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Article Excerpt
Alice is a moral responsibility abolitionist. She firmly believes that no one (including herself) is ever morally responsible, that rewards and punishments can never be justified on the basis of just deserts, and that blaming people for vicious character traits and vile acts is never morally justified. One day, Barbara, Alice's dearest friend, confides to Alice a special secret: a secret Barbara clearly does not want revealed to others, a secret shared only with a special and specially trusted friend. A week later, Alice--in a moment of weakness, but with conscious awareness of betraying a deep confidence--tells Barbara's secret to Carl, who spreads the secret to a wide circle of people. Barbara soon discovers that her secret has been betrayed, and her feelings are profoundly hurt. Can Alice-who denies all moral responsibility--sincerely apologize to Barbara?
Moral responsibility abolitionists can indeed make sincere apologies. The denial of moral responsibility promotes sincere apology, and (it will be argued) insistence on moral responsibility is an impediment to sincere apology. This claim that apology is compatible with the denial of moral responsibility is not based on some attenuated version of apology: the politician's pseudo-apology, in the form of "I'm sorry if anyone took offense at my words," or "I'm sorry if anyone misinterpreted my statement in such a way as to feel insulted." (1) Denial of moral responsibility is consistent with, and contributes to, full categorical apologies: (2) apologies in which the moral responsibility abolitionist honestly acknowledges having done wrong, sincerely regrets the moral flaw in his or her character, resolves to avoid such wrongful acts in the future, and desires to repair or mitigate the harm caused. Moral responsibility abolitionists can consistently make such categorical apologies; and the denial of moral responsibility will facilitate sincere full apology.
The assertion that denial of moral responsibility is compatible with sincere apology does have some limits. Obviously if you set the standards for moral responsibility low enough--for example, Daniel Dennett (3) suggests that anyone meeting a very minimal standard of rationality is morally responsible--then it follows that anyone who is not morally responsible is incapable of reasoning, and thus is incapable of recognizing what counts as a wrongful act, and therefore is incapable of genuine apology for such acts. But the question is not whether the denial of moral responsibility on some grounds would preclude apology, but whether there is something inherent in the denial of moral responsibility that makes sincere apology impossible. The proper test for that question is whether--given the common grounds for denying moral responsibility generally favored by moral responsibility abolitionists--sincere apology remains viable. And the claim is that sincere apology can function and flourish under a standard universal denial of moral responsibility.
Virtue and Vice Without Moral Responsibility
Before laying out the positive arguments, some initial objections must be answered. Some insist that a moral responsibility abolitionist cannot consistently count any acts as right or wrong. That is a view expressed forcefully by Peter van Inwagen:
I have listened to philosophers who deny the existence of moral responsibility. I cannot take them seriously. I know a philosopher who has written a paper in which he denies the reality of moral responsibility. And yet this same philosopher, when certain of his books were stolen, said, "That was a shoddy thing to do!" But no one can consistently say that a certain act was a shoddy thing to do and say that its agent was not morally responsible when he performed it. (4)
C.A. Campbell asserts that denying justly deserved praise and blame means denying "the reality of the moral life." (5) J. Angelo Corlett gives a blunt assessment of the implications of denying moral responsibility: "if causal determinism is true in the hard deterministic sense, then there is no sense to be made of ethics and moral responsibility, and not even moral practices such as forgiving others make much sense." (6) Susan Wolf insists that without moral responsibility we must "stop thinking in terms of what ought and ought not to be." (7) Afortiori, Alice cannot sincerely apologize because she can never believe that she has done anything wrong.
But why should it be impossible for Alice consistently to deny that she is morally responsible for her bad act while also maintaining that the act was her own morally egregious act of betraying a friend's trust? Of course if Alice were not morally responsible because she is insane, or deeply deranged, or incapable of reason, or driven by the fates and devoid of any control over her own acts, then it would make little sense to think of Alice's act as morally bad--any more than we think of the destructive force of a hurricane as morally bad. Indeed, we might doubt that it is Alice's act at all. But Alice is not deranged, not irrational, not the pawn of capricious fate. She is an intelligent, reflective, self-directed person with considerable strength of character. She is not, however, perfect. She sometimes does wrong, and her wrong acts stem from deep flaws in her own character: flaws she acknowledges as her own, faults that--in the words of Shakespeare's Antony--lie "not in our stars, but in ourselves." Alice is at fault, her act flowed from her own flawed character, the harm caused is due to Alice's intentional bad act. But Alice can acknowledge all that, and still deny that she deserves blame for either her flawed character or her flawed behavior (because, Alice might insist, both are ultimately the result of causes she could not control).
