THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO IN PRAISE OF PRAISE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY BY DANIEL J. TELECH CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my dissertation committee. I am incredibly fortunate to have had Agnes Callard and Brian Leiter direct my dissertation project. Their support, wisdom, and generosity have meant a great deal to me—philosophically and personally—over the past several years. Joint dissertation meetings with Agnes and Brian unfailingly left me with a sense of urgency, demandingness, and encouragement that remains with me, at least on good days, when doing philosophy. Before they were my advisors, they were my teachers. Agnes’ seminar on deliberation, on the one hand, and Brian’s workshop on free will and responsibility, on the other, played significant roles in my becoming gripped by the questions animating this project. I hope to be able to live up to the ideals that working and studying with them has allowed me, however incipiently, to appreciate. I thank Paul Russell for being an excellent committee member. Paul has helped me stay attuned to the complexity and humanness of issues of agency and responsibility. This dissertation owes much to insightful conversations with him. I also thank Derk Pereboom. Derk supervised a valuable visit of mine to Cornell in the fall of 2016, and became something of an unofficial committee member, providing me with generous and instructive comments on the majority of the dissertation. There are many others to whom I am grateful for support with and valuable discussion on, parts of my project, and its earlier and attendant stages. I thank Nomy Arpaly, Dani Attas, Gunnar Björnsson, Dan Baras, Alex Boeglin, Matt Boyle, Pascal Brixel, Mark Bronson, Dan Brudney, Andreas Carlsson-Brekke, Justin Coates, Taylor Cyr, Evan Dutmer, David Enoch, Augie Faller, Paul Franks, Tobias Fuchs, Sol Goldberg, ii Matthias Haase, David Heyd, Karolina Huebner, Jessica Isserow, Michael Kremer, Jonathan Lear, Arnon Levy, Nethanel Lipshitz, Julia Markovits, Karin Nisenbaum, Martha Nussbaum, Andrew Pitel, Gabriel Richardson Lear, Robert Roberts, Kirun Sankaran, Sophia Sklaviadis, Nicholas Smyth, Hannah Tierney, Patrick Todd, Mark Thomson, Evan Thompson, Candace Vogler, the Centre for Moral and Political Philosophy at the Hebrew University, and Princeton University’s Social Philosophy Workshop. Lastly, and in warm anticipation, I thank the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Daniel J. Telech, Berlin, 2018 iii ABSTRACT It is a commonplace that blameworthy agents deserve blame, and praiseworthy agents deserve praise. But while blame has in recent years received considerable and often illuminating philosophical discussion (e.g. Bell 2013; Coates and Tognazzini 2013; Hieronymi 2004; Mason 2011; McKenna 2012; Pickard 2014; Scanlon 2008; Sher 2008; Smith 2007; Talbert 2012; Wallace 1994, 2011; Wolf 2011), the nature and norms of praise remain relatively unanalyzed. Since the publication of Peter Strawson’s highly influential essay “Freedom and Resentment” (1962), philosophers have increasingly understood moral responsibility in terms of our susceptibility to a range of moral emotions (or “reactive attitudes”) in response to expressions of good and ill will. The Strawsonian, moral psychological, approach to moral responsibility owes part of its appeal to its ability to captures the valence and interpersonal significance of the forms of assessment characteristic of our responsibility responses. But while Strawson himself includes blaming and praising emotions among the reactive attitudes, subsequent philosophical work in this area has concentrated overwhelmingly on blame. Our philosophical vocabulary of praise is impoverished. (But this is not because we fail to respond positively to praiseworthy actions. Nor do we fail to recognize the importance of so responding. The popular saying, ‘give credit where credit is due’ is an injunction to just this.) This omission matters in part because blameworthiness and praiseworthiness are opposed modes of moral iv responsibility—i.e. they are taken to be two—often the two— ways of being morally responsible.1 A negative effect of the disproportionate attention dedicated to blame is that philosophers have imported to their conceptions of moral responsibility in general features that are in fact specific to blame(-worthiness). Resultantly, we not only lack an account of the nature and norms of praise; philosophical work on our responsibility practices displays a narrow, quasi-legalistic, moral orientation, one in which the concepts of normative demand, right-violation, and sanction reign supreme. If, however, we seek to understand what it is to be, and to respond to, a full range of responsible agents, it is incumbent upon us to enrich our vocabulary of praise. My dissertation takes a step in this direction. In chapter 1, I offer a novel account of gratitude and on its basis argue that the significance of benevolence is limited in