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Scapegoating: Blame gone wrong

1. Scapegoating: false and excessive blame and punishment for perceived norm violations

Scapegoating is the practice of blaming and punishing innocent victims for purposes of expediency and/or political gain. Blame is a contested term, but I take it to denote negative and avoidant interpersonal practices, such as resenting, sanctioning, distrusting, excluding, and marginalizing people. Punishment also includes negative and exclusionary (albeit institutionalized) practices, such as incarcerating, disciplining, and isolating people. Depending on your theoretical framework, punishment may or may not fall under the rubric of blame; punishment may be an institutionalized version of blame, though with additional constraints determined by relevant institutional considerations, or it may be an entirely separate practice. I agree with Wallace (1996) that blame includes a range of criticizing and sanctioning responses, including, “at the limit,” punishment (1996: 54). Some reasons for thinking that punishment is part of the blaming system is that it is part of a system of relations in which we assign responsibility, and it is amenable to the same cognitive distortions, including implicit biases. Scapegoating as a type of epistemically irresponsible blame, then, can occur in carceral and extra-carceral systems.

America is one of the most socioeconomically stratified and demographically unequal countries in the developed world. As a result, historically disenfranchised groups, including African American, Hispanic, and LatinX people, women, and people with mental illness, are systemically scapegoated. That is, members of these groups are blamed and punished for norm violations they did not commit, or excessively blamed and punished for relatively insignificant norm violations, on the basis of oppressive cultural stereotypes and social scripts. Scapegoating reinforces existing asymmetries of power and protects the positive self-conception and socioeconomic status of privileged groups.

In this post, I will explain how America’s extreme socioeconomic inequality harms Black and LatinX Americans, women, and people with mental illness*, making them vulnerable to scapegoating (section 2). In section 3, I will explain more specifically how scapegoating practices harm and vilify these groups across a range of social institutions. In section 4, I will define scapegoating as not just a type of misdirected blame, but a type of epistemic injustice with the characteristic feature of vilifying marginalized groups by blaming them for society’s real or imagined problems, and I will outline some of the harms perpetrated by this type of injustice. In sections 5 and 6, I will explain who is responsible for scapegoating, on two different theories of responsibility (the indirect-control view and functionalism). I hold that cognitively functional Americans are generally responsible for scapegoating on both views, though there may be some variation in degrees of blameworthiness depending on the circumstance; and I say that, on both views, scapegoaters can be blamed for both the harms and the contents of overt scapegoating actions.

2. Socioeconomic Inequality

Scapegoating is a common practice in modern society, in part because modern society is characterized by conditions of severe socioeconomic inequality and demographic stratification. The United States has the fifth highest level of income inequality (measured by household disposable income per year) of all OECD countries, behind only Turkey, Chile, Costa Rica, and South Africa  (OECD 2017). The top 1% of Americans control 38.6% of the nation’s wealth – almost twice as much as the bottom 90% combined (Egan 2017). Poverty does not affect every social group equally; it disproportionally affects historically disenfranchised groups. The real median income of non-Hispanic white households is $65,041, compared to only $47,675 for Hispanic-origin households and $39,490 for Black households (Semega et al. 2017). Income inequality, moreover, pales in comparison to wealth inequality: ‘white households in the middle-income quintile (those earning $37,201-$61,328 annually) own nearly eight times as much wealth ($86,100) as middle-income Black earners ($11,000) and ten times as much wealth as middle-income Latino earners ($8,600)” (Asante-Muhammad et al. 2017). That is, within the same income bracket, Black and LatinX earners own much less wealth than white earners.

Income also varies by gender: Women as a group earn just 80% as much as men, but Hispanic/Latina women and African American women, respectively, earn only 54% and 63% on the dollar, compared to white women’s 79% and Asian women’s 87% earnings (AAUW 2017).

These are some of the major populations studied by economists, but it leaves out many disadvantaged groups, including people with mental illness. Higher economic inequality is linked with higher national rates of mental illness (Pickett et al. 2006), and mental illness is highest amongst low-income families (McSilver Institute 2014). Research suggests that poverty is not just the result of disability due to mental illness, but a significant cause of mental illness (ibid). The United States has the third-highest disease burden due to mental illness of all WHO member states (after only China and India) (McPhillips 2014, WHO 2017), and ranks 37th for access to healthcare services – higher than Slovenia, but below Costa Rica (TPF 2018). 56% of Americans currently lack access to mental health treatment, with worse access in states that chose not to expand Medicaid (MHA 2017).

This isn’t an exhaustive list of socioeconomically disadvantaged demographic groups, of course, but it is a suggestive compilation of readily-available economic data. (I don’t have time to address further intersections of oppression here). The specified disadvantaged groups – Black, LatinX, Hispanic Americans, women, and those with mental illness – are victims of systemic scapegoating. That is, they are systemically blamed for illusory and trivial norm-violations because they are easy targets (due to low socioeconomic status, intergenerational trauma, etc.), and because blaming these groups reinforces the existing colonialist, patriarchal, ableist social order. Blaming members of disadvantaged groups for norm violations that they didn’t commit maintains the status quo, reinforces oppressive social narratives, and protects the socioeconomic interests of  the historically privileged.

3. The cultural scapegoating of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups

Here are some examples of systemic scapegoating.

The United States, which contains 21% of the world’s prison population – more than China (APA 2014) – incarcerates African Americans at almost five times the rate of white Americans, incarcerates twice as many Black women as white women, disproportionally arrests Black children, and has a majority Black and Hispanic prison population (56%), even though these groups make up only 32% of the U.S. population (NAACP 2018). Implicit racial bias, structural disadvantages, and racial profiling lead to high levels of incarceration amongst African Americans (TSP 2016). In terms of postsecondary education, African Americans have a 47.1% graduation rate and Hispanic/LatinX Americans have a 56.5% graduation rate at public 4-year colleges, compared to a 64.4% graduation rate for White students (Imagine 2008). This is in part because African American and Hispanic/LatinX students receive disproportionate discipline referrals (controlling for socioeconomic status), resulting in more suspensions and expulsions (ibid., Wallace et al. 2005). This is due in part to implicit racial bias and stereotype threat. Of students classified as aggressive, African Americans are more likely to be disciplined than any other student group, especially by white teachers (Horner, Fireman, & Wang, 2010; KITSRE 2018). (Same-race teachers judge Black students’ classroom behaviour more favourably than do white teachers). Students with a ‘black walking style’ are perceived by teachers as lower in academic achievement, highly aggressive, and likely to be in need of special education services (Neal et al. 2003). Teachers have lower expectations of Black students than other student groups, resulting in expectancy effects and stereotype threat that harm their academic performance (McKown & Weinstein 2002). Black girls are seen as more adult-like and less innocent than their peers, resulting in harsher and more frequent punishments by educators and school resource officers (Epstein et al. 2016). These effects converge in scholastic system of relations in which “less praise” and “more disciplinary action” is taken against Black students (KITSRE 2018).

Women don’t suffer incarceration rates equal to Black and Hispanic/Latino men, but they suffer higher rates of sexual violence: 90% of adult and 87% juvenile rape victims are female (RAINN 2018) – and women are often blamed for being raped, especially by people high in rape-myth acceptance and implicit gender bias (Grubb & Turner 2012). This helps to explain why only 6 out of every 1000 rapists go to prison, and most rapists are never reported (RAINN 2018). In the criminal justice system, female expert witnesses tend to be seen as more credible in civil cases than criminal cases, possibly because criminal litigation is stereotypically male (Larson & Brodsky 2010; Couch & Sigler, 2002; Jones et al. 2014). This implies that credibility in court depends on salient gender stereotypes. In postsecondary education, female teachers receive lower scores on Students Evaluations of Teaching than male teachers across almost all disciplines, controlling for student learning outcomes (Flaherty 2016; Flaherty 2017), which suggests that women are subject to harsher criticism and resentment from students than male teachers on average. In the workplace, women who exhibit leadership skills are seen as ‘bossy’ and ‘less effective’ than men (Kramer 2016). Women can’t just transfer into a more lucrative (historically male) profession on mass, because when the share of women in an occupation increases, the occupation is devalued and pays lower wages (Levanon et al. 2009). In short, women are blamed and punished more often than men when gender stereotypes are salient, including in criminal court, higher education, and corporate America. Women are seen as less praiseworthy, and more blameworthy, in their capacity as court witnesses, university professors, and workers in historically male fields. (I should note that I used statistics about ‘female’ vs. ‘male’ expert witnesses, teachers, and workers, because of the availability of the data; it is a reasonable conjecture that trans women face the same discrimination, plus transphobia, in historically male workplaces).

Next, people with mental illness tend to be incarcerated rather than being provided with mental health services, but a majority of mentally ill prisoners are not violent offenders (NAMI 2018). Nonetheless, people with mental illness are systemically scapegoated for America’s culture of mass shootings. After the 1999 Columbine shooting, psychiatrist Peter Breggin blamed mentally ill people; after the 2012 Newtown shooting, psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey blamed ‘mentally ill subgroups’; and in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed prohibitions on gun ownership for people with mental illness, on the assumption that there is a correlation between mental illness and homicide (AJPH 2014). There isn’t. Research shows that “fewer than 5% of the 120 000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness” (ibid), while about 20% of American adults have a diagnosable mental illness (Insel 2015). In other words, having a mental illness predicts not committing a mass shooting. People with mental illness are more likely to be assaulted than to commit assault (AJPH 2014), but they are stereotyped as ‘dangerous,’ ‘violent,’ and ‘criminal.’

Factors that do predict gun violence include gun availability and social relations: up to 85% of shootings occur within social networks (Papachristos 2012). There is also a positive correlation between mass shootings and domestic violence: while “perpetrators of domestic violence account for only about 10 percent of all gun violence, they accounted for 54 percent of mass shootings between 2009 and 2016” (NPR 2017; citing Everytown 2017). Psychiatrists are not effective barriers to mass shootings, as they are no better than laypeople at predicting whether a patient will commit a violent crime (Steadman 1978). As Jonathan Metzl clarifies, there is no psychiatric diagnosis that includes gun violence as a symptom; hence, when it comes to mass shootings, there is no “predictive value to psychiatric diagnosis” (Metzl on NPR, February 18, 2018).

Mental illness is diagnosed three to four times more often in Black and Hispanic/LatinX service users than in white service users, possibly due to clinical racial bias, differential access to healthcare, and different attitudes toward mental healthcare (Schwartz et al. 2014). This suggests that mental illness may not have robust construct validity, let alone predictive value. In any case, the majority of mass shooters are white males (54%) (Foleman et al. 2017), and most do not have a diagnosed mental illness. Salient predictors of gun violence, then, do not include having a mental illness; they having access to guns, knowing the victim, having a record of domestic violence, and being a white male. If there is a predictively valid stereotype of a mass shooter, then, it is a normal white male.

In sum, racialized minorities, women, and people with mental illness tend to be falsely and excessively blamed and punished due to the saliency of cultural stereotypes.  These patterns of blame and punishment reinforce patriarchal, colonial, and ableist social scripts.

4. Scapegoating as epistemic injustice 

Scapegoating reinforces oppressive social scripts rooted in America’s colonial-patriarchal history. Black and Hispanic/LatinX Americans are disproportionally blamed and punished for perceived norm violations and perceived suberogatory performance in judicial and educational contexts; women are unfairly blamed for perceived subordinate performance in stereotypically male judicial, educational, and corporate contexts; and people with mental illness are unfairly blamed and stigmatized in the wake of mass shootings.

In his influential work on responsibility, Manual Vargas argues that our capacity for moral responsibility is influenced by the availability of “narratives, scripts, or cultural frameworks,” which comprise our “moral ecology” (2013: 246). Similarly, Jose Medina argues that our capacity for responsibility depends on the availability of social scripts, narratives, and discourses, which comprise our shared “social imagination” (2012). Our sensitivity to people’s moral and epistemic traits, on these views, is conditioned by salient social scripts – for example, scripts about putative associations between race and criminality, gender and credibly, and mental health and violence. These scripts are rooted in historical asymmetries of power, and they normalize and reinforce these asymmetries. Blaming disadvantaged groups reinforces the very scripts that oppress them.

Scapegoating targets socially marginalized groups because these groups are vulnerable, socioeconomically, politically, and epistemically. Therefore, they are easy targets. Perhaps the best way of framing scapegoating as a type of harm or injustice is to see it is as a kind of epistemic injustice, which involves giving someone a deflated credibility rating on the basis of identity prejudice (Fricker 2007). When we scapegoat someone by framing the person’s group identity or visible demographic attributes through dominant social narratives as a type of failing or liability, we are harming the scapegoating victim’s epistemic standing within the community – that is, we are committing testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007: 1). Similarly, when we fail to refute false stereotypes about marginalized social groups, we are withholding pertinent epistemic resources from those groups and normalizing oppressive scripts, which is what Alyssa Cirne calls “willful hermeneutical marginalization” (2012: 46) –  a second type of epistemic injustice. Both types of epistemic injustice are perpetrated by people with epistemic deficits.

The distinctive characteristic of scapegoating as a type of epistemic injustice is that scapegoating vilifies an epistemically vulnerable group by framing their identities and experiences through the dominant framework(s) of the privileged, and therefore frames their identities and experiences as essentially morally corrupt. As Gaile Pohlhais, Jr. (2014) describes epistemic injustice, its “primary harms” involve “othering” members of marginalized groups, specifically for purposes of “maintaining epistemic practices that make sense of the world as experienced from dominant subjectivities, but [does not grant the ‘othered’ individuals] the same epistemic support with regard to their lived experiences in the world” (2014: 105, emphasis mine). Scapegoating has this character of ‘othering’ epistemically vulnerable groups, but also vilifying these groups by framing them as responsible for a range of real or imagined social ills. Mentally ill people are responsible for mass shootings; Black and LatinX Americans are responsible for crime and socioeconomic inequality; women are to blame not earning as much as men, seeing that they are less competent. Nothing is the fault of the privileged on this top-down, non-reciprocal, hierarchical framework. Scapegoating reinforces social inequality by redistributing moral responsibility from the privileged to the least well-off, mirroring the flow of currency within the financial economy. This is a far cry from Rawls’ ideal of justice.

