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Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments

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This is an outstanding book. It is not, however, a beginner's book and will be appreciated best by those already familiar with the field. Two of its most interesting claims are as follows. First, that emotions are constitutive of the practice of holding people morally responsible. That is, to say what it is to hold someone morally responsible--to blame someone, for instance--one must make reference to the emotions of the person who is holding the other responsible. To blame someone for something necessarily involves feeling appropriate emotions like resentment or indignation for the other's failure to live up to one's expectations regarding moral behavior. Or, if one does not actually feel resentment (as when one forgives someone whom one regards as morally responsible and blameworthy), one must at least think that feeling such an emotion would be justified. Second, the author contends that in order to be responsible for something, the responsible party need not have had any alternate possibilities to the blameworthy or praiseworthy action. This claim is supported by a detailed examination of the grounds for excuses and exemptions from moral responsibility. We exempt people from moral responsibility because they lack the capacities necessary for it, and we excuse people from moral responsibility because what they did or failed to do lacked moral fault. This sometimes, but not always, coincides with the absence of alternate possibilities for action, but it is lack of capacity or absence of fault, not absence of alternate possibility, that explains the exemption or excuse. This is a careful and stimulating study by a scholar who has mastered the literature in the field. It is likely to have a deep impact on philosophical thinking about freedom and responsibility.

There are two main objectives a compatibilist account of moral responsibility should have. It should give an explanatory account of our practice of attributing blame (or praise), explaining when and why blame is appropriate. The second part should account for why incompatibalist criticisms have such intuitive appeal. Wallace accomplishes both with rigor and originality here. the book is argued quite comprehensively and gives a rather convincing account of moral responsibility inspired by Peter Strawson's seminal insights in his "Freedom and Resentment" which sought to situate moral responsibility on our actual practices of meting out blame and their associated emotions or the "reactive attitudes" (emotions such as resentment, indignation, guilt, e.g. where we tend to blame others) and not on the nature of physical reality (i.e., on the truth or falsity of determinism).

The reactive attitudes, as Wallace notes, are "quasi evaluative" or they seem to either be justified or unjustified. One can be wrong about blaming (or praising) someone. Unlike Strawson, Wallace sees the justification of moral responsibility on two fronts rather than from an evaluation of the "quality of their will" in the production of their actions(s) (see Nomy Arpaly's book Unprincipled Virtue for a defense of this "quality of will" account). Wallace explains that excusing conditions makes it unfair to blame someone (when their excuse is legitimate) because they are not responsible for the actions(s). An example is when someone hits another person because of an involuntary spasm of the arm muscles. On the other hand, exempting conditions also makes it unfair to blame someone for their action because in these conditions, the agent lacks the crucial element for attribution of blame, namely, the ability or capacity for reflective self-control. This is the ability to take moral reasons to be the effective motive for one's actions. An example here is when someone suffers from severe brain damage or is a very young child. These people lack this ability and hence, we do not to blame them in the way we blame normal adults for their actions. This capacity for reflective self-control is then shown to be compatible with determinism. In cases where we do have this ability or capacity and we do wrong, we are blameworthy. In cases where we don't, we are not blameworthy despite our actions. Wallace shows in some detail how just about all the kinds of conditions in which we either see blame for someone's action as intuitively unjustified or at least mitigated in everyday contexts can be accounted for by these excusing and exemption accounts.

He then shows that incompatibilists accounts go wrong because they rely on the explanation of a lack of alternate possibilities to account for our normal practices of excusing or exempting someone for blame which only occurs in some of these cases. Thus the incompatibilist mistakingly over-generalizes by focusing on the wrong aspect of our everyday practice of attributing and judging moral responsibility.

The book is not for those just beginning to learn about the philosophy of moral responsibility, free will, and moral psychology. It has quite a bit of jargon. The two appendixes are quite informative especially the last one about the metaphysics of alternate possibilities and action.