Responsibility

[JKSCHW at aol.com]

Ken Hanly, Sam Pawlett, and Jim  Heartfield are trying to draw me into a 
metaphysical discussion about whether punishment and responsibility can be 
reconciled with causal determinism. I won't be drawn. I used to be a 
philosophy professor and I know the territory and all the moves. I even wrote 
a dissertation, not on free will, but on attempting to reconcile natural 
scientific types of explanations with social science meaning-type 
explanations of human actions. That's all good clean fun, but I have become 
convinced that it is entirely irrelevant to the questions before us 
concerning responsibility, despite the draw of the reasoning that pulls us 
from questions of responsibility back to talk of metaphysical determinism. I 
have decided that Rousseau is right, we have to resist that draw. 

I think that something like the following set of claims are fixed points in 
our social thinking, by which I mean that we cannot really imagine giving 
them up except hypothetically, if we amuse ourself by philosophical argument. 
These propositions include: people of mature enough age and in possession of 
their faculties are responsible for what they do; that they deserve praise 
and blame for making choices that are right or wrong; that if they choose to 
do bad things they deserve to be punished proportionately, and they have a 
right not to be punished if they did not do bad things. (I do not say that 
desert is the only thing that matters here, but it is crucial). Please note 
that nothing I have said in these propositions says anything about freedom or 
determinism, much less "free will." 

I think this set of propositions is crucial to our thinking of ourselves as 
agents and people who can in part make our own history. Several of you 
suggested that we might try a different conception of history makers, but I 
don't think you or anyone has worked one out in enough detail to see if it 
preserves enough of what we care about to be acceptable. I have a  very 
strong suspicion that any notion of agency that reduces responsibility to a 
matter of having a role in the the causal chain that produced the event would 
not do this. 

But whatever the reasons are that we believe thsi, I think we do accept these 
propositions ona  far deeper level than any views we may have about 
determinism. So I think they have to be our starting point, and we should 
think in terms of making sense of them rather than trying to come up with a 
hard determinist alternative that we are not going to accept anyway.

--Justin