Scapegoating as an epistemic practice inflicts distinct  harms on scapegoating victims. Pohlhais, Jr. argues that epistemic injustice perpetrates two types of primary harm: it harms the individual as an epistemic agent, and it harms the epistemic community by withholding or suppressing valuable hermeneutical resources, particularly knowledge about the lived experiences of the oppressed – knowledge that the community is entitled to and requires in order to function well (in a truth-conducive way). Scapegoating is precisely this type of injustice – an injustice that validates the worldview and epistemic standing of the privileged and discredits the lived reality and epistemic standing of the victims, thereby harming the victims and the entirely epistemic community. These harms cannot be seen as equivalent, however. The victim is harmed in a particularly egregious way, as her epistemic standing is damaged, her testimony is discredited, she is prevented from pursuing epistemic projects that stem from her lived experiences, and she is denied the right to form epistemic alliances with other disadvantaged knowers (Pohlhaus, Jr. 2014: 110), and she is then subjected to “secondary harms” (Fricker 2007: 47), such as a loss of moral, socioeconomic, and political standing. This is why scapegoating – similar to gaslighting as described by Kate Abramson (2014) – is a particularly pernicious type of epistemic injustice: it inflicts distinct epistemic, moral, and existential harms on its victims. But unlike gaslighting, which pathologizes the victim, scapegoating vilifies the victim.

5. Who is responsible for scapegoating? Responsibility as indirect control

Who is responsible for scapegoating qua epistemic injustice? Fricker says that perpetrators of testimonial injustice are culpable, unless the hermeneutical resources required to accurately frame the victim’s experiences are socio-historically unavailable, in which case the perpetrator is a victim of “epistemic bad luck” (2007: 42). Sexual harassment, for example, was non-culpable (or less-than-full-culpable) before “sexual harassment” entered the English lexicon, and the same is true of testimonial injustice against victims of sexual harassment, who could not intelligibly frame their experiences (Fricker 2007: 148).

This is a strict view of culpability, as it sees culpability as dependent on control, such that we are only culpable for epistemic transgression that we could have avoided or prevented (or otherwise controlled), either directly or indirectly. (Direct control is too strict, since many mental states are cognitively impenetrable but amenable to indirect, non-immediate control via “life hacks,” such as intergroup contact, implementation intentions, and exposure to counter-stereotypcal images [viz., Holroyd 2012, Christiane Merritt: forthcoming]; thus, indirect control is the better criterion, and currently the more popular one). Some theorists don’t require any amount of control for responsibility, but even on the ‘control view,’ most Americans would turn out to be responsible for scapegoating, given that information about group-level injustice in America is openly discussed, widely disseminated, and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection or a library card. By all appearances, the control condition is met by most Americans on Fricker’s interpretation, since the “relevant concepts” for accurately framing the epistemic harms inflicted on scapegoating victims are “socio-historically available” (2007: 100). While I can’t speak to everyone’s specific epistemic position, I can say this: if you’re reading this blog post, you’re in an epistemic position to be held responsible for scapegoating, should you go ahead and scapegoat a member of a marginalized social group.

Many responsibility theorists subscribe to a version of the indirect-control view. (Fricker is a social epistemologists, not a responsibility theorists per se, though she writes about culpability). J. M. Fischer, the protagonist on the ‘deep control view’ (2006), has never, to my knowledge, written about epistemic ignorance (which is the basis of testimonial injustice), but most theorists who have written on this topic agree that ignorance is not an excuse for wrongdoing, since ignorance can be a culpable failing. People who fail to guard against ignorance are responsible for that epistemic vice and its downstream effects.

Manual Vargas and Jose Medina seem to agree with Fricker that culpability depends on access to epistemic resources, in addition to a functional adult brain. (Children, they would say, are not fully responsible). They are optimistic that ordinary people have the baseline cognitive capacity to sort through competing social scripts, narratives, and schemas, and appraise them for credibility. Unlike totalitarian regimes, liberal democracies involve a marketplace of ideas in which epistemic resources are widely available. That said, epistemic resources may vary by geographical location – for example, 28% of Americans living in rural areas have no access to the Internet, compared to only 23% of urban Americans [Molla 2017], and rural Americans also have less access to library books (Weingarten 2017. These epistemic factors might mitigate responsibility for resource-dependent epistemic deficits, but they don’t necessarily extinguish responsibility. If indirect control is all that is needed, then perhaps neurotypical adults would be expected to stop by a library at some point in their lives. All that we can say for sure is that responsibility is almost certainly extinguished in “epistemic black holes,” i.e., locations in which relevant concepts are completely absent. North Korea involves large areas of epistemic black holes; America involves relatively few. 

It is notable here that many cases of epistemic injustice are not motivated by simple ignorance, but, in Fricker’s view, by “motivated irrationality,” underpinned by “ethically noxious” motives (2007: 34). Scapegoating involves motivated irrationality in that it is motivated, as we saw, by a vested interest in protecting and perpetrating dominant frames of references. Jonathan Metzl notes that scapegoating narratives tend to use different frames of reference to explain the same behaviours in members of different social groups, even when there are no morally salient differences between the two. For example, when People of Color commit mass shootings, politicians and the media tend to frame the event as a collective or group-based problem – namely, a ‘problem with the Black community.’ This narrative has false predictive value because, if true, it would allow us to predict mass shootings on the basis of African descent. On the other hand, when white men commit mass shootings, politicians and the media tend to invoke an individualist or bad-apple framework, which allows them to frame the event as the decision of a mentally ill “lone wolf” (Metz 2017). The reason for this paradigm shift, says Metzl, is that white people identify with other white people and don’t want to see their image reflected back to them in the faces of white shooters, so they are reluctant to identify being white and male as a predictor of being a mass shooter, even though this paradigm would have much more predictive validity than their preferred scapegoating scripts. This exemplifies how scapegoating scripts rests on noxious motives – a vested interest in preserving one’s positive self-conception and privileged status as a white male.

Because scapegoating narratives, as such, involve not only pernicious consequences (the primary and secondary harms of epistemic injustice), but also noxious motives, they could be seen as blame-imputing on two counts: the agent is blameworthy for perpetrating certain harms, and perhaps also for acting on certain noxious motives. While there are debates about the moral status of implicit states (See Kelly & Roedder 2008), most people agree that a person can, under certain circumstances, be blameworthy for expressing morally problematic implicit states in his overt behaviour. Thus, scapegoaters might be blameworthy on both deontic and aretaic grounds, i.e., both for committing a moral transgression, and for expressing character flaws in their behaviour.

6. Responsibility as a social regulation mechanism (functionalism)

Many contemporary responsibility theorists reject the control condition, and subscribe to a ‘functionalist’ view on which blame is appropriate if this reaction would serve some positive social end (e.g., McGeer 2014, Bell 2014, Malle et al. 2014). Thus, people might be blameworthy even if they are irredeemable psychopaths. On this view, scapegoaters should be blamed and virtuous explainers praised, it seems, so as to establish a moral-epistemic ecology in which credible explanatory paradigms are salient, and harmful stereotypes are debunked. Blaming scapegoaters could be a way of condemning the expression of these harmful narratives and thwarting the spread of the “noxious” motives that support them. If so, then blaming scapegoaters is generally a good social policy.

This view also seems to imply that blaming public figures, whose speech is particularly visible, is an especially good social policy. Donald Trump is an example of a very public and very committed scapegoater. Trump, for example, has a habit of scapegoating Muslims for acts of terrorism, in spite of the fact that a majority of domestic terrorism is committed by non-Islamic right-wing extremists [Niewart et al. 2017]); but Trump was quick to swap the collectivist paradigm for an individualist one when he described the Las Vegas shooter as “‘a very sick man’ and a ‘very demented person,’ without mentioning anything about the shooter’s background or potential political ideology” (Metzl 2017).

Who is actually responsible for the American culture of school shootings? James Fallows argues that Mitch McConnel is perhaps more blameworthy than anyone, seeing that he blocked a bipartisan vote on gun control measures by leading a filibuster in 2013, and then Tweeted his “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of the Los Vegas shooting in 2017 (Fallows 2018). The ‘thoughts and prayers’ Tweet is a familiar obfuscatory tactic that substitutes a positive-thinking narrative for a causal explanation. The reason for McConnel’s decision is arguably his funding from the N.R.A. (though he is not even on the list of top-ten Senators and Congresspeople receiving N.R.A. funding [David Leonhardt et al. 2017]). McConnel, and other politicians who have accepted N.R.A. donations, then, seem to be blameworthy for thwarting gun control legislation, thereby perpetuating America’s gun culture, and for acting on ostensibly noxious (financial) motives.

On a functionalist picture, it makes sense to see Trump and McConnel as exceptionally blameworthy for scapegoating vulnerable groups and perpetrating false narratives (e.g., ‘thoughts and prayers’ are effective). But on the control view, they are potentially just as blameworthy. (I say ‘potentially’ because there are substantive questions about whether Trump has a functional adult brain, one that supports self-control [see Hamblin 2018]. In general, however, the the control view and the functionalist view converge in holding cognitively functional adults generally blameworthy for their overt scapegoating behaviours.

If we don’t reject scapegoating narratives about mass shootings and adopt evidence-based blaming practices and policies, then this Onion article might actually be our future:

Notes

*I’m not committed to saying that mental illness is a valid construct, but I’m adopting this term from the research simply to pick out a social group that is especially disadvantaged.

Can children be responsible agents? (tl;dr: No).

Philosophers tend to see young children as paradigmatic cases of non-responsible agents. Strawson, for example, says that very young children are non-responsible, but older children as “penumbral” cases, as they are acquiring the capacity for responsibility (1963). Strawson also cites people with severe mental disorders as paradigmatically non-responsible. These two types of agent reside in a sphere outside of the reactive attitudes (blame, praise).

In my contribution to the Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry, I argued that people with mental disorders are not, in fact, non-responsible, contrary to the received philosophical wisdom. Indeed, seeing psychiatric service users are non-responsible is incompatible with the dominant model of therapeutic treatment, the person-centered model, on which service users are treated as presumptively capable of exercising responsibility over their treatment-relevant choices, as well as a non-trivial range of non-therapeutic choices (Rogers 1986). Why have many philosophers, then, seen service users (‘the insane’) as non-responsible? One likely explanation is culture-wide implicit bias against persons with psychological disorders. (Strawson wrote his seminal work in the 1960s, remember). Another likely reason, I believe, is the tendency to see responsibility (tacitly, perhaps) as a modular capacity rather than a complex suite of capacities involving many cognitive processes distributed across the brain. On the modular view, moral processing is similar to colour processing, which involves a small constellation of cortical regions, where damage to any one can severely impair the perception of colour.

On the complex-capacity model of responsibility, a person can lack one of the capacities paradigmatically implicated in responsible agency (e.g., perspective-taking), but posses many others (e.g., self-efficacy). Consider two cases that have received much philosophical scrutiny (e.g., Jeanette Kennett 2002): psychopaths and people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Both groups share deficits in empathic processing and traits of alexithymia (the inability to describe emotions in the self), but psychopaths have difficulty resonating with others’ emotions, whereas people with ASD have difficulty with cognitive perspective-taking and emotional recognition, and not vice versa (Morosan et al. 2017; Lockwood et al. 2013). On the basis of these cognitive profiles, we can infer that people with ASD may be forgiven for failing to register someone’s emotional distress, but not for failing to care about a person’s emotional distress once registered, since ASD impairs the first capacity (emotional recognition) but not the latter (resonating with emotions). Psychopaths, meanwhile, have much more severe moral deficits – they register distress in others, but do not care about it. This raises the legitimate question of whether psychopaths are morally responsible agents in any non-trivial sense. Aside from the psychopathic population (which is responsible for a vastly disproportionate amount of crimes according to the author of the Psychopathy Checklist PCL-R, Robert Hare), persons with psychological disorders across all DSM-5 categories possess many of the paradigmatic capacities implicated in responsibility. In general, deficits in responsible agency are local and highly specific, not global, and acquired deficits may be responsive to therapeutic interventions. Thus, it makes sense to hold people with psychological disorders responsible for actions not impaired by those disorders.

Young children are a different case because they have deficits in all responsibility-relevant capacities, as they are not fully cognitively developed. This has led some people to jokingly observe that “all children are little sociopaths.” But children really do have morally-relevant cognitive deficits, including theory-of-mind deficits (Wellman et al. 2001), perspective-taking deficits, and planned problem-solving deficits (Tecwyn et al. 2014). That said, children have different capacities depending on their age, cognitive architecture, and learning environment. Does this mean that children are quasi-responsible?

I am inclined to say that young children, unlike adults with domain-specific cognitive deficits, are not responsible, full stop. Of course, at some indeterminate point, children become responsible, but young children, in my view, are non-responsible. When we blame and praise children, we are, I believe, using operant conditioning to shape children’s cognitive architecture to discriminate different moral stimuli and respond sensitively to discriminable stimuli in the future and across various contexts. Young children unquestionably possess the neurological states required to respond to conditioning (e.g., nucleus basalis neurons and dopamine receptors). Even non-human animals possess these states, which is why they are capable of learning conditioned responses.

