SOLERAS, SOLADOS Y ALICATADOS

So, what exactly would count as an applicable standard(s) for a failure to recognize having evidence for an act’s wrongness (in clause 2a)? In other words: what exactly would count as an applicable standard that determines what an agent in a given situation should be (or should have been) aware of?

Even though Sher takes all the nine example cases to fulfill some (external and implicit) standard of recognition, he does mention some examples that would not fulfill the standard. These examples are situations where the agent, despite their act’s wrongness being possibly caused by their constitutive attitudes, dispositions, and traits, they are (intuitively) not responsible. Namely, Sher mentions the victim of a sudden heart attack (who, had they been more attuned to their body, would have avoided the situation), the teacher whose chance remark precipitates a suicide (who, had they been more psychologically insightful, would have recognized the warning signs), and the pedestrian who is swallowed by a sinkhole (who, had they had X-ray eyes, would have seen the earth opening).

The question is what, specifically, are the standards separating Sher’s example cases where the agents seem responsible and these latter types of cases where the agents seem not. In the former cases the agents’ state of awareness – or their constitutive attitudes, dispositions, or traits – are defective against some applicable standards. (Sher 2009, 87–88.)

Sher distinguishes two challenges that he needs to solve in specific ways via two presuppositions, for the applicable standards to function the way he intents.

Firstly, for Sher to be able to identify the standards, it is necessary for him to distinguish (internal) facts about the agent from (external) facts about their situation. In other words: between the nine example cases that fulfill the standard and the abovementioned cases that do not fulfill the standard, Sher needs to distinguish between situational factors on the one hand, and the agents’

constitutive attitudes, dispositions, and traits, on the other. This poses a challenge, because drawing the boundary is not immediately clear. For example, an agent’s prior history, and their moral and nonmoral background beliefs, lie close to the boundary. An example situation that Sher mentions lying close to the boundary is of a homeopath who endangers his sick child’s life by refusing to authorize a proven therapy (yet who theoretically has easy access to orthodox medical care and critical knowledge on the Internet).⁶⁸ If the agent and their situation cannot be properly distinguished – if the agent’s constitutive attitudes, dispositions, and traits preventing them from realizing the moral character of their act are part of their situation – then their resulting lack of awareness cannot fall below any standards that apply to agents in a similar situation. Consequently, if the distinction was not made and thus the situation in 2a was understood in a subjective manner, the moral intuitions underlying clause 2 would be seriously undermined. (Sher 2009, 98–99.)

Secondly, the nature of the standards needs to be understood to be normative instead of statistical. This means that the standards – when we say someone should be aware of something, or a reasonable person in a similar situation would be aware of something – is not relying merely on what a typical or average person who found themselves in the agent’s situation would realize about the moral implications of the act, but that the agent has failed to meet a demand whose force is independent of what anyone else in their situation would or would not realize. A related question is whether the normative requirement is epistemic, or moral (or prudential). The reason why Sher needs the standard to be understood as nonstatistical is because otherwise the intuitions underlying PEC would also be undermined. If the standards in 2a were merely statistical, they would be too relativized for Sher, depending on other people’s reactions instead of intrinsic features of the agents’ reactions.

(ibid.)

Hence, to defend PEC, Sher defends the two presuppositions behind his applicable standard (in 2a): (1) a nonsubjective, specifically objective, account of the unwitting wrongdoer’s situation, and (2) a nonstatistical, specifically normative, account of what one ought to be aware of. (ibid.)

Initially, Sher looks for help in legal literature, particularly in literature concerning negligence and the use of the reasonable-person standard.⁶⁹ The standard can be interpreted objectively or

subjectively, but ultimately Sher doesn’t find any satisfying arguments in the legal literature for how we should interpret the standard in a moral (or prudential) context, as opposed to legal. Essentially, the legal context focuses too much on efficient administration of the law and effective control of future behavior: for example, the commonly applied nonsubjective account of the reasonable-person standard in the legal context is justified via practical, forward-looking considerations instead of moral considerations after the act. Sher is thus forced to offer his own, original justifications. (Sher 2009, 100–104.)

I examine Sher’s justifications concerning his two presuppositions in the following two sections: an objective account of the unwitting wrongdoer’s situation (in 4.1.2.1), and normative account of what one ought to be aware of (in 4.1.2.2). In section 4.1.2.3, I provide a condensed summary of how Sher understands clause 2a.

