Álvaro Rodríguez-González Barredo

[O]ne may take a voluntary action, e.g. a malicious lie, through which a person has brought about a certain confusion in society; and one may first investigate its moving causes, through which it arose, judging on that basis how the lie and its consequences could be imputed to the person. […] Now even if one believes the action to be determined by these causes, one nonetheless blames the agent, and not on account of his unhappy natural temper, not on account of the circumstances influencing him, not even on account of the life he has led previously; for one presupposes that it can be entirely set aside how that life was constituted, and that the series of conditions that transpired might not have been

Critique of Pure Reason, A 554-5/B 582-3

1

There is something immediately appalling about Kant’s opinions on responsibility. If we shouldn’t care about upbringing, a hard life, a temper we didn’t choose to have, all room for charity and mitigating circumstances seems to vanish. We should ideally – or so we have come to think now – tone down our draconian instincts and first consider how a person came to choose to do harm before resorting to the archaic toolbox of blame, guilt, and punishment.

I think it is very fair to say that a person with an “unhappy natural temper”, “a bad upbringing” and surrounded by “bad company” should be cut some slack [1]; and that it isn’t so obvious that we “presuppose” that all of that can be set aside when judging their behaviour.

Things can get tricky, though. Why do we have that intuition? Perhaps we think of someone who has gone through a lot, forced to focus foremost on survival, and we admire their struggle. In the face of it, our – let’s say it, bourgeois – pleas for moral integrity can make us flush for their sheer frivolity. We have already had novels going into the lives of sympathetic rogues and knaves for – at least – half a millennium, and no-one likes to hear the nunnish admonitions of a moralist when someone’s had it rough – we get it.

But we run a specific risk if we justify this attitude in terms of the knave’s being determined into action by their surroundings, upbringing, and so forth. Think of a millionaire born of millionaires, who decides to extort what wealth she can from a community of farmers (maybe on IP grounds). Or picture someone educated strictly under oppressive dogmas who, nonetheless, reaches adulthood and comes to repudiate the creed of her parents. If Kant’s knave was determined into lying by circumstances outside of his control, and that’s why we shy away from blaming (or, at least, blaming blaming) him for his lies, shouldn’t the same principle apply to the heiress and the apostate? Either the poor rabblerouser just happens to be an automaton unlike the rest, or the other two are equally as determined by their respective companies, upbringings, and characters [2].

This, of course, is the core of Galen Strawson’s “Basic Argument” (1994). What we do depends on what type of person we are; what type of person we are is (ultimately!) not under our control; therefore, what we do isn’t really under our control. “We”, in this case, would appear to encompass all of the human race; not just those people we want to be more understanding with.

2

I won’t discuss here and now whether there actually is a way to do as Kant says, and regard people as truly responsible albeit determined “like a solar eclipse”. Even if we grant him that it is possible to construe responsibility like that, there is something that appears objectionable about actually doing so.

In that sense, I find it laudable that people like Caruso and Pereboom (2022) have attempted to ditch strict moral responsibility across the board. If we feel uneasy about applying it in some scenarios, and we find that maybe every scenario shares its key features, then, good riddance to responsibility, right? Our atavistic drive to blaming and punishing the worst of people, and to praising and rewarding the best of them, in the way we would want to do it, most probably needs revision anyway – even the most punitivist of states tend to find it a good idea to forbid lynchings and riotous mobs. Maybe the heiress isn’t so much “to blame” as to “be stopped”; and the apostate isn’t so much “to praise” as to “be encouraged”.

3

I think there are many good reasons why, if we can have moral responsibility, we should take it. I am pretty irked by paternalism; I can’t make sense of a meaningful life without deep responsibility for what we undertake; I think people would deserve praise even if that didn’t bring them or society at large any benefits. I’m not going to talk about any of this, however.

4

I think we can make a better case for Kant’s insistance on responsibility “despite all” by leaving the stage of familial drama and thinking of grander examples. Human history, it will come as news to no-one, is full of atrocities. That much is undeniable. It, too, has had events every now and then that, even if imperfect, inspire awe in many.

The realm of great historical events seems like an ideal place where we may apply Kant’s model that deep, true responsibility has to be asserted despite determination. When we ponder about the causes, say, of the Haitian revolution, or the German Peasants’ War, or the advent of universal suffrage; in a sense we are sometimes drawn to thinking “well, that was bound to happen”. Historical analysis is, of course, fraught with contingencies and uncertainty, it is a whole different story from the sorts of predictions that go on in the “hard sciences”. But the question about the causes of a historical event is intelligible, and sometimes we are satisfied with an answer to it, even if incomplete.