There is another critical element to this picture, however. Once children begin to develop the neural correlates of moral responsibility (over and above the neural structures implicated in conditioned learning), they still are not responsible for their behaviour on my view, because they are not responsible for the acquisition (or not) of these higher-order neural structures. Their caretakers are responsible for conditioning them to respond sensitively to moral stimuli, thereby acquiring adult moral capacities. If children grow up with deficit in moral cognition due to caretaker neglect, this is their caretaker’s fault. (The correct specification of ‘caretaker’ is complicated, but for my purposes, it can be seen as encompassing anyone responsible for the child’s wellbeing). Thus, children are not responsible for their behaviour even if they possess some morally-relevant capacities, because any non-congenital deficits in their cognitive architecture are their caretakers’ fault, and any congenital deficits are the result of the natural lottery, i.e., not their fault. So, if a child, say, burns down a bee farm, bankrupting the owners and killing half-a-million bees, the caretakers are responsible, not the child. The caretakers are responsible to pay restitution, and are also the correct targets of moral blame.

The reason children are not responsible for their behaviour when adults with equivalent cognitive deficits are, is that children’s are not autonomous: they are under their caretakers’ directorship. Children cannot autonomously choose their learning environment, peer group, school – the salient features of their ‘moral ecology,’ so to speak (Vargas 2016), whereas adults (in a pluralistic democratic state) can choose one moral ecology over another. Because children lack autonomy vis-a-vis their moral ecology, they lack responsibility for their actions, even if they have many of the neural structures implicated in the capacity for moral responsibility. In other words, if child C and adult A have similar responsibility deficits D, child C will not be responsible for moral infractions caused by D, whereas adult A may be responsible moral infractions caused by D (depending on other conditions, such as whether A could have taken steps to remediate D or prevent the transgression by other means). Thus, even if C and A are cognitively identical, their responsibility status differs due to different background conditions.

It is only once children have autonomy comparable to most adults that they become responsible.

Similar considerations apply to adults – namely, adults can be differentially responsible depending on their access to different moral ecologies. (For a full argument to this effect, see Ciurria 2016 in the Journal of the APA). Yet, the differences amongst adults will be a matter of degree, not of kind; while adult P may be less responsible than adult Q for moral infraction I when P and Q have identical cognitive architectures but differential access to agency-enhancing moral ecologies, child C is not responsible for I across all moral ecologies. Unlike children, no cognitively-normal adult is non-responsible by virtue of ecological deprivation, because all societies include a non-trivial amount of cultural pluralism (with the possible exception of North Korea). In America, there is extensive pluralism, so no adult can escape blame (or praise) by saying that she couldn’t have done otherwise.

Thank you for reading my post.

 

 

Responsibilities (moral, epistemic, practical), and why they matter (relational equality).

There are various kinds of responsibility identified in the philosophical literature. These include moral responsibility (e.g., Strawson, Wolf, Fischer), epistemic responsibility (e.g., Fricker, Medina), and responsibility as a kind of self-efficacy (e.g., Waller). It may not be obvious how these dimensions of responsibility intersect, but they are all tied to personhood, and to evaluative attitudes that respond to features of personhood and relevant background conditions. Without these capacities, an agent is lacking in some critical feature of personhood, something that rational humans value—either moral, epistemic, or practical agency; and people who lack these features without an excuse or extenuating circumstance are amenable to negative evaluation, whether moral, epistemic, or practical. People who excel in these capacities, particularly in the face of adversity, are praiseworthy, epistemically virtuous, or self-efficacious. They deserve laudatory treatment. These exceptional individuals, too, are capable of having functional relationships and achieving worthy goals, and for this reason, they are likely to enjoy higher wellbeing than those who lack these dimensions of human agency. These are people we want to invest in because they are reliable, versatile, and responsive to facts.

These three capacities are interrelated in that they all function to bring about a positive achievement – a positive goal or outcome – and a deficit in any one facet could undermine the attainment of this goal or outcome, as well as the cultivation of the other facets. For example, if Jeff the Jerk is antisocial, he may also be sexist, because in a patriarchal society it is easier to be selectively antisocial to vulnerable groups like women, and to harass and discriminate against precisely those groups. If Jeff is epistemically insensitive to women’s credibility, he is not only epistemically flawed, but also morally flawed (sexist, misogynistic). If Jeff is a CEO who wants to run his company effectively, but he discounts feedback from women due to epistemic insensitivity (an epistemic flaw) or sexism (a moral-epistemic flaw), he is going to discount valuable perspectives in corporate decision-making, undermining his own pragmatic goals as CEO (see Sandra Harding 2015 on the collective effects of ignorance). While a person can be good but epistemically flawed, like Huck Finn (see Arpaly 2016), epistemic sensitivity makes moral sensitivity more likely and more robust across circumstances and time. If Huck Finn had rebuked slavery (instead of thinking it was justified), he would have been disposed to act appropriately in response to all African Americans, not just his friend Jim. He helped Jim, which was virtuous on Nomy Arpaly’s view, but how would he have responded to other enslaved persons, with whom he had no prior acquaintance? Epistemic sensitivity seems to reinforce moral virtue, and vice versa. People who care about morality are more likely to care about how their epistemic profile affects oppressed groups, and how their epistemic deficits could potentially be remediated (e.g., by education, exposure to countersterotypical exemplars, the adoption of evidence-based policies, etc.). And epistemically flawed people are likely to treat marginalized groups in immoral ways because they don’t care to cultivate epistemic virtues. Furthermore, morally and epistemically irresponsible people will be poor at achieving their pragmatic goals just in case they discount evidence or distrust experts and knowledgeable people on prejudiced grounds. Clearly, those with volitional deficits (e.g., low self-efficacy) will be poor at initiating and executing morally and epistemically responsible plans, just because they are poor at executing any plans. In this way, the three salient dimensions of responsibility are deeply intertwined.

The upshot is that people who are strong in one facet of responsibility are likely to be strong in all facets, and a deficit in one facet is likely to impair the others. This is something akin to Socrates’ ‘unity of the virtues’ thesis, but applied to dimensions of responsibility. Yet it is weaker than Socrates’ thesis, because it only claims that each dimension makes the others more robust, or more resilient across different circumstances, not that each dimension is a necessary prerequisite for the others. A person could be morally responsible in one domain without epistemic or pragmatic responsibility, but in an unfamiliar situation, epistemic sensitivity to the demands of the situation and self-efficacy could serve to enhance moral responsibility. For example, I might be morally upstanding in my day-to-day life, but if I were to move to a different country with radically different cultural norms, I would have to learn the ropes pretty quickly to avoid committing unintentional norm violations. Jeff might have grown up in a culture infused with toxic masculinity, but he had better pay attention to changing cultural standards if he wants to avoid committing workplace harassment, and he should apologize for past transgressions. In both cases, the agent has to update his epistemic profile to respond sensitivity to accessible moral norms. In this way, heightened sensitivity across each dimension of agency enhances the robustness of the other aspects.

That said, none of these dimensions of agency is reducible or eliminable; each aspect can be individuated on the basis of its object, or the thing it tracks (moral, epistemic, or practical facts). While these capacities are ontologically distinct, they are, in effect, implicated in a positive feedback loop in which each dimension positively reinforces the others.

Responsibility across all three dimensions is also vulnerable to the same undermining or defeating factors. These factors can be congenital, but more often than not they are environmental, and environmental factors always mediate the expression of overt behaviour. To give an example: there is mounting evidence that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, and poverty, can impair responsibility across all three dimensions. People high in ACEs (i) are more likely to commit violent criminal offenses like rape and assault as adults (Craparo 2017); (ii) are less capable of participating in epistemically valuable trust relationships (Ijzendoorn et al. 2011), and (iii) are more susceptible to depressive disorders (Chapman et al. 2004), alcoholism (Rothman et al. 2008), attempted suicide (Dube et al. 2001), and other behaviours that impair self-efficacy and practical achievement. These dysfunctions, rooted in ACES, undermine the achievement of moral, epistemic, and pragmatic goals, and in this sense they can be seen as deficits in responsibility. Identifying these factors helps us predict and diagnose responsibility-relevant deficits in populations with responsibility-umpiring causal histories. These populations are also prone to adverse health outcomes like ischemic heart disease, cancer, and chronic lung disease (Felitti 1998). There are positive correlations, in other words, between ACEs and responsibility deficits, and between ACEs and poor health outcomes.

Responsibility may be a mediating psychometric factor between childhood conditions and certain life outcomes, just as self-efficacy is a mediating psychometric factor between situational adversity and avolition on social cognition theory (Bandura 2006). Unsurprisingly, people low in responsibility due to adverse experiences tend to be less healthy and less satisfied than people high in responsibility. But more importantly for out purposes, responsibility mediates our interpersonal relationships and influences how we respond to others—whether with kindness or antisociality, with trust or distrust, with avolition or engagement. Hence, responsibility enables us to maintain and promote relations of equality.

Further, responsibility on a social cognition model is a biopsychosocial capacity, sensitive to situational factors. Thus, while it can be impaired by ACEs, it can also be remediated by trauma-informed interventions, such as CBT, heathy relationships, community support, affordable housing, and so on. These interventions can enhance responsibility, and thus relational competency. When people experience responsibility deficits because of misfortune or injustice, they are entitled to community support and public health resources.

But people with functional childhoods and privileged lives can also have significant responsibility deficits. For example, many privileged white people with no history of trauma are high in implicit bias, and implicit bias can motivate prejudiced behaviour. This behaviour is unethical, and it can also have adverse epistemic consequences, such as prompting the hiring of unqualified white candidates (see Bertran & Mullainathan 2013); and it can have adverse pragmatic consequences, such as undermining corporate decision-making. (This is not to say that all privileged white people are high in implicit bias, but white people show higher implicit racial bias than other groups on the Project Implicit IAT, and they benefit from implicit bias against people of color, which creates de facto affirmative action for white people). Moreover, many privileged people also have explicit biases, whether due to ill will or indifference to the interests of disadvantaged groups. These biases similarly cause or constitute moral, epistemic, and pragmatic deficits, undermining the attainment of relevant goals. Unlike the role of ACEs, however, motivated irrationality and moral indifference are not public health problems that call for rehabilitative interventions. The government should intervene to reduce the prevalence of implicit bias in our social institutions (see Hurley 2006), but this is not because privileged people deserve public resources; it is because disadvantaged people do.

Deciding how to respond to responsibility deficits is not a straightforward matter, particularly as there are two oppositional approaches recommended by research on agency and public health. We can blame someone for a responsibility deficit, or we can offer a remediating intervention. While we can, in principle, do both, there are putative tensions between the blaming response and the remediating response. If someone is in treatment for an addiction, it may be counterproductive to blame the person for her addictive impulses or for past alcohol-induced behaviour, if blame would hinder the person’s recovery. Furthermore, blame may be unwarranted if the person’s deficits are due to oppressive circumstances such as ACEs. We would not blame someone for failing an academic test because the person was barred from attending school, and by parity of reasoning, we should not blame someone for lacking responsibility due to childhood trauma. ACEs are a paradigmatic example of a non-culpable deficit, as children have little autonomy or volitional control, so their psychological development is not up to them. For traumatized and oppressed people, the rehabilitative approach may be more fitting.

Privileged people who lack responsibility due to their own life choices, on the other hand, are better candidates for blame, as they may not want to be rehabilitated, they may not respond well to rehabilitative interventions, and they are the authors of their own destinies (if anyone is). Blame, exclusion, and sanctions are perhaps the best approach to such people.

These claims highlight important considerations, but they fall short of providing a systematic method for attributing blame and praise. I propose the following framework, which fits with the above impressions: blame and praise should serve the purpose of enhancing relations of equality (see Elizabeth Anderson 2013), and thus, of undermining oppression. This provides a way of systematizing our impressions across cases. Victims of ACEs are victims of a type of oppression—traumatic experiences and/or poverty—and to blame them, instead of their oppressors, may serve to reinforce systemic injustice, particularly if this is part of a broader victim-blaming narrative. Offering rehabilitative interventions, by contrast, may enhance the recipient’s ability to participate fully in relations of equal standing, esteem, and authority with others, if these interventions enhance the person’s responsibility. Privileged people who lack responsibility, on the contrary, have more than their fair share of status, respect, and resources, and may be insensitive to rehabilitative interventions, making blame the fitting response. A blaming response may also serve to condemn their role in hierarchies of oppression and alert others to their motivational deficits, contributing to an egalitarian social narrative, and protecting potential victims from their vicious behaviour. The role of praise and blame in these cases supports egalitarian aims, and this is what justifies its differential deployment.

These claims are still rather impressionistic, and require empirical support to be validated. If praise and blame, as I claim, ought to serve relational equality, we need to know more about how these attitudes affect people in light of their motivational profile, learning history, and social circumstances. Then we can draw accurate generalizations  about what types of response are fitting for what type of person and in what context. That said, when we hold people responsible in our daily lives, we typically do so on the basis of incomplete data. So, schematic, ambivalent attributions might be okay, and even inevitable, if we are acting under time constraints (as we do). That said, even if we cannot know everything about a person’s circumstances, we should at least be mindful of the purpose our reactive attitudes are meant to serve when deciding how to express them. On my view, that purpose is to construct and reinforce relations of equality. To be responsible critics, we should keep this in mind when blaming and praising people.

In sum, responsibilities are valuable because they enable us to participate in relations of equality; that is, responsible people are in a position to contribute to a society of equals, one in which people respect each other’s moral and epistemic standing, and take the initiative to pursue and protect egalitarian goals. Responsible people do not unfairly oppress others, or undermine their own agential capacities by pursuing irresponsible and counterproductive agendas. Responsibility is also valuable because it can improve health outcomes, if it enables us to respond to situations and relationships in an adaptive way; but positive health outcomes are a byproduct of responsibility, not its end goal.