4.1.2.1 An objective account of the boundary between the agent and the situation

In terms of the first presupposition – an objective account of the wrongdoer’s situation – Sher notes that in considering where to draw the boundary between the agent and their situation, we can equally well choose whether to examine the question in terms of what aspects of the agents should the situation include or in terms of what aspects of the situation should the agent include. These are both addressing the same boundary, but Sher thinks the latter is a more fruitful way to frame the matter in the context of epistemic condition of responsibility, as it is primarily interested in the agent rather than the situation. In other words, it is helpful to focus on where the boundary of the agent him- or herself is. This leads Sher to examine theories related to the nature of the agents themselves. (Sher 2009, 105.)

Via that body of theory, Sher supports his first presupposition, an objective account of the wrongdoer’s situation. Even though Sher doesn’t provide any explicit references, he notes that many philosophers, when considering what makes someone the person they are, very often appeal to some combination of the person’s desires, beliefs, dispositions, and traits.⁷⁰ These aspects of the person are very often taken to determine the person’s identity in a way that their physical attributes and social circumstances (that is, situation) do not. Albeit there is disagreement of how much of a person’s psychology has this status, Sher considers that many philosophers would draw the line between an agent and their situation roughly to the same place as the traditional legal rule. Namely, the line would be drawn to – and the applicable standard would be understood as – what a reasonable person in the agent’s situation would realize. (ibid.)

Thus, the more specific related question Sher wants to answer is where to locate the boundaries of the responsible self – i.e., the boundaries of the features of agents that constitute them as responsible persons in situations where they seem responsible without awareness. This reveals a close connection between clauses 2a and 2b: the answer is needed not only to make further sense of the applicable standard (2a), but also to answer which psychological states are constitutive of an agent (2b). (Sher 2009, 105–106.) Clarifying this connection, Sher writes:

“[F]or any given agent, the range of answers that exclude from his situation the psychological states that account for his failure to recognize his act as wrong or foolish will roughly coincide with the range of answers that construe those psychological states as constitutive of him. This suggests that the two requirements of PEC’s second disjunct—that the agent’s failure to respond to his evidence that his act is wrong or foolish be both (a) defective relative to the standards that determine what a reasonable person in his situation would realize and (b) traceable to his own constitutive attitudes and dispositions—are connected at a deep level.

Although they appear distinct, the two requirements are rooted in a single theory of the responsible self.” (Sher 2009, 106.)

As a single theory of the responsible self can further clarify both 2a and 2b, Sher concludes that he doesn’t need to provide any independent arguments for the agent’s psychological states – whose interaction prevents agents from realizing the moral implications of their act – not being included in the situation. It suffices that he demonstrates that the attitudes and traits that prevent the agents from realizing the moral implications are generally constitutive of their possessors (clarifying 2b), as the conclusion that they are not elements of their possessors’ situation would immediately follow (establishing the distinction between the agent and their situation in 2a). (ibid.)

In the next section, 4.1.3, I summarize Sher’s theory of the responsible self, and thus his concluding illustration of how to understand clause 2. But first, I introduce his justification for his other presupposition concerning clause 2a.

4.1.2.2 Normative account of responsibility without awareness

In terms of the second presupposition – a normative (instead of statistical) account of what one ought to be aware of – Sher notes that unlike the first presupposition, this is genuinely independent of how we interpret clause 2b. Thus, it requires its own defense. (Sher 2009, 106.)

Sher provides a few arguments for the normative account:

Firstly, he notes that even though our judgments in a given situation are often heavily influenced by our (statistical) beliefs about what most others in the target agent’s situation are (or would be) aware of, a statistical interpretation of the standards would too easily be reduced to an argumentum ad populum. Even if the standards were ones that most people would meet, it wouldn’t follow that the standards apply because most people meet them. (Sher 2009, 107–108.)

Secondly, he notes that the statistical approach – often utilized in legal context – is not applicable to moral context, because in practice it would undermine many of our moral intuitions.

For example, if a virus suddenly impaired everyone’s cognitive faculties in such a way that most people would forget their dogs in a hot van (like Alessandra in Sher’s example case Hot Dog), the statistics changing would not affect our moral judgments of the matter concerning the minority who remain cognitively unimpaired. (Sher 2009, 107–108.)

Thirdly, even if the statistical approach was understood to be set by the agent’s own previous level of performance – e.g., that Alessandra should have been aware of Sheba’s plight because it is the sort of thing that Alessandra generally does recognize – it too would undermine many of our moral intuitions. For example, if Alessandra was just inflicted by the virus, we would not continue insisting that the impaired Alessandra was responsible unlike the unimpaired Alessandra. (Sher 2009, 109.)

