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The Future of Moral Responsibility and Desert

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Abstract

Most contemporary accounts of moral responsibility take desert to play a central role in the nature of moral responsibility. It is also assumed that desert is a backward-looking concept that is not directly derivable from any forward-looking or consequentialist considerations, such as whether blaming an agent would deter the agent from performing similar bad actions in the future. When determining which account of moral responsibility is correct, proponents of desert-based accounts often take intuitions about cases to provide evidence either in favor of or against a proposed theory. In this paper, I discuss two experiments that test whether folk intuitions accord with what desert-based accounts would predict. Results suggest that moral responsibility intuitions are sensitive to forward-looking considerations, thus posing a problem for desert-based accounts of moral responsibility. If appealing to intuitions about cases is a valid method of discovering the nature of moral responsibility and desert, it seems either desert is not entirely backward-looking or moral responsibility is not exclusively desert-based. These experimental results also suggest that consequentialist accounts of moral responsibility, which have largely been abandoned due to their counterintuitive nature, are perhaps not so counterintuitive after all.

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Notes

  1. If we were to find out about A’s murdering B because A confesses this at t2, then this confession and our learning of this confession would be forward-looking considerations. However, the thing that we learn at t2 – the fact that A murdered B – would be a backward-looking consideration.

  2. Note that there are forward-looking considerations that are not consequentialist considerations. Facts pertaining only to states and events that occur after an action but before the agent is praised or blamed for that action fall in this category.

  3. Although “consequentialist” can take on different meanings in different normative spheres, I intend only to pick out accounts that take the consequences that would follow from praise and blame to determine whether an agent is morally responsible. I do not here employ the term narrowly enough to pick out which specific types of consequences are relevant for justifying a moral responsibility practice, nor do I take “consequentialism” to necessarily require that an action bring about consequences that are maximal or optimal in some sense.

  4. For Pereboom’s understanding of moral responsibility, see Pereboom 2014: 2.

  5. For the purposes of this paper, I will treat both contractarian and consequentialist considerations similarly and refer to them as consequentialist considerations. Though the two views are different, they are not relevantly different for my purposes, and alternatives to desert-based moral responsibility are largely consequentialist, and not contractarian, in nature.

  6. The motivation for merging responses into a composite score was to follow the same methods Mele (2019) used when testing moral responsibility intuitions for radical reversal cases.

  7. For a defense of these concerns, see Strohminger and Nichols 2014.

  8. The questions, presented in a random order to each participant, asked 1) whether Jones spends a day hurting/helping people in the story described above, 2) whether Jones will likely hurt/help people again, 3) how likely it is that Jones will hurt/help people in the future, 4) whether it is likely or unlikely that Jones will hurt/help people in the future, 5) whether Jones is morally responsible for the bad/good things he does on the day described in the story above, 6) whether Jones deserves blame/credit for the bad/good things he does on the day described in the story above, 7) whether Jones is blameworthy/praiseworthy for the bad/good things he does on the day described in the story above, 8) whether Jones values the wellbeing of others, 9) whether Jones cares more about others than himself, and 10) what Jones’ values and attitudes are towards those in his community.

  9. A reliability coefficient of .70 or higher is normally considered acceptable.

  10. Some philosophers (some inspired by Hume’s view) argue that moral judgments depend, at least in part, on deeper or more stable characterological dispositions, traits, or desires (Frankfurt 1971; Arpaly and Schroeder, 1999; Sripada 2010, 2015a, b; Sher 2006; Smith 2004, 2005, 2007a, b; Shoemaker 2011, 2013, 2015a, b). There is also empirical work that suggests that these features drive moral intuitions (Sripada 2010, 2012; Sripada and Konrath 2011)

  11. Roughly, given a data set with corresponding variables, GES evaluates possible models that might explain the data. GES first assigns an information score to the model in which the variables are not connected at all (the null model). Second, GES considers adding arrows between the different variables that would improve the information score. Third, GES considers deletions that would further increase the information score. This process is repeated until no additional changes would increase the information score. Orientation of the arrows is always determined by the edge-orientation rules discussed in Meek (1997). This method has been demonstrated to provide the best fitting causal model for a set of data insofar as the data set is large enough (Chickering 2002) and is commonly used to explain intuitions (for some examples, see Rose and Nichols 2013; Turri et al. 2016; Rose 2017).

  12. Asymmetrical intuitions as a result of either differing moral valence or direction of change (improving or deterioration) have been widely documented (Knobe and Roedder 2009; Phillips et al., 2011; Phillips et al. 2014; May and Holton 2012; Pizarro et al. 2003; Newman et al., 2015; Molouki and Bartels 2017; Tobia 2015, 2016; Earp et al. 2018)

  13. For discussion of this debate, see Buckwalter (2016) and Nado (2014).

  14. For more on why philosophers should care about folk intuitions, see Nahmias 2011.

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Spitzley, J. The Future of Moral Responsibility and Desert. Rev.Phil.Psych. 12, 977–997 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00522-5

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