The setting of a moral community in which persons (i.e. mutually accountable agents) require certain standards of conduct from each other, are disposed to respond unfavourably to another’s voluntary failure to meet these shared demands, and their deserving these unfavourable responses for thus failing, is what characterizes the notion of accountability. According to accountability, B is responsible to (i.e. accountable or answerable to) A, and to everyone A represents, for complying or not with these demands or expectations.
What emerged from my arguments in Chapter 1 is that Aristotle’s concern with the conditions of voluntariness in his Ethics is not primarily a concern with the conditions of moral responsibility as accountability. There was no reason to think that Aristotle’s concept of the prohairetic agent is identical with our modern concept of the morally accountable agent (even if these two concepts have the same extension), nor was there any reason to think that the blameworthiness or praiseworthiness appropriate to human agents for their actions, can be analyzed in terms of the S-reactive attitudes or, more generally, in terms of sanctioning
61 dispositions (i.e. the praise and blame appropriate to them is not grounded on their breaching or meeting certain requirements of interpersonal relations, nor do they
deserve or merit praise and blame for their ethically significant responses). Further, we found no convincing argument for thinking that children should be categorically excluded from the recipients of Aristotelian praise and blame, and lastly, we found positive reasons for thinking that the sort of praise and blame that Aristotle has in mind is sufficiently akin to the sort of assessment appropriate to skills and skillful activities, to warrant the suspicion that an altogether different model of what Aristotle means by ‘S is blameworthy/praiseworthy for voluntarily doing A’ is required. But what model?
Such a model is provided by Gary Watson’s notion of attributability.1 Watson argues that there is available another notion of ‘responsibility’ (his term) that can also be construed as moral, which does not correspond to, nor is parasitic on, the notion of accountability. [Of course, being the cause of one’s actions is independent of people’s demands or expectations with regard to one’s actions (more emphatically, independent of owing obligations to one another), but this is an obvious and uninteresting point].2 The interesting idea is that not all cases of being
morally responsible for one’s actions are analyzable in terms of having certain responsibilities or being answerable to certain people. There is a sense of ‘moral’ in which one can say, without invoking others’ moral demands, that S is morally responsible for an action. Gary Watson offers a good illustration of this claim:
If someone betrays her ideals by choosing a dull but secure occupation in favour of a riskier but potentially more enriching one, or endangers something of deep importance to her life for trivial ends (by sleeping too little and drinking too much before important performances, for example), then she has acted badly – cowardly, self-indulgently, at least unwisely. But by these assessments we are not thereby holding her responsible, as distinct from holding her to be responsible. To do that, we would have to think that she is accountable to us and to others, whereas in many cases we suppose that such behaviour is ‘nobody else’s business’. Unless we think she is responsible to us or to others to live the best life she can – and that is a moral question – we do not think she is accountable here. If her
1
Watson, G. (1996).
2 It is uninteresting because this is the sense of „responsibility‟ involved in the notion of agency, and in
62
timid or foolish behaviour also harms others, and thereby violates requirements of interpersonal relations, that is a different matter.3
Assessments of the sort here distinguished from accountability are made from ‘the aretaic perspective’. Underlying this perspective, Watson argues, is one set of interests central to ‘the ethical life’, the one that “hinges upon our concern with living a good human life, with models and ideals of human possibility”.4 This ‘face of moral responsibility’, characterized by the aretaic perspective and the set of interests underlying it, is what Watson calls ‘attributability’.
In contrast with accountability, which focuses on three elements – an agent A holding B accountable or answerable to certain moral requirements R – attributability focuses on two elements; the agent and his actions. What is important, from the point of view of attributability, is not the causal relationship between conduct and the agent (for such a relation might even be analyzed in non- causal terms), but the fact that such conduct is expressive of the agent’s self, his values and adoption of ends, and that it is executive of his or her will. From this aretaic perspective, appraisals like “he acted in a cowardly way” can be understood, as expressing an appraisal of the agent as coward, that is, as implying that such cowardly conduct is attributable or ascribable to a kind of fault in the agent, i.e. an ethical fault or vice (which, by the way, does not have to be a fixed, stable character trait).
The blaming judgements involved in ascribing faulty actions to an agent’s defect of character, when made from the aretaic perspective, are not appropriately described as ‘sanctioning responses’ or as expressing sanctioning dispositions. In a sense, of course, they are ‘responses’ or ‘reactions’ occasioned by someone’s action, but they do not, as such, involve sanctioning dispositions.5 Because of this, they are not appropriately characterized as responses that the agent ‘deserves’ (in virtue of his not conforming to the judger’s normative expectations). Therefore, from the
3
Watson, G. (1996), p. 231.
4Ibid, p. 240.
5 The term „disposition‟ here is very important. Someone could argue that the ethical condemnation of
someone beyond reach of sanction, e.g. an historical figure, is thereby on the attributability side of Watson‟s distinction. This would be a hasty conclusion to draw, however. It still needs to be shown that such ethical condemnation does not express a disposition to sanction such person, e.g. perhaps one
63 perspective of attributability, questions concerning the degree to which a certain piece of conduct deserves a certain response do not naturally arise. (‘Desert’ here is the narrow normative concept isolated in Chapter 1, Section F). Moreover, the attribution of an action to a fault or excellence in the agent does not have to imply that such fault or virtue is of an ethical nature, as opposed to a technical one, since there is nothing intrinsically ‘moral’ about aretaic appraisals, as there is about S- reactive attitudes.
Watson offers an interesting illustration of how the distinction between attributability and accountability can account for cases in which our intuitions as to whether an agent is responsible for a given action diverge. Think about the case (described by Watson) of the vicious criminal, who is not a psychopath, but who has been himself a victim of abusive childhood. “His deliberate and remorseless murders characterize him as malicious and cruel in a sense that no non-reflective being could be. The fact that life gave him a rotten deal, that his squalid circumstances made it overwhelmingly difficult to develop a respect for the standards to which we would hold him accountable, does not impugn these aretaic appraisals. His conduct is attributable to him as an exercise of his ‘moral capacities’ …”6 On the other hand, Watson notes that “there is an inclination to doubt that such a person can rightly be
held accountable, at least fully; that while he might ‘deserve pity’ … he ‘does not deserve blame’.” According to Watson, “what gives rise to our ‘pity’ are concerns about fairness. Facts about his formative years give rise to the thought that the individual has already suffered too much and that we too would probably have been morally ruined by such a childhood.”7
In so far as to live the best life one can is a ‘moral’ question, then attributability is one aspect of ‘moral responsibility’, as Watson claims. But here ‘moral’ needs to be distinguished from the social network of demands or obligations, actions complying or failing to comply with them, and the corresponding
6 Watson, G. (1996), p. 240.
7 Ibid, p. 240. Philosophers who adopt a Strawsonian conception of moral responsibility of course agree
with this. Peter Strawson himself includes seeing someone as “peculiarly unfortunate in his formative circumstances” (Strawson, P. F. (1962), p. 79) as the sort of agent-based consideration that tends to inhibit the S-reactive attitudes and to promote, instead, the objective attitude. See also Fischer & Ravizza (1998), p. 187; and Wolf, S. (1990), pp. 85-6.
64 institutionalized or informal sanctions or rewards (all of them elements of accountability). Accordingly I will keep the term ‘ethical’ to stand for the former interest and to keep ‘moral’ to stand for the later, and will call Aristotle’s own version of attributability ‘ethical ascription’. To the characteristics peculiar to ethical ascription I now turn.