Causation and Responsibility
Carolina Sartorio2007, Philosophy Compass
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Abstract
In this article I examine the relation between causation and moral responsibility. I distinguish four possible views about that relation. One is the standard view: the view that an agent's moral responsibility for an outcome requires, and is grounded in, the agent's causal responsibility for it. I discuss several challenges to the standard view, which motivate the three remaining views. The final viewthe view I argue for -is that causation is the vehicle of transmission of moral responsibility. According to this view, although moral responsibility does not require causation, causation still grounds moral responsibility.
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According to the conventional view, causal and moral responsibility have a strict hierarchical relationship. Determining causal responsibility comes first; then we sort through the factors to which we have assigned causal responsibility and determine which, if any, should be assigned moral responsibility too. Moral inquiry accordingly stands not only apart but also above causal inquiry. But I am going to argue that this way of looking at causal and moral responsibility is a mistake. Rather than being separate and independent inquires with different purposes and concerns, I am going to argue that finding causal responsibility actually entails finding moral responsibility even when there is no evidence of what we would call traditional fault. Indeed, I am going to argue we cannot find someone causally responsible without finding them morally responsible too.
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Philosophic Exchange, 2010
Our lives intertwine with praise and blame in ways both simple and complex. If you ask me to pick up your child after work, and I fail to do so even after promising that I would, you will very likely be angry at me. This is not the irritation we experience when the weather is chilly or when we don't win the lottery. This attitude is directed at a specific person, ordinarily a (somewhat) aware and responsive being. That is, you are presuming that I am a particular kind of entity, a responsive, choice-making agent. It is partly in virtue of this fact that your reaction of irritation has its distinctive flavor; unlike bad weather or unreliable lottery drawings, I can knowingly and willingly bind myself with commitments that we both take to license blaming when I fail to live up to them. In short, I am a special kind of entity-a responsible agent. In virtue of my conduct, I can be worthy of praise and blame. These moralized reactions are not limited to interpersonal relationships. People spend years in prison, beyond what is plausibly useful for rehabilitation, and usually to the exclusion of victim restitution, out of an oftentimes inchoate or implicit conviction that criminals deserve punishment in light of their culpable failure to exercise their agency in the right ways. Indeed, it is difficult to make sense of the impulse to execute criminals without appeal to some notion of deservingness bound up in the idea that the criminal is morally responsible for his crime in some deep way. So, moral responsibility, the idea of praiseworthiness, blameworthiness, and associated notions of merit are all important parts of our shared lives. This picture, however, is threatened by a very familiar chain of reasoning. The reasoning goes like this: if everything is caused, no one is genuinely free, and thus, no one can be genuinely morally responsible for anything. It is a very old argument. 1 Versions of it have been banging around in the Western intellectual tradition for millennia, and every age has its favorite formulation of it. Perhaps the most common contemporary incarnation of
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In discussions of moral responsibility for collectively produced effects, it is not uncommon to assume that we have to abandon the view that causal involvement is a necessary condition for individual co-responsibility. In general, considerations of cases where there is "a mismatch between the wrong a group commits and the apparent causal contributions for which we can hold individuals responsible" motivate this move. According to Brian Lawson, "solving this problem requires an approach that deemphasizes the importance of causal contributions". Christopher Kutz's theory of complicitious accountability in Complicity from 2000 is probably the most well-known approach of that kind. Standard examples are supposed to illustrate mismatches of three different kinds: an agent may be morally coresponsible for an event to a high degree even if her causal contribution to that event is a) very small, b) imperceptible, or c) non-existent (in overdetermination cases). From such examples, Kutz and others conclude that principles of complicitious accountability cannot include a condition of causal involvement. In the present paper, I defend the causal involvement condition for co-responsibility. These are my lines of argument: First, overdetermination cases can be accommodated within a theory of coresponsibility without giving up the causality condition. Kutz and others oversimplify the relation between counterfactual dependence and causation, and they overlook the possibility that causal relations other than marginal contribution could be morally relevant. Second, harmful effects are sometimes overdetermined by noncollective sets of acts. Over-farming, or the greenhouse effect, might be cases of that kind. In such cases, there need not be any formal organization, any unifying intentions, or any other noncausal criterion of membership available. If we give up the causal condition for coresponsibility it will be impossible to delimit the morally relevant set of acts related to those harms. Since we sometimes find it fair to blame people for such harms, we must question the argument from overdetermination.
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In the paper, I try to cast some doubt on traditional attempts to defi ne, or explicate, moral responsibility in terms of deserved praise and blame. Desert-based accounts of moral responsibility, though no doubt more faithful to our ordinary notion of moral responsibility, tend to run into trouble in the face of challenges posed by a deterministic picture of the world on the one hand and the impact of moral luck on human action on the other. Besides, grounding responsibility in desert seems to support ascriptions of pathological blame to agents trapped in moral dilemmas as well as of excess blame in cases of joint action. Desert is also notoriously diffi cult, if not impossible, to determine (at least with suffi cient precision). And fi nally, though not least important, recent empirical research on people's responsibility judgments reveals our common-sense notion of responsibility to be hopelessly confused and easily manipulated.
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Some writers, such as John Fischer and Michael McKenna, have recently claimed that an agent can be morally responsible for a wrong action and yet not be blameworthy for that action. A careful examination of the claim, however, suggests two readings. On one reading, there are further conditions on blameworthiness beyond freely and wittingly doing wrong. On another innocuous reading, there are no such further conditions. Despite Fischer and McKenna's attempts to offer further conditions on blameworthiness in addition to responsibility for wrongdoing, I argue that only the innocuous reading is plausible. Once we distinguish between blame being deserved and blame being all-things-considered appropriate, we need not appeal to further conditions on blameworthiness. This discussion has important upshots regarding how compatibilists respond to certain manipulation arguments and how proponents of derived responsibility respond to criticism that agents are responsible even for outcomes that are not reasonably foreseeable.
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Inquiry, 2015
Philosophers have been concerned with and puzzled by the nature of responsibility at least since Aristotle's time. What does it take to be a responsible agent? Under what conditions is it justifiable to hold someone responsible for her character or behavior? Notoriously, it seems to many that genuine responsibility requires a kind of metaphysical freedom that is hard to understand much less believe in, while others insist that no such metaphysical freedom is necessary. A common way of introducing the subject calls attention to two senses of responsibility. Sometimes when we say "X is responsible for Y' we mean only to name a causal connection: X is an individual or a state of affairs that makes a salient causal contribution to the occurrence of Y. In this sense, your cat might be responsible for the spilled milk, the rain might be responsible for spoiling the picnic. By contrast, this paradigmatic introduction continues, when we charge an individual with moral responsibility, we mean something more. Like the cat, a person can be causally responsible for the spilled milk if she knocks over the bottle during an epileptic seizure; like the rain, a person can be causally responsible for spoiling the picnic if in the course of it she is stung by a bee and goes into anaphylactic shock. But a person might also spill the milk on purpose, wanting to ruin her host's tablecloth or disrupt the family brunch; she might spoil the picnic by her irritable carping or by rudely insulting the other guests. In these latter cases the person's connection to the event under discussion appears to reflect more deeply on her, and, at least initially, it does not seem inappropriate to blame her. These latter cases
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