Kristoffer Moody

Why should we blame one another? That is, when are we morally responsible; what, if anything, justifies us in blaming one another? Blame seems to stand in need of justification given how unpleasant it is to blame, and, especially, to be blamed. In the philosophical literature, blame is typically justified on the basis of backwards-looking considerations; did the purportedly blameworthy person manifest the right kind of free-will, or control, and epistemic awareness in order to be held responsible? Much of this debate has, historically, turned primarily on theoretical and metaphysical considerations. For example, it has been argued that the fact that our present action is entirely the product of the past states of the world in conjunction with the laws of nature, and we entirely lack control over both those past states of the world and the laws of nature, but that these may, in conjunction, fully explain our present action. Thus, one might worry that we never actually fully manifest the free-will, or control, necessary to be held responsible. This dissertation is not centrally concerned with this sort of metaphysical debate. Instead, I argue that even putting this metaphysical debate aside, evidence from psychology research poses several grave, and perhaps insurmountable, challenges for accounts justifying blame on the basis of backwards-looking considerations. These are, first, the Situationist Threat, considered in chapters 1 and 2, according to which fine-grained situational features have a surprisingly large effect on our capacity to act in line with moral considerations in circumstances in which those features are present. For example, merely being in a group of people, being exposed to loud noises, or being asked to do something by a man in a white lab coat, might, surprisingly, undermine our free-will. This both threatens several theoretical assumptions made by standard retrospectively-justified accounts of moral responsibility, but also suggests that we may lack free-will more often than we might have thought. In addition, in chapters 2 and 3, I develop the argument that the Manipulationist Threat poses a potentially intractable problem for such backwards-looking justifications of blame. This threat is that we might be subject to a particularly pernicious form of manipulation—what I call valuational manipulation—much more often than we might have thought. Valuational manipulation is the manipulation of our beliefs and desires in a way that bypasses our evaluative control, i.e., our capacity to adjudicate our beliefs and desires in a manner reflective of our take on the world. I claim, citing evidence from psychology research on choice blindness, confirmation bias, and the truth effect, that we may be far more commonly subject to valuational manipulation than we might have thought, and in particular over social media. This is a problem both because it suggests we may commonly be subject to manipulation—and hence, arguably, diminished in our moral responsibility—but also because it targets what I claim are the theoretical roots of backwards-looking justifications of blame. These are that most such accounts adjudicate blameworthiness on the basis of an assessment of whether or not an agent’s action is appropriately reflective of the agent’s own beliefs and desires. The concern here is that if an agent has been manipulated, then why should this sort of correspondence suggest that the individual manifests the right kind of control, or free-will, to be held responsible? I suggest that these considerations should motivate us towards a set of alternative accounts of the justification of blame, presently emerging in the philosophical literature. These alternative accounts—called instrumentalist accounts--justify blame on the basis of its effects. That is, they claim that blame is justified given that it serves to cultivate moral agency, i.e., the capacity to act appropriately in line with shared moral considerations. These instrumentalist accounts claim, further, that blame is a central and critical explanation of how we develop into moral agents. One benefit of these accounts, I suggest, is that they do not seem to me to be similarly vulnerable to the Situationist Threat and the Manipulationist Threat. However, in chapter 4, I (along with my co-author for this chapter, Makan Nojoumian) claim that instrumentalist accounts are, instead, vulnerable to other empirical evidence from psychology research. That is, if one justifies blame on the basis of its effects, then it is critical that the evidence shows that blame actually has those effects. However, we argue that the evidence appears to show that blame does not have these effects. Or, at least, we suggest, it does not have these effects directly on those subject to blame. Instead, we claim, citing evidence from the moral development and prosocial behaviour psychology literature that blame might, instead, primarily be indirectly effective on those who witness that blame, but not on those subject to it. This should be unsurprising: we are not ourselves often subject to blame, but we regularly witness moralized behaviour among friends, colleagues, relations, and in media. This, we claim, explains what might otherwise be puzzling, which is how we develop an awareness of moral norms absent being blamed for failing to adhere to those norms ourselves. In chapter 5, I consider another problem for such instrumentalist accounts: who, precisely, should we blame to cultivate moral agency? I argue that extant instrumentalist accounts appear to cast this net either too widely, or too narrowly; they either expand, or constrict, the set of appropriate targets for blame too much. I construct an emendation to what I take to be the least problematic instrumentalist account in order to avoid this problem. However, I suggest that insofar as such accounts are justified in terms of cultivating moral agency, that it is perhaps a mistake that they focus so squarely on blame as being what centrally cultivates moral agency. Instead, I gesture towards additional research in psychology suggesting that whether or not people develop an appropriate responsiveness to shared moral considerations in a given situation may turn on a variety of considerations presently underexplored in the philosophy literature.

