Time: October 4, 9:00 AM-5:00 PM
Venue: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Common Room, Fabianinkatu 24 A Helsinki (3rd floor)
Organisers: Lilian O'Brien (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies) and Dane Leigh Gogoshin (University of Helsinki, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Among the many complex practices of which our social life is composed, one stands out for its importance and complexity. It is our practice of blaming and praising one another – of holding one another responsible for what we have done or failed to do. This practice shapes our relationships with others and to ourselves. We accept blame, feel guilt, shame, or remorse, make amends, seek – and think we deserve – praise. But our responsibility practices also raise many questions – when, if ever, is it justified to hold another responsible? What kinds of creatures qualify for praise and blame? These and other questions will be considered at the workshop.
09.00-09.15
Introduction
Hanne Appelqvist
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
09.15-10.30
Responsibility for Shared Habits
Lubomira Radoilska, Kent
10.40-11.30
What is Control?
Ninni Suni, Helsinki
11.40-12.30
Feeling Guilty
Charlie Kurth, Clemson
12.30-13.40 Lunch
13.40-14.30
Responsible Institutional Agents
Pekka Mäkelä, Helsinki
14.40-15.30
A Place for Moral Influence
Dane Leigh Gogoshin, Helsinki and Wisconsin-Madison
15.45-17.00
True Scepticism and Responsibility Realism
Paul Russell, British Columbia, Lund, and Gothenburg
Responsibility for Shared Habits
Lubomira Radoilska, Kent
People are frequently held responsible for behaviour, the moral significance of which bears little or no relation to their own understanding of what they are doing. Some of the behaviours in question are non-exceptional, unreflective or socially prevalent patterns of interaction that have as their basis the embodiment of habits which, although they may be easily recognisable in principle, do not play a conscious role in the self-conception of the people who display them. This talk aims to shed new light on the moral significance of such habits and their role in moral agency. The key idea behind the proposed account is that of a moral agent who is prepared to participate in the cultivation of morally responsible habits, of which they take ownership. The result is a conception of moral responsibility in terms of preparedness to be held accountable for the social patterns of behaviour, in which one takes part.
What is control?
Ninni Suni, Helsinki
The notion of control is central to theorizing about agency and responsibility. However, as theories of responsibility have attempted to capture responsibility for attitudes such as beliefs, it has become obvious that the relevant sort of control cannot be voluntary control. In place, authors have suggested other kinds of control, such as evaluative (Hieronymi 2008), cognitive (McHugh 2011), or deliberative (Moran 2001) control. Others have argued that we should distinguish between regulative and guidance control (Fischer and Ravizza 1998), or extrinsic and intrinsic control (Boyle 2009, 2011), while some hold that responsibility doesn’t require any kind of control (Smith 2005). The problem is that it’s difficult to assess the merits of various competing views because the crucial notion of control remains elusive. What marks the difference between a view that appeals to control and one that does not? My aim is to clarify the situation by suggesting criteria for the substantive work that a notion of control does in a theory of responsibility. In short, a control-view of responsibility places an extrinsic governing attitude or process as a necessary condition of agency, whereas non-control views see agency as part of the constitution of reason-responsive attitudes.
Feeling Guilty
Charlie Kurth, Clemson
On the received view, guilt is an emotion that both sensitizes us to harms done to the relationships we care about and motivates us to try to make up for the damage done. But if that’s what guilt does, then why must we feel guilty? After all, it seems that just having better social/situational awareness and a disposition to apologize and compensate would suffice. Such a combination might even be better insofar as there wouldn’t be the pain of guilt or the psychopathologies that it can bring.
Moreover, the most common suggestions for why we need to feel guilt seem insufficient. For instance, feelings of guilt (anticipatory or post-transgression) are thought to shape our decision-making for the better (Joyce 2006), to help us better signal our sincerity (Frank 1988), to motivate repair (O’Conner 2016), and convey content that cancels what is said by the relationship-damaging action (Greenspan 1995). But each of these proposals offers—at best—a partial explanation for why feeling guilty matters. We do better in following suggestions that guilt offer a distinctive form of moral understanding (Russell 2004, Shoemaker 2015). But not only are these proposals more suggestive than substantive, but they’re also committed to a view of the connection between guilt and morality that fits poorly with cross-cultural variation in how guilt understood.
