Contextualist Response to Frankfurt-Style Cases

A possible response to Frankfurt-style cases has just occurred to me. In a Frankfurt-style case, an agent is felt to be blameworthy for an action they were unable to avoid performing, because a counterfactual intervener waits in the wings to ensure they perform it. Such cases conflict with a widely held intuition that agents are responsible only for actions which they could have avoided performing. Now recall Watson’s ‘Two Faces of Responsibility’. There Watson distinguishes two kinds of responsibility, which he calls aretaic responsibility and accountability. Watson argues that both are genuinely kinds of responsibility, and attributing either (in its negative mode) is a way of blaming. But different conditions must be fulfilled for each rightly to be attributed. I am aretaically responsible for something if it expresses where I stand on matters of importance. But I am accountable for it only if I had a fair opportunity either to avoid performing the action, or to avoid getting myself into the situation in which (as I knew) I could be called upon to perform it.

Part of Watson’s aim in ‘Two Faces’ is to dispel the apparent paradox sketched by Susan Wolf, when she argues that there is an asymmetry in our judgments of praise and blame. Wolf argues that if an agent is so constituted that she cannot help but perform a morally good action, she deserves praise, but if she is so constituted that she cannot help but perform a bad action she deserves no blame. Watson argues that the asymmetry is the product of switching between the two faces of responsibility. Aretaically the good agent is praiseworthy, but she may not be accountable for her action. The bad agent is not accountable for her action, though she is aretaically blameworthy. If we stick to one standard of responsibility, we dispel the paradox (just as we can block certain sceptical arguments by maintaining a consistent standard for the application of ‘knows’).

It will be obvious where I am going with this. Is it possible that alternative possibilities is a precondition of responsibility as accountability, and that agents in Frankfurt-style cases are not accountable? On this view, they are (merely) aretaically responsible for their actions, because they express where they stand on questions of value.

Comments

[Tamler Sommers]

Not only possible, but actual...

[Mark Smeltzer]

"Is it possible that alternative possibilities is a precondition of responsibility as accountability, and that agents in Frankfurt-style cases are not accountable?"

I think the answer is no. What is important in holding someone accountable is the warrant related to holding one another accountable to second-person demands (http://www.philosophy.ucr.edu/conference/Darwall-Obligation.pdf). In other words, to hold Joe accountable for X I need to be warranted in believing that Joe was responsible for X. As John Fischer's work on over-determination has shown, cases of over-determination rule this out on the practical (epistemic) level, but not on the metaphysical level. In cases of over-determination I cannot know from which causal path X issued, so I wouldn't be warranted in holding Joe accountable for X (presuming that the existence of the over-determining mechanism was known).

The basic idea is that in cases of over-determination it doesn’t matter what moral positions Joe has; X was inevitable and happens regardless of whether Joe is a good or evil person. In normal cases (cases lacking an over-determining mechanism) Joe’s moral positions matter: in these cases the outcome of the causal sequence is determined, in part, by Joe’s moral positions/character.

In cases lacking over-determining factors, I do not see any reason to think that we lack warrant to hold one another accountable, even on the presumption of determinism.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Correction: I actually think that you are correct regarding the person *in* a Frankfurt case. (I read your question wrong the first time.) While the person may be responsible for their action if the over-determining mechanism is not engaged, we wouldn't know it.

What is at issue is whether causal determinism would entail that all of reality is one big Frankfurt case. If this worry can be dismissed, we would be warranted in holding one another accountable even if causal determinism turns out to be true.

[John Fischer]

Neil, this is an interesting post.

But. First, I don't see how contextualism blocks skeptical arguments in epistemology. I don't frankly see how contextualism makes any genuine progress on skeptical problems.

Second, I believe that agents in Frankfurt-type situations are indeed responsible in the accountability sense. Why wouldn't they be?

[Mark Smeltzer]

John,

The problem with the agent in a Frankfurt case is that as omniscient third person observers we are warranted in holding that agent accountable only because we know that they were responsible for their action(s). Without that special perspective it is doubtful that we would know that the agent was responsible (we could know the agent was responsible inductively if we are unaware of the presence of the over-determining mechanism in a non-obtaining causal path or we are aware of its presence in the alternate path and we know that the alternate path did not obtain), and thus we would not be warranted to hold them accountable.

Do you think that this conflicts with your account?

[Neil]

John,

I'm playing devil's advocate here. I'm assuming, for the sake of the argument, that alternative possibilities are necessary for MR. I'm then (from that point of view) offering a diagnosis of why some people think that agents in FCs are morally responsible. My suggestion is that they're confusing attributability and accountability. Some philosophers (eg Watson, Scanlon and Angela Smith) say that an agent is blameworthy for some action X just in case X is attributable to her. I agree with Susan Wolf that this is false, but I need take no stand on the issue here. All I want to say is that the fact of attributability is sufficient to explain the disposition to blame. Why wouldn't agents in FCs be accountable? Because alternative possibilities are (by hypothesis) a necessary condition of MR. Naturally, I don't take this to be an adequate response by itself. However, a diagnosis of the disposition to hold accountable seems to be a necessary condition of a response to FCs which would vindicate alternative possibilities (obviously, a positive argument needs to be given as well).

I called the response contextualist because it seemed to me that it was plausible to think that the attributability-is-accountability view confused low and high standards of responsibility. Contextualism doesn't block scepticism: it allows us to put it to one side in contexts which are not high-standard. The contextualism view I'm proposing has a more interesting implication. In high standard contexts, agents would need alternative possibilities. High standard contexts for epistemology occur only (or almost only) in the seminar room. But high standard contexts for MR occur in everyday life: in the court room, for instance.

Mark,

You seem to be saying (if I understand you) that agents in FCs are responsible, but we would often not be able to know this. But I'm denying the antecedent. Are we talking past each other?

[Mark Smeltzer]

Neil,

I believe you said that they are responsible (in the aretaic sense that I am simply calling "responsible" versus "accountable", which is probably the source of the confusion) in this quote: "On this view, they are (merely) aretaically responsible for their actions, because they express where they stand on questions of value."

I agree with you that the agents in FCs are responsible, and I agree with you that they cannot be held accountable (except in special cases as noted in previous posts). But I think they are not accountable for a different reason than you do: I don't think it has anything to do with a lack of (robust) alternate possibilities. I think it has to do with a lack of epistemic warrant in these cases that is required to justly hold someone accountable to a moral demand due to the fact that without the special insight (e.g. the third person omniscient perspective afforded to us in Frankfurt-stories) we wouldn't know whether the agent was responsible.