Richard Spencer, white ignorance, and white guilt

Richard Spencer, the infamous American white supremacist, fundamentally misunderstands biology, history, and social anthropology, resulting in a deeply flawed moral economy. Although his racist beliefs are extreme, I think that we can take them as a point of departure for evaluating less conspicuous, but more prevalent, forms of insensitivity, including the denial that white people should feel guilty for benefiting from white privilege. After surveying these attitudes, I argue that white guilt is an appropriate affective response to knowing that one is unfairly benefiting from an economy of racial injustice. It is also a constitutive part of taking responsibility for one’s role within this system.

Spencer, in case you’re not familiar, is a white supremacist – in his preferred terminology, a ‘racialist,’ – who believes that white people are a superior ‘race.’ He takes a race to be “something between a breed and an actual species.” He espouses an ‘identitatian’ politics on which white people have a collective identity rooted in their genes and shared history, and this history is something to celebrate. He claims that “race is the foundation of identity,” meaning that race confers morally-relevant character traits – traits that constitute a person’s deepest self. He supports the creation of an exclusively white nation or a “white ethno-state.”

This system of beliefs is so distorted on so many levels, it’s difficult to know where to begin, but I’ll start with what I take to be a basic axiom– the belief that there are separate races with separate and distinct biological traits, and these biological traits are linked to moral properties that determine each group’s moral character. This belief is doubly unscientific, as there are, in fact, no biologically distinct races, and phenotypic traits do not correlate with moral properties. Kwame A. Appiah pointed this out in his 1990 essay, so I won’t elaborate, except to say that there is general consensus that race is a social construct.

Next, Spencer believes that European people’s history of oppressing other races is a mark of strength and moral excellence, rather than a geographical accident, combined with moral and political corruption on the part of the beneficiaries. To begin, Europeans were able to develop agricultural surpluses because they happened to live in a fertile geographical location with easily-domesticated animals; this surplus of crops enabled a division of labour and accelerated technological progress, including the production of steel and guns; and these developments allowed Europeans to slaughter and oppress other peoples, whom they encountered on their voyages. Their advantage lay not so much in their fighting ability as in their acquired immunity to transmissible diseases, conferred by their close proximity to livestock, together with their location in a hospitable climate. In other words, Europeans were able to develop a hegemonic imperialist culture by virtue of a series of geographical accidents, not due to innate properties. All of this was pointed out by Jared Diamond in ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ (2007), but anyone with a passing familiarity with anthropology and a modicum of common sense could have figure out the basic premise.

This isn’t the end of the story, of course, because Europeans weren’t just lucky: they exploited their geographical good fortune to oppress differently-geographically-located groups, and this was a conscious choice and an act of political will. Far from being heroic, this political decision was one of the most shameful acts of terrorism in history.

If Spencer truly wanted to reclaim his European ancestors’ heritage, he would apologize on their behalf to historically oppressed groups and demand that governments of white-majority countries pay reparations to these groups out of taxpayer dollars. He would also admit that European hegemony is rooted in a historical accident that was then exploited by Europeans who, after committing cultural genocide, rewrote history to favour their interests, and created racist policies to protect their privileged status. These historical myths and social practices have been passed down to the current generation, and are being revivified by Spencer and his followers.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Spencer holds homophobic and misogynistic beliefs that are similarly rooted in false biological assumptions, misrepresentations of history, ignorance about social anthropology, and false generalizations about the targeted social groups. Apparently Spencer holds an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, but what knowledge he could have gained during this degree is truly a mystery for the ages. So misguided are his beliefs about every aspect of human nature, it beggars belief that he was deemed competent at any single discipline in the Humanities.

Spencer’s claims that European culture is admirable and ought to be ‘reclaimed’ and championed are widely rejected because they are embedded in a broader racist belief system. What surprises me is that a lot of people seem to think that European culture is dissociable from the institution of slavery, in a way that Nazism is not dissociable from the Holocaust. Europeans are a larger and more diverse group than Nazis, of course, but to think that European history can be expunged of, or bracketed from, the politics of slavery is just another example of Eurocentric historical revisionism. If you are going to claim derivative responsibility for the positive accomplishments of European peoples, you must also, by the same token, claim derivative responsibility for the system of oppression that enabled those developments and is intertwined with the politics and morality of that culture. That is, if you are going to feel pride about your European inheritance, you must also feel, by the same token, shame. You cannot cherry-pick flattering elements of your cultural legacy and tout them as emblematic, while pretending that institutionalized, race-based terrorism is not part and parcel of that same legacy.

A common objection to this line of reasoning is that slavery is a thing of the past and therefore has no bearing on the image or self-conception of contemporary white people. But this logic is flawed for two reasons. First, if you are going to claim that ‘white culture’ exists at all, you must admit that oppressing other races is a defining feature of this culture’s historical legacy. Second, even if you wanted to draw an arbitrary line in the historical record and extol ‘white culture’ as it now exists (ignoring the history that led up to it), you would be denying the fact that white people currently reap the rewards of historical white imperialism, because this legacy is enshrined in our current systems of legal and social practices. For example, red lining and anti-black credit policies throughout the 20th Century banned Black Americans from purchasing valuable property, resulting in a 21st-Century economy in which white households are worth 20 times as much as black households; Black American are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans; Black Americans are paid less than White Americans at every level of education; and so on and so forth. These are current injustices enforced by our current social institutions (not to mention the countless microagressions that Black Americans face on a regular basis). Thus, if ‘reclaiming white culture’ means anything, it means taking responsibility, if not for Europe’s legacy of cultural genocide, then at least for profiting off of the fallout of this legacy, viz., the systems of racial injustice in which we are presently situated. It also arguably means agreeing to pay reparations to historically disenfranchised groups, who continue to bear the burden of white cultural imperialism.

Even many people who are not proud of European history or ‘white culture’ deny that they ought to feel guilty in light of the fact that they are participating in a system of racial injustice that unfairly favours them. This refusal of collective guilt is weaker than ‘white pride’, but still, in my opinion, a kind of bad faith, because it denies the reality that white people are profiting off of racism and, for the most part, doing remarkably little to foster change. Oddly, justice theorists like Jose Medina and Althea Prince (who are not white) argue that white people need not feel guilty, we simply need to acknowledge the existence of white privilege in order to discharge our moral-epistemic obligations. But how can we dissociate these two states? Being aware of your (unearned, historically contingent) privileges surely entails some negative affective response. Turning to philosophy, on some theories of responsibility (e.g., Arpaly), benefiting from injustice may be sufficient for feeling guilty; on others (e.g., Fischer), benefiting from injustice together with being in a position to grasp and respond to this situation may be sufficient for guilt. There is good philosophical reason, I believe, to feel guilty as the beneficiary of white privilege – unless you are making a momentous effort to foment political change. For the average white person, lack of guilt for one’s status in the social order is a reliably sign of (what Charles Mills calls) white ignorance as well as moral insensitivity, and is therefore grounds for blame.

Relatedly, people who lack adequate guilt are notoriously defective in their capacity for moral responsibility, i.e., their capacity to respond to moral facts. This applies not only to psychopaths and clinical narcissists (who are incapable of guilt and sympathy), but also to relatively neurotypical people who are in denial about certain facts of life. Responsibility deficits can be global or domain-specific: psychopaths lack guilt entirely, while ordinary people who are in denial have circumscribed insensitivities, which allow them to retain their rosy self-conception while denying the reality of their role in systems of social injustice. Having these traits makes one an appropriate target for blame and censure.

Another objection to the argument for ‘white guilt’ – feeling guilty for benefiting from systemic white privilege – is that white privilege is simply an accident, not something over which we have control and can bear responsibility. (This objection assumes a control-based theory of responsibility, which is relatively stringent, but I will grant it for the sake of argument). Perhaps white privilege is an instance of moral luck, over which we can feel, at most, “agent-regret,” not guilt. Agent-regret is a term coined by Bernard Williams (1979) to describe the feeling a moral agent experiences in response to causing harm purely by accident. If a trolley driver hits and kills a child who darts out into the road, the driver feels ‘agent-regret’ if he is a competent moral agent, but he is not responsible for the tragedy – perhaps no one is responsible. Maybe white people are in the position of the trolley driver, in that they lack control over their privileged status, though this status imposes harms and limitations on historically disenfranchised groups. Notably, this analogy already entails a concession, which is that we should feel, at least, agent-regret about benefiting from white privilege. But white privilege is not actually a case of moral luck, because beneficiaries of white privilege do not simply cause harm, we also profit off of this harm: we gain substantive advantages in terms of economic security, perceived credibility, and so on. If the trolley driver had killed the child and subsequently been rewarded for doing so, and also kept the reward, he would then be implicated in a harm over which he had no control (warranting agent-regret), as well as responsible for an injustice (reaping the rewards of that tragedy). What he should do is transfer the rewards to the family of the deceased child to compensate for their loss. Benefiting from a system of racial injustice is like this: it is a state of affairs in which both agent-regret and guilt are fitting for beneficiaries. People who lack these sentiments may be morally /epistemically lacking.

Spencer’s belief system is riddled with such flaws – denials of reality, misconstruals of the historical record, mythical interpretations of contemporary social institutions, and so on…  White ignorance is a matter of degree, and Spencer is on the far end of the spectrum – the fringe of extreme ignorance. Spencer is also on the far end of the spectrum of white privilege, since he is seemingly well-off and directly profits from his ancestors’ enslavement of African peoples, as an absentee landlord (with his mother and sister) of “5,200 acres of cotton and corn fields in an impoverished, largely African American region of Louisiana.” This means that Spencer is both high in white privilege and high in white ignorance – a toxic combination of moral-epistemic flaws. Instead of feeling the guilt appropriate to a moral agent, he willfully denies responsibility, choosing to re-interpret biology, history, and social anthropology in a way that justifies his narcissistic worldview. He is not someone with whom moral agents can have a functional relationship – he is, in Strawson’s term (1963), outside of the boundaries of the moral community.

I’ve said a lot in this post, but the main points are: (1) Spencer is deeply delusional, not merely by accident, but by virtue of his own willful (white) ignorance; and (2) white guilt is a respectable philosophical concept – namely, the appropriate affective response to voluntarily benefiting from privileges conferred by social injustice. White guilt can also be seen as the content of an attitude of responsibility (following Strawson’s model), in which one takes responsibility for a wrong, in this case, accepting the proceeds of racial injustice.

 

 

Responsibility, Epistemic Confidence, and Trust

In my last post, I argued that severe deficits of epistemic confidence can undermine responsible agency by undermining a person’s ability to form resolutions and have a deep self. In this post, I want to discuss a related notion: trust. In writing about epistemic confidence, Miranda Fricker (2007) says that people who conspicuously lack epistemic confidence are perceived as less competent and less trustworthy. Being seen as less trustworthy undermines a person’s epistemic confidence, which in turn undermines the person’s agency or competency. Trust, epistemic confidence, and agency are thus related in a positive feedback loop. This is illustrated in the experiment on expectancy effect, in which certain students were randomly designated as academically gifted, and the teacher’s trust in the students’ academic competency actually improved their competency (as measured by test scores) over the course of the year (Rosenthal & Jacobson 1996, cited by Fricker 2007: 56).

In this post, I want to look more closely at trust and its relation to responsible agency.

Victoria McGeer also writes about trust. She argues the ‘substantial trust’—trust that goes beyond the evidence and abjures strategic judgment—enhances the trustee’s responsible agency (2008).[1] Substantial trust ‘goes beyond the evidence’ in the sense that it embodies a belief in the trustee’s moral worth that isn’t supported by the balance of evidence; and it ‘abjures strategic judgment’ in that it entails a refusal to evaluate the trustee’s worth on the basis of evidence. That is, trustors don’t meticulously scrutinize the evidence regarding their friend’s moral qualities; they take a leap of faith in favour of the friend’s potential to be good. To illustrate this epistemic state, if my friend is accused of bribery, I exhibit substantial trust if I’m biased in favour of her innocence, in spite of any evidence to the contrary. When we substantively trust someone, we refuse to judge her on evidential grounds.

A central element of substantial trust on McGeer’s view is hope: in trusting a friend, we hope the person will live up to our optimistic expectations of her moral worth, but we don’t know if she will. Yet substantive trust can’t (or shouldn’t) be delusory: if the evidence confirms our friend’s guilt beyond doubt, we shouldn’t trust in the person’s innocence; but it would still be reasonable in this case to trust in our friend’s capacity to improve. In this way, substantive trust is relatively resistant to disappointment: even if a friend fails several times, we can continue to trust in the person’s basic capacity to live up to our hopes. We trust that the person can gain new capacities or build on existing capacities to embody our ideal. Only in the face of repeated disappointment does substantive trust become irrational. ‘Irrational’ trust on McGeer’s view is pointless; it doesn’t reliably contribute to the trustee’s agency.

Substantive trust enhances the trustee’s agency because it “has a galvanizing effect on how trustees see themselves, as trustors avowedly do, in the fullest of their potential” (McGeer 2008: 252). That is, our trust inspires confidence in the trustee, who begins to believe in herself.

This picture of trust as agency-enhancing interests me for 3 reasons, which I’ll elaborate briefly here.

