Porque la circuncisión en verdad aprovecha, si guardares la ley; más s

In the prior section, we discovered that Internalism’s commitments can lead to a regress of blameworthiness—a continuing search for an act of direct blameworthiness (i.e. clear-eyed akrasia), pushing the search further and further back in the chain of culpability. Those same internalist commitments that allow for such a regress can generate a skeptical challenge to moral responsibility.

Rosen (2004) appropriates Zimmerman’s Origination Thesis to generate a skeptical challenge concerning judgments of moral responsibility in any particular case.48 _{Recall, there is a distinction between original (or direct) responsibility and}

derivative (or indirect responsibility). According to the Origination Thesis, the origin of any sequence of culpability always terminates in an act of clear-eyed akrasia. Such akrasia occurs when one knows that the balance of one’s reasons count against doing

47 _{One might also wonder whether Internalism and its regress are equivalent to a tracing requirement,} such that they should just be called a tracing requirement on blameworthiness? In short, I think Internalism and its regress are species of a tracing requirement, but I do not think they should simply be called a tracing requirement. Simply calling Internalism and its regress a tracing requirement places Internalism and the regress at the wrong level of generality, as the term “tracing requirement” is a general term that does not specify the content of when a previous act can secure blameworthiness for a subsequent act. Internalism, and its regress, specifies this content in terms of a propositional attitude the content of which is the wrongness of one’s present act (i.e., that the act I am committing is morally wrong overall). Thanks to Hieronymi and Hanser for comments prompting this clarification about Internalism, the regress, and tracing requirements.

48 _{It is worth noting that this is not a skeptical argument that moral responsibility is impossible. For} such an impossibility argument see Galen G. Strawson (1994), and for an explanation why the impossibility argument fails see Randolph Clarke (2005). Rather, the claim is that even if moral responsibility is possible we never have a sufficient degree of confidence that warrants us in making judgments of moral responsibility in particular cases. This is also not skepticism concerning morality because the skeptical argument assumes common sense morality is roughly correct.

act A, and one judges that one ought not A, but one does A anyway. Rosen argues that identifying acts of clear-eyed akrasia in the sequence of culpability is extremely difficult. This is because the contents of one’s mind or another person’s mind is often opaque to introspection and reflection. To illustrate, given the opacity of the contents of someone’s mental states, concerning someone who unwittingly broke a promise through lying it is unreasonable to judge that, “at the time of action, either he knew that he had decisive reason not to lie, or if he did not know this, that his ignorance was the upshot of some prior bad action done in full knowledge of every pertinent fact or norm” (Rosen 2004: 308). As Rosen explains:

Sometimes the relevant facts will be straightforwardly inaccessible. The surgeon neglects to check her patient’s chart; this is an act done from ignorance. Is she culpable for the ignorance? That depends on whether it derives from some prior culpable act or omission. But how are you (a third party) supposed to approach that question? Perhaps you can identify the prior omission—perhaps you can show that given her track record on such matters, she should have asked a colleague to remind her to check the chart. Still, the question will be whether her failure to do so was itself a culpable failure; and that will depend on whether this episode was itself an akratic episode—that she failed to ask for the reminder even though she knew that she ought to ask for it—or traces back to an akratic episode. And it seems obvious that in any real case it will be impossible to resolve this question with any confidence.49

49 _{Rosen also points out that it will often be difficult to tell a genuine act of akrasia apart from a standard} act of weakness of will:

It is possible to reinforce this line of thought with a more general ground for doubt. The agent is culpable for his bad action only if that bad action is, or derives from, an episode of genuine

Rosen’s skeptical challenge to moral responsibility is somewhat qualified. It is skepticism about attributions of responsibility, not about the possibility of responsibility itself. It is a claim that we, as a third party, can never be sufficiently confident that akratic conditions are satisfied. The regress must bottom out in an act of clear-eyed akrasia for us to establish blameworthiness for the act in question. But given that we cannot get inside the head of the person at the time they made the decision and given that first person reports concerning whether at the time of action the person believed that what they were doing was wrong are unreliable, we can never possess justified judgments concerning whether a person was morally responsible for what they did (or failed to do). We can never justifiably halt the regress by forming a justified judgment that the chain has bottomed out in an act of clear-eyed akrasia.