I feel like something goes irredeemably missing when we remove responsibility from these events. And not just responsibility in the weaker senses of causality, or reasons-responsiveness, but of becoming truly deserving of whatever fits the feat. If there is something like a plight for emancipation that is really moral, and to which we really are entitled, reducing our actions to happenings of a special kind, which have to be controlled and channelled through special means doesn’t sit well with the purported goals of emancipatory struggle. Of course, a sceptic about moral responsibility doesn’t need to be reducive about the sort of things we have duties (if duties be saved) towards, but why should we have any sort of duty of emancipation per se, and not of a merely instrumental emancipation, if we aren’t the sort of beings who are really free? The sort of beings who “are born free” even if they “everywhere are in chains” [3]? Kant’s theory allows us to grant that history is intelligible, that things have causes even in the sphere of human affairs, whilst never giving up on the idea that, at all points, we have a responsibility to actualize the freedom that is already in our nature. In short, these two outlooks have radically opposing readings of what rising for one’s freedom amounts to. To the sceptic, it is one happening among others, perhaps morally justified and good; for Kant, it is a living example of the reality of our moral ideals, and of the possibility of realizing our autonomy:

The revolution of a gifted people which have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry; it may be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a right-thinking human being, were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time, would never resolve to make the experiment at such cost – this revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race.

The Conflict of the Faculties, 7: 85

What is more, Kantian responsibility also gives what I contend is a better view on the great atrocities of humankind. If we are, at all points, responsible for bringing about the realization of the autonomy of all people and all peoples, whilst failures to do it are always bad enough, actions that explicitly and purposefully hamper our freedoms are true moral catastrophes. Genocide, forced migrations, slavery, they aren’t “only” bad in the immense pain they create – though that they definitely are -, but they are also an irremovable stain in our past, because we chose to destroy the dignity of freedom instead of fulfilling our duties to elevate it and make Earth a “kingdom of ends”.

5

Am I not conflating things here? Can I attribute moral responsibility to individuals through examples of large-scale, collective action? Maybe my problem, as well as Kant’s, is a typically liberal notion that the individual is the agent at stake in history. I can easily budge a lot on this point. We have already taken for granted that, as individuals, we are determined by our upbringing, and our surroundings, and so forth. We definitely aren’t autarkic beings, we aren’t “beasts or gods” who can exist without their peers, or live amongst them uninfluenced. That much is clear. I, however, do not know what to make of the idea that the French people would be responsible for their revolution in 1789 without any French persons being so.

Of course, this cannot be an objection on metaphysical principle: after all, as far as we know (though panpsychists may disagree), we can call ourselves free without necessarily sharing that title with the cells we are made of. But whilst I know what it means for someone to be responsible, and whilst I know what it would mean for many someones to be collectively responsible, I’m not sure I know what it would mean for them to be so without participating in the slightest in a responsibility of their own, even if we grant that individuals are only free through their collective plight. Even within the necessity of the moment, one has to choose whether to join the ranks or to stay behind, and one will be remembered for their comraderie or lack thereof. I will admit lack of philosophical imagination if need be, but the notion of a completely collective freedom with no bearing on individual freedoms is alien to me.

6

Not even Kant argues that we are always, no matter what, responsible for what we do. At the very least, inebriation and some mental illnesses (Coll 27: 288) preclude moral imputation. We have to be a certain way in order to be free, not every causal chain in the world results in a free being, as is evident. Maybe, then, Kant needed to be more careful thinking out the conditions under which a free being may be said to exist in the world [4]. But one of his key points, I think, is clear. Though our actions are the result of things beyond our control, responsibility – true, deep, moral responsibility – is at the heart of much of what we care about in our history as a species, and in the prospects we have for our collective future. Without it, the struggles of yesterday and tomorrow aren’t real assertions of our freedom; without it, the atrocities we live through aren’t that more grievous for making a mockery of our emancipatory ends. Kant’s jejune and unforgiving view of responsibility, to my judgment, paints a very accurate picture of what it is our history means to us; better, I have argued, than that of the sceptics.

[1] Joe Saunders (2019) makes a very good case for this, and he argues Kant really cannot, within the scope of his other commitments, give us an acceptable account of responsibility.

[2] Why assume determinism? Whilst Kant did as much, the problem seems to be more generally about our not being in control of the factors that go into our actions. That is compatible with (some) indeterminisms as well.

[3] The quote is, famously, the beginning of Rousseau’s On the Social Contract.

[4] On the weirdness of free beings being “brought into the world” in Kant’s philosophy, Kain’s (2008) paper is very good.

References:

Caruso, G. and Pereboom, D. (2022) Moral Responsibility Reconsidered. Cambridge Elements.

Kain, P. (2008) “Kant’s Defense of Human Moral Status”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 47(1):59-101

Saunders, J. (2019) “Kant and Degrees of Responsibility”, Journal of Applied Philosophy 36: 137-154

Strawson, G. (1994) “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility”, Philosophical Studies 75(1/2): 5-24