Sher notes that the third argument shows that it doesn’t matter what Alessandra has remembered in the past but only what she is capable of currently remembering. This suggests that instead of the statistical approach, the standards about what a person should realize at a given time may be set by that person’s current cognitive capacities. Initially, for Sher, this seems like a very promising way to understand the standards. (Sher 2009, 109–110.)

However, even if the standards were understood in terms of the agent’s current cognitive capacities, it is not enough: Sher notes that the standards underlying our intuitive judgments about what an agent in a particular situation should be aware of cannot be set exclusively by the cognitive capacities of that agent. If what Alessandra should have remembered when she was preoccupied in the school is entirely dependent on what she was capable of remembering, then she should equally remember, for example, an umbrella, and last summer’s beach novel that she also noticed in the car besides Sheba.

(Sher 2009, 111.)

Thus, Sher concludes that what any given agent should recognize depends not only on what that agent is capable of recognizing, but also on the agent’s moral obligations; i.e., on what they must recognize if they are to discharge their moral (or prudential) duty. To illustrate the latter dependency:

as Alessandra does not have any moral duties towards her umbrella, but does have towards Sheba, only the latter should have been recognized. This result suggests to Sher that the applicable standards of what agents should (epistemically) be aware of are rooted in the ostensibly different standards that determine what those agents morally (or prudentially) ought to do. Hence, the nature of the applicable standard, in 2a, should be understood as normative in the same way as moral “oughts” are.⁷¹ (Sher 2009, 111–112.)

One possible objection to this conclusion that Sher answers is that it might be the case that morality can only give rise to standards that dictate actions – i.e., that are action-guiding – in which case the standards that determine what agents merely should be aware of could not rise from morality.

Even if this might be the case (despite, for example, many virtue ethicists disagreeing), Sher thinks that the two could still be connected. Namely, by morality playing a role in our non-action-guiding standards by which we assess others. For example, traits like honesty and kindness are not actions, and neither are feelings such as pride nor attitudes such as indifference, but they still describe a moral character that people ought or ought not to have. Thus, Sher sees that the normativity of the applicable standard, in 2a, can at the very least be rooted in non-action-guiding moral requirements. And hence, overall, the applicable standard, in 2a, is to be understood as a joint function of (a) the agent’s cognitive capacities, and (b) the [non-action-guiding] moral requirements that apply to the agent.

(Sher 2009, 112–113.)

But how are (a) and (b) connected, exactly? Sher illuminates the connection as follows:

“From the premises that the demands of morality … are directed at agents in their capacity as reason-responders and that agents cannot be reason-responders if they lack relevant cognitive capacities, we may conclude that the demands of morality … are directed only at those who possess the relevant cognitive capacities, but not at those who lack them.” (Sher 2009, 115.)

The relevant cognitive capacities for agents to be reason-responsive (in a general sense), Sher takes to include the agents’ disposition to notice various features of their surroundings, to separate what is relevant from what is not, to preserve any relevant beliefs in their short-term memory, to retrieve

information from their long-term memory as needed, and to draw the appropriate conclusions from their beliefs and goals. (Sher 2009, 114–115.)

4.1.2.3 Summary of Sher’s applicable standard

Sher’s examination of the applicable standard, that he has in mind in clause 2a, to match with what he sees to be our intuitions in the nine example cases, could be summarized as follows:

The applicable standards that determine what an agent in a given situation should be (or should have been) aware of are to be understood in terms of what a reasonable person in the agent’s situation would realize when the boundaries of the responsible self are properly understood (4.1.2.1), and specifically should realize in a normative sense, by relevant moral demands being directed at agents who possess cognitive capacities necessary for them to be reason-responsive (4.1.2.2).

Thus, further considering that the responsible self establishes a connection between clauses 2a and 2b, the agents in the example cases can be (intuitively) considered responsible without awareness in the sense that their failure of recognizing the wrongness of their act has resulted from the interaction of the attitudes, dispositions, and traits that make them the person they are.

For example, what separates Alessandra – in Sher’s example case Hot Dog – from the victim of a sudden heart attack, is the standard that Alessandra’s constitutive attitudes, dispositions, and traits were within the boundaries of the responsible self, whereas the victim of a heart attack was under a situation beyond the boundaries of the responsible self. And moral demands can be directed to Alessandra as she possesses cognitive capacities necessary for her to be reason-responsive.

To conclude his explanation of PEC, Sher sets out to draw the boundaries of the responsible self – that is, the boundary between the responsible agent and their situation. This is the topic of the following section, concluding our trek through Sher’s partial account of the epistemic condition.