A New Way of Thinking About Moral Responsibility
Word Count: 968
In 1969, an American philosopher named Harry Frankfurt proposed that a person could be morally responsible even if that person could not have done otherwise (Frankfurt 829). To demonstrate, he proposed a scenario involving two individuals, Black and Jones, in which Jones performs an action by his own intention even though Black secretly might have interfered and prevented Jones from doing otherwise (Frankfurt 835–836).
What is striking about this scenario, among other “Frankfurt cases,” is that they defy the common notion that moral responsibility requires the possibility of choosing between two or more outcomes. This is referred to as the principle of alternative possibilities. But what Frankfurt cases demonstrate is that there are actually two kinds of factors that determine behavior:
- Factors that produce the behavior.
- Factors that remove one or more alternatives. (Pendergraft 84)
In the case of Black and Jones, Jones is morally responsible because he produces his own behavior (1) even though Black has removed all alternatives (2).
Importantly, if Frankfurt cases undermine the standard way of considering moral responsibility, then we need a new principle that can account for Frankfurt cases.
In her book titled Making Sense of Freedom & Responsibility, the philosopher Dana Nelkin argues in favor of an abilities-based understanding of moral responsibility.
A key feature of her work is called the rational abilities view, which states that the capacity to act on good reasons is both necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility. In other words, an agent is morally responsible if and only if they have the capacity for acting on good reasons.
To illustrate, consider that psychopaths are psychologically incapable of distinguishing between good and bad. At most, they learn to resemble the moral behavior of regular people, but they never actually adopt the attitudes themselves. According to the rational abilities view, psychopaths cannot be morally responsible since they lack the capacity to truly act for good reasons.
Conversely, Nelkin argues that many whom we consider heroes do not require the capacity for considering bad reasons. In particular, she emphasizes firefighters who participated in the tragedy of September 11, 2001. They are the kinds of people who might be imagined saying “I couldn’t help it, I had to do it” (Nelkin 15).
For Nelkin, the difference between negative and positive cases is that the former requires a full range of capacity while the latter does not. This is what makes her idea of moral responsibility asymmetrical.
However, in considering positive moral scenarios, Nelkin encounters an issue. While firefighters deserve our praise, it is not as though anyone literally believes that they do not have the capacity for doing wrong. More importantly, many people would feel inclined not to attribute moral responsibility to an agent that lacked a full range of moral capacity. Consider the following:
Imagine a robot named Ava. She is special in two distinct ways. The first is that Ava’s hardware allows her to navigate the physical world in exactly the same way as a human being. The second is that her “mind” is based on a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI).
Her designer, Nathan, often worried that his creation would pose a threat to humanity. So, he programmed her only to consider reasons to do good.
One day, Ava is walking down a busy urban street when suddenly a driver loses control of their vehicle and jumps the curb. Seeing that a child is about to be fatally struck, Ava uses her extraordinary physical mechanisms and fast AI processing to rescue the child out of harm’s way.
Is Ava, a robot, morally responsible in the way a human being would be? That she “couldn’t help” but save the child might be said of Ava, just as Nelkin has said of the firemen of September 11th.
But are they the same thing? Certainly not.
In this hypothetical scenario, Ava’s creator, Nathan, would be morally responsible. This is as true of Ava’s good deeds as her bad ones.
If Ava is reminiscent of dystopian science fiction, then so is the rational abilities view. That Ava is morally responsible (an unacceptable view) follows naturally from Nelkin’s view that moral responsibility only requires the capacity for acting on good reasons. And yet, Ava does not deserve either negative or positive moral responsibility.
While Nelkin’s rational abilities view is false, she draws attention to a correct view held by another philosopher named Susan Wolf. In Freedom Within Reason, Wolf describes a framework called interference-free capacity. It goes like this:
An agent has an ability X if…
- The agent possesses the capacities, skills, talents, knowledge and so on which are necessary for X’ing.
- Nothing interferes with or prevents the exercise of the relevant capacities, skills, talents and so on. (Wolf 101)
Wolf provides an example of a person’s ability to walk as a way of illustrating each criterion. The first is met if the person has functioning legs and knowledge of walking, while the second requires that nothing gets in the way of their walking. Conversely, a person does not have the ability to walk if either they do not have legs, do not know how to walk, or are bound to a chair.
An important difference between the rational abilities view and interference-free capacity is that the latter is symmetrical. In other words, the degree of “capacity” necessary for moral responsibility is the same in both positive and negative cases.
The idea of interference-free capacity provides an alternative to the principle of alternative possibilities because it can accommodate Frankfurt cases. Thinking back to our starting scenario involving Black and Jones, Jones can be thought of as possessing interference-free capacity—and thus be morally responsible as we might intuit—while lacking alternative outcomes due to Black.
So, one way of conceiving of moral responsibility is as “ability” (interference-free capacity) that produces a symmetrical outlook on moral scenarios.
— — — — — — — — —Works Cited — — — — — — — — —-
Frankfurt, Harry G. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 66, no. 23, 1969, pp. 829–39. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2023833.
Nelkin, Dana Kay. Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility. Oxford University Press, 2011. WorldCat Discovery Service, http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1205/2011275027-t.html.
Pendergraft, Garrett. Free Will and Human Agency: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments. Routledge, 2023.
Wolf, Susan R. Freedom Within Reason. Oxford University Press, 1993.
