Moral agency, responsibility, and punishment

In conclusion I want to speculate on whether intention, responsibil­ity, and punishment are together necessary to the notion of agency with which we have become familiar in secular ethics.

The tragedy of Oedipus depicts a story of suffering and disempower­ment that is neither voluntary nor involuntary. For Oedipus is an agent who, not knowing what he has done, makes a deep difference in the world. On gradually learning the secret of his past acts he inflicts terrible wounds on the body that performed them, on the self that can neither be recog­nized nor repudiated. Oedipus’ final acts consist of his public renunciation of kingly power as both expression and consequence of pain. They embody and extend his passion—his agony—not of his conscious intention. Oedi­pus’ agency is constituted by the conflicting definitions of his predicament that is the outcome of his insistence on uncovering the truth of his origin. The act of disempowering himself is performed because, as the slayer of his father and the husband of his mother (a double transgression, both Un­knowingly committed), he is the cause of his subjects’ unique suffering, which will cease when he exiles himself from Thebes—that is, when he disempowers himself.

42.1 am grateful to John Milbank for helping me get a clearer understand­ing of the early church fathers’ views on suffering. See especially “The Force of Identity” and “Can Morality Be Christian,” in his The Word Made Strange, Ox­ford: Blackwell, 1997.

Michael Dillon,⁴³ whose impressive analysis of disempowerment has led me to write this section, observes that by finally “taking responsibility” for himself, Oedipus becomes an agent in his own right.

In Colonus Oedipus explicitly denies that his transgressions were his own acts, and interrupts the Chorus, who refers to what he has done, by insisting that it was "No doing of mine.” What he denies is not that he caused the death of a man at the crossroads {that he had always known) but that he murdered his father, which is a different act, and one which he had tried specifically to avoid. In what sense was he responsible for this act? By disowning the terrible thing done (parricide) he isn’t saying that he didn’t intend to kill. In that sense he recognizes himself as the owner of a re­sponsible act (as an agent). But he also claims that the act turned out to be not his own, that he was an unwitting instrument (agent) of the gods, and that as such his own intention was irrelevant. Yet when he discovers what has been done, he knows he must act—not because he admits or claims “responsibility,” but because he cannot live in the knowledge of who he is and what, being who he is, he has done to his father and his mother. That knowledge demands some resolution. Although Oedipus did not know “the moral meaning” of his transgressive act at the time it was performed he nonetheless suffers for it. His subjects aren’t immune from suffering ei­ther even though iAeyhave done nothing “to deserve it.”

(Is Oedipus the same man at the end of the drama as he was at the beginning? By the end he has undergone horrendous experiences—the mental trauma of self-discovery and the bodily trauma of self-blinding.

43. Michael Dillon, “Otherwise than Self-Determination: The Mortal Free­dom of Oedipus Asphaleos,” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

44.1 stress that my purpose is not to argue that the Greeks had no concept of responsibility. I have not the scholarly competence to make or defend such a thesis. My skeptical questions relate only to the case of Oedipus as presented by Dillon—and (see below) by Bernard Williams.

its own capacity for sight. From a powerful, admired, and protective king to a homeless, blinded, despised exile. Does this rupture allow a continu­ous personal identity for Oedipus, a Lockean self-identifying conscious­ness? And without that continuity, can we really say that at last Oedipus takes up responsibility for what he has done—or has responsibility as­cribed to him?^[66])

l am not implying that what Oedipus does is best explained by relat­ing it to magic as opposed to moral agency—that since he believed he had unwittingly released a dangerous pollution by killing his father he then sought to stop it by punishing and exiling himself. (This is what Freud saw in the Oedipus story—transgressions against magically conditioned prohi­bitions that therefore have nothing to do with morality.)^[67]1 am urging that acts can have an ethical significance without necessarily having to be inter­preted in terms of “answerability.”

Victorian anthropologists held the view that “magic,” being essen­tially the deployment of mistaken understandings of natural causality, was a kind of pseudoscience—and therefore not to be confused with morality. “Religion,” on the other hand, when purified of its “magical” elements, was held to be the original site of morality, because religious morality had to do with the responsibility of agents for their actions and to their God.

The nature of Oedipus’ moral action may thus not depend on a se­quence of natural causality to which “responsibility” can be attached. One might say that Oedipus’ actions on discovering what he has done (begin­ning with “self-punishment”) arise from virtues that depend on what Mar­cel Mauss called habitus—an embodied capacity that is more than physi­cal ability in that it also includes cultivated sensibilities and passions, an orchestration of the senses. Thus Oedipus’ self-inflicted pain should not, 1 think, be regarded as the outcome of a judgment about his responsibility. It is perhaps best not thought of as “punishment” (a notion that has pre­tensions to being a reasoned and reasonable action), but as itself the pas­sionate performance of an embodied ethical sensibility.

In the modern sense to be responsible is to be accountable to an au­thority, to be prepared to give justifications and excuses for one’s actions, to know that one deserves punishment for the failure to do one’s duty—a duty that one could and should have done, and therefore another’s right that that duty be performed. Richard McKeon notes that the first use of the word “responsibility” in English and French was in 1787, in the context of the American and French revolutions, and that since then its primary use has remained political.⁴⁸ Thus the notion of “responsible govern-

47. See, for example, Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and

the New Laws of Nature, New York: The Free Press, 1997.,

48. Richard McKeon, “The Development and the Significance of the Con­cept of Responsibility,” in freedom and History, and Other Essays, Chicago: Uni­versity of Chicago Press, 1990.

ment”—meaning constitutionalism, the rule of law, and self-determination— has come to be the model not only for political behavior that is imbued with a certain moral quality, but for morality itself. «

Habitus, in contrast to this political model of ethics, is not something one accepts or rejects, it is part of what one essentially is and must do. (The ethics of passionate necessity encompasses tragedy.) Oedipus puts out his own eyes not because his conscience or his god considers that he de­serves to be punished for failing to be responsible—or because he thinks he does—but because (as he says) he cannot bear the thought of having to look his father and his mother in the eyes when he joins them beyond the grave, or to see his children, “begotten as they were begotten.” He acts as he does necessarily, out of the passion that is his habitus. I am therefore puzzled by Dillon’s representation of Oedipus as a paradigm of moral “responsibility.”

