What do you think of Galen Strawson's refutation of responsibility, EB? In a nutshell, his argument is as follows:
1. We do what we do because of the way that we are.
2. In order to be responsible for what we do, we must be responsible for the way we are.
3. To be responsible for the way we are, we must have contributed to bringing it about in some relevant way.
4. But any contribution we might have made to the way we are must have been the result of the way we were when we made the contribution (from 1).
5. Thus it is impossible to be responsible for the way that we are.
6. Thus it is impossible to be responsible for what we do.
By "responsibility" he means the robust, intentional kind that is necessary for moral agency. His argument seems to apply equally whether you accept determinism or not. Even if you believe you freely chose to do something, it still is true that you chose what you did because of antecedent conditions. Even if you brought about those antecedent conditions intentionally, your having done so would itself be rooted in prior antecedent conditions, and so on into the past until inevitably there would be an antecedent condition you did not bring about.
If I had to poke holes in Strawson's argument, I think premise 1 and maybe 2 are the most suspect, but they are arguably true if the terms are defined properly. I haven't given it a whole lot of thought, but I wondered if this was something you'd come across before.
Well, this seems to show that Galen Strawson's concept of a "
robust, intentional kind (of responsibility) that is necessary for moral agency", as he thinks of it, doesn't really work.
He should try thinking differently about responsibility, for example as a "
robust, intentional kind (of responsibility) that is necessary for moral agency.
We're actually told how to go about this, if we're prepared to face the dictionary definition of what it means to be responsible, here:
responsible
adj.
1.
a. Liable to be required to give account, as of one's actions or of the discharge of a duty or trust: Who is responsible while their parents are away?
b. Required to render account; answerable: The cabinet is responsible to the parliament.
2. Involving important duties, the supervision of others, or the ability to make decisions with little supervision: a responsible position within the firm.
3. Being a source or cause: Viruses are responsible for many diseases.
4.
a. Able to make moral or rational decisions on one's own and therefore answerable for one's behavior: At what age does a person become responsible?
b. Able to be trusted or depended upon; trustworthy or reliable: a responsible art dealer.
5. Based on or characterized by good judgment or sound thinking: responsible journalism.
I don't see how one could possibly refute responsibility as it is defined here. Somebody who's asking you to give an account of your action will do so presumably because they see you as responsible for your actions. Whether you can be held responsible in this sense could be debated within a legal framework for example. If so, at some point, a judge will just decide if they hold you responsible or not. And that's it. It's not that you are responsible in some abstract sense.
You are held responsible and it's usually somebody else who will make this call.
Strawson is talking about something else. He is talking of responsibility in his argument as if it was something similar to being the causal factor of an event. And from there, it's easy to go the infinite regress route. It's been done so many times before. Easy do.
So, yes, we should follow Strawson's logic and count the concept of responsibility he's using in his argument as incoherent, ineffective, just wrong.
And then go back, if we ever left it behind, to the dictionary definition of what it means for most people to be responsible. This one seems to work, although, clearly, it's not going to stop people arguing they're not responsible. The dictionary definition works because it doesn't say we have to accept arguments about somebody not being responsible.
EB
