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Autonomy and Blameworthiness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Ishtiyaque Haji
Ishtiyaque Haji*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Morris, MN56267, USA
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Extract

Certain cases emphatically motivate the view that personal autonomy — autonomy as self-government — is a necessary condition of moral blameworthiness. The cases, that is, suggest that one cannot be morally blameworthy for performing an action unless one is autonomous with respect to that action, or one is autonomous with respect to the motivational underpinnings (the desires perhaps) that figure in the etiology of the action. Here is a typical, fanciful example. Unbeknownst to Bond, a minute electronic device has been implanted in his brain. Maxine can use the device to induce desires or intentions in Bond without her electronic manipulations being ‘felt’ or detected by Bond. Suppose Maxine implants in Bond a powerful desire to kill Oskar, a distant associate of Bond, together with the belief that the desire is irresistible. Though the electronically induced desire is not in fact irresistible, Bond could resist it only with a great deal of difficulty and only at the expense of suffering considerable psychological damage; Bond, to his astonishment, acts on this desire and does away with Oskar. This case (call it ‘Secret Agent’) is one in which Bond, it appears, is not morally blameworthy for killing Oskar. According to one strand of thought, the judgment that Bond is not blameworthy rests squarely on the view that Bond acts on a desire that is not truly his own;1 Bond is not his own master with respect to the implanted desire that causes him to kill Oskar.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 593 - 612
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 This line of thought, for instance, can be found in Holly Smith’s ‘Culpable Ignorance,’ Philosophical Review 92 (1983) 543-71.

2 This example is an adaptation of an example discussed by Alfred Mele in Irrationality (New York: Oxford University Press 1987), 22.

3 Christman, Cf. John ‘Constructing the Inner Citadel: Recent Work on the Concept of Autonomy,’ Ethics 99 (1988) 109-24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 112; cf. also John Christman, ed., The Inner Citadel (New York: Oxford University Press 1989), 13.

4 Christman, Cf. John ‘Autonomy and Personal History,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (1991) 1-24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Defending Historical Autonomy: A Reply to Professor Mele,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (1993) 281-90. Subsequent references to these works will appear respectively in the text in this way: (APH, page number); (DHA, page number).

5 Double, Richard ‘Two Types of Autonomy Accounts,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1992) 65-80CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 I here set aside worries that come from the direction of hard determinism.

7 There is a suggestive discussion on moral responsibility and induced desires in Ferdinand Schoeman, ‘Responsibility and the Problem of Induced Desires,’ Philosophical Studies 34 (1978) 293-301.

8 The sprinter’s case is advanced by Alfred Mele in ‘History and Personal Autonomy,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (1993) 271-80, n. 2.

9 For a recent highly instructive account of akratic action, see Alfred Mele’s Irrationality. Not everyone agrees that akratic action is possible. Cf., for example, Watson, Gary ‘Skepticism About Weakness of Will,’ Philosophical Review 86 (1977) 316-39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 ‘Two Types of Autonomy Accounts,’ 68-9

11 Ibid., 69

12 On misalignments between evaluative judgments and motivations, cf. Watson, Gary ‘Free Agency,’ Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975) 205-20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mele, Alfred Springs of Action (New York: Oxford University Press 1992)Google Scholar ch. 9; and Mele’s Irrationality, ch.6.

13 On this theme, cf., for example, Audi, Robert ‘Autonomy, Reason, and Desire,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1991) 247-71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Hierarchical analyses of what makes one’s desires truly one’s own are well entrenched in the literature. Cf., for example, Harry Frankfurt’s ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,’ Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971) 5-20; and Gerald Dworkin’s’ Acting Freely,’ Nous 4 (1970) 367-83.

15 For more on the distinction between mere choice and decision, cf. Klein, Martha Determinism, Blameworthiness, and Deprivation (New York: Oxford University Press 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 5. I am grateful to a referee for this journal for indicating these things to me: first, there appear to be some unusual but possible cases in which an agent decides to A, even though prior to decision, the agent is not uncertain about whether she will A. Mele’s, Cf. Alfred ‘Intentions, Reasons, and Beliefs: Morals of the Toxin Puzzle,’ Philosophical Studies 68 (1992) 171-94Google Scholar. Second, Buridan’s ass scenarios in which the relevant options are doing A and doing B, might be ones in which an agent can decide to A while remaining convinced that her reasons for her two options are equally strong.

16 Cf. Springs of Action, ch. 9.

17 Susan Wolf, for example, discusses this sort of worry in Freedom Within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press 1990).

18 The point that decisions (in the mental sense action) are not implantable has been made by Mele in Springs of Action, 141.

19 I am here skirting an important complication. Suppose an agent’s evaluative standards themselves can be electronically induced. Suppose, without her knowing it, Victim’s values have been engineered in this fashion. Then, it might be charged, the evaluative judgments that Victim makes, and her DA-autonomous decisions, are in fact nonautonomous. Perhaps so, and if so, the account of decisional autonomy that I give should be taken to be conditional upon one’s evaluative standards (or reasons) being authentically one’s own. I leave it open that the required account of authenticity may well appeal to history-sensitive considerations.

20 It might prove fruitful to compare this account of control to John Martin Fischer’s conception of reason responsive mechanisms discussed in ‘Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility,’ in Schoeman, F. ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 81-106Google Scholar.

21 ‘Liberating Constraints,’ manuscript in progress.

22 P.S. Greenspan has an intriguing suggestion that personality traits such as shyness that are genetically determined control behavior to a degree that undermines freedom. Cf. ‘Free Will and the Genome Project,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993) 31-43. If Greenspan is right, such traits may also undermine autonomy.

23 I am indebted to a referee for this journal for this example.

24 Watson, Gary ‘Free Action and Free Will,’ Mind 96 (1987) 145-172CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 145

25 I am deeply grateful to an editor of, and referees for, the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for their comments and suggestions.