Moral Responsibility Is Impossible and No One Deserves Anything

Further Analysis of a Simple-but-Robust Argument Against Moral Responsibility

I recently argued that people cannot deserve their economic fates through being self-made because no one is self-made. The concept is fundamentally paradoxical: for a person to engage in self-design, they’d need to somehow causally precede themselves. Because this is nonsensical, no one truly deserves anything (beyond however things should be divided up to maximize social welfare, to the extent that qualifies as “deserving” something). To help apply my point, I borrowed an argument that moral responsibility is impossible (Strawson’s Basic Argument), and I put it like this:

1. No one is the original cause of their own character.

2. Without being the original cause of their own character, no one is responsible for who they are.

3. Without being responsible for who they are, someone cannot be morally responsible for what they do.

I also posted this argument to notes and solicited feedback, but the replies were incongruous: many people disliked the argument, but there was little overlap in diagnosing the perceived philosophical malfunction, so it’s worth spelling out the argument in more detail and exploring some potential counter-maneuvers.

Clarifications

For someone to be morally responsible in the sense I’m using it here, it’s fitting (in that they deserve it, and it’s not unfair) to blame them for something because of their involvement in making it happen—it was somehow up to them and their fault, in more than a merely descriptive way that you’d talk about causal responsibility (e.g., like a tornado being responsible destroying a house).

Something else worth emphasizing is that these propositions about who someone is and their character are supposed to encompass their entire repertoire of mental faculties. People’s actions/choices (the stuff which they are supposedly responsible for) issue from their reasons, beliefs, predilections, etc., and the argument claims that folks cannot be an original cause of any of these features. Lengthier versions of the argument involve the notion of an infinite regress and go something more like this:

1. For someone to be responsible for something, then they must have done it purposefully rather than because of something like an involuntary reflex.

2. Doing something of this kind is a function of one’s mental makeup.

3. To be truly responsible for doing something, then, someone must be partly responsible for their mental makeup.

4. For S to be partly responsible for one’s own mental makeup, S must have freely chosen/formed their mental makeup to some extent in a way they would be responsible for.

5. But S choosing/forming their own mental makeup in a way they’re responsible for is an action of the type described in (1) and thus subject to the same analysis.

6. This process continues endlessly, so there are no grounds for assigning moral responsibility.

7. Therefore, no one is morally responsible for anything.

This more expansive version should make plain that the motivation animating the Basic Argument and its fixation on original causes isn’t—as many understandably suppose—some blunt intuition that obviously you must initialize causal influences in order to accrue moral responsibility for their concomitant outcomes, or that being an initial cause would be so manifestly special that it’d automatically imbue agents with moral responsibility for any downstream events, regardless of how circuitous the causal pathway is or how attenuated the relationship between the source and the resulting action turns out. Instead, the key point is that trying to apportion blame for a choice or action, even beginning with the most nearby and prominent influencing factors, inevitably spins up a never-ending cycle; originating yourself (i.e., being causa sui)—while completely impossible, would terminate the otherwise infinite loop of blamelessness.¹

So, it’s tempting to downplay the potential importance of some distant and arbitrary jumping-off point that eventually culminates in an action: how and why could such a metaphysically remote event hold enduring sway over the proper allocation of moral responsibility? But actually, the impossibility of being causa sui matters because assigning blame for the more immediate causal factors would necessitate it. So, diminishing the standalone importance of any potential original cause doesn’t accomplish much. The crucial takeaway is instead that being responsible for any of the crucial/immediate causal factors necessitates an infinite regress, and the absence of some causal backstop means that you can’t be even partly responsible for these more proximate and decisive causal factors.

Pragmatism and Moral Responsibility

One objection to the Basic Argument (and I suppose to all skepticism about this topic) claims that the whole issue of moral responsibility is immunized against philosophical undermining because it’s such a practical and improving custom; accordingly, even if close inspection reveals that moral responsibility is a confused myth, it’s too useful to dismantle anyway, and therefore analyzing the concept’s structural integrity is misguided or maybe even downright pernicious. Adherents of this view seemingly think that so long as the concept isn’t entirely irrational, all bets are off, and if moral responsibility is even sometimes pragmatic, that usefulness establishes an Archimedean point to extend its application without limit and dismiss any incoming skepticism about its soundness.

But resorting to moral responsibility’s utility only justifies the fiction so far (namely to whatever degree it betters social welfare) and I’m skeptical that everyone citing moral responsibility’s practical appeal will readily endorse whatever tax schema or welfare programs or punishment regime best maximizes utility. Instead, they try using the portion of moral responsibility that’s defensible—its practical upside—as cover fire to smuggle in anachronistic and defective instincts about blameworthiness and people deserving particular outcomes.

My views largely overlap with anyone genuinely wishing to shrink the purview of these ideas to be less retributive—something more strictly aligned to whatever’s socially optimal, but this reformulated vision both undershoots and overshoots the ordinary meaning of moral responsibility. It could be practical to blame someone for an action even when they aren’t culpable, and contrariwise, it could be useless to blame someone for wrongdoings in situations wherein moral responsibility is widely presumed to exist. And contrary to a defunct, old-school line of American philosophy, truth isn’t just whatever is pragmatically believed.

Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote a story called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” wherein an otherwise idyllic society’s joyous existence relies on the practice of imposing hellish conditions on an unfortunate child. Suppose the citizenry of Omelas maintained this custom under the guise of moral responsibility, blaming the child for something in a fashion they don’t deserve in any sense except for its social benefit via the continuation of Omelas’s halcyon environment. Regardless of your feelings about utilitarianism and the morality of such trade-offs, it seems incoherent to classify this scenario—the unhappy fate of the patently blameless child—as an example of true blameworthiness or moral responsibility. I just don’t buy this.

