Jeanette Kennett

It seems to be a truism that whenever we do something - and so, given the omnipresence of trying (Hornsby 1980), whenever we try to do something - we want to do that thing more than we want to do anything else we can do (Davidson 1970). However, according to Frog, when we have will power we are able to try not to do something that we ‘really want to do’. In context the idea is clearly meant to be that what we really want to do and what we most want to do are one and the same. But how is this meant to be so much as possible? It seems to require that our desire not to do what we most want to do is both our strongest desire and not our strongest desire. And that is a blatant contradiction. This is the so-called ‘paradox of self-control’ (Mele 1987). The aim of our paper is to explain how to make sense of the story of Frog and Toad.

This chapter takes up the question of whether psychopaths can legitimately be held morally accountable, and the resolution of these issues developed is subtle. First it argues that psychopaths are not accountable for their actions in the sense required for moral blameworthiness. Second, it argues that psychopaths’ actions are not attributable to them in the way that would make them fitting targets of the criminal law. The assertion that attributability is not a face of responsibility is explored and justified. The chapter, while respecting Watson and authors who have followed him in the enquiry into the crucially important attributability ‘face’ of responsibility, also offers a somewhat revisionary account of the ethical significance of attributability and the role of the reactive attitudes in social and moral life.

Are drug addicts helpless in the face of their addiction, compelled by cravings too strong to resist, as some recent work in the neuroscience of addiction has claimed to establish? Or is drug taking voluntary activity that can be ceased at will? In this chapter I examine Gene Heyman’s recent argument against the disease model and his analysis of addiction in terms of supposedly universal principles of motivation and choice. Despite the many virtues of Heyman’s account I suggest that it does not succeed in ruling out the disease model, even on the assumption that addictive choices are voluntary. I then question that assumption and the account of motivation on which it rests. I argue there are significant involuntary aspects to addiction which could mitigate the responsibility of addicts for their choices and that neuroscientific evidence may help to distinguish addicts whose choices are compelled from those who are capable of responding to ordinary incentives.

What is a moral judgment? Jonathan Haidt and others who adopt a dual-process model of cognition see moral judgment as largely automatic and regard explicit reasoning as directed to the task of ex post facto justification and persuasion. This chapter argues that a capacity for diachronic agency is essential to moral deliberation and that once we focus on the full range of processes involved in moral decision-making it is not so clear that rationalism is undermined. In particular, initial, quick, affective moral judgments are just one input to moral decision-making, subject to moderation by social and rational pressures consistent with a broadly rationalist perspective.

Kant claimed both that “moral feeling is the capacity to be affected by a moral judgment” and that moral motivation is motivation by principle. What are the psychological mechanism(s) that could enable principles to motivate? This chapter develops in more detail a suggestion made elsewhere by the author that posits a connection between susceptibility to the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and moral motivation of a broadly Kantian kind. The chapter argues that the possession of principles is constitutively connected to one’s status as a diachronic self and to one’s rational agentive capacities. If psychopaths are insensitive to cognitive dissonance, they cannot have or be motivated by principles. This provides an explanation of the failure of moral motivation in psychopaths that differs from the usual focus on lack of empathy.

Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of will and compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness of will and self-control are possible is of great practical significance.Taking the problem of weakness of will as her starting point, Jeanette Kennett builds an admirably comprehensive and integrated account of moral agency which gives a central place to the capacity for self-control. Her account of the exercise and limits of self-control vindicates the common-sense distinction between weakness of will and compulsion and so underwrites our ordinary allocations of moral responsibility. She addresses with clarity and insight a range of important topics in moral psychology, such as the nature of valuing and desiring, conceptions of virtue, moral conflict, and the varieties of recklessness (here characterised as culpable bad judgement) - and does so in terms which make their relations to each other and to the challenges of real life obvious. Agency and Responsibility concludes by testing the accounts developed of self-control, moral failure, and moral responsibility against the hard cases provided by acts of extreme evil.

