Schwitzgebel on Control and Situationism

Over at The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel has an interesting post about the situationist critique of virtue ethics.  Gardeners may find his response interesting, as it appeals to control and moral responsibility. 

I find the post especially interesting because I have recently been thinking a lot about the relationship between skepticism about moral responsibility and the problem of moral luck.  Of the four sorts of moral luck Nagel identifies in his article on the topic, all but circumstantial luck play a large role in the literature on freedom and responsibility, as far as I can tell.  (The worry about deterministic causation is a worry about antecedent luck, Strawson's worry about self-creation is a worry about constitutive luck, and the worry about indeterministic causation -- which is the only one to explicitly use the word 'luck' -- is, I think, a worry akin to worries about resultant luck.)  This suggests that there is another skeptical argument to be had from the idea of circumstantial luck, but I've never seen such an argument.  How might it go?  Well, maybe something like this (with an obvious nod to Strawson):

1) You do what you do because of the situations in which you find yourself.

2) If (1), then in order to be responsible for what you do, you must be responsible for finding yourself in those particular situations.

3) But you cannot, ultimately, be responsible for finding yourself in the particular situations in which you find yourself.

4) Therefore, you cannot be responsible for what you do.

If anyone is moved by something like this argument, I suspect that they will think Schwitzgebel's response to the situationist critique of virtue ethics is unconvincing.  But...is anyone moved by something like this argument?  I wonder why it gets so much less attention than the other three worries about luck mentioned above.

Comments

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

I vote for rejecting (3) -- although of course there are some situations you are plunged into without your being responsible for being in them. If such situations would then call out behavior X in almost anyone, that may substantially attenuate your responsibility for X.

[John Fischer]

So, on Eric Schwitzgebel's view, one could be morally responsible for one's behavior even if it is completely "situation-dependent", based on one's choosing to be in situations of the right kind. I have sympathy with this. It is kind of a more extreme version of the alcoholic who deliberately chooses not to be in contexts where alcohol is served, or the (perhaps closeted) homosexual who deliberately avoids contexts where this sort of sexual activity would be available, and so forth.

[Cihan Baran]

My problem with Eric Schwitzgebel's view is that it doesn't recognize the depth of "radical situationism" - how much it can undercut control.

Do I choose to keep the situations I am in stable because of the situations I am in or do I choose so because of my character?

If the former, I can not be morally responsible. If the latter, then radical situationism is not true.

[Eddy Nahmias]

John, I think you and Eric are right that we presumably have some control (i.e., conscious deliberations influencing our actions based on reasons we accept or would accept) over what sort of situations (e.g., careers) we get ourselves into. But the real situationist threat is that the research claims to show that we do not know about many of the situational factors that influence us (unless we read the social psych research), so we can't really control their influence on us. For instance, the group effect suggests that a highly significant influence on people's helping behavior is how many other people are around. Most people don't know about this influence and cannot therefore counteract its influence. And the claim is that their purported character traits do not correlate with their helping behavior. (I posted a bit more at Eric's blog).

[Tamler Sommers]

John wrote:

"So, on Eric Schwitzgebel's view, one could be morally responsible for one's behavior even if it is completely "situation-dependent", based on one's choosing to be in situations of the right kind. I have sympathy with this. It is kind of a more extreme version of the alcoholic who deliberately chooses not to be in contexts where alcohol is served, or the (perhaps closeted) homosexual who deliberately avoids contexts where this sort of sexual activity would be available, and so forth."

(Ok, don't make the obvious Larry Craig joke, don't make the obvious Larry Craig joke, don't make--No, I can't resist, I'm not mature enough yet...)

You mean like the Minneapolis airport?

More seriously, it seems this debate just hangs on whether you find the basic argument and the TNR principle that drives it compelling. The only way to be responsible for choosing to put yourself in a bad situation is if you were responsible for being the way you were when you made that choice. If you buy that principle, you'll buy premise (3) in Neal's argument. I don't think either Nagel or Strawson believe that circumstantial or situationist luck on its own is enough to absolve people of moral responsibility. It's only when you combine circumstantial luck with constitutive luck that moral responsibility becomes impossible.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Yes, a *really* radical situationism, where one only avoids or chooses situations because of the situation one is currently in, which in turn was only chosen because of the situation one is previously in, etc., collapses into the general determinism problem. But *if* you grant (as most people, I think, would) that we do have some control over and responsibility for our future situations, then you get the kinds of cases in which we hold a drunkard responsible because he could have chosen not to go into the bar.

My original point was parallel, I suppose, to the case of being responsible when you freely put yourself in situations where you're out of control, even though you have no control once you're *in* that situation -- but with respect to character traits and virtues. One can rightly be said to have a consistent character trait or virtue, even if it is radically situationally contingent, as long as you have the power to ensure that you avoid the sorts of situations in which behavior inconsistent with that trait or virtue would be evoked....

[Cihan Baran]

Thanks for replying.

I think this'll be a tangent but what the heck. In line with your drunkard example, I think Gary Watson offered a similar account of weakness of the will in "Skepticism about Weakness of the Will" in which he claims that weakness of the will is like negligence. Even if the agent was helpless during the moment(and hence not morally responsible for that particular act at that time) when he suffered from weakness of the will, he ought to have developed a strong enough will (and related capacities) in the past to prevent something like that from occurring. Thus we ought to treat agents who suffer from weakness of the will akin to those who neglect to do stuff. (That paper was difficult but this should basically be right.)

Nevertheless, a similar worry can be raised about Watson's account. What about agents who suffer from weakness of the will when they try to develop relevant capacities that'll fight weakness of the will?

And now coming back to the topic at hand, what about the effects of situation when one ponders about what kind of situation to go for? I don't think you need a really *radical* situationism for that to take effect.

An alcoholic in a really bad mood (hence in a negative situation) might go to the bar just because she feels bad. She may then feel worse because she drinks. (Idea from Orwell: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.")

Then on the other hand, an alcoholic who finds a dime may not go to the bar because she's happy she found a dime and therefore realizes that putting herself in a bar situation may cause her to drink. (After all %88 of the people who find a dime help an old lady.)

Maybe there are situations that allow for reflection and control. But then, if such situations exist, does situationism hold? How exactly should we understand situationism?