1. Epistemic confidence: the mediating variable between trust and responsible agency

McGeer’s account helps to explain how epistemic confidence is related to responsible agency: substantial trust (when assimilated to Fricker’s moral epistemology) inspires epistemic confidence, which (in the right degree) facilitates responsible agency. The right degree, as per my last post, is midway between between epistemic insecurity and epistemic arrogance; it’s neither too much nor too little self-regard. Epistemic confidence, then, is the mediating variable between trust and responsible agency. McGeer doesn’t explicitly mention ‘epistemic confidence,’ but she’s interested in elucidating the psychological mechanism whereby trust enhances responsibility. She rejects Pettit’s theory (1995) that trust incites a desire for approval, as this isn’t a ‘morally decent’ motive, befitting of the trust relationship (2008: 252). Instead, McGeer proposes that trust ‘galvanizes’ the trustee to see herself in a more positive light—through the trustor’s eyes. The resultant state—let’s call it positive self-regard—motivates the trustee to aspire to a higher standard of conduct.

Positive self-regard can be seen as a weak form of epistemic confidence—an aspirational kind. Whereas epistemic confidence is a positive belief in one’s merit or abilities, self-regard (in McGeer’s sense) appears to be faith in one’s (as yet unproven) merits and abilities. But self-esteem and epistemic confidence are of a kind: one is just firmer than the other. So, we can see positive self-regard as a weak form of epistemic confidence, and both states as intermediary between two epistemic defects: epistemic insecurity and epistemic arrogance. These epistemic virtues—self-esteem and epistemic confidence—are positively correlated with responsible agency, in the following sense: they enhance the trustee’s confidence in herself, and thus her ability to have firm beliefs and values (or convictions) about herself, and to act on those states. Having convictions prevents people from being ‘wantons,’ akratics, and irresolute people—paradigms of irresponsibility or weak responsibility. Responsibility is enhanced by belief in oneself, and this belief tends to confer self-control, willpower, and resilience—competencies implicated in or constitutive of fully responsible agency.

These related virtues—positive self-regard and epistemic confidence—might serve slightly different purposes; specifically, self-esteem might be particularly adaptive in adverse circumstances where a positive outcome is unlikely (but possible), whereas epistemic confidence might be more fitting when success is reasonably probable; but both states facilitate responsibility. Trust is fitting, therefore, when it’s likely to enhance responsibility by either of these means. In other words, we’re rational to trust someone when our trusting attitude reliably confers agency-conducive epistemic virtues. This allows us to say (consistent with McGeer’s view) that trust is a ‘rational’ attitude even if it goes against the evidence, insofar as it tends to foster agency in the trustee. Trusting in someone ‘irrationally’ would mean trusting in someone who can’t reasonably be expected to live up to our ideal; in that case, we’re merely wishing (not trusting) that the person could be better. Trust is also irrational if the trustee is overconfident, since in that case, our trust is either wasted or positively harmful: it’s likely to increase the person’s epistemic narcissism.

On this (basically functionalist) account of trust, epistemic confidence is counterfactually dependent on trust in the following sense: it wouldn’t exist without some initial investment of trust, but it can become increasingly self-sustaining and self-perpetuating over time. That is, people who never receive trust probably (as a matter of statistical probability) won’t develop epistemic confidence, but people who do receive trust may become increasingly self-trusting and self-sufficient. This claim is based in part on facts about ordinary human psychology: As a matter of fact, trust tends to confer epistemic confidence in psychologically normal humans, which enhances responsibility as a measure of resoluteness, willpower, and resilience. This psychological picture is suggested (though not explicitly articulated) by McGeer and Fricker, who cite developmental and child education studies showing that trust from an adult inspires confidence and competency in children. (This is sometimes called ‘Pygmalion effect’). Fricker cites the famous teacher expectation study (Rosenthal & Jacobson 1996), and McGeer cites research in developmental psychology showing that children who receive support from parents—‘parental scaffolding,’ as she calls it (2007: 249)—develop stronger powers of agency than deprived and neglected children. This research suggests that agency typically, in ordinary humans, depends on positive self-regard, which depends on a non-trivial investment of trust, especially during a person’s formative years. Subsequent trusting relationships, however, can compensate for deficits in childhood, as other research indicates—for example, research on therapy showing how positive therapeutic relationships can remediate symptoms of childhood trauma (Pearlman & Saakvitne 1995). This is how I suggest we perceive the trust-epistemic confidence relationship: epistemic confidence is counterfactually dependent on a non-trivial investment of trust in psychologically normal people, but can eventually become relatively (though not completely) self-sustaining; epistemic virtues inculcated by trust typically confer strong(er) agency.

This discussion suggests a particular taxonomy of epistemic states related to trust and agency. Specifically, I’ve said that trust catalyses three closely-related epistemic virtues: positive self-regard, epistemic confidence, and epistemic courage. These states are increasingly robust epistemic virtues, which support our ability to form resolutions, exercise willpower, and act resiliently. At either end of thus spectrum is an epistemic defect: on one side, epistemic insecurity (a paucity of epistemic confidence), and on the other side, epistemic arrogance (a superabundance of epistemic confidence). These defects undermine agency for different reasons: epistemic insecurity undermines our ability to form and act on convictions, and epistemic arrogance undermines our ability to adequately consider evidence for and against our beliefs, inciting us to favour our prior assumptions come what may. (That is, it spurs self-serving bias and confirmation bias). These vices thus undermine our ability to have a deep self and to exercise moderate control over our deep self, respectively.

This is one possible epistemic framework for responsible agency—the one that I’ve settled on. I think that more work can be done here, viz., at the intersection of responsibility and epistemology (especially social/feminist epistemology, which is relational in nature). We can call this intersection ‘the epistemology of moral responsibility’. This is promising area for future research, I think, and it may be of interest to neuroscientifically-inclined philosophers, inasmuch as these epistemic states are amenable to neuroscientific description.

2. Responsibility as ‘external’ or ‘distributed.’ 

I’m also interested in McGeer’s account because (I think) it poses a challenge to classic theories of responsible agency that are relatively ‘atomistic’ (Vargas 2013) or ‘internalist’ (Hurley 2011). Classic accounts include Frankfurt’s (1971), on which responsibility is a matter of being able to form higher-order volitions consistent with one’s lower-order desires, and Fischer’s (2006, 2011), on which responsibility is a matter of being moderately responsive to reasons. These are different types of theory (one is character-based and the other is control-based, as typically construed), but they both emphasize the internal properties of agents to a greater extent than McGeer’s theory of trust, and so they can be regarded as comparatively ‘internalistic.’ (I’ve adopted aspect of these theories here—the idea that responsible agency is a function of deep-selfhood and reasons-responsiveness—but I’m going to to suggest that these capacities are more ‘extended’ than classic accounts imply).

Internalism should be seen as a matter of degree: most theories of responsibility treat some background factors as responsibility-relevant—for example, neuroscientific intervention (Mele 1995). But classic theorists usually think that exogenous factors are only relevant insofar as they intervene on the ‘actual sequence’ of the agent’s deliberation. For example, Fischer holds that clandestine brainwashing impairs responsibility because it operates on the agent’s actual motivational profile, dramatically altering it; but a ‘counterfactual device,’ that would have intervened had the agent deliberated differently is ‘bracketed’ as irrelevant (for more on this, see Levy 2008). Frankfurt, too, sees these counterfactual conditions as irrelevant.

McGeer’s theory is comparatively ‘externalistic’ in that it (implicitly, at least) construes counterfactual interveners as relevant to responsibility (qua trust-fittingness). We can’t, on her view, ‘bracket’ these counterfactual conditions when considering whether someone is trustworthy. This is because when we substantially trust someone, we (implicity) judge the person by what she could be in a nearby possible world—one in which she’s better than she is. This is implied by the hopeful optimism intrinsic to substantial trust—we don’t see the trustee as she is (at least, in paradigm cases), but rather as she would be if she succeeded in translating our trust into ideal self-regard. Moreover, when someone fails to live up to our optimistic expectations, we don’t immediately withdraw our trust, since substantial trust is inherently resilient. Trust, then, doesn’t always track a person’s real-world capacity for control or real-world quality of will; it sometmes tracks the person’s potential to improve, not based on evidence but on hopeful optimism. Trust, then, is a form of responsibility (a reactive attitude) that isn’t constrained by considerations about a person’s real-world or actual-sequence capacities at the time of action—when the trustee did something good or bad. It considers the person as she is in a nearby possible world or as she may become in the future.

This sets McGeer’s account apart from classic ‘actual-world’ or ‘actual sequence’ theories, because substantial trust treats counterfactual possibilities—in which the agent has a different kind of self-regard—as morally relevant. The trust relationship itself can be seen as a ‘counterfactual enabler’ in Levy’s terms (2008), in that it enables the trustee to gain a capacity, if the person succeeds in internalizing the proffered trust. But these transformative effects aren’t countenanced as legitimate considerations on classic views of responsibility. Also importantly, the trust relationship is distributed between two people, not intrinsic to the trustee; if it’s withdrawn at a critical stage of development, it undermines the cultivation of positive self-regard and agency. This is another ‘externalist’ aspect to trust: it implicates two or more people’s agencies. So trust is ‘externalistic’ in at least these two aspects: it depends upon counterfactual scenarios and it implicates two agents.

3. Responsibility as care-based (non-retributive) and forward-looking

Substantial trust also challenges two other familiar approaches to responsibility: the retributive view and the backward-looking view.

Retributivism is, in very simple terms, the view that those who commit a wrongful action deserve punitive attitudes (blame, disapprobation, resentment) and those who perform an excellent action deserve rewards (praise, approbation). (I won’t consider more complex versions of retributivism: this one will be my only target). This is a very natural way of thinking about the reactive attitudes, and it seems to be Strawson’s understanding. He implies that those who fail to conform to reasonable social expectations deserve punitive attitudes, unless there’s an excusing or exempting condition (e.g., hypnosis, severe psychosis).

Substantial trust challenges this neat binary by holding that a person who falls short of our aspirational norms still ‘deserves’ trust, if trust is likely to instil positive self-regard across a reasonable time scale. That is, continuance of trust is fitting when someone makes a “one-off” mistake, as substantial trust is an “on-going activity” that’s resilient in the face of moderate set-backs (McGeer 2008: 247). Hence, we can’t simply say that someone who surpasses our expectations thereby warrants praise and someone who breaches our trust thereby warrants blame, as per the standard desert-based picture. This doesn’t capture the essence of trust. Rather, we withdraw or modify our trusting disposition only when someone repeatedly or catastrophically disappoints us, rendering trust pointless and irrational. Since substantial trust is aspirational at its core, substandard conduct on the trustee’s part doesn’t compel us to automatically withdraw our trust and assume a retributive stance: we’re licensed to suspend blame in the hope that the person will improve.

This is related to the fact that substantial trust is a forward-looking attitude. Most theories of responsibility are backward-looking, meaning that they attribute responsibility (praise/blame) on the basis of an agent’s capacities at the time of action, i.e., some time in the past. Frankfurt’s and Fischer’s views are like this: if someone had (a) a certain motivational structure, or (b) reasons-responsiveness when performing a certain action A, the person is thereby responsible for A. Trust, however, isn’t deployed solely on the basis of someone’s past motivational psychology and conduct; it’s also deployed on the basis of the trustee’s ongoing and fluid potential: we can trust someone who doesn’t (presently) have the capacity to improve. Trust, that is, outstrips the trustee’s current capacities at any given time.

As McGeer points out, we don’t (paradigmatically) invest trust in someone on a calculated judgment that the person will ‘earn’ our trust (as Pettit thinks), as this would be perverse and ‘manipulative’ (2008: 252). Rather, we trust someone as a way of empowering the person. Another way of putting this, I think, is to say that we trust someone for that person’s own sake. This interpretation of trust has affinities with Claudia Card’s (1996) care-based approach to responsibility, on which responsibility serves the function of expressing care to the target agent. It also resembles Vargas’ agency-cultivation model (2013), which reflects a concern for the target’s wellbeing (at least, it’s amenable to this reading). This care-based orientation is very different from the retributive rationale, and it’s also not backward-looking: responsibility attributions are meant to enhance or empower the recipient, not to punish her for past misdeeds. McGeer’s account of trust thus fits better with consequentialist theories rather than retributive ones, and it seems to embody a care ethos—trust is an essentially caring attitude. It seems to be essential to trust that it be care-based—or at least forward-looking; any other interpretation is simply conceptually mistaken.

I think that this is the correct way to think about responsibility in general (i.e., as consequentialist); but even if this isn’t the whole story (arguably there are many incommensurable but correct theories of responsibility—see Doris 2015 on ‘pluralism’), this seems to be a necessary way of seeing at least one facet of responsibility: trust. This means (at a minimum) that not all of our responsibility-constitutive reactive attitudes are retributive.

 

*****

[1] McGeer says that substantial trust fosters ‘more responsible and responsive trustworthy behaviour’ (2008). I’m just going to say that it fosters ‘responsible agency,’ and I’ll make a case for this more general claim in this post. It’s not hard to see how trust can enhance responsible agency: if we trust in our potential to achieve a desired outcome, we’re better able to achieve that outcome (under success-conducive circumstances, which I’ll leave vague).

Blame and Brock Turner

 

This is *very* rough and there’s a lot going on, but here you go.

Trigger warning: this post contains information about sexual assault and/or violence that may be triggering to survivors.

Introductory Statements

I’m going to write about a sensitive topic with some reservations and apprehensions, but I think that it’s a case worth addressing from a philosophical perspective. I believe it’s a case on which philosophers can shed light, and a case that we can learn from. As I’m sure you know, Brock Turner raped a 23-year-old woman whom he met at a party. He was convicted of three charges of felony sexual assault and sentenced to six months’ jail time and 3 years’ probation by Judge Aaron Persky. This case has elicited a very vocal blaming response from the public, which I think is eminently appropriate. But it raises some questions for responsibility theorists. The main one that I want to address is the relationship between individual and collective responsibility, or more specifically, the responsibility that an individual bears when he is a member of a broader social group, and his actions reflect the (implicit or explicit) values of the group. I also plan to reconsider what can count as responsibility-relevant group membership, to include participation in ‘mere aggregates’ such as rape culture. I think that assessing Turner through the lens of collective responsibility explains the force of our shared reaction in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. That is, I think that there is general consensus that Turner is blameworthy in a particularly strong way, and we can explain this reaction by considering his social position – specifically, his implicit affiliation with particular (loose) social groups.