Against this backdrop, I sketch an alternative on which the feeling of guilt is the upshot of a conceptual structuring of the perspective taking and affective experiences that undergird episodes of guilt (e.g., feelings of sadness, shame, self-directed disappointment). As such, it’s important for understanding because it provides individuals with a more encompassing, holistic, and motivation-engaging perspective on the damaged relationship it is about. I then show that this proposal not only improves on what we get from existing accounts but also enjoys support from research on psychopathy and autism.
Responsible Institutional Agents
Pekka Mäkelä, Helsinki
The speed of progress in the development of modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Automated Decision Making, machine learning, and social and industrial robotics is flabbergasting. Algorithms and robots functioning and making decisions in areas that used to be controlled by humans alone, for instance, in stock trading, medical diagnosing, and car driving are becoming ubiquitous. This development creates a call for responsibility for the changes that are taking place as well as for responsible ways of going forward. This call is manifested in the promotion, of such ideas as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Responsible Research and Development (RRD), and Responsible Artificial Intelligence. Indeed, “responsibility” has become a catch word, which politicians, company representatives, and researchers frequently use to flag that they are sensitive to moral, social, and political risks that accompany the technological change and evolution. In this talk I try to contribute to this discussion by way of analyzing one relevant sense of responsibility figuring in the public, political and scientific discussions and debates concerning for example RRI and RRD and their cousin notions.
A Place for Moral Influence
Dane Leigh Gogoshin, Helsinki and Wisconsin-Madison
The contemporary moral influence account offers a uniquely coherent picture of the relationship between our reactive practices and responsible agency. It does not, however, capture the objectivity or deeper moral agency of concern to capacitarians. In this paper, I suggest that we can have both a coherent practice-based picture of responsible agency and a satisfying account of moral agency, provided we do not try to keep these things entirely together. I thus defend a novel two-tiered account of moral agency, with influenceability, understood as a susceptibility to reactive practices, as the defining feature of the first, and a reactive practice-independent sensitivity to moral reasons, as that of the second. By showing the overlap between these tiers, I build a bridge between influence and capacitarian views.
True Scepticism and Responsibility Realism
Paul Russell, British Columbia, Lund, Gothenburg
This paper is concerned with three influential contemporary statements of scepticism about moral responsibility. The first of these is Galen Strawson’s “Basic Argument” in defence of “the impossibility of moral responsibility. The second is Derk Pereboom’s account of “Hard Incompatibilism”, which holds that “we lack the sort of free will required for moral responsibility”. The third view is Bernard Williams’ critique of “morality” and its (peculiar) conception of moral responsibility and blame. On the most plausible reading, both Strawson’s “Basic Argument” and Pereboom’s “Hard Incompatibilism” arrive at the same categorical and unqualified sceptical conclusion: no one is morally responsible for their actions or conduct. In certain important respects this strong sceptical conclusion finds points of agreement with Williams’ critique of the morality system and his particular criticisms of its conception of moral responsibility. In light of this, it may be assumed that the sceptical arguments that Strawson and Pereboom advance also reject the assumptions and aspirations of “the morality system”.
Contrary to this understanding, this paper argues Williams does not accept the strong sceptical conclusion. On the contrary, according to Williams’ critique, the strong sceptical conclusion is itself a product of the morality system and its problematic assumptions and aspirations. What both Strawson and Pereboom share, in particular, is a commitment to the morality system’s way of understanding the free will problem as based on its (peculiar and problematic) understanding of the concept of moral responsibility. From this perspective, the strong sceptical views that Strawson and Pereboom defend should not be interpreted as efforts to discard “morality” but, rather, express the last gasps of “morality” as it collapses under the weight of its own assumptions.