David Shoemaker

Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility

Recently T. M. Scanlon and others have advanced an ostensibly comprehensive theory of moral responsibility—a theory of both being responsible and being held responsible—that best accounts for our moral practices. I argue that both aspects of the Scanlonian theory fail this test. A truly comprehensive theory must incorporate and explain three distinct conceptions of responsibility—attributability, answerability, and accountability—and the Scanlonian view conflates the first two and ignores the importance of the third. To illustrate what a truly comprehensive theory might look like, I investigate what it would say about the difficult case of the psychopath.

Caring, identification, and agency

Any robust theory of free agency must account for its two central features, namely, the availability of alternative possibilities and selfdetermination (i.e., autonomy). I here wish to focus on this latter feature, specifically with respect to its treatment by compatibilists. For both classical (e.g., Hobbes or Hume) and contemporary compatibilists, free agency involves a dependence relation between a person’s actions and, roughly, that person’s wants. Where the two differ, however, is in their explication of the genuine wants of a person and the relation of those wants to self-determination. For the classical compatibilist, one’s will— one’s effective desire—just is one’s self. Thus, to be self-determined is to be determined by one’s will. The only possible impediments, then, to free action are external impediments, obstacles to the will of the self from forces outside the physical boundaries of the self. But this conception of free agency is recognized by contemporary compatibilists to be incomplete, for even though one’s externally unimpeded actions may depend on one’s will (one’s effective desire) in one sense, there is another crucial sense in which one’s actions may conflict with, or be independent of, what one really wants, a state of affairs illustrated most starkly by examples of compulsion or addiction. These are cases in which what moves one to action is not what one genuinely wants to be moved by, cases in which one’s autonomy is impeded not by anything external but by one’s own effective desires to the contrary.

Moral Address, Moral Responsibility, and the Boundaries of the Moral Community*

When we hold someone morally responsible for her actions, we are acknowledging, reiterating, or perhaps even making it the case that, among other things, she’s a member of a particular sort of club, namely, the moral community. Members of the club are eligible for such assessments, and nonmembers are exempt. But what does it take to be or to become a member? Why are assessments of moral responsibility intelligible and appropriate only for those on the inside? And what does it take to lose membership or not to be a member in the first place? It is my aim in this article to address these questions by advancing a theory of the relation between moral responsibility, moral address, and moral community. I will simply take it for granted, following Peter Strawson, Lawrence Stern, Gary Watson, Stephen Darwall, and many others, that there is an important relation between these features. This is in part because our practices in voicing the praise and blame expressive of holding someone morally responsible, in the paradigm case, consist of an interplay between at least two agents, one who addresses a moral demand to the

Self-exposure and exposure of the self: informational privacy and the presentation of identity

The alleged right to privacy has increasingly come to be about informational privacy, especially in light of persistent technological breakthroughs. The amount of information capable of being known about each of us is by now familiar, yet remains staggering. Whenever we use our computers, show a discount card at the supermarket, order a pizza, apply for a loan or job, use a bank or credit card, or engage in a host of other activities, multiple bits of our personal data are collected, collated, distributed, and stored. This state of affairs strikes many as cause for concern, even alarm. But getting clear on the nature of this threat is quite elusive. That there is a zone of informational privacy, in some sense and of some sort, seems uncontroversial. But of what sense and of what sort? Further, why think we might have a right to informational privacy, such that a breach of that zone would be wrongful? Several have tried to make the case that a threat to informational privacy is a threat to our personal identity. It is difficult to articulate the precise nature of this connection, however. Here is one quite literal attempt: [I]nformational privacy requires [a] ... radical reinterpretation..., achieved by considering each person as constituted by his or her information, and hence by understanding a breach of one’s informational privacy as a form of aggression towards one’s personal identity.

Selves and Moral Units

Derek Parfit claims that, at certain times and places, the metaphysical units he labels “selves” may be thought of as the morally significant units (i.e., the objects of moral concern) for such things as resource distribution, moral responsibility, commitments, etc. But his concept of the self is problematic in important respects, and it remains unclear just why and how this entity should count as a moral unit in the first place. In developing a view I call “Moderate Reductionism,” I attempt to resolve these worries, first by offering a clearer, more consistent account of what the concept of “self” should involve, and second by arguing for why selves should indeed be viewed as moral (and prudential) units. I then defend this view in detail from both “conservative” and “extreme” objections.

The Insignificance of Personal Identity for Bioethics

It has long been thought that certain key bioethical views depend heavily on work in personal identity theory, regarding questions of either our essence or the conditions of our numerical identity across time. In this paper I argue to the contrary, that personal identity is actually not significant at all in this arena. Specifically, I explore three topics where considerations of identity are thought to be essential - abortion, definition of death, and advance directives - and I show in each case that the significant work is being done by a relation other than identity.

QUALITIES OF WILL

One of P. F. Strawsons suggestions in “Freedom and Resentment” was that there might be an elegant theory of moral responsibility that accounted for all of our responsibility responses (our “reactive attitudes,” in his words) in a way that also explained why we get off the hook from those responses. Such a theory would appeal exclusively to quality of will : when we react with any of a variety of responsibility responses to someone, we are responding to the quality of her will with respect to us, and when we let her off the hook (either for her action or with respect to her qua agent), we are doing so in virtue of her lacking the capacity for the relevant quality of will. Strawsons own attempt to put forward such a view fails, for reasons Gary Watson has given, but several other theorists have advanced their own, more developed, Pure Quality of Will theories in recent years (including Scanlon, Arpaly, and McKenna). Specifically, there have been three distinct interpretations of “will” defended in the literature, yielding three different possible targets of our responsibility responses: quality of character , quality of judgment , or quality of regard . My first task in this essay will be to show that none of these theories individually can capture all of our responsibility responses, given our deeply ambivalent responses to several marginal cases (e.g., psychopathy, clinical depression, Alzheimers dementia). One reaction to this fact might be to abandon the quality of will approach altogether. Another, more plausible, reaction is to develop a pluralistic account of responsibility, one that admits three noncompeting conceptions of responsibility, each of which emphasizes one of the three different qualities of will as the target of a distinct subset of our responsibility responses. On this pluralistic approach, marginal agents might be responsible on some conceptions, but not responsible on others. In the bulk of the paper, I discuss each of the relevant subsets of responsibility responses, the different qualities of will they target, what the capacities for the three qualities of will are, and how the pluralistic qualities of will approach could account for our ambivalence in the marginal cases.

Personal identity and bioethics: the state of the art

In this introduction to the special issue of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics on the topic of personal identity and bioethics, I provide a background for the topic and then discuss the contributions in the special issue by Eric Olson, Marya Schechtman, Tim Campbell and Jeff McMahan, James Delaney and David Hershenov, and David DeGrazia.