Without saying too much about this, I take this analysis to be consistent with certain contemporary projects in responsibility theory, particularly Vargas’ emphasis of the ‘moral ecology’ (2013) – the social structures that enhance or limit moral agency. I don’t think that it’s possible to assess a person’s responsibility status without considering the moral ecology, since responsibility, properly understood, is a function not just of a person’s internal properties, but the dynamic interaction between those properties and the world. Individual responsibility, then, can’t be judged independently of person’s social context. While social factors can impair responsibility by cutting off deliberative possibilities (consider Wolf’s famous JoJo example [1986], or Beauvoir’s example of the cloistered sex slave living in a harem [1964]), I argue that social structures can also amplify a person’s blameworthiness if those structures enable antisocial behaviour by creating conditions of privilege.

Before proceeding, a few clarifications.

I favour the view of blame on which blame is more than just a judgment to the effect that someone is blameworthy or that blame is fitting; I take it to be a cognitive state (i.e., a judgment) plus a conative or affective response – a disposition to rebuke the target or feel negative reactive emotions under blame-conducive circumstances, or something along those lines. I won’t defend this picture here, but in any case, I think that what I have to say is probably compatible with different conceptions of blame. You can adopt your preferred view.

I also want to state in advance that in what follows I’ll be discussing ‘rape culture’ and a ‘culture of White privilege’ (CWP for short), by which I mean to denote an aggregate of persons that could be called a loose ‘collective’ or ‘social group,’ though there is no shared intentionality amongst its members (i.e., ‘intentional agency’), or well-ordered decision procedures, unlike structured organizations (e.g., Walmart, the US military). I think that these particular aggregates are ‘social groups’ in a morally-relevant sense (i.e., a sense that confers responsibility on group members) because they share a set of implicit attitudes that motivate characteristic antisocial behaviours – most importantly, misogynistic attitudes, and an assumption of racial superiority and relative immunity from legal and moral sanctions, respectively. Members of these groups implicitly hold these attitudes, though they probably would not explicitly avow them, nor would they self-identify with these groups – they may not even know that these groups exist. Nonetheless, I hold that people who harbour and act on these types of implicit attitudes form a responsibilty-releative collective, and their group-typical individual behaviours are inflected by their group membership. Specifically, they can be responsible for harms committed by group, even if these harms outstrip their individual causal contributions to the group.

With this in mind, I submit that Turner is responsible for an individual act of rape as well as participation in rape culture and CWP, and this group participation makes his individual act more blameworthy, because it is both more wrong (in deontic or acetic terms – take your pick) and more harmful (in its effects). To be clear, I’m not just saying that Turner is blameworthy on three counts: for committing rape, for participating in rape culture, and for advancing CWP; I’m saying that his act of rape is more blameworthy as an act of rape on account of his participation in these social groups. This makes his act different from similar acts committed in different contexts. Some people benefit from membership in privileged social groups without committing rape, and some people who commit rape don’t belong to these types of groups; the unique confluence of rape and membership in these privileged social groups has normative implications for members’ responsibility status.  Now, even if we were to deny that group membership impacts on individual responsibility in this aggregative way, it would still be useful and informative to characterise Turner as responsible for not only an individual act of rape, but also implicit participation in these groups, which requires attention to Turner’s moral ecology. Yet I think it’s more accurate and informative still to see his action as part of a collective activity, and thus imbued with an ‘extra’ layer of moral significance which makes it more blameworthy.

I will also argue that Turner was a particularly active, albeit implicit, member of these groups, which prevents us from seeing his membership as in any way coerced (contrary to what he would have us believe). His participation in these groups was, properly understood, fully voluntary, given that he (tacitly) promoted the implicit values of these groups.

This construal of the situation poses a challenge to some popular ideas about responsibility. For example, the idea that collectives must have shared intentional agency or formal decision-making procedures to be collectives in a morally-relevant sense, and to confer responsibility onto individual members; the idea that individuals can be responsible for implicit biases and unwitting social affiliations; and the idea that unwitting group membership can have inculpating effects rather than (just) excusing effects.

This is a lot to take in, but for the rest of this post I’m going to focus on three key claims: (1) Turner is an active albeit unwitting participant in rape culture and CWP, (2) rape culture and CWP are responsibility-relevant collectives in spite of falling afoul of the standard criteria (i.e., intentional agency and/or formal decision procedures); and (3) Turner’s membership in these collectives intensified his blameworthiness, because it makes his action both worse (inherently) as well as more harmful. Then I’m going to explain how this construal of the situation challenges some popular assumptions about moral responsibility.

Note: To avoid confusion, I want to clarify that even if Turner’s action hadn’t been part of a collective harm, it would still have been utterly blameworthy and offensive in its own right. But while admitting this, I want to draw attention to features of the case that have received less attention in the media, that are generally overlooked by philosophers, and that might challenge some of our assumptions, especially concerning individual responsibility and the relevance of collectives.

(1) Active implicit participation

There are different degrees of group participation, and correspondingly different degrees of responsibility. Most theorists agree that resistors are not responsible for the activities of the group, and reluctant participants may be less-than-fully responsible. Passive participants, who neither contribute to the group’s aims nor resist, may be somewhat responsible. By contrast, active participants, who advance the group’s aims, are more responsible than any other type of group member. It may seem paradoxical to say that an active participant can also be an unwitting participant – oblivious to the group’s aims – but I think that this is intelligible if we consider tactic promotion of the group’s aims to count as ‘active participation.’ When someone explicitly denies group membership but exemplifies adherence to the group’s values through his actions, we can consider the person a willing participant. This allows us to say that someone might be a member of a collective even if the person wouldn’t recognize the collective as such: all that matters is whether that the person embodies the group’s values, even if they are only implicit represented in the person’s motivational system. The person wouldn’t count as ‘decisively endorsing’ his values in Frankfurt’s sense (1971), but he ‘endorses’ them at the level of overt behaviour – either bodily actions or speech acts that tacitly invoke the group’s values.

I think that this is true of Turner, inasmuch as he tacitly invoked salient features of rape culture and CWP repeatedly in his court statement. For instance, he claimed that, ‘coming from a small town in Ohio,’ he ‘had never really experienced celebrating or partying that involved alcohol.’ These are salient features of rape culture, and when invoked as a defence against rape, they function in a stereotypical way – to obscure the normative import of misogyny and violence against women, and to protect group members against harsh legal and social sanctions. It’s worth noting that Turner never confessed to rape, nor was he ever convicted of rape; he was convicted of felony sexual assault on (what I would describe as) a technicality – because the prosecution couldn’t prove to the court’s satisfaction that Turner raped his vicim with his own ‘sexual organ,’ as California law requires. This law can be seen another artefact of rape culture, promoting the idea that the male penis is special, imbued with some magical power to transform a woman’s moral and legal status in a unique way. (Otherwise why treat it differently than any other penetrative object?) Next, Turner appealed to ‘the stress of school and swimming’ as an apparent excuse for his ‘lapse of judgment’ (which, again, he refused to describe as rape). This can be seen as an invocation of White privilege: White people disproportionally participate in varsity swimming and comprise a majority of Stanford’s student and faculty population, and disproportionally  take this to reflect special moral standing, which can potentially ‘offset’ antisocial behaviour in their private lives – like a carbon tax for ‘white-collar crime.’ Turner’s father’s testimony reinforces this notion, citing Turner’s swimming record as an excuse for his behaviour. (A commentator cleverly edited this letter to show what a red herring these details are; but it would be wrong to see them as mere non sequiturs, rather than characteristic appeals to salient features of CWP. Seen in this light, they’re not morally irrelevant – they reveal flaws in the speaker’s moral sense). The judge responded by giving Turner a lenient sentence – much less than the maximum of 14 years in prison – on grounds that “a prison sentence would have a severe impact” on the defendant. It might not be a coincidence that the judge himself went to Stanford and was the captain of the Lacrosse team. It’s not implausible to think that he, too, is a member of CWP, sympathized with Turner as a compatriot, rather than the plaintiff, who pleaded for a harsher sentence. In any case, the point of this section is that salient aspects of Turner’s testimony suggest that he is a spokesperson for rape culture and CWP, even if he would deny it.

One might object here that a lenient sentence is required by liberalism and a commitment to rehabilitation – and perhaps this is the right attitude to take toward crime in general, which is often committed by underprivileged members of society (especially in economically polarized countries like the United States); but when you construe the judge’s verdict as a concession to Turner’s invocation of White privilege and rape culture, it can no long be seen as an innocuous defence of rehabilitative justice: it begins to look more like a defence of White privilege, rape culture, and the misogynistic attitudes that flow from the intersection of these subcultures. While some lenient sentences might legitimately rest on rehabilitative principles, Persky’s verdict problematically legitimates the defendant’s ludicrous excuses, and ignores the plaintiff’s request for a harsher sentence. This reinforce the pervasive social narratives of rape culture and CWP. And while rehabilitative justice is meant to equalize social inequality, this verdict does the opposite: it actually reinforces social equality by favouring the interests of the most well-off.

 

 

It’s also worth noting here that Turner denied responsibility for rape, absurdly insisting, both before and after the trial, that his interaction with the plaintiff was ‘consensual.’ I don’t think it’s implausible to say that Turner didn’t know that he was committing rape, but surely he should have known, and (relatedly) he could have known – he could have learned what rape means. Turner says, and perhaps genuinely believes, that he was ‘coerced’ by Stanford’s party culture (into committing an ‘indiscretion’), and this is supposed to excuse him. But he wasn’t coerced in any meaningful sense of the word. He could have sought out a different peer group, but he chose note to. He’s not like Wolf’s famous lone psychopath (JoJo). He’s an exceptionally privileged members of a liberal democracy with unimpeded access to many forms of life, and so he had as much free choice as any living person could want. He was thus ‘free’ in any meaningful compatibilst sense.

(2) Responsibility in collective contexts

One of the controversies in the collective responsibility literature is whether responsibility for participation in a collective harm can transcend the contributions of individual members, such that the collective harm is greater than the contribution of each member – whether the sum can be greater than its parts. For example, there is a question about whether genocide can be worse than multiple individual acts of anti-Semitic murder. I think that it can, but we need to deny some classic assumptions about collective responsibility. Some theorists (methodological individualists) think that collective action, and thus collective responsibility, is metaphysically impossible, but I see this as a collectivist version of what Strawson called ‘panicky metaphysics,’ and I don’t want to get bogged down in metaphysical concerns, so I won’t. I’m concerned with developing a practical evaluation of the situation that makes sensible distinctions amongst people. Other theorists are worried about treating individuals unfairly by lumping them together, which might seem to contravene Rawls’ principle of the ‘separateness of persons.’ This may be why H. D. Lewis referred to collective responsibility as a kind of “barbarism” (1948). But this worry seems to jump the gun; if there is a compelling reason to see individual participation in a collective as (morally) different then individual action simpliciter, then we should treat them differently. This isn’t barbarism, it’s realism. Of theorists who think that collective responsibility is coherent, many take this to be the case only if the collective has either organizational mechanisms (decision-procedures), or collective intentionality – especially shared intentional aims (e.g., French 1984). Others have defended a more permissible notion of collective responsibility, on which group membership can be based on shared attitudes;  yet these attitudes are typically construed as reflective. Marilyn Friedman and Larry May (2985), for instance, hold that ethnic groups, such as White men, can bear collective responsibility, but they offer the following three conditions of group membership: self-identification, continuous primary relationships with members of that group, and a shared cultural heritage. I doubt that rape culture and CWP meet any of these criteria. Certainly ‘group identity’ (in the typical sense) is lacking, since involvement in rape culture tends to be implicit, and would be explicitly disavowed by most members if asked. Nor do members bear ‘primary relations’ to one another; they usually meet only sporadically, if ever. Nor do members share something that could be called, in substantive terms, a share cultural heritage – at least, not the kind of well-established heritage that most ethnic groups share. Yet I still want to say that these groups – rape culture and CWP – commit collective harms, and members can be held responsible for these harms (depending on their degree of participation). Furthermore, the wrongness and harmfulness of collective harms outstrips the contribution of any individual member, yet each member bears a degree of blameworthiness for the collective harm – that is, the individual’s blameworthiness for his group-typical behaviours – such as rape – is intensified by virtue of his relation to the group. This is true whether the person knows that his action is part of a broader harm, or whether he knows that he belongs to the group at all. This is also different from being part of an ethnic group per se because rape culture and CWP are smaller subcultures, making it relatively easy to avoid them. And on top of this, their core members are relatively privileged and autonomous, and can fairly easily use their privilege and self-determination to choose more pro-social peer groups.

These thoughts, however, go against the standard constraints on collective responsibility, which hold that group membership only confers responsibility if shared intentional agency or organizational mechanisms are present, rendering membership ‘voluntary.’ On my proposal, group membership can be a matter of shared group-typical implicit biases, in addition to the standard criteria. (This expands the definition of ‘collective’). This modification fits most closely, of all the views I can think of, with Larry May’s notion of ‘group intentions’ as “pre-reflective intentions,” which are “not yet reflected upon by each of the members of the group” (May 1987 p. 64); yet this description suggests that there is counterfactual reflective endorsement, i.e., that group intentions would be avowed upon adequate reflection. Implicit biases aren’t like this; they resist reflective access. Perhaps May’s view could be adjusted to accommodate implicit attitudes; but either way, I have a different reason for rejecting the condition of shared intentionality – the ‘intentionality constraint.’ The reason, very simply, is that we shouldn’t even have an intentionality constraint on individual responsibility, let alone collective responsibility.