several ways that have not been duly appreciated by pure quality of will theorists of moral responsibility—i.e. those who think that quality of will is all that matters in assessing an agent’s moral responsibility—and especially those quality of will theorists who take the reactive attitudes to comprise our responsibility 1 This is not a claim merely about recent scholarship about moral responsibility. The idea that expressions of our agency may be assessable as warranting blame or praise—where these are understood as contraries— has featured in philosophical thought concerning agency and ethics since at least the 4th century BC. In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle (2.1223a) writes that “since goodness and badness and the actions that spring from them are in some cases praiseworthy and in other cases blameworthy (for praise and blame are not given to things that we possess from necessity or fortune or nature but to things of which we ourselves are the cause, since for things of which another person is the cause, that person has the blame and the praise), it is clear that both goodness and badness have to do with things where a man is himself the cause and origin of his actions.” Epicurus similarly writes: “...some things happen of necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency...necessity destroys responsibility and chance is uncertain; whereas our own actions are autonomous, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach.” (Letter to Menoeceus, §133) v responses, i.e. Strawsonians. The claim that I defend most extensively in that chapter is that gratitude is susceptible to retroactive feedback, according to which the (unforeseen and unintended) consequences of the benefactor’s manifestation of quality of will can give the beneficiary reason to be more grateful to their benefactor than they were for the immediately willed benefit, despite the fact that the benefactor’s degree of benevolence is recognized as remaining diachronically stable. If this “gratitude-feedback thesis” is accepted, in those cases where gratitude constitutes a form of moral praise, as Strawsonians maintain it sometimes does, it will be a matter of luck in consequences whether an agent’s action garners her more or less praise. Another way to put this is to say that the moral worth of an action, its praiseworthiness, may be vulnerable to resultant moral luck (Nagel 1979; Williams 1981). In chapter 2, I provide an analysis of the nature of pride that overcomes the shortcomings of the restrictive approach to pride, on the one hand, and the disjunctive approach, on the other. On the restrictive approach, pride involves viewing an object as expressive of one’s agency and as something for which one is thereby morally responsible. On this view, to be proud of one’s naturally good memory is either to misrepresent one’s memory as a product of one’s agency, or to misidentify one’s happiness that one has a good memory. On the disjunctive view, by contrast, there are really two distinct emotions called “pride”: a moral emotion and a non-moral one. Although the disjunctive view accommodates pride for traits and other non-actions, it fails to explain the sense we have that there is unity to our range of pride emotions. A capacious and unified view of pride’s objects is available, and through its outline and defense I shed light on the relationship vi between agency and practical identity, one reflecting that we are, even as agents, more than what we do. In chapter 3 I argue that interpersonal praise cannot be understood in terms of deontic concepts like “moral demand”, and that the assumption that it can be so understood—which I call the demand prejudice— has a stronghold largely owing to the kind of dominance that “accountability” views of responsibility have enjoyed. I propose a novel axiological conception of responsibility in the estimability sense. Estimability characterizes our aspirational stance of holding agents up to interpersonal ideals. It is in light of this latter stance, which I characterize as a broad disposition of “normative hope”, that our praise of others is fruitfully understood. I then provide a way of unifying accountability and estimability by construing both as forms of responsibility in the deserved moral address sense. On this picture, accountability blame and estimability praise are both paradigmatically expressed through moral address (demand and affirmation, respectively), which forms of address characteristically impact their targets’ interests. In chapter 4, I challenge the assumption that blame is unique in being governed by norms of “standing”, like the non-hypocrisy condition. I first motivate a shift in attention from the target of praise to the person doing the praising, i.e. the praiser, by introducing two relatively uncontroversial norms governing the praise of candidate praisers: an epistemic condition and a right-relationship condition. I then make a case for the existence and importance of norms of standing to praise.