Demandingness and Slave Morality

Another common reply to the Basic Argument is that it refutes a strawman—that its vision of moral responsibility is too demanding. Unfortunately, Strawson invites this (ultimately specious) critique by how he initially presents the variety of responsibility he’s talking about—the kind that would justify something like eternal damnation. But as I specified above, the Basic Argument applies with similar force to any notion of desert and moral responsibility outside of whatever is most practical.² We can rightly ask whether someone deserves retribution or if it’s fair to blame them even without mixing in theological-grade stakes.

Also, some writers think the Basic Argument requires that agents have complete dominion over the entire array of causal histories that coalesce to produce events, but that’s mistaken too. Really, the abbreviated version of the Basic Argument that I outlined above should be modified: “the original cause” ought to be “an original cause”, since the issue isn’t whether people must be the exclusive author of their actions to justify moral responsibility, but whether people can be morally responsible without contributing any original influence to a choice or action whatever.³

A related objection to the Basic Argument is that the requirements are unfairly strong because they’re plainly impossible to satisfy. But this response begs the question. If we disqualify any potential set of requirements for moral responsibility that are unachievable, then we’ve rigged our analysis—moral responsibility would necessarily be possible if criteria that are too demanding are disallowed from the outset. Others contend that adjusting human nature to conform with the nonexistence of moral responsibility is unworkable, but that has no bearing on whether the Basic Argument is valid, and while maybe it’s too difficult to so completely rewire human nature, it’s possible we could adjust things for the better.

Finally, some people reject all skepticism of moral responsibility on grounds that refusing to adopt responsibility for your life is aesthetically unpleasant and self-undermining—that it’s a loser-y slave morality viewpoint, essentially, which is greatly ironic, given that the Basic Argument traces back to Nietzsche, who viewed the possibility of self-formation as a farce and considered widespread eagerness for unalloyed moral responsibility to be a misconception foisted on society by the backwardness of Christianity.⁴ More crucially, however, this whole criticism again conflates pragmatism with truth-seeking and needlessly presumes that the impossibility of self-formation entails a defeatist mindset.

Agent-Causal Free Will

The most promising rebuttal to the Basic Argument (in a strangely limited way, it turns out) is positing an especially robust version of free will. Many admit that people are saddled with various psychologies and backgrounds, but they insist that people retain a choice about how to navigate those prefixed features of the world. Put differently, maybe someone can still freely choose what to do, even given who they are. This theory adheres to an inchoate notion that someone’s decision-making is partially independent of their makeup—that maybe someone’s experiences or innate character defects are occasionally relevant, but the process of choosing actions is metaphysically separable.

The type of free will required to pull this off is something like agent-causal libertarian free will, which is a subject best reserved for future posts, but the theory requires subscribing to what’s sometimes characterized as “spooky” or “panicky” metaphysics, whereby instead of the universe comprising a series of events unfolding via causal relations, ordinary people (i.e., agents) have a special capacity to jumpstart new causal sequences outside of the myriad event-based causation populating the world. This isn’t hugely popular among philosophers. It is, however, possibly reflective of how many unstudied people think of free will.

It should be easily understandable how this ability sharply conflicts with the Basic Argument, given that people with agent-casual free will really could originate new causal chains that explain their actions and choose to do whatever, notwithstanding who they are. If this version of free will were more credible, it’d majorly jeopardize the Basic Argument, so I’m partly sympathetic to this pushback. The critique’s upshot is underwhelming, however, because agent-causal free will is so radical and arguably even more patently impossible than moral responsibility (maybe even by the same reasoning); thus, the Basic Argument isn’t seriously weakened by being mutually exclusive with it.

Moreover, advocates for this rebuttal are persistently vulnerable to the key point offered at the beginning that people cannot make themselves because they’d need to already exist to do so, which is incoherent. Thus, agent-causal theorists confront a simple dilemma here: is the action attributable to the agent or not? Your choices/actions are either attributable to an extant self (who you are) or they aren’t. If they are not attributable to an extant self, then you’re not responsible for them because the choices/actions aren’t really yours; if they are attributable to your extant self, then the Basic Argument functions normally, and you’re still not morally responsible.⁵

Conclusion

In sum, no one deserves anything because moral responsibility is impossible, and no one deserves what they aren’t responsible for. Many folks find this conclusion repugnant, and apparently there’s something artless about the reasoning at play here (Strawson devoted nontrivial energy in his 1994 paper toward imploring philosophers to tackle the challenge earnestly). Even though a variety of counterattacks have been trialed, however, the Basic Argument remains largely unscathed. The rebuttals are either totally misplaced or embrace a doomed metaphysics of agent-causal libertarianism. And its detractors disagree about why the argument is so unpersuasive. Notice, for example, how support for agent-causal free will straightforwardly clashes with the accusations that the Basic Argument is torching a strawman and forwarding an overly demanding picture of moral responsibility.

The Basic Argument is an especially potent and intriguing slice of logic because, unlike many other skeptical arguments that impugn the legitimacy of free will or moral responsibility, it doesn’t rely on features of determinism (or indeterminism), so all the typical compatibilist chicanery can be sidestepped. There’s some potential overlap, however, with arguments that determinism prevents people from being the ultimate source of their actions, so defenders of free will must contend with this sourcehood issue either way (or at least explain how these arguments requiring it are flawed). It’s highly plausible, though, that the Basic Argument is valid and that moral responsibility simply doesn’t exist.

1. See Michael Anthony Istvan Jr., “Concerning the Resilience of Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument,” 155 Philosophical Studies 399, 404 (2011).

2. Id. at 401.

3. Id. at 405-406.

4. Check out this Very Bad Wizards episode on “Twilight of the Idols” for more about this.

5. See e.g., Istvan supra note 1 at 407, 409.