Angela M. Smith

Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life*

I forgot a close friend’s birthday last year. A few days after the fact, I realized that this important date had come and gone without my so much as sending a card or giving her a call. I was mortified. What kind of a friend could forget such a thing? Within minutes I was on the phone to her, acknowledging my fault and offering my apologies. But what, exactly, was the nature of my fault in this case? After all, I did not consciously choose to forget this special day or deliberately decide to ignore it. I did not intend to hurt my friend’s feelings or even foresee that my conduct would have this effect. I just forgot. It didn’t occur to me. I failed to notice. And yet, despite the apparent involuntariness of this failure, there was no doubt in either of our minds that I was, indeed, responsible for it. Although my friend was quick to pardon my thoughtlessness and to dismiss it as trivial and unimportant, the act of pardoning itself is simply a way of renouncing certain critical responses which it is acknowledged would, in principle, be justified. Moments such as these—which for many of us, I imagine, are more common than we would like to admit—reveal a deep tension in our ordinary thinking about the conditions of moral responsibility. If asked, most of us would probably say that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of legitimate moral assessment. And yet, as the case above was meant to illustrate, we regularly do hold ourselves and others responsible for things that do not appear to reflect a conscious choice or decision. Indeed, we quite often respond to people’s spontaneous at-

Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: In Defense of a Unified Account*

In his recent article “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility,” David Shoemaker argues that our actual moral practices embody three distinct conceptions of responsibility and that some recent accounts of moral responsibility that draw their inspiration from the work of T. M. Scanlon fail to capture these distinct conceptions. My aim in this essay is to argue that our moral practices do not, in fact, embody three different conceptions of moral responsibility and that what Shoemaker aptly calls “responsibility as answerability” is indeed the only kind of moral responsibility there is.

Identification and Responsibility

There is a deep tension in our everyday practices of moral assessment. We tend to think, on the one hand, that people should be held responsible and morally accountable only for what they freely and knowingly choose to do — that is, for their voluntary actions and omissions. On the other hand, we regularly hold ourselves and others morally responsible for various intentional mental states (e.g. desires, emotions, and other attitudes) that seem, prima facie, to fall outside the scope of our immediate voluntary control. We sometimes blame people simply for having objectionable attitudes or vicious desires, for example, even when these arise spontaneously and even when they do not lead to the performance of morally objectionable actions.1 Thus our actual practices of moral assessment seem to conflict with what we often say, and seem to believe, about the conditions under which moral appraisal is legitimate.2

Responsibility as Answerability

ABSTRACT It has recently become fashionable among those who write on questions of moral responsibility to distinguish two different concepts, or senses, of moral responsibility via the labels ‘responsibility as attributability’ and ‘responsibility as accountability’. Gary Watson was perhaps the first to introduce this distinction in his influential 1996 article ‘Two Faces of Responsibility’ (in Agency and Answerability, 260–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), but it has since been taken up by many other philosophers. My aim in this study is to raise some questions and doubts about this distinction and to argue that it has led to confusion rather than clarification in debates over moral responsibility. In place of the attributability/accountability distinction, I propose that there is a single (and unified) concept of moral responsibility underlying our actual moral practices. This core notion of moral responsibility, which I call ‘responsibility as answerability’, is well positioned to explain those aspects of our moral practice that Watson associates with the ‘attributability’ face of moral responsibility as well as those aspects of our moral practice he associates with the ‘accountability’ face. But it does so in a way that does not require us to multiply senses of moral responsibility and that allows us to continue to have meaningful disagreements over the basic conditions of moral responsibility.