Typically, skepticism about attributions of moral responsibility bears two features: (i) it relies upon metaphysical claims regarding the impossibility of free agency in a deterministic universe; and (ii) it encompasses all cases of moral responsibility, good and bad – judgments of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness alike. Thus it is noteworthy that Gideon Rosen offers us an argument for moral responsibility skepticism (hereafter ‘MRS’) bereft of either of these standard features.

In essence, the argument is two-staged. First, Rosen argues that for any agent’s action to qualify as blameworthy, an instance of genuine akrasia must appear at some point in the “causal etiology” of that action. Second, Rosen argues that we never have good grounds for judging an action to be akratic. Let us consider each stage in turn.

1. The first argument is, in my judgment, quite compelling. Imagine Sally performs wrong action A. There are two relevant possibilities here. The first is that Sally knows that A is a wrong action. If so, we have a clear case of akrasia, and clear grounds for an attribution of moral responsibility (in the form of a judgment of blameworthiness). The second possibility is that Sally does not know that A is a wrong action. In this case, we say that Sally acts “from ignorance” – either “circumstantial ignorance” (wherein Sally’s failure to know that A is wrong results from her ignorance of some matter of fact) or “normative ignorance” (wherein her failure to know that A is wrong results from her ignorance of some normative or moral truth). Does Sally’s ignorance – whether circumstantial or moral – excuse her from responsibility for her wrong action? Only if she bears no responsibility for her ignorance itself. If Sally is not to blame for her ignorance, we regard this ignorance as a mitigating factor, and exempt Sally from judgments of responsibility for performing wrong action A. If Sally is responsible for her ignorance, however, we say that she is “culpably ignorant”, and we do not regard her ignorance of A’s wrongness as an excuse.

When, then, is Sally morally responsible for her ignorance that A is wrong? When she is morally responsible for her failure to discharge one of her “procedural epistemic obligations” – the procedures “any reasonably prudent person in [her] circumstances would have done in order to see to it that [she] was adequately informed” (301). (Such requirements are “obligations to do (or to refrain from doing) certain things: to ask certain questions, to take careful notes, to stop and think, to focus one’s attention in a certain direction, etc.” (301).) And when is Sally responsible for her failure to discharge one of these procedural epistemic obligations? Here is the crux of Rosen’s argument: Sally is thus responsible only when her failure to discharge these epistemic obligations is itself a clear instance of akrasia. Were Sally (non-culpably) unaware that she stood under any such procedural epistemic obligation, her failure to discharge this epistemic duty – and thereby her resulting ignorance regarding A’s wrongness – would be non-culpable.

Thus, we see that assignments of moral responsibility for the performance of wrong actions must always terminate with the identification of an akratic act – either Sally’s performance of A is itself akratic (Rosen terms this a case of “original responsibility” for A), or Sally’s ignorance of A’s wrongness derives from an akratic failure to discharge one of her procedural epistemic obligations (a case of “derivative responsibility”). Attributions of moral responsibility thus track attributions of akrasia: any culpable wrong action A must either itself be an akratic action, or must stem from an ignorance made culpable by an akratic failure to discharge epistemic obligations, causally ‘upstream’ from the action.

2. Having identified akratic action as a necessary condition of any agent’s bearing moral responsibility for any wrong action A, Rosen now turns to the second stage of his argument. And this stage amounts to little more than the bare assertion that reliable attributions of akrasia are difficult to make. According to Rosen, we have scant grounds for such attributions, even in cases of first-personal attributions of akrasia. This claim rests on an appeal to the general “opacity of the mind” (308), together with the observation that it is often difficult to distinguish cases of genuine akrasia from those of “an imposter – ordinary weakness of will” (309). (In contrast to the akratic agent, who “judges that A is the thing to do, then does something else, retaining his original judgment undiminished,” the moral weakling initially judges “that A is the thing to do, but when the time comes to act, loses confidence in this judgment and ultimately persuades himself … that the preferred alternative is at least reasonable” (309).) To illustrate what he means, Rosen offers reflections on his own reflections: “When I consider my own case and ask whether some weakish act of mine amounts to genuine akrasia as opposed to ordinary moral weakness, I have no trouble identifying tolerably clear cases of the latter; but I confess that I cannot identify clear examples of the former with any confidence” (309). A fortiori, Rosen concludes, we ought to have very little confidence in our second- and third-personal attributions of akrasia.

Rosen’s argument does not depend on controvertible metaphysical theses (for instance: an antecedent defense of an incompatibilist determinism) ‘upstream’, nor does it entail ‘global’ MRS (the sort of skepticism that regards attributions of praiseworthiness to be as ill-founded as assignments of blame) ‘downstream.’ For this reason alone, it is an important contribution. However, Rosen’s overall argument is only as strong as the claim that culpability requires akrasia – that in order to be responsible for performing some wrong action A, one must confidently judge that A is wrong, even as one elects to perform A. Philosophers who question Rosen’s tight linkage between culpability and akrasia will find much in this article that is valuable and instructive, but they will not find here a compelling reason to embrace MRS.

Reviewed by Vaughn Bryan Baltzly
Bowling Green State University

3 Comments

• By Richard, May 27, 2009 @ 10:12 pm

  “The first argument is, in my judgment, quite compelling.”

  I’ve sketched a possible counterargument here. (I’d be very interested to hear whether you think it works or not.)
• By nice, September 1, 2009 @ 9:01 pm

  nice article..

Other Links to this Post

1. Philosopher’s Digest » “Moral Responsibility and Normative Ignorance: Answering a New Skeptical Challenge” William J. FitzPatrick — October 15, 2009 @ 9:49 pm

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