TRADUCIR O TRANSLITERAR LOS NOMBRES

Despite the advantages of the Minimal Approval view’s handling of the weakness of will problem, it does have some features that may seem unin- tuitive due to worries about the fairness of demarcating compulsion and weakness in the way that I have suggested we should. In this section my aim is to respond to these concerns.

First, some may object that on my view we let people off too easily for their compulsions. I am committed to the claim that it can be the case that a person is not attributionally-responsible for her action even if she could have done otherwise had she resisted. On my view, compulsions in theory need not even be particularly difficult to resist to make a person exempt from attributional-responsibility for the resultant actions. To the extent that this strikes some people as implausible, I take it this is motivated by a concern about fairness.

I have several lines of response to such worries. First, there is much contested ground over which questions about free will and moral respon- sibility should be answered in the domain of metaphysics and which should be answered in the domain of first-order ethical theory, but I take there to be a methodological problem with raising concerns about fairness at least with this part of the picture. This is not to say that questions of fairness need not enter consideration at all, just that if they do, they do so at a different level of generality. We might reasonably ask the question, given considerations of fairness, what is the appropriate basis on which to judge people to be attributionally-responsible for their actions? Once we have decided that the answer to that question is that it is appropriate to hold people at- tributionally-responsible for their actions just in case they reveal some- thing about what they are like as agents, and commit to a Deep Self view, our further question is now: what does it take for someone to reveal something

about what she is like as an agent through her action? Our criterion for answer- ing that question should be based on how well the proposed state or pro- cess corresponds to the proper notion of self-disclosure that is relevant to praise and blame. Reintroducing concerns about fairness in answering this question seems to admit a certain kind of defeat for the metaphysical in- quiry of the B-Tradition. We sought to discover the conditions that tell us when an act actually is self-disclosing, not just when it would be best for us to think of someone’s act as self-disclosing given the consequences of do- ing so as they bare on considerations of fairness.

Setting aside these methodological concerns, it is not even clear that considerations of fairness would make us favor an ability-based theory of when people are exempt from attributional-responsibility for compulsive action over the view I have put forward.

There are at least two different concerns about fairness that might be raised in regards to my proposal. First, one might think the victims of moral transgressions that are caused by compulsive agents who could have easily resisted their compulsive actions have a right to blame the people who wronged them. Moral wrongdoing could have been prevent- ed easily, and so, given considerations of fairness, blame seems warrant- ed.133 _{Second, given that on my view agents are attributionally-responsible} for weak-willed actions that are very difficult to resist, it seems unfair to exempt similarly situated compulsive agents who would not have the same difficulty resisting were they to try. One thing to note is that the view is a view about attributional-responsibility, not just blameworthi- ness, so presumably the inverse fairness concerns could equally be raised for praiseworthiness. These concerns might be thought in a way to balance

133 I actually agree that such victims might deserve an apology, but do not think they have the right to blame compulsive agents. I develop a brief sketch of a sense of respon- sibility that might make the former but not the latter response appropriate in Chapter 5, §5.

each other out. But given that susceptibility to blame may be more bur- densome than susceptibility to praise is a benefit, noting this may do little to quell worries.

But isn’t it also unfair that compulsive agents are expected to shoulder the burden of resisting external urges? If compulsive urges are in fact ex- ternal, why should they be the responsibility of the agent to have to man- age them? One could try to somehow balance this consideration of fair- ness against those raised against the proposal, but I think to make fairness the sole criterion for the theory would be to make a methodological mis- take. It would amount to reducing blame and responsibility practices to mere burdens rather than acknowledging them as practices that are inex- tricably bound up in a context that makes such practices apt.

If remaining concerns linger, the following is at least dialectically open to the Minimal Approval theorist. She may admit that even if concerns about fairness do not influence ascriptions of attributability, they may in- form the background conditions of the agent’s action such that they influ- ence blaming practices, thus affecting the way in which it is appropriate to interpret and respond to the meaning of the agent’s action. The Minimal Approval theorist may even accept that while it plays no role in assign- ment of attributional-responsibility, difficulty resisting countervailing mo- tives may have a role to play in distinguishing between whether or not, for example, an agent reveals through her action an overtly malicious trait or a mere lack of moral fortitude. In this way the Minimal Approval theo- rist can accommodate the datum that degrees of difficulty resisting does seem to play some role in our assessment of agent blameworthiness with- out ceding the crucial point that control plays no role in setting the bounds of attributability.