William FitzPatrick (2008) precisifies Rosen’s skeptical challenge. FitzPatrick more explicitly details the propositions involved in the skeptical challenge and how those propositions generate the skeptical conclusion.50

(1) An agent S is responsible for a wrong act A only if either

akrasia. But genuine akrasia in this sense is extremely difficult to identify. The reason is that it is not readily distinguishable from an impostor: ordinary weakness of will. The akratic agent judges that A is the thing to do, and then does something else, retaining his original judgment undiminished. The ordinary moral weakling, by contrast, may initially judge that A is the thing to do, but when the time comes to act, loses confidence in this judgment and ultimately persuades himself (or finds himself persuaded) that the preferred alternative is at least as reasonable. Moreover, in between these two pure cases there is a continuum of cases; cases in which the agent suspends his original judgment without quite rejecting it; or cases in which it is simply indeterminate as the agent acts whether he in fact believes that all things considered he should do A. (Real action almost never involves an explicit practical judgment; and it is not hard to imagine that it may be indeterminate whether, in the absence of such a judgment, the agent is to be credited with an implicit belief that A is to be done.) (2004: 308-9)

This is another reason to maintain skepticism concerning judgments of moral responsibility.

50 _{I present FitzPatrick’s specification of Rosen’s skeptical argument in slightly modified form. I do this} to make more obvious the connection between the argument and the regress of blameworthiness facing Internalism. Though, as Greco rightly points out, the full logical structure of the argument has not been laid bare. Laying bare the full logic of the argument is a worthwhile future project.

(a) S is originally responsible for A, or (b) S is derivatively responsible for A by virtue of being originally responsible for something else that led to A.

(2) Thus, S is responsible for A only if either

(c) A itself is the origin of original responsibility, or (d) there exists an origin of original responsibility in A’s causal history.

(3) Act A is an origin of original responsibility (such as case (2c) above) only if (e) S knows the balance of reasons against doing A; ignorance of this— whether due to circumstantial ignorance or to normative ignorance— removes original responsibility for A.

(4) Thus, S is originally responsible for A only if his action is a case of clear- eyed akrasia (i.e., acting against his considered judgment about what there is most reason for him to do).

(5) If instead S is ignorant of the balance of reasons against doing A, and hence is not originally responsible for A, then S may still be derivatively responsible for A (case (2d) above) but only if S is culpable for the relevant circumstantial or normative ignorance by being originally responsible for whatever led to that state of ignorance.

(6) But, as in (3), S will be originally responsible for what led to his ignorance only if this amounted to a knowing failure to fulfill certain procedural epistemic duties—that is, knowing “negligence or recklessness in the management of his

opinion,” in this case related to securing knowledge of the balance of reasons against doing A.51

(7) So the only way for S to be responsible for what led to the ignorance that resulted in A would again be for S to have been involved in a form of clear-eyed akrasia in connection with the relevant epistemically debilitating behavior— that is, knowing that he had most reason to fulfill certain epistemic duties and yet failing to do so, knowingly being negligent in the management of his opinion.

(8) Thus, if S is responsible for A, then either A is itself a case of clear-eyed akrasia or it results from such akrasia associated with A’s causal antecedents. (9) But it is not possible for us to know in any particular case whether such clear-eyed akrasia is really involved in the etiology of the action.

(10) Therefore, it is not possible to know in any particular case whether S is truly responsible for A, and we should thus suspend judgment about it.

The skeptical argument concludes that suspension of judgment is warranted concerning responsibility for acts. This includes responsibility for unwitting wrongful acts, but it is not limited to them. Yet, given the scope of the argument, in any specific case where we are trying to judge that an agent is morally responsible for an unwitting wrongful act we cannot know that the agent is responsible for that act.52

51 _{Otherwise, as FitzPatrick indicates, “if [S] has been duly thoughtful and reflective all along, and his} ignorance is merely a result of poor available information, bad upbringing, or being in the grip of a false normative view despite his best efforts, then the ignorance leading [S] to do A isn’t his fault: he blamelessly believes what he believes” (FitzPatrick 2008: 592).

52 _{There are various ways of indicating why we lack such knowledge. One way of explaining this, which} aligns with Rosen’s comments, is that we cannot have sufficient confidence in our judgments of responsibility, where such confidence (all else being equal) licenses knowledge or puts us in a position