Responsibility theorists who specialize in individual responsibility are increasingly moving away from the intentionality requirement (also referred to as the ‘epistemic condition,’ ‘knowledge condition,’ or ‘reflective condition’). For example, George Sher argues that we can be responsible for unconscious omissions such as forgetting about a beloved pet in the backseat of a hot car, falling asleep on duty in a combat zone, or crashing an airplane due to lack of proper attention (2010: 24). Angela Smith (2005) argues that we can we can responsible for forgetting about a friend’s birthday. Nomy Arpaly (2014) says that we can praiseworthy for doing the right thing unwittingly, i.e., ‘inverse akrasia.’ She cites  Huck Finn as an example, for helping his friend Jim escape from slavery in spite of naively thinking that slavery is justified. These examples illustrate the idea that people can be responsible for their behaviour even if they fail to grasp the normative force of that behaviour, provided that their actions are ‘characteristic’ in some sense. (Most of these theorists believe that actions have to be suitably connected to some subset of an agent’s motivational system – the person’s moral personality – to confer responsibility). Some of these arguments rest on the intuitive force of the examples, while others marshall theoretical arguments. Arpaly, for instance, contends that reflective judgments are not, as Kant believed, “non-accidentally” connected to the normative features of right action, such that they reliably produce right action (2014: 145); hence, non-reflective actions can be praiseworthy – and presumably, they can also be blameworthy. If this is right, then maybe we should reject the intentionality constraint.

Another rationale for rejecting this constraint is that empirical research indicates that many of our characteristic choices and actions are not the result of reflection. Yet these choices and actions seem to define us as persons – even as moral agents. For example, people are more likely to donate to an honour box if there are eyes posted next to it (Bateson 2006). Although this is a non-reflective (automatic) choice, it might reflect a person’s agency (characteristic values and beliefs). John Doris (2015) takes this kind of research to show that agency doesn’t require reflective control – it’s at most loosely connected with reflection. Extrapolating from this, we can infer that responsibility, too, doesn’t require reflection. Extrapolating further, we can infer that implicit biases, if expressed in a person’s characteristic behaviours, can be responsibility-imputing albeit non-reflective.

By rejecting the intentionality constraint, we allow that people’s implicit biases might be responsibilty-conferring, if those implicit biases are manifested in overt behaviour. We also allow, by the same token, that a person’s implicit participation in a social group can be responsibility-conferring, and further, that this participation can amplify the person’s responsibility for his individual implicit biases and related actions. I turn to this thought next.

(3) Blame amplification through group participation

Although I am not aware of an exact precedent for defining groups in terms of implicit biases, there are precedents in the collective responsibility literature for discussing individual responsibility in collective contexts, and we can modify them to fit our purposes.

I hold that a person’s action can be especially blameworthy if the person is a member of a harmful collective, even if the person doesn’t self-identify with the group. I’ll unpack this claim in four steps. This will partially summarize, and partially build on, what has already been said.

(1) A person is responsible for participation in a group harm if this participation is voluntary either in the classic sense, i.e., there are decision procedures or shared intentional agency, or the members share group-typical implicit biases and manifest those biases in their overt behaviour. It is also relevant whether there are alternative possibilities within the person’s cultural environment: a lack of alternatives can undermine the voluntariness requirement by practically necessitating a certain outcome. In liberal democracies, it’s relatively easy for most people to move from one subculture to another.

(2) A person’s action is more blameworthy when the person is part of an antisocial collective (and the person meets condition 1), because the action is more wrong (deontically or aretaically), inasmuch as it embodies rational flaws and/moral and epistemic vices, or both, over and above the person’s individual flaws; and it is more harmful, inasmuch as is it part of a group harm, which outstrips the individual’s causal contribution to the group. Rape culture and CWP embody misogynistic and racist attitudes, and they perpetrate harms not just against individuals, but against whole groups – women and racial minorities (directly). They might even be construed as committing harms against everyone, inasmuch as they promote pernicious cultural myths that normalise misogyny and racism and make it harder for ordinary people to see them for what they are. Yet individual members might not know or appreciate what they are doing. Nonetheless, I think that it’s reasonable to see these agents as responsible for these outcomes, even if they don’t explicitly intend or endorse them. And I also think it’s plausible to see members who promote the core values of the group as responsible for peripheral values that they don’t implicitly hold, inasmuch as promoting the core features of an ideological system supports the perpetuation of the system as a whole. So group members can, I think, be responsible for promoting values that they neither implicitly nor explicitly hold. In this way, group members who promote core ideological tenets can be responsible for more than their own implicit biases – they can be responsible for unwittingly promoting additional values; and they can be responsible more than their individual direct contrition to the group – they can be responsible for additional indirect harms.

(3) I don’t just want to say that members of antisocial groups who commit a group-typical harm are responsible for their individual action, in addition to their membership in the group – although this is an interesting claim in its own right, and it helps to counterbalance the tendency to ignore the moral relevance of context. But I want to say more than this, i.e., that a person’s individual action is coloured by his membership in the group. Turner, specifically, is responsible not just for an act of rape, but for an act of rape as an act of group-based misogyny and White privilege. The act itself has several moral ‘layers.’

This is where there’s a helpful precedence in the collectivist literature, and I’m thinking specifically of Tracy Isaacs (2011). She says that when an individual’s action makes a causal contribution to a collective harm, that action (in effect) inherits a layer of normative significance from its relationship to that broader harm. So for instance, when someone murders a Jewish person in a Holocaust context, this isn’t just an act of murder, or even an act of anti-Semitic murder; it’s an act of genocide. The action is thus transformed from a strictly individual action to part of a collective harm, and this has significance for the individual’s responsibility status – how blameworthy he is. This theory leans on previous accounts of agency (Williams and Davidson’s), but adds a new dimension to them. On Bernard Williams’ theory of evaluative concepts (1985), a single action can be described variably in ‘thinner’ or ‘thicker’ terms. For instance, saving a drowning child can be described more ‘thickly’ as an act of courage. On Davidson’s theory of reasons, actions admit of intentional and non-intentional description; the act of flipping a light switch can be redescribed (intentionally) as an act of turning on a light or (unintentionally) as alerting a prowler lurking outside that someone is inside (1963). These accounts exemplify ‘the accordion effect’ in Sheffler’s sense – action descriptions ‘expand’ and ‘contract’ to reveal different layers of meaning. What Issacs adds to these ‘accordion’ views is the idea that an individual action can have collective significance –  a thicker type of significance. This explains the Nazi example: the individual act of murder becomes an act of genocide when the agent is part of a Holocaust. Isaacs, however, is only talking about organisations and goal-oriented collectives (like military regimens), which satisfy the group intentionality constraint. But if you drop this requirement, her view can be made to suit my purposes: we can describe individual actions in terms of implicit group membership, yielding a ‘thicker’ description. So Turner’s act of rape is, properly understood, also an act of misogynistic violence and White privilege. These collective descriptions are part of the meaning of his action, and inform his moral status. Note that individual and collective descriptions don’t attach to different actions; they co-describe the self-same action. The description of rape as, in part, an endorsement of rape culture and CWP may not be as succinct or epigrammatic as the description, ‘an act of genocide,’ but I don’t think that semantic clumsiness should bother us; we happen to have a convenient word for a genocidal action, but not other types of group harms. Yet I think that there are many group harms beyond the classic compendium, and they are sufficiently analogous, although they may be more complex and multifaceted. If we fail to see Turner’s action as part of a group harm in the relevant sense, this may be due to a pervasive individualist bias.

 

(4) When I say that Turner’s action is worse because it casually contributes to these two collectives – rape culture and CWP – I mean that it’s worse than an equivalent action performed outside of these groups, ceteris paribus. The reason this action is worse is that the collectives are especially morally flawed and especially harmful. Rape culture represents a set of misogynistic ideas, including that it’s permissible to treat women as objects, that sex doesn’t require explicit consent, and so on. If someone holds a core subset of these values, the person implicitly promotes the whole evaluative framework – not just these attitudes, but connected ones closer to the periphery. These attitudes also become more plausible to people, by virtue of their relation to the ideological system. Furthermore, the group perpetuates a set of harms that no individual would be capable of perpetrating on his own, yet every member’s contribution helps to sustain the group. For these reasons, actions that contribute to the group are especially wrong and especially harmful.

People who commit wrongs individually often don’t bear the same degree of responsibility as group members, especially particular types of group members. For example, a lone psychopath might commit a heinous offence, but either the person had no choice due to severe, inalterable cognitive deficits, or the psychopath wasn’t causally implicated in a harmful collective, capable of causing collective harms and promoting pernicious and false beliefs and attitudes;  he acted on his own psychopathic ‘reasons.’ In either case, the psychopath’s responsibility it determined by his own internal properties. A child soldier, like Ishmael Beah, might commit atrocities as part of a group, yet not be responsible because the person was a child, indoctrinated into a pernicious ideology by force; or the person might have lacked alternative possibilities – Beah, after all, was captured by the Sierra Leon government army during a civil war, drugged, and basically brainwashed. Members of privileged groups in liberal democracies aren’t like this. They’re not psychopaths for the most part, and they’re not captured, forced, or coerced in the literal sense.

This explanation poses some challenge to standard accounts of responsibility, which I’ll address next.

Responsibility as theory and practice

Here are some theoretical and practical commitments that are challenged by my claims. I should be careful here because I suspect that many theorists would reject these commitments, but I think that there is a natural way of construing certain view such that they imply these commitments, and I also think that commonsense morality might be committed to some of them. To avoid controversy, I’ll avoid citing anyone unless there is a clear connection.

(1) What is a collective?

First, I challenge the idea that responsibility-relevant collective must have clear decision-making procedures and/or explicit shared intentionality. This broadens the scope of responsibility-relevant collectives, but not so much that pervasive, practically inescapable collectives count. I don’t want to say that whole cultures are collectives in the responsibilty-conferring sense. Subcultures seem like more apt candidates for group status.

(2) Atomism

I’ve argued that we can’t adequately describe an individual’s action without considering the individual’s relation to collectives, since certain collectives can confer moral significance onto their members’ actions. This goes against the atomistic view, on which only individual actions have moral significance. While people can be responsible for an individual action, and for participating in a certain collective, atomists don’t allow that group membership can affect the significance of the individual’s action in a qualitative way.

(3) Groups as excusing

There’s a pervasive line of thinking on which group membership is excusing, because it induces ignorance and undermines control. Milligram’s famous experiments (1963) purported to show that anyone could have been a Nazi under the wrong circumstances, which reinforces a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ mentality. If people do bad things only because they didn’t know better and couldn’t have done otherwise, people aren’t blameworthy. But there are degrees of control, and some people have more of it than others. Turner invoked lack of control in his defence: he suggested that when he committed ‘a lapse of judgment’ (in his words), he was under duress from ‘party culture.’ Reinforcing this narrative is dangerous, and I think that the narrative itself is false. Turner had as much freedom and autonomy as anyone in this world could want; if he isn’t free, then who is? Appeals to coercion are legitimate in some cases (maybe Ishmael Beah’s, for example), but not everyone can legitimately appeal to them. There are morally relevant differences between getting drunk at a party and raping someone, on the one hand, and being kidnapped, drugged, and brainwashed during a civil war as a child, on the other. These differences, I think, are sufficient to say that one person is responsible and the other isn’t (or at least, that one person is significantly more blameworthy than the other).

(3) Implicit attitudes aren’t responsibility-imputing

There’s also a pervasive line of thinking on which implicit attitudes are not blameworthy (e.g., Levy 2014; H. Smith 2014). (I say blameworthy because the kinds of implicit attitudes that philosophers are generally interested in are morally problematic). But if we have to define a person’s responsibility status on the basis of either a person’s explicitly avowed commitments or the person’s conflicting implicit attitudes, where the latter are expressed in the person’s overt behavioural patterns, then it makes sense to go with the manifested implicit attitudes. This is especially true of people who implicitly promote certain groups by invoking or embodying their normative features, since their contribution to the group’s aims can intelligibly be construed as a kind of (implicit) endorsement of these aims. This is different from Frankfurt’s notion of ‘decisively endorsement,’ since ‘decisiveness’ is conspicuously lacking, but it better captures what Watson (2006) described as a person’s values.

(4) The Searchlight View

There’s yet another prominent line of thinking on which a person can’t be responsible for unwitting infractions. Sher (2010) calls this the ‘searchlight view,’ and says that it can be attributable to Kant as well as commonsense morality. In some cases, this logic seems to make sense: if someone does something under posthypnotic suggestion, he’s not responsible because he didn’t know what he was doing and couldn’t have done otherwise. But as we saw, Sher and other modern deep-self theorists reject this view, on grounds that unconscious infractions might reflect our moral personality more than our reflective beliefs. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that consciousness and control don’t matter at all, I think that in many cases of ‘unwitting wrongdoing,’ there is an element of control, albeit in a very indirect sense: specifically, the agent could have made different choices in the past, which could have conferred a stronger capacity for control. This is certainly true of Turner (on a very natural interpretation): he could have chosen different peers, different social groups, different ideological perspectives, different books, different movies. In any case, unwitting infractions seem responsibility-relevant, either because they reflect a person’s moral personality, or because the person could have made better choices.