Section: Lectures Keywords: poverty, welfare, blame, responsibility, choice Disciplines: Philosophy In contemporary Western societies, poverty is often framed as a choice, or as the outcome of poor choices, for which the individual may fairly be held accountable and blamed. People dependent on income support may be depicted as lazy, manipulative, weak or impulsive, and as taking advantage of honest taxpayers. Their every spending decision is considered ripe for scrutiny and criticism. Assumptions about poor choice-making and poor character, implicit and explicit, inform policies directed at people living in poverty, including mutual obligation requirements and forced control of expenditure via cashless debit cards. These measures are experienced as punitive and as undermining the agency and autonomy of the individual to whom they are applied. How can philosophical work on blame, responsibility, and punishment help to analyze and evaluate the moral impacts of poverty and the policies and discourse surrounding it? And how might an understanding of the impact poverty has on the choice-making and capacities of those affected by it force us to re-evaluate those theories?

A dominant view of guilt and shame is that they have opposing action tendencies: guilt- prone people are more likely to avoid or overcome dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, making amends for past misdoings, whereas shame-prone people are more likely to persist in dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, avoiding responsibility for past misdoings and/or lashing out in defensive aggression. Some have suggested that addiction treatment should make use of these insights, tailoring therapy according to people’s degree of guilt-proneness versus shame-proneness. In this paper, we challenge this dominant view, reviewing empirical findings from others as well as our own to question (1) whether shame and guilt can be so easily disentangled in the experience of people with addiction, and (2) whether shame and guilt have the opposing action tendencies standardly attributed to them. We recommend a shift in theoretical perspective that explains our main finding that both emotions can be either destructive or constructive for recovery, depending on how these emotions are managed. We argue such management depends in turn on a person’s quality of self-blame (retributive or ‘scaffolding’), impacting upon their attitude towards their own agency as someone with fixed and unchanging dispositions (shame and guilt destructive for recovery) or as someone capable of changing themselves (shame and guilt productive for recovery). With an eye to therapeutic intervention, we then explore how this shift in attitude towards the self can be accomplished. Specifically, we discuss empathy-driven affective and narratively-driven cognitive components of a process that allow individuals to move away from the register of retributive self-blame into a register of scaffolding ‘reproach’, thereby enabling them to manage their experiences of both shame and guilt in a more generative way.

Recent studies reveal some of the neurophysiological mechanisms involved in drug addiction. This prompts some theorists to claim that drug addiction diminishes responsibility. Stephen Morse however rejects this claim. Morse argues that these studies show that drug addiction involves neither compulsion, coercion, nor irrationality. He also adds that addicted people are responsible for becoming addicted and for failing to take measures to manage their addiction. After summarizing relevant neuroscience of addiction literature, this chapter engages critically with Morse to argue that a subgroup of addicted people does meet plausible criteria for compulsion, coercion, or irrationality; that few addicted people are fully responsible for becoming addicted; and that some addicted people can be at least partly excused for failing to manage their addiction. Pickard and Lacey’s “responsibility without blame” approach is also suggested as a fruitful basis for future work in this field.

According to a Kantian conception truthfulness is characterised as a requirement of respect for the agency of another. In lying we manipulate the other’s rational capacities to achieve ends we know or fear they may not share. This is paradigmatically a failure of respect. In this paper we argue that the importance of truthfulness also lies in significant part in the ways in which it supports our agential need to make sense of the world, other people, and ourselves. Since sense-making is something we do together, and that we can support or undermine, it generates norms of interaction that constitute a further, distinct, mode of recognition and respect for another’s agency. But the requirements of truthfulness and support for sense-making sometimes conflict. Through a series of cases, we analyze why and when a rigid insistence on truthfulness is disrespectful of the other and undermining of their agency.

Encouraging and supporting people to take responsibility for their health is a laudable forward-looking goal of a public health system. Holding people responsible for conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and addiction, that may have resulted from their past actions, is more controversial, particularly when it is used as a basis to deny or restrict treatment that would otherwise have been provided. In this chapter I will draw upon retributive theories of punishment to argue that restricting access to health care to persons who are deemed to have contributed to their health condition, say by smoking, drinking, poor diet or lack of exercise, is inevitably to engage in a form of retributive blame and punishment and that the system-wide justifications that might be offered for such practices fail. Denial or limitation of treatment on other than medical grounds will frequently constitute excessive rather than proportional punishment for past actions. Moreover, determining and meting out such sanctions is beyond the proper scope of health care professionals and undermines the virtues proper to their roles.

