W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 7-2012 Rehabilitating the Consequentialist View of Moral Responsibility Adam Jared Lerner College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Lerner, Adam Jared, "Rehabilitating the Consequentialist View of Moral Responsibility" (2012). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 511. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/511 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Rehabilitating the Consequentialist View of Moral Responsibility A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of the Arts in Philosophy from The College of William and Mary by Adam Jared Lerner Accepted for __________________________________ (Honors, High Honors, Highest Honors) __________________________________ Matthew Haug, Director __________________________________ Neal Tognazzini __________________________________ Lee Kirkpatrick Williamsburg, VA May 1, 2012 Table of Contents Chapter 1: What a Consequentialist View Ought to Do 1.1 Introduction............................................................................................................................. 2 1.2 How Not to Defend Consequentialism About Moral Responsibility ..................................... 3 1.3 What Do You Mean, “Morally Responsible”? ....................................................................... 6 1.4 The Normative Triviality of Being Morally Responsible..................................................... 11 Chapter 2: For and Against Weak Consequentialism 2.1 A Consequentialist View of Holding People Morally Responsible...................................... 14 2.2.1 Why Not Weak Consequentialism?................................................................................... 17 2.2.2 Unconscious Consequentialism ......................................................................................... 22 2.2.3 Moral Judgment, Modularity, and Encapsulation.............................................................. 28 2.2.4 Unconscious Representations or Unconscious Beliefs? .................................................... 31 2.2.5 Stereotypes and Unusual Cases ......................................................................................... 32 2.2.6 The Criminal Stereotype and the Automaticity of Person Perception............................... 38 2.2.7 The Futility of Conscious Reflection................................................................................. 44 2.3.1 Why Care about Wrongdoers’ Well-Being?...................................................................... 52 2.3.2 Stalemate and Arguments for Incompatibilism ................................................................. 54 2.3.3 Two Error Theories for Weak Consequentialist Intuitions................................................ 64 Chapter 3: Why Strong Consequentialism? 3.1 Why Weak Consequentialism Collapses into Strong Consequentialism.............................. 70 Chapter 4: Practical Objections and Implications 4.1 Why This Chapter is in Some Sense Irrelevant .................................................................... 79 4.2.1 Psychological Objections................................................................................................... 81 4.2.2 When and Where are the Reactive Attitudes Optimific?................................................... 85 4.3 The Collective Deterrence Problem.................................................................................... 101 4.4 The Fairness Problem ......................................................................................................... 106 Chapter 5: Conclusion 5.1 Summary............................................................................................................................. 112 Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................... 114 References................................................................................................................................. 115 1 Chapter 1: What a Consequentialist View Ought to Do 1.1 Introduction The consequentialist view of moral responsibility has been called many things: “The Influenceability Account” (Arneson, 2003, p. 234), “The Economy of Threats Approach” (Wallace, 1994, p. 57), “Hard Compatibilism” (Arneson, 2003, p. 234), “Consequentialist Compatibilis[m]” (Darwall, 2006, p. 65), “Effect Compatibilism” (Smilansky, 2000, p. 33), “Social Regulation Theor[y]” (Watson, 1987, p. 117) and “Deterrence Theory” (Pereboom, 2001, p. 168). It has also been called “simple-minded” (Smilansky, 2003, p. 280), “comically external” (Wallace, 1994, p. 57), and “positively wrong” (Bennett, 2008, p. 52). The consequentialist view of moral responsibility— according to which the concept of moral responsibility essentially has something to do with the beneficial consequences of holding people morally responsible—is nearly universally despised. Although the complaints are numerous, perhaps the most serious objection is that consequentialism fails to capture a central part of our ordinary practices, namely that when we take someone to be morally responsible, we intuitively believe the appropriateness of that judgment to be entirely independent of whether it has beneficial consequences. In this paper I argue, first, that this objection owes its resilience in part to an ambiguity about what theories of moral responsibility are supposed to do. Resolving this ambiguity requires distinguishing between what it takes to be morally responsible from what it takes to permissibly be held morally responsible. Arguing that plausible consequentialist views of moral responsibility should aim only to provide an account of the latter, I proceed to spell out one such view and defend it against initial objections. I go on to argue that if the central objection described above remains despite this 2 clarification, then the stalemate between consequentialists and non-consequentialists about holding people morally responsible can be broken only if we take a closer look at the conflicting intuitions that perpetuate it.1 Drawing on a wide variety of psychological research, I spend the majority of the paper developing an error theory for non- consequentialist intuitions. I then go on to use this error theory to bolster arguments from moral luck for consequentialism about moral responsibility. I conclude by considering potential obstacles to implementing consequentialism about moral responsibility in the real world. 1.2 How Not to Defend Consequentialism about Moral Responsibility The most influential consequentialist view of moral responsibility on offer was first articulated by J.J.C. Smart in just a few pages at the end of his (1961) Mind article, “Free Will, Praise, and Blame”. The characteristic feature of Smart’s theory is that he attempts to derive claims about what it means for someone to be morally responsible from claims about when it is permissible to hold someone morally responsible, where the latter depends entirely on whether holding that person morally responsible is likely to influence his future behavior in morally desirable ways. To illustrate, Smart asks us to consider our differential treatment of a lazy student and a “stupid” student. According to Smart, the reason we say that the lazy student is responsible for not doing his homework is because holding him morally responsible—by blaming and punishing him—is likely to influence him to do his homework in the future. On the other hand, the reason we say that the “stupid” student is not responsible for failing to do his homework is because “if he is 1 I use ‘intuition’ throughout this thesis to loosely refer to beliefs or judgments that do not seem to have been deduced through any explicit reasoning process. That being said, nothing changes if we understand intuitions to be “intellectual seemings” rather than full- blown beliefs. 3 sufficiently stupid, then it does not matter whether he is exposed to temptation or not exposed to temptation, threatened or not threatened, cajoled or not cajoled. When his negligence is found out, he is not made less likely to repeat it by threats, promises, or punishments” (Smart 1961, p. 302).2 Richard Arneson points out an unintuitive consequence of this view often thought so obvious as to not even be worth making explicit. He puts the problem this way: …imagine a Mafia thug terrorizes a small village. He commits many heinous crimes. But as it happens any attempt to punish or reproach him will be unsuccessful, will only make him irritable, and hence will lead him to act more brutally. Even self-reproach would have no effect other than to make him more prone than he otherwise would be to angry, immoral outbursts. The influenceability theory then must say that he is not morally responsible for his misdeeds, which seems odd, for no standard excuses exempt him from blame. (Arneson, 2003, p. 248) Not only would this particular consequentialist view of morally responsibility forbid us from attributing moral responsibility to people who are intuitively morally responsible, but