(5) Actual-sequence control

Fischer (2012) famously defends a view of responsibility on which responsibility for an action A requires ‘actual sequence control’ over A, i.e., a person must have had control over A in the actual sequence of his deliberation. If the person could have exercised control over A only under different, counterfactual circumstance, the person isn’t responsible for A. It’s hard to apply this view to practical cases, because it’s hard to know when anyone has actual-sequence control over a particular choice, and this has led to an extended debate between Vargas (2005) and Fischer (2012). I think there’s a case to be made that Turner didn’t have actual-sequence control when he committed rape, because he was closed off to certain moral considerations, and couldn’t entertain or imagine them; but if that’s the case, then I think that this shows what’s wrong with the actual sequence control model. If this isn’t the case and Turner did have actual sequence control (sufficient to underwrite responsibility), then the actual sequence control model might be viable, but I would still worry that it artificially cuts off relevant parts of the moral ecology which might inflect a person’s responsibly, as I’ve argued in previous posts. But I won’t take this up here.

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Conclusion: TBC.

Please comment in the ‘comments’ section above.

Non-cognitvism as philosophical method?

*By non-cognitivism I just mean a view on which emotions play a role in reasoning.

This post continues from the last one, which was on cognitivism and moral reasoning. I’m going to make some personal statements and some controversial statements, which are meant to be friendly and constructive suggestions, and I hope they’re taken in the right spirit.

So:

It might be instructive to reflect on where the philosophical ideal of un-emotional (purely cognitive) reasoning comes from. In philosophy, we write dispassionately. We don’t include emotional arguments, or even personal anecdotes for the most part. The problem with personal stories is not just that they’re anecdotal, but that they’re emotionally evocative: they persuade without giving ‘reasons.’ They elicit our unreflective sympathy and agreement. If someone writes about her harrowing experience as a rape victim to frame an argument about the epistemic value of intuitions, like Karyn L. Friedman did (2006), we might worry that the anecdote does a lot of the argumentative lifting. But why shouldn’t it? We assume the validity of cognitivism when we assume that emotionally-resonant narratives can’t confer epistemic warrant – the very position Freedman is disputing! Maybe the cognitivist assumption is right, but for the most part, as a community, we assume it without argument, and this is a very dogmatic position. If we’re all going to agree that this is the right way to do philosophy, we’d better have a long discussion about it. And I’m not aware that a lot of discussions about the authority of cognitivism are taking place. If anything, they’re buried in the history of philosophical discourse.

I find personal narratives to be some of the most compelling arguments in philosophical writing, although I don’t come across them very often, and when I do, they’re usually in ‘newer’ branches of philosophy: transgendeer theory, mad studies (basically, philosophy of psychiatry from the service user’s perspective), critical disabilities studies, and sometimes feminist philosophy. Anecdotes arise more often in these fields because the fields themselves represent the perspectives of underrepresented groups who have relevant experiences – experiences that challenge the assumptions of the majority and make the field more objective. (see Sandra Harding 2015 for an account of objectivity as diversity – I can’t recommend it enough).

I write about my own experiences all the time, even in this blog. But I write about them under the guise of philosophical abstraction and objectivity. I don’t say, ‘this is my experience, which I’m refracting through the lens of philosophical convention to make it sound more professional.’ But that’s what I do. To be honest, I’m constantly writing about myself but presenting it as an argument about some philosophical construct, from a disembodied perspective – ‘the view from nowhere – as if it had nothing to do with my personal experiences. That’s what Freedman could have done – she could have written about epistemic warrant without talking about being raped. But she broke with convention, and maybe that’s what more of us should do. Maybe it’s better and more intellectually honest to ‘lay your cards on the table’ rather than pretend there aren’t any cards.

I think that responsibility theory is a very fruitful space for marginalized groups to write about their experiences, because if you think about it, responsibility is about those groups: it’s about people who had abusive and neglectful childhoods, people with psychological disorders, people who have have been oppressed by sexism and racism and homophobia and transphobia. These are the people that we’re writing about when we write about ‘unfortunate formative circumstances’ and ‘psychologically abnormal individuals’ and addictions and personal identity and psychological congruence and coercion and duress, etc., etc., etc. And sometimes when we write about those groups we’re really writing about ourselves, only we’re not saying so.

What better opportunity for marginalized groups to make a dent in trenchant philosophical issues?

But sometimes I worry that by presenting philosophical problems as abstractions, as problems about what to do with people and how to handle people, and about what specific cognitive states are implicated in ideal responsible agency, etc., we alienate the people who are in the best position to contribute to the discourse – the people who are in a position to give us the objectivity-as-diversity that we so desperately need in this field. We risk alienating people, I think, when we represent philosophical problems as abstract problems rather than questions that deeply affect us on a personal level and connect with our lives.

I want to clarify in closing that I’m not saying that philosophy is rubbish as it’s currently done, or anything even close to that. I just want to suggest that there might be other ways of doing philosophy that might seem less ‘philosophical’ only because of a cognitivist bias.

Moral responsibility and implicit bias

 

Today I want to talk about moral responsibility and implicit bias. I have to confess that I’m not quite up-to-date on the implicit bias literature, including this new book, “Implicit Bias and Philosophy,” eds. M. Brownstein & Jennifer Saul (2016), so this will be an informal treatment.

As I noted in previous posts, some of the debates in moral philosophy centre on whether a person can be responsible for unconscious/implicit/system-1 states or processes. There are disagreements in both major camps: character theory and control theory. That is, there are disagreements between camps, and also within camps. Here’s an example of some fractures.

On the control theory side, Jules Holroyd (2012) argues that we cannot be responsible for having implicit biases, since we lack direct control over them, but we can be responsible for manifesting implicit biases insofar as we failed to put into place strategies for preventing them from influencing our behaviour – strategies like anonymizing job applications. Neil Levy similarly (2014, 2014b) argues that we cannot be responsible for manifesting implicit biases because we don’t have personal-level control over them.

Amongst character theorists, Angela Smith (2005) thinks that we can be responsible for implicit biases because they can reflect our evaluative judgments – our character – whether we explicitly endorse them or not. On the other hand, Holly Smith (2014) (not to be confused with Angela) argues that we cannot be responsible for implicit biases because they don’t reflect our ‘full evaluative structure’: they’re recalcitrant, alien states, that are outweighed by our explicit commitments. Levy similarly holds that implicit biases are not blameworthy on character theory because they’re ‘too alien to the self to ground responsibility.’

Obviously this doesn’t exhaust the possible responses to this question. I just wanted to point our some of the fault lines in the literature and then throw in my own two cents.

I feel like we can be responsible for acting on implicit biases, even if we don’t have direct reflective control over them, and even if they run afoul of our explicit commitments. I’m not going to make a theoretical case for this intuition: I’m just going to tell a kind of story.

When I was searching for pictures for my post on responsibility and attachment theory the other day, I did an image search for ‘attachment theory’ to find some stock photos. I had already decided that I wanted to use fairly generic, mostly cartoon-y, images for all of my posts. These are the first three images of human figures that I found, and they’re typical examples:

Notice anything? These are all pictures of White women with White babies. (The third picture is of a White woman’s hand holding a White baby’s hand – another typical image). The frequency of this particular type of image is troubling for several reasons, including the following. First, it marginalizes interracial families (like my own extended family). Second, when interpreted against the backdrop of western patriarchal colonialism, it implies that White people are more concerned to ensure that their (White) children grow up with a healthy attachment style: that this is a special concern for White mothers. And third, it suggests that women (not men) are primarily responsible for ensuring that their children develop secure attachment. And conversely, when children turn out badly, mothers are to blame.

The pictures of White dads and babies were way down the list. And the pictures of Black dads and babies were way, way, way down the list. No one curated this list, so I’m not saying that there’s a biased curator behind the results. But the list reflects the top hits of Google users, so it reflects a culture-wide implicit bias – a composite sketch of our implicit biases.

It’s worth noting that attachment theory was originally a theory about women’s parenting abilities. John Bowlby’s original formulation of the view was called ‘maternal attachment theory,’ and it posited a lack of proper bonding with the mother as the main source of later emotional problems in the child. In a report for the World Health Organization titled ‘Maternal Care and Mental Health,’ Bowlby wrote that “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment” or else the child was at risk of serious mental health problems (1953). To be fair to Bowlby, women were obliged to do a majority of the care-taking in his time, but only because they lived in a patriarchal culture where men were generally unwilling to do their fair share. This doesn’t mean that women were exclusively, or primarily, blameworthy for their children’s emotional problems. Bowlby also lived at a time when it was natural to assume that parents formed heterosexual pair-bonds, which explains his assumption that there would even be a mother, and only one (cisgender) mother, paired with a (probably cisgender) father. In other words, the theory, in its original formulation, is archaic. That’s why people now call it just ‘attachment theory,’ and expunge all of the (implicitly) heteronormative, racist, and sexist parts of the original theory.

It’s problematic that in 2016, the Google image page for attachment theory still reflects Bowlby’s original version of the theory: the idea that women have a responsibility to foster secure attachment in their babies in the context of a heteronormative same-race family.

Now, here’s how this discussion is related to responsibility. Yesterday when I was browsing the pictures, I unreflectively chose the first image in the list: the first one posted above. I was prepared to insert it at the top of my entry, under the title. I wasn’t being very discriminating: I just needed stock images to divide my entries, to make it easier for the reader to distinguish one from the other. I didn’t much care about the image. Then I scrolled down and noticed that most of the pictures were of White mothers and White babies. And then I thought about Bowlby’s implicitly sexist ‘maternal attachment theory’ from the 1950s, and how those Google images implicitly reaffirm Bowlby’s problematic conception of the ‘healthily-attached American family.’ Then I decided not to use that picture, and instead chose a generic black-and-white image of two hands. Then I did a special search, and paired the original picture with a less ambiguous one of a Black man’s hand holding a child’s hand. I didn’t want to perpetuate Bowlby’s archaic conception of the family.

I think that if I had hastily posted a stereotypical stock image, it would have been a manifestation of implicit bias, because it would have reflected my tendency to see this kind of stereotypical image as unproblematic. If someone had said, ‘you chose a stereotypical image for your picture, and it reflects implicit bias on your part,’ I would have been inclined to agree. But even if I hadn’t been acting on implicit bias, I would have been making a morally problematic choice, something for which I might be blameworthy provided that I satisfy other conditions – having the capacity for control, being a certain kind of person.

On either interpretation, the choice is problematic.

Now, when I made my original selection, did I have control over my decision? In one sense, no. I didn’t realize at the time that I was making a criticizable choice. On the other hand, with more reflection, I could have made a better choice. (Fortunately, I did reflect more; but this was something of an accident. What if I had been tired, or hungry, or in a hurry?). The idea of control is elusive. Do we have control over a certain decision if we make the decision in a hurry, and we could have made a better decision with more time? Do we have control if we act on a bad decision, when we could have solicited advice from another person prior to so acting?  What if we solicit feedback from the wrong person, when we could have gotten better advice from someone else? Is this scenario too remote to say that we had ‘control’ over our decision? In other words, how context-bound is control? Is our capacity for control ‘narrow’ or ‘extended’?

Here’s one of the problems with the notion of control (reasons-responsiveness). Our reasoning capabilities are ‘bounded,’ i.e., limited by available information, available time, and the mind’s information-processing ability (H. A. Simon 1982). This is why people perform differently in different contexts, as situationist psychology shows: moral competency is situation-sensitive (e.g., Doris 2008). A person might be better able to notice and respond to moral reasons in context A than in context B. We might be in a better position to make a decision after we have taken a nap, or had a good meal, or consulted with a trustworthy advisor, or taken a class, and so on and so forth.

It’s instructive to consider that both food and sleep (amongst other creature comforts) affect reasoning ability. Judges tend to give more lenient verdicts after lunch (Danziger et al. 2011). Sleep enhances memory processing and emotional brain reactivity (Walker 2009), and facilitates creative problem solving (Mednick 2009). Robert Louis Steven claims to have come up with the plot for ‘Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde’ during a dream, and this is also how Mary Shelley conceived of Frankenstein’s monster. Perhaps people are more responsive to relevant reasons when their basic necessities have been met – when they are at peak cognitive performance. Situations also make a difference. A person might be unwittingly sexist until taking a university course in feminist philosophy. The person was, in a broad sense, ‘capable’ of responding to reasons not to be sexist all along, but he needed the right circumstance to realize that capacity. He wasn’t capable of responding appropriately using only his own cognitive faculties prior to taking the class.

The point of this discussion is to point out that the correct notion of control – whether it should be narrow or extended – is debatable. Should we hold someone responsible for manifesting implicit bias only when her physical needs are met and she is at peak cognitive performance? Or also when she is hungry, tired, sick, etc.? Or also when she failed to take an interest in the patriarchal, colonial, heteronormative history of her own culture?

I don’t think this question has been satisfactorily decided, and it might underlie some of the disputes in the literature.

This also connects with character theory. Is someone who acts on implicit biases – someone who would unreflectively post problematic content on social media, or unreflectively say problematic things – ultimately not responsible for those behaviours because they are at odds with her full evaluative structure? Or does her behaviour reflect a lack of appropriate concern? If the latter, there is a case to be made that her indifference makes her responsible for manifesting implicit bias, because her indifference is really what defines her evaluative structure. She’s more indifferent than she is concerned about her moral integrity.

I can’t pretend to be able to resolve these issues. This was mostly a reflective exercise for my own benefit, and a way of understanding some of the debates in the responsibility literature.

I am aware of some good work that makes inroads into this debate. First, Levy has a couple of articles that argue that an agent’s responsibility-relevant capacities are extended beyond the agent’s mind-brain (2008, 2014); and Doris has a book that argues that agency is socially-embedded and interpersonal (2015). We can see earlier precedents for these views in feminist philosophy, including relational accounts of autonomy (e.g., Code 1991, Friedman 2003, Oshana 2006). Unfortunately, feminist philosophy hardly ever gets cited in non-specialized journals. But a relational/extended account of responsibility owes a lot to feminism.

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