From Moral Influence to Moral Autonomy: Responsibility Reconsidered
Abstract
The importance of moral responsibility transcends the confines of academic philosophy. It lies at the heart of our most basic notions about human agency, morality, and justice. It relates to trust and accountability at interpersonal and institutional levels and grounds many of our most enduring social and legal practices. Without the ability to act responsibly or answer for our actions, meaningful relationships and social cooperation do not seem possible. Concern for responsibility arguably motivates and guides our inquiry into free will. In this light, moral responsibility is the precondition for all that really matters and the hallmark of human moral agency. In holding responsible, it is thus thought, we affirm and uphold one another’s dignity.
This dissertation challenges this picture. In it, I suggest that what we really (ought to) care about, the true benchmark for moral agency, is moral autonomy. Responsibility, understood through the lens of our social practices of holding responsible, is important to ethical life, particularly with respect to social cooperation, but it is not the epitome of moral agency. Praise and blame attitudes and responses (reactive feedback) directly target our social-prudential sensitivities. Due to the link between sociality and morality, these sensitivities are important for moral agency, but they are not sufficient and, moreover, can sometimes lead us astray. Reactive feedback can draw our attention away from relevant moral considerations and foster extrinsic moral motivation.
The crucial feature of moral agency is a direct sensitivity to moral considerations, without reference to any audience’s reactive feedback (doing the right thing for the considerations that make it right, not because we are liable to blame for not doing it). Our responsibility practices, however, do not reliably track or foster this feature. We might be highly responsive to blame – apologize, change our behavior, etc., without ever attuning to the relevant moral considerations (considerations which make that blame fitting). In fact, doing the right thing sometimes requires that we go against this feedback (when our audience blames right action, e.g.). The relationship between these sensitivities is complex and warrants the careful investigation undertaken in this dissertation.
I argue that we should understand what it is to be responsible (responsible agency) in terms of what our practices are best suited to bring about. Their socially useful effects (norm compliance) have been noted by philosophers from Hobbes and Hume to Mill and Adam Smith. It is our susceptibility to these practices that gives rise to these effects and that thus constitutes responsible agency. It is this susceptibility that enables us to comply with normative demands and expectations and that makes it appropriate to hold us responsible when we transgress (or exceed) them. Although it is not enough for moral autonomy, which requires (a stronger) sensitivity to moral considerations, sensitivity to reactive feedback is necessary for responsiveness to the full range of moral considerations. Responsible agency is therefore an important part of the story of moral agency, but it is not the whole of it.