Moral responsibility

Moral responsibility is a duty or obligation to behave in a 'good' manner and refrain from behaving in a 'bad' manner. The classification of 'good' and 'bad' is a subject for ethics and metaethics, and from an anthropological standpoint, the specifics vary considerably from one group to another.

A large part of the discussion of 'moral responsibility' is focused upon whether or not humans can actually control their actions, and if they can, to what extent and under what circumstances. Resolution of that issue is the philosophical subject of free will, a continuing debate that began millennia ago and seems destined to continue indefinitely. Evidently, should it be decided that humans' control over their actions is severely limited in some circumstances, any requirement attributing moral responsibility where there is only curtailed agency is mitigated. While awaiting the (probably very nuanced) resolution of this issue, we can inquire what else can be said about the nature of 'moral responsibility'

Moral relativism

Adopting the view that 'moral responsibility' "attributes duties and obligations to a person that devolve from moral, legal, or ritual imperatives", moral philosophy is a key to much that is so attributed. The implications of anthropology for moral philosophy largely fall under the topic of moral relativism. According to Gowans, moral relativism concerns two broad categories:

Descriptive Moral Relativism: As a matter of empirical fact, there are deep and widespread moral disagreements across different societies, and these disagreements are much more significant than whatever agreements there may be.

The last claim about the significance of disagreement is controversial, but the first claim is not. The other form of moral relativism is:

Metaethical Moral Relativism: The truth or falsity of moral judgments, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but is relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons.

This position can be contrasted with moral objectivism, the view "that moral judgments are ordinarily true or false in an absolute or universal sense, that some of them are true, and that people sometimes are justified in accepting true moral judgments (and rejecting false ones) on the basis of evidence available to any reasonable and well-informed person."

Reactions

Although a great deal is written about moral responsibility, a surprising number of authors do not define the term. Richard Double suggests that there is no such thing as 'moral responsibility', that the term is "merely honorific and subjective" and cannot be "counted as [a candidate] among the class of real entities". He bases what he calls this nonrealist view upon the huge variety of factors "pragmatic, ideological, conventional, aesthetic, psychological, and/or idiosyncratic" and all fundamentally "non-objectively grounded" that enter a decision about 'moral responsibility', and suggests that no form of words captures the "deep senses" of the term, its "visceral" emotional source.

Other authors do not define 'moral responsibility' itself, but rely for its identification upon exactly these visceral responses. According to Bruce Waller:

"As I use the phrase..."moral responsibility" is the essential (necessary, if not sufficient) condition for justified blame and punishment."

He quotes Michael McKenna as stating:

"what most everyone is hunting for ... is the sort of moral responsibility that is desert entailing, the kind the makes blaming and punishing as well as praising and rewarding justified."

and he also quotes Randolph Clarke as saying:

"If any agent is truly responsible...that fact provides us with a specific type of justification for ...praise or blame, with finite rewards or punishments. To be a morally responsible human agent is to be truly deserving of these sorts of responses, and deserving in a way that no agent is that is not morally responsible."

This last excerpt is quoted by K.E. Boxer as well.

The problem with this approach is that of defining an itch as something mitigated by scratching. It addresses the topic only symptomatically, indirectly, and leaves us wondering if we have really reached the root of the matter when the same action moves some enormously, even to violence, while leaving others unmoved.

Dualist approach

Immanuel Kant took the view in his Critique of Pure Reason and Religion within the limits of reason alone that humankind had a 'will' that itself was exempt from the 'laws of nature'. He divided reality into two realms, the noumenal realm where humans could themselves cause things, and the phenomenal realm where the laws of nature applied, which in his day were thought to be entirely deterministic. Kant introduced two kinds of will, the Wille capable of moral reasoning, and a second, the Willkür, that takes the deliberations of the Wille into account, but makes the final choice between an individual's impulses, which choice might follow the dictates of moral responsibility, or not.

According to Velasquez:

"Many writers today agree with Kant. The philosopher/psychologist Steven Pinker, for example writes the following:

'Science and morality are separate spheres of reasoning...[more of this quote is provided]'

Here Pinker is agreeing with Kant. ... So are we free or determined? Are we responsible agents or passive victims? Was Darrow right? Or was Sartre right? Or were both right as Kant and Pinker suggest?"

The basic idea here is to separate the actual deliberations involved in moral responsibility, as described by Hart, for example, from the implementation of these considerations, which may indeed involve the various feelings and inputs identified by many as integral to the concept of 'moral responsibility'.

The 'no free will' approach

According to Sam Harris:

"The belief in free will has given us both the religious conception of 'sin' and our commitment to retributive justice. The US Supreme Court has called free will a "universal and persistent" foundation for our system of law, distinct from 'a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with he underlying precepts of our criminal justice system' (United States v. Grayson, 1978)"

This is a clear statement of the common view of the origins of 'moral responsibility' in a belief that humankind has the capacity to control their own actions, at least to some degree. However, Harris and many others have devised arguments they are convinced make the idea of holding people responsible for their acts makes sense even if it turns out they have no control over their actions.

Generally, it is also held by those with this view that a consequence of having no control or only limited control makes a retributive or punishment aspect of dealing with transgressions inappropriate. For example, one might be incarcerated to protect society from your dangerous proclivities, but not as punishment because, after all, you really could not have chosen to do otherwise.

A logically more confused claim also is made that rehabilitation of transgressors might be possible. Although one can well understand from within this viewpoint that some 'reprogramming' of individuals could be successful by conditioning the subject's environment to produce the appropriate predetermined result, it is not clear how a decision to introduce such programs could be divorced from the ability of someone or some group to make the decision to implement such a plan, which is a choice that seems to contradict any claim that no autonomy of humankind is possible. Any attempt to push this implementation further up some decision tree seems to avoid a requirement for autonomy only at the expense of an infinite regress.

Harris suggests "judgements of responsibility depend upon the overall complexion of one's mind"..."Degrees of guilt can still be judged by reference to the facts of a case: the personality of the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of association with others ....If a person's actions seem to have been entirely out of character this might influence our view..."

That is, one is held responsible for one's character. Is this to place decisions in various categories, in the manner described by David Hume? Hume adopts the view that moral judgments are determined by character, which can decide an individual's actions:

"Where [actions] proceed not from some cause in the characters and dispositions of the persons who perform them, they...can neither redound to his honor, if good, nor infamy, if evil...the person is not responsible for the [action]...as it proceed from nothing in him that is durable or constant."

If we are to avoid entirely the assertion of free will, on the other hand, we cannot suggest that one does have control over the more deliberative, long-term trends of one's life, even though any particular decision may be impetuous and possibly decided by other forces. Hume himself accepted the ability to make decisions, and was not a believer in causality at all, thinking it was just a convenient invention of the human mind to help to organize one's life, a view further expounded by Pierre Duhem, who (although he hoped for more) saw existing scientific theories as mnemonic devices to connect observations of the phenomenal world. Further examination of these issues leads one to consider the subjective-objective dichotomy.