Types of Moral Responsibility

Gary Watson, in a well-known paper (Watson 2004), distinguishes between the attributability aspect of responsibility, and the accountability aspect. Watson, Tim Scanlon (Scanlon 1998), and Angela Smith (Smith 2007) among others, opt for the attributability aspect, maintaining that justifiably holding an entity responsible is dependent on whether the event that occasioned the ascription is expressive of the entity’s inner structure with respect to value.

is merely to say that she [or it] is connected to it in such a way that she [or it] can, in principle, serve as a basis for moral appraisal of that person [or group or organiza­tion]. What is in question here is the relation between an agent and her [its] actions, attitudes, values, etc., and the conditions under which those things can be said to reflect on her [its] morality... should they turn out to exceed or fall short of certain moral norms or expectations.

(Smith 467-468)

Marina Oshana (Oshana 1997) defends the accountability position. She maintains that for something to be held to account by members of the moral community, it must be capable of entering into moral conversation, defend itself, make excuses, confess, justify its behavior, etc.

Although I haven’t a convincing argument to support adopting one or the other of those approaches, I follow Watson and maintain that an entity (human person, group, or organization) is attributably morally responsible for an event, if the occurrence of the event discloses some­thing positive or negative about the nature of the entity’s inner functionalities, how it works or worked, decides or decided, and translates its intentions into actions. A negative responsibility ascription, blaming a human, a group or an organization for a morally bad or unacceptable action or event, makes the claim that its subject is internally morally defective in some crucial and relevant way.

Subjects are held morally responsible for their actions that under some true description were intended by them. In moral assessment what was intended matters more than what subsequently occurred. The consequences of an action, if not fitted into the scope of the subject’s intentions in acting, are externalities to moral assessment and not directly relevant to holding the subject morally responsible for the action. Andrew Khoury writes: “In order for a given consequence to result from some action the world must cooperate in some way and this is a matter external to the agent” (Khoury 2012). If a person, a group, or an organization were held morally respon­sible for the consequences of an action that fall outside the scope of its intentions in acting and beyond the limits of reasonable foreseeability, sheer luck would be a dominating factor in what may be a majority of responsibility ascription cases.

The moderate reasons responsiveness condition for membership in the moral community is an internal condition that connects the motivational mechanism of the subject to an action. Moral responsibility ascriptions focus on a subject’s internal decision states, including what it intended, not on events that may have a direct causal relationship to its actions though were not captured in the scope of the operations of its neuro-psychological mechanism or its decision processes.

There are two ways moral responsibility may be assessed. One holds the subject responsible or not for an action or event at the time of its occurrence (responsibility at t₁ for what was done at t₁)—call that synchronic moral responsibility. The other holds the subject responsible or not for the action committed at t₁ at a time later than t₁ (responsibility at t₁+n for what was done at t₁)—call that diachronic moral responsibility (or the diachronic ownership) of a past action.⁵ In some cases they may be significantly different with respect to the degree of responsibility ascribed for what was done at t₁. In other words, moral responsibility for the same event or action may change over time. However, the truth of a synchronic moral responsibility ascrip­tion holding its subject responsible for an action or event at the time of its occurrence (t₁) is invariant over time. The degree or amount of diachronic moral responsibility ascribed to the subject for the same action or event at a later date may be more, less, or the same as the syn­chronic moral responsibility ascribed at t₁. Diachronic moral responsibility is not limited by the degree of synchronic moral responsibility justifiably accessed at t₁. Over the passage of time the subject may have undergone psychological or operational changes and/or had opportunities to rectify, remedy, or redress what it did at t₁ in a morally meaningful way. Diachronic responsibility ascriptions are revisitations of moral assessments of a subject’s previous actions, but they are not revisions ofjustified synchronic responsibility assessments.⁶

If something untoward occurred at t₁, we are likely to have moral reasons to want to know if the subject that was synchronically responsible for it at t₁ is an appropriate candidate at t₁+n for punishment, blaming, or other forms of retrospectively being held to account for it.

Philosophers have proposed a variety of candidates for subject sameness from soma-centricity focused on physical continuity to versions of the Lockean memory criterion and psychological continuity. In the recent philosophical literature two alternatives to straightforward numer­ical soma-centric identity in the case of humans have been championed. One is psychological connectedness; the other is narrative coherence. If psychological connectedness is adopted in the case of humans, diachronic responsibility/ownership for an action at t₁ is dependent on the degree to which and the way in which the subject’s current psychology in its neuro­psychological mechanism is connected to the psychology of the subject at t₁ that was the spring of the subject’s action at t₁.⁷ Justifiable diachronic responsibility at t₂ for an action performed at t₁ is dependent on the degree to which and the way in which identified psychological states and functions of a person’s current neuro-psychological mechanism, such as beliefs, values, desires, and the like, are causally connected to those that were the effective motivational springs of the subject at t₁. Only if they are psychologically connected to a reasonably high degree can the human at t₂ be held responsible for what was done at t₁.

Benjamin Matheson writes of the narrative coherence account of sameness: “An agent is morally responsible for a past action to the extent that the action coheres with the agent’s self­told narrative” (Matheson 2014). Most human lives are to some extent self-told stories in that we, the autobiographers, organize the acts we have performed, the things we have done, and what we plan to do, into intelligibly structured storylines even if we only tell those stories to ourselves during reflective interludes.⁸ Briefly, the narrative coherence account of sameness required for diachronic responsibility is that a person is morally responsible for a past action to the extent that the action coheres with that person’s self-told narrative, as long as that narrative is not delusional or fictional. On this account, the narrative self, not personal identity or psy­chological connectedness, is the locus in persons of diachronic moral responsibility. If a past action no longer coheres with the person’s current self-narrative, it is not something for which the person legitimately can be held morally diachronically responsible. It is likely that among collectives only the highly organized ones can satisfy the conditions of narrative coherence. In them operational sameness is likely to be preserved over time.

I propose to use the clarifications of the previous two sections in taking a stab at sorting out types of collectives and moral responsibility.

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