Bernard Williams too maintains that the story of Oedipus illustrates the concept of moral responsibility.^[68] Williams regards the idea of respon­sibility to be essential to the concept of agency, thereby virtually equating morality with criminal law.

Typically, this mode of explanation by analogy presents “the secular” (the law) as a desacralized version of “the religious” (the ritual). Yet the in­ternal structure of the two cases is not the same. Modern law defines the li­ability of legal persons such as landlords prior to any tort, whereas scape­goats are constituted in relation to specific transgressions. The landlord’s liability for damage to others that occurs on his property is quite different from the scapegoat’s role in carrying people’s sins away into the desert. To begin with, the concept of “negligence,” which made a property owner legally liable, is entirely a modern one—and therefore the concept of

Thinking about Agency and Pain 97 agency based on it is modern too.^[69] Furthermore, the scapegoat was not— as Franz Steiner makes clear—a stand-in for a legal culprit (someone who had himself failed to be adequately responsible), nor an expression of a primitive belief in taboo, but the ritual expulsion of evil from the renewed, community.^[70] The landlord is made responsible to society of which he is a member; the scapegoats function is to be outside it. It is precisely the rad­icalized Protestant idea that “true religion” requires belief in “individual re­sponsibility” and that ritual practices occupy the domain in which magic and superstition also flourish that gives us our oversimplified secular sense of the “scapegoat” as a person who is blamed for the misdeeds of others.

Like nineteenth-century anthropologists, Williams believes that the notion of “magical beliefs” (such as pollution caused by homicide) cannot be the basis of “moral agency.” He is unlike them in thinking that the story of Oedipus is not essentially about primitive superstition but about what moderns would recognize as morality. However, he is like them in assuming that to justify this claim requires proof that the story contains a modern concept of responsibility, one divorced from superstition. “The whole of Oedipus Tyrranus, that dreadfill machine, moves to the discovery of just one thing, that he did it,” he writes. “Do we understand the terror of that discovery only because we residually share magical beliefs in blood-guilt, or archaic notions of responsibility? Certainly not: we under­stand it because we know that in the story of one’s life there is an author­ity exercised by what one has done, not merely by what one has inten­tionally done” (p. 69). Williams would have us understand Oedipus as a familiar “human” individual, a character at once real and profound, whose moral status is independent of any plot. On that score there seems to be no essential difference for Williams between the way a fifth-century Athenian audience saw Oedipus and the way we are urged to see him. But the sense in this passage of the expression “there is an authority” is ob­scure. It allows one to evade the question of precisely when, how, and. by whom the terror at the discovery that “he did it” comes to be construed as a recognition of one’s “responsibility.”

In the paradigm case of Oedipus it is not simply that he uninten­tionally offends against moral interdictions and only subsequently makes this terrible discovery. It is that he is, from his very birth, destined to do so.

Even his parents, Laius and Jocasta, contribute to that destiny by trying to evade it. And however much Oedipus tries to avoid it, he unwittingly acts in the way scripted for him. That plot is part of who he is. (Freud, fa­mously, saw this plot as the working out of unconscious desires,^[71] but we may also regard it as th«; story made up of the actions of many agents work­ing together to produce a singular outcome.^[72]) It is precisely the retrospec­tive telling of this pre-scription that serves to define his present status as a moral agent—not because it liberates him from his past but because it traces his agency to his habitus, the ability to act sanely—albeit tragically— in accordance with his experience and situation. The authority of the past is not necessarily a sign of psychopathology, as Freud the modernist taught.

Paul Feyerabend once claimed that classical Greek tragedy was at once “a factual account of social conditions with a criticism of these con­ditions and the suggestion for an alternative.”^[73] But this statement does not allow for the possibility that tragedy (like pain itself) may be actively lived as a necessary form of life, one that no amount of social reform and indi­vidual therapy can eliminate forever. The tragedy of Oedipus does not il­lustrate “how institutions may paralyze action,” as Feyerabend and others have put it. It shows how the past—whether secular or religious—consti­tutes agency. An “impossible choice” is a choice between terrible alterna­tives that have been pre-scripted for one—but it is still possible to choose, and to act on that choice. By this I do not mean of course that no reform of social arrangements depicted in the play is conceivable (of course it is, although the idea of reform is not equivalent to the secular ideas of history­making or self-empowerment). I mean simply that Oedipus does act, that he does so in a situation that was »or his “responsibility,” and that he can act creatively (to free his city) without aiming at self-empowerment. I mean further that reform cannot do away with pain—not merely because pain is always pan of the vicissitudes of life, but because it is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions of obligation, and to the secular tra­dition of attributing individual responsibility that has been formed out of the latter. The nature of this pain (punishment, repentance, discipline) is different from the one endured by Oedipus because it is rooted in the idea of responsibility, the idea that someone can be held accountable and blam­able for a particular outcome. It implies that the acceptance of guilt and painful expiation opens the way back to a kind of just restoration.^[74] For Oedipus such a return does not exist. The accumulation of events is not re­versible. The future is not made, but encountered and suffered.