In this commentary on Anneli Jefferson’s Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? I endorse her capacitarian approach to responsibility but suggest that the effects of at least some mental/brain disorders on the agent’s psychology show that we cannot neatly separate the epistemic condition from the control condition when assessing agential capacity. I then discuss the labeling issue in the context of rival attributionist accounts of responsibility which hold that agents are responsible if their actions are attributable to them. The incorporation of mental disorders into identity through social processes may open agents with mental or brain disorders open to unfair blame. However, we cannot fully understand the effects of the disorders on agential capacity without closely attending to the social environment that shapes the way the disorder is conceived, enacted, perceived, and responded to over time.

In a 2004 paper, Greene and Cohen predicted that neuroscience would revolutionise criminal justice by presenting a mechanistic view of human agency that would change people’s intuitions about retributive punishment. According to their theory, this change in intuitions would in turn lead to the demise of retributivism within criminal justice systems. Their influential paper has been challenged, most notably by Morse, who has argued that it is unlikely that there will be major changes to criminal justice systems in response to neuroscience. In this paper we commence a tentative empirical enquiry into the claims of these theorists, focusing on Australian criminal justice. Our analysis of Australian cases is not supportive of claims about the demise of retributive justice, and instead suggests the possibility that neuroscience may be used by the courts to calibrate retributive desert. It is thus more consistent with the predictive claims of Morse than of Greene and Cohen. We also consider evidence derived from interviews with judges, and this leads us to consider the possibility of a backlash against evidence of brain impairment. Finally we note that change in penal aims may be occurring that is unrelated to developments in neuroscience.

ABSTRACT Choice theorists such as George Ainslie and Gene Heyman argue that the drug-seeking behaviour of addicts is best understood in the same terms that explain everyday choices. Everyday choices, they claim, aim to maximise the reward from available incentives. Continuing drug-use is, therefore, what addicts most want given the incentives they are aware of but they will change their behaviour if and when better incentives become available. This model might explain many typical cases of addiction, but there are hard cases that pose a problem. In these hard cases the addicted individual does not cease using drugs in the face of consequences that are so adverse it is implausible that they are unaware of more rewarding paths of action. These cases force the choice theorist into a dilemma: either these addicts? drug use does not count as action and so is best described by a neurobiological model, or reference to ?reward? in these cases means merely ?motivated? and so provides no explanatory power. We propose a different model of motivation that takes self-conception into account. We show how that can better explain the hard cases of addiction and also inform our understanding of recovery and self-control.

In her wonderfully rich and insightful article, Sofia Jeppsson argues that, although a person with psychosis may seem to be strange and unintelligible to us, we nevertheless have duties of intelligibility toward them. And she draws upon her own experience to show that psychotic experiences and reasoning are more intelligible than we might have thought.In this brief commentary, I focus on why the assumption of hypothetical intelligibility is a duty of respect owed to those experiencing psychosis. In everyday human interaction we expend significant resources on interpreting other people, largely to be able to predict and explain their behavior and to adjust our own behavior and expectations accordingly in our...

The decline in autobiographical memory function in people with Alzheimer’s dementia has been argued to cause a loss of self-identity. Prior research suggests that people perceive changes in moral traits and loss of memories with a “social-moral core” as most impactful to the maintenance of identity. However, such research has so far asked people to rate from a third-person perspective, considering the extent to which hypothetical others maintain their identity in the face of various impairments. In the current study, we examined the impact of perspective, comparing first- and third-person perspectives, as well as memory type. This online study asked 201 participants to consider hypothetical scenarios in which either themselves or another person experienced different types of memory failures associated with a diagnosis of AD. For each scenario, participants rated the degree to which the depicted individual remained the same person, and how impactful the impairment was. Social semantic memory failures – involving failures to recognise a loved one – were rated as most detrimental to self-continuity, and procedural memory failures the least. Averaged across all memory types, people considered their own and their partner’s self-continuity to be more resilient to memory failures than that of a parent or stranger. However, this pattern was reversed for some memory types: forgetting semantic or episodic information about close relationships was rated as more detrimental from a first-person than third-person perspective. Our findings suggest that perspective and type of memory impairment interact to impact judgements about the extent to which people maintain their identity when they experience dementia, and highlight the importance of social relationships to maintaining a sense of self.