Blame is typically justified on the basis of retrospective desert. However, an emerging strand of account gives an alternative justification for blame: the forward-looking, or proleptic, effects of that blame in cultivating a desirable form of agency, shared moral considerations responsive agency. These instrumentalist accounts differ as to their grounding conditions: the agential features that licence blame in cases of moral failure. Some accounts advocate grounding such justified blame in terms of whether or not the agent meets the condition of influenceability; others advocate the condition of reasons responsiveness. I will argue that influenceability is unsuccessful as a grounding condition: such accounts appear to licence blame in too many cases of bad action (or omission). In order to not do so, it is unclear how they can avoid either reducing to another kind of grounding condition, such as reasons-responsiveness, or abandoning any attempt to posit a substantive grounding condition. However, the reasons responsiveness condition has also been attacked: it appears to be vulnerable to a mismatch between the proleptic goals of the accounts to which it is a part, and to empirical evidence suggesting an apparent situational lack of control. I will defend reasons-responsiveness as a grounding condition; however, I will suggest that instrumentalist accounts should be focused less on their grounding conditions and on blame, and more on the empirical efficacy of our reactive attitudes in scaffolding moral agency. In light of these considerations, I will suggest a friendly revision to Vargas’ grounding condition drawing on Fischer and Ravizza, Holroyd, and Calhoun that, I think, better accommodates the proleptic concerns that motivate Vargas’ and McGeer’s accounts.

Standard compatibilist accounts adjudicating when individuals are morally responsible for their actions are predicated on the assumption that individuals will have responsibility for the valuational structure undergirding their actions. However, I will claim that evidence from psychology and social psychology seems to show that manipulation of our valuational structure, far from being esoteric, is more common than we might pre-theoretically think. I call this evidence of manipulation the Manipulationist Threat. Given the Manipulationist Threat, I will argue that the strategies employed by reasons-responsiveness and Deep Self accounts for responding to manipulation are inadequate; they fail at either giving appropriate excusing conditions, or explaining why individuals subject to manipulation maintain responsibility.

An emerging strand of research claims that blame is justified on the basis of its instrumental role in serving to ‘cultivate’ or ‘scaffold’ moral agency in those to whom it is directed. On these instrumentalist accounts, our actual collective responsiveness to moral considerations is largely explained by the scaffolding or cultivating force of blame as directed at us. We believe that there is some reason to be sceptical of the instrumental role assigned to blame on these accounts. This is because there is evidence from the psychology literature on prosocial behaviour and moral development that blame may be directly ineffective; it may be ineffective in inculcating moral norms in the children and young adults to whom it is directed. We concede that blame may have this proximate instrumental role in scaffolding moral behaviour in adults, however we believe that such accounts overlook what we think is likely the more central instrumental role of blame. This is the role blame plays in the moral ecology: the models, narratives, scripts, and cultural frameworks that we internalize. The most central instrumental role of blame, we claim, is to indirectly foster moral considerations responsive agency in third parties through modelling behaviour observed in the moral ecology.