Attributability

Practical-Foresight fails as an account of the possibility of an ethics of emotion, both because it excludes emotions which intuitively are subject to assessment and criticism, and secondly, because it unduly assimilates the putative wrongness of an emotion to that of negligence. So, we must consider the possibility that “ought” does not, or does not always, imply “can.” How might such a strategy be substantiated?

There are strategies that reject the assumption that the correctness of moral criticism requires reasonable opportunity to have avoided such criticism in the first place. On this line of

thought, the characteristics which are subject to moral criticism are those which express

fundamentally who the person is, what she is like, in a way that her shoe-size, height, or family's income do not. This view of responsibility can be called the Attributability theory.61

Attributability theorists argue that criticism and censure can be appropriate even without control, even of an indirect sort.62 _{What is instead being criticized or censured is who the person is,} regardless of whether her act fulfills the more stringent requirements for reasonable opportunity that are part of the conception of responsibility as accountability. As Watson says “these

appraisals concern the agent's excellences and faults – or virtues and vices – as manifested in thought and action.”63

Take some action, such as a factory owner's firing two-hundred local, skilled workers in order to move his factory overseas. Suppose that the owner truly did not have a reasonable opportunity to avoid firing these workers, perhaps on account of a sudden, unpredictable

down-turn in the market. Moreover, if he does not fire them, the company runs the risk of going under, with the result that the workers lose their jobs anyway, in addition to those who were not fired. Attributionists can argue that, nevertheless, firing the workers in order to save the company discloses something significant about the character of the owner. Watson offers a justification for this idea, in terms of intention: “the conduct in question expresses the agent's own evaluative commitments, her adoption of some ends among others. To adopt some ends among others is to declare what one stands for.”64

The defenders of Attributability, in effect, re-order the relative importance of character 61 Watson, 2004 describes this as the “aretaic perspective,” 266. Scanlon, 1998; Scanlon, 2008 describes it as

responsibility as “attributability.” Despite subtle differences between the views of these two authors, I stick to the language of attributability.

62 Scanlon, 2008, 193-195 63 Watson, 2004, 266 64 Watson, 2004, 270

and action. They acknowledge that there may be fundamental normative requirements regarding to sort of character one has, which do not derive from any logically prior requirements regarding how one is to act. This is broadly in line with what is sometimes called “virtue ethics.”65 _Many may be inclined to deny that the relevant evaluation here is, in any sense, concerned with what sort of character one ought to have, but instead with what kind of character it would be good to have.66 _{But it is worth pointing out that others have thought that character appropriately comes} with the purview of “ought” as well: “it has often been said that for virtue ethics the central question is not 'what ought I to do?' but rather 'what sort of person ought I to be?'”67 _{I will} assume then that some sense can be made of such propositions. If so, then the appeal to attributability furnishes a radically distinct alternative to any view which bases normative requirements on one's intentional actions.

However, Watson's description of attributability in terms of the concept of intention, and the “adopting” of certain ends rather than others, applies to norms that govern actions, but it does not do so for emotions, desires, and other characteristics with regard to which we lack intention. And the Attributability approach certainly can, and should, be extended to these other

characteristics. As Aristotle says in book II of the Ethics, the assessment of character “is about feelings and actions … We can be afraid, for instance, or be confident, or have appetites, or get angry, or feel pity, and in general have pleasure or pain, both too much and too little, and in both ways not well.”68 _{Smith offers the example of the oftentimes fleeting thoughts that arise}

unbidden in a person's mind, such as suddenly thinking how easy it would be to steal a laptop

65 Hursthouse, 1999

66 Anscombe, 1958, 29ff., argues that 'ought' lacks sense without a divine law-giver 67 Louden, 1984, 230

computer close at hand.69 _{Yet, one's emotions, or appetites, or pleasure and pain, passing} thoughts, do not involve intention, wherein one adopts one end among others.

To extend the Attributability theory to cover ethically significant emotions, thoughts, desires, and so on, defenders need to argue that emotions reveal what the person who experiences the emotion is like, and what she stands for, in approximately the same way that actions do so. But this faces certain philosophical problems, insofar as not every element in one's mental life discloses the person's moral character. Harry Frankfurt famously raises the problem of how to distinguish those aspects of mental life that can be substantively identified with the person, i.e., they are hers, from those that are not.70 _{Call this the Problem of Attributability. The category of} the the non-attributable (what Frankfurt calls “the external”) is difficult to understand without resorting to figures and metaphors, such as the person being a “bystander” with respect to them or their “befalling” her, even though these events transpire within her own conscious life.71 _But even without furnishing a precise definition of non-attributability, we do have a pre-theoretical sense that certain thoughts, desires, hopes, fears, are distinctively “mine.” Accordingly, there is an interesting and worthwhile problem here about how to establish some principled philosophical account of the limits of the self. In virtue of what is a thought, desire, hope, feeling, etc., mine? Could thoughts, desires, hopes, feeling ever fail to be mine in this sense?

Many Attributionists have argued that the rationality of our attitudes, including emotions but also beliefs and desires, is what explains how character can be disclosed by them.72 _{Insofar as} 69 Smith, 2005, 246-248

70 Frankfurt, 1977, 60-61

71 Frankfurt clearly thought that some mental occurrences would be external to the self. His examples include momentary bouts of anger in which the person loses control. Frankfurt, 1977, 63. Thalberg, 1978, 389-391, discusses some difficulties involved in the claim that we are bystanders to our own mental life.

72 Scanlon, 1998, 272-274; Smith, 2004, Smith, 2005, Smith, 2008, Smith, 2012. The underlying idea that we are being active, or (what is treated as synonymous) being ourselves, when we are responsive to reasons can be found in Raz, 1997, 14-17; Moran, 2002; Moreau, 2005, 295ff. This idea is discussed further in Ch. III.

emotions involve a disposition to recognize and respond accordingly to certain normative considerations, they show who the person is and what she is like. Call this strategy Rationalism. Rationalism will be the topic for the next part of the dissertation, but for the time being, the appeal to attributability can be defended in broad strokes.