Perhaps Alice's flawed behavior results not so much from her character flaws as from her immediate situation, as suggested by John Doris (8) and a substantial body of situationist psychological research. But if that is the case, it will raise even more doubts concerning Alice's moral responsibility. In any case, situationist psychology obviously does not lend support to the libertarian model of control, and rejecting that model is the basis for the denial of moral responsibility examined here. Furthermore, even strong situationist assumptions would not undercut all character traits, nor the legitimacy of apologizing for acts stemming from character flaws. One of the most famous situationist experiments was the Milgram obedience experiment, in which a majority of subjects administered (what they thought to be) severe shocks to another person, under the guidance and influence of a strong authority figure. The experiment demonstrated that situational factors have a much stronger influence on our behavior than we imagined. Still, some participants (a minority) had sufficient strength of self-reliance to resist the situational pressures of authority. If I were a participant who (like most) lacked such strong resistance to authority, I would deeply regret my lack of strength for resisting dangerous authoritative direction. The fact that I share that character weakness with many others would not eliminate my regret at my own acknowledged character flaw. Furthermore, recognizing my genuine moral flaw would be consistent with believing that I am not morally responsible for the character flaw and the resulting harmful behavior. I might well conclude that the strong tendency of Milgram's subjects to follow authority indicates that this is a powerful tendency among members of my species, and that those rare individuals who have the special strength to resist authority were particularly lucky in their early development; but that I am not morally responsible for my naturally flawed character, just as the virtuous exceptions are not morally responsible for the strength of character resulting from their lucky special childhood nurturing.
The compatibility between denying moral responsibility and making moral judgments was clearly recognized by Martin Luther, who fervently denied that humans are morally responsible. We are chosen by an omnipotent God for either damnation or grace; if the former, we are irredeemably evil; if the latter, we become good, even saintly--by God's grace, not of our own works, "lest any man should boast." But though Luther denied that we have the tiniest degree of moral responsibility for our good or evil characters (even the slightest tinge of human moral responsibility would deprive God of His majestic omnipotence), he retained a very lively sense of right and wrong, good and evil. While we may find Luther's divine command account of ethics implausible, there is no reason to conclude that he was being inconsistent, much less incoherent, in making strong moral claims concerning humans and their behavior while denying all human moral responsibility. Moving to more contemporary cases, I believe that my character and all my behavior were shaped by causal forces--by genetic and environmental and social factors--that I ultimately did not control, and therefore it is unfair to blame or punish me for my bad acts and my character flaws; but nothing in that implies that my character flaws and bad acts are not genuinely bad, and that my virtuous character traits (which are the product of my good genetic and environmental fortune--and perhaps my own good efforts, which are in turn the product of my genetic and environmental history) are not genuinely good. Perhaps there are fatal flaws in both the contemporary and the Reformation arguments against moral responsibility. The purpose of this paper is not to argue for the denial of moral responsibility, but only to insist that those enlightened souls who do deny all moral responsibility can nonetheless make moral claims and sincere apologies.
Finding "Fault"
If it is granted that the denial of moral responsibility is consistent with claims of right and wrong, the central question remains: Can one who denies all moral responsibility still sincerely and consistently apologize for her bad behavior? If Alice sincerely apologizes, she must acknowledge that the bad act was her own fault. But it may seem obvious that one who denies moral responsibility cannot meet that condition. Can Alice--the moral responsibility abolitionist--consistently acknowledge that her bad act was her own fault?
When we say the failure was Alice's fault (and Alice is not a hurricane nor a psychopath), we may mean two distinctly different things. First, we may mean only that the source of the problem is within Alice: it is Alice's own character flaw, not an external force. The fault is in Alice herself: a part of Alice' s...
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