Syracuse University SURFACE Philosophy - Dissertations College of Arts and Sciences 2013 Towards a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility Kelly Anne McCormick Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/phi_etd Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation McCormick, Kelly Anne, "Towards a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility" (2013). Philosophy - Dissertations. 75. https://surface.syr.edu/phi_etd/75 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts and Sciences at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy - Dissertations by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract: Revisionism is the view that we would do well to distinguish between what we think about moral responsibility and what we ought to think about it, that the former is in some important sense implausible and conflicts with the latter, and so we should revise our concept of moral responsibility accordingly. There are three main challenges for a successful revisionist account of moral responsibility: (i) it must meet the diagnostic challenge of identifying our folk concept and provide good reason to think that significant features of this concept are implausible, (ii) it must meet the motivational challenge and explain why, in light of this implausibility, our folk concept ought to be revised rather than eliminated, and (iii) it must meet the prescriptive challenge and provide an account of how, all things considered, we ought to revise our thinking about moral responsibility. In order to meet (iii) revisionism must provide a prescriptive account of responsibility that is free of the problematic features of our folk concept identified in meeting the diagnostic challenge, is naturalistically plausible, normatively adequate, and justifies our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming. So, while the first of these three challenges is primarily concerned with the nature of our concepts, the latter two move to questions about whether or not, to use Dennett’s terms, we can defend and accept an account of moral responsibility “worth wanting.” In my dissertation I raise a new problem for revisionism, the normativity-anchoring problem. The heart of this problem is that the methodological commitments used to motivate revisionism and distinguish the view from conventional theorizing about moral responsibility make it uniquely difficult for revisionists to justify our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming. Following Manuel Vargas, who has thus far developed and defended the view most rigorously, revisionists endorse the following skeptical claim: it is possible that our intuitions fail to inform us about what responsibility is, and furthermore we lack good epistemic reasons for thinking that they ever do. For conventional theorists, the fact that a particular account of responsibility best aligns with our refined intuitions, beliefs, and theoretical commitments is reason enough, ceteris paribus, to endorse that view. But revisionists who endorse the skeptical claim must find some alternative method for arguing that their prescriptive account is one that we should in fact endorse. One alternative, suggested by Vargas himself, is to show that the prescriptive account in question justifies our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming, and preserves the “work of the concept.” However, I argue that Vargas’ own claim that the prescriptive account he offers promotes an independently valuable form of agency fails to bridge the gap between axiological claims about value and normative claims about how we should treat responsible agents. Moreover, bridging this gap looks to be a serious problem for any form of revisionism which shares the methodological commitments used to motivate the view thus far, and so further development of revisionism requires having a solution to the normativity-anchoring problem in hand. I go on to develop a new revisionist strategy that avoids the normativity-anchoring problem. I propose and defend a new methodological assumption (hereafter referred to as MAP) that I argue revisionists can and should accept, capable of preserving the skeptical spirit of revisionism while identifying a particular class of intuitions about moral responsibility as having a privileged epistemic status. In particular, I argue that revisionists can and should accept that widespread judgments about responsibility generated by concrete cases which elicit a strong affective response in the person making the judgment have a privileged epistemic status in our responsibility theorizing. My arguments in support of this assumption depend on an analogy between the responsibility judgments in question and the kinds of paradigmatic judgments which constrain our ethical theorizing more generally. Having established this analogy I then offer a series of companions in guilt style arguments for the claim that the epistemic status of these two kinds of judgments should stand and fall together. I conclude that the responsibility judgments in question should ultimately share the privileged status of the paradigmatic ethical judgments in question, and thus play an evidentiary role in our theorizing about moral responsibility. If these arguments are successful then acceptance of the methodological assumption I defend allows revisionists to avoid the normativity-anchoring problem while preserving the unique methodological spirit which motivates revisionism and sets it apart from conventional theorizing about moral responsibility. TOWARDS A REVISIONIST ACCOUNT OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY Kelly McCormick B.A. Colgate University 2006 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Syracuse University June 2013 Copyright © Kelly Anne McCormick 2013 All Rights Reserved vi Acknowledgment There are a great many mentors, colleagues, and friends without whom what follows would not be what it is (or perhaps ever have come into existence in the first place). First and foremost I would like to thank my advisor, André Gallois for the countless hours spent discussing what must have at first blush seemed like a number of very crazy ideas, for the wealth of invaluable feedback he provided on first, second, third, ad infinitum drafts, and for his constant support and encouragement. This project and my development as a philosopher have both benefited in ways impossible to do credit to here from the time he invested in them. Next, a big thanks to Manuel Vargas for the helpful and insightful feedback provided on drafts of this project at all of its many stages. Thanks to Ken Baynes, Ben Bradley, Mark Heller, and Derk Pereboom for their excellent comments and questions in my dissertation defense, and for an all-around engaging and productive discussion of this project. The faculty and graduate students of the Syracuse University philosophy department provided helpful feedback on early drafts of parts of this work (especially Chapter Three) in both ABD workshops and informal discussions. Special thanks are due to the following colleagues and dear friends in particular: Kirsten Egerstrom, Jake Greenblum, Matthew Koehler, Amy Massoud, Rachel McKinney, and Aaron Wolf. Finally, thanks to my loving and supportive family for never once asking, “Shouldn’t you think about getting a real job,” and for keeping me going every step of the way. vii Table of Contents Chapter One Revisionism: Goals and Challenges…………………………………………….1 Chapter Two Meeting the Three Challenges…………………………………………………..22 Chapter Three Anchoring a Revisionist Account of Moral Responsibility……………………...56 Chapter Four Ordinary Judgments about Moral Responsibility: Experimental Philosophy, Empirical Data, and Individual Influences……………………………………..75 Chapter Five The Abstract/Concrete Asymmetry……………………………………………...123 Chapter Six Defending a New Methodological Assumption: MAP…………………………..147 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..191 1 Chapter One Revisionism: Goals and Challenges Introduction As the “new kid on the free will block,” revisionism does not benefit from the same degree of familiarity as many of its competitors (Vargas 2009, 46). Nor is it always clear exactly how best to characterize where the view is situated dialectically in the contemporary free will debate. In order to assess the strengths and weaknesses of revisionism and to attempt to defend and develop the view further it is therefore helpful to first clarify what revisionism is, and where it stands in relation to the other influential views considered to be the main players in this debate. I begin this chapter with a brief overview of the contemporary philosophical discussion of free will and moral responsibility. This overview is not intended to be comprehensive, nor does it provide an exhaustive account of the different views one might hold on the topic. Rather, it is a characterization that I take to be the most instructive in mapping out where revisionism stands in relation to some of its most prominent competitors. In Section 2 I turn to revisionism itself. I first discuss how revisionism differs from other traditional accounts of free will, and the various ways one might motivate revisionism. I then identify three challenges that any revisionist view must meet: the diagnostic, motivational, and prescriptive challenges. The majority of Chapters 1-3 will be devoted to discussion of these three challenges