form of engagement with others that is reactive in strawson's sense is a condition of rationality.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Although we are sensitive to the advantages of reactive attitudes as a starting point, we are concerned that confusion on the level of analysis can easily plague this type of account. We defend that what is needed here is a serious appraisal of the effects on the promotion of values of moralistic responses towards different types of agency.

Sociological Theory, 2011

This article develops a research position that allows cultural sociologists to compare morality across sociohistorical cases. In order to do so, the article suggests focusing analytic attention on actions that fulfill the following criteria: (a) actions that define the actor as a certain kind of socially recognized person, both within and across fields; (b) actions that actors experience—or that they expect others to perceive—as defining the actor both intersituationally and to a greater extent than other available definitions of self; and (c) actions to which actors either have themselves, or expect others to have, a predictable emotional reaction. Such a position avoids both a realist moral sociology and descriptive-relativism, and provides sociologists with criteria for comparing moral action in different cases while staying attuned to social and historical specificity.

Abstract: This paper introduces a new theory of moral responsibility that does not rely on any concept of human control. Since an understanding of determin-ism shapes the possible set of views one can take regarding control, and there is no account of control that could be held simultaneously by both compatibilists and libertarians, the " relational theory of responsibility " is meant to create a common ground between compatibilism and libertarianism which are held to be mutually exclusive. Since the relational account of responsibility is to be a common ground, it must be neutral regarding the truth of determinism and indeterminism. Thus, it must also be indifferent concerning different concepts of control formed by compati-bilists and libertarians. I argue that my view can be accepted by both compatibilists and incompatibilists. It makes the claim that, in order for a person to be responsible, she has to act in a certain type of situation that needs to be such that there is at least one relevantly similar situation in which the agent (be she the same person or not) refrains from performing the action that was executed in the original case. A person cannot be held responsible for doing what she does if no person (including herself) refrains from performing that action in a relevantly similar situation. I claim that the relational theory of responsibility itself is sufficient for grounding responsibility. Since the relational account expresses responsibility without relying on any concept of control, a choice between determinism and indeterminism does not have to be made in order to establish a proper concept of moral responsibility .

Nous, 2001

Philosophers have long been interested in the relation between the world and the mind which strives to know it. In this paper I argue that there is also a deep question about the relation between the world and the agent who strives to act in it. The question is not primarily about the ...