Intuitions and practices

A substantial and apparently motivating premise behind Sher’s case for the searchlight view being inadequate is that it sometimes goes against what he considers to be our common intuitions about responsibility. Relatedly, it doesn’t match with what he considers our actual practices concerning responsibility. He sees that we tend to hold people – others and ourselves – responsible for lack of imagination, lapses of attention, poor judgment, and lack of insight in various situations. He sees that we tend to hold agents responsible from the detached perspective, for cognitive states the agents lacked access to – as opposed to just exclusively noting their past engaged perspective, and hence only the cognitive states that they did have access to (as the searchlight view seems to do). Thus, ultimately, Sher argues that as our intuitions and practices concerning responsibility sometimes conflict with the searchlight view, it is in some way lacking (specifically by means of conflating the engaged and the detached perspective, as introduced in the previous section 3.3.1). (Sher 2009, 9–12;

Waller 2014, 641.)

Sher backs up his premise that our common intuitions go against the searchlight view, in some cases, via nine example cases.⁵⁵ The cases are designed to illustrate that in some situations our intuitions would say that an agent is responsible without awareness, and that thus the searchlight view is inadequate. The example cases aim to illustrate this via three ways in which the searchlight view seems to fail: according to Sher, it fails to capture our intuitions in situations where an agent acts wrongly because s/he (1) loses track of some crucial elements of their situation, (2) exercises poor judgment, or (3) lacks in moral insight or imagination (Sher 2009, 23).⁵⁶ More colloquially, Sher briefly summarizes these three to concern (1) forgetting, (2) bad judgment, and (3) insensitivity (Sher 2009, 31). In his review of Sher’s book, Michael J. Zimmerman further summarizes these three aspects as roughly having to do with (1) involuntary lapses of judgment, (2) poor judgment, and (3) lack of moral insight (Zimmerman 2009, 249).

The first three of the nine Sher’s example cases correspond to the first kind of situations where our intuitions, according to Sher, fail to match with the searchlight view: situations that involve an involuntary lapse of judgment. The cases Sher presents are (quoted directly from Sher 2009, 24):

1. Hot Dog. Alessandra, a soccer mom, has gone to pick up her children at their elementary school. As usual, Alessandra is accompanied by the family’s border collie, Bathsheba, who rides in the back of the van. Although it is very hot, the pick-up has never taken long, so Alessandra leaves Sheba in the van while she goes to gather her children. This time, however, Alessandra is greeted by a tangled tale of misbehavior, ill-considered punishment, and administrative bungling which requires several hours of indignant sorting out. During that time, Sheba languishes, forgotten, in the locked car. When Alessandra and her children finally make it to the parking lot, they find Sheba unconscious from heat prostration.

2. On the Rocks. Julian, a ferry pilot, is nearing the end of a forty-minute trip that he has made hundreds of times before. The only challenge in this segment of the trip is to avoid some submerged rocks that jut out irregularly from the mainland. However, just because the trip is so routine, Julian’s thoughts have wandered to the previous evening’s pleasant romantic encounter. Too late, he realizes that he no longer has time to maneuver the ferry.

3. Caught off Guard. Wren is on guard duty in a combat zone. There is real danger, but the night is quiet. Lulled by the sound of the wind in the leaves, Wren has twice caught herself dozing and shaken herself awake. The third time she does not catch herself. She falls into a deep slumber, leaving the compound unguarded.

The second three cases are ones in which the agents, according to Sher, seem responsible without awareness for wrong acts they perform because they display poor judgment, thus corresponding with the second kind of situations where he sees our intuitions to fail to match with the searchlight view.

These are as follows (quoted directly from Sher 2009, 26):

4. Home for the Holidays. Joliet, who is afraid of burglars, is alone in the house. Panicked by sounds of movement in her kitchen, she grabs her husband’s gun, tiptoes down the stairs, and shoots the intruder. It is her son, who has come home early for the holidays.

5. Colicky Baby. Scout, a young woman of twenty-three, has been left in charge of her sister’s baby. The infant is experiencing digestive pains and has cried steadily for hours.

Scout has made various attempts to ease its discomfort, but nothing has worked. Finally,

to make the child sleep, she mixes vodka with its fruit juice. The child is rushed to the hospital with alcohol poisoning.

6. Jackknife. Father Poteet, a good driver, is gathering speed to enter a busy freeway.

Because the merge lane is very short, he must either pull in front of a looming eighteen-wheeler or stop abruptly. He makes the split-second decision that he has room to merge, but he is wrong. The trucker hits the brakes hard, his truck jackknifes across four lanes of traffic, and many people are seriously injured.

The last three of the nine Sher’s example cases are ones which involve lack of moral insight or imagination, thus corresponding with the third kind of situations where, according to him, our intuitions seem to fail to match with the searchlight view. These are the following (quoted directly from Sher 2009, 28):

7. Bad Joke. Ryland is very self-absorbed. Though not malicious, she is oblivious to the impact that her behavior will have on others. Consequently, she is bewildered and a bit hurt when her rambling anecdote about childless couple, handicapped person, and a financial failure is not well received by an audience that includes a childless couple, a handicapped person, and a financial failure.

8. Bad Policy. Sylvain, a college professor, is empathetic to a fault. He identifies with troubled students and freely grants their requests for opportunities to earn extra credit.

Because he enters so completely into each interlocutor’s perspective, he often forgets that there are other less aggressive students who would eagerly welcome the same chance. As a result, his grading policy is inconsistent and unfair.

9. Bad Weather. It is 1968, and amerika (a nom de guerre) is a member of the Weather Underground. Sensitive and conscientious as a child, amerika has been rethinking his moral beliefs. In a series of stages, he has become convinced, first, that capitalism is deeply unjust; next, that nothing short of revolution will bring change; and, finally, that the need to rectify massive injustice far outweighs the rights or interests of mere individuals. To procure funds for the Revolution, amerika takes part in a robbery in which a bank guard is killed.

Sher further summarizes the particulars in the nine example cases:

“We have now encountered a total of nine cases in which agents seem responsible for wrong acts whose wrongness they did not recognize. Although the agent’s lack of awareness is crucial

to all nine cases, it does not always take the same form. In three cases (Hot Dog, On the Rocks, Caught off Guard), the agent does not even realize that he is in a situation that calls for action, while in the remaining six he does realize this but lacks an accurate appreciation of what he ought to do. In one of these six cases (Home for the Holidays), the agent’s cognitive defect is due to a distorting emotion (panic), in two others (Bad Joke, Bad Policy), it can be traced to his insensitivity to a morally relevant factor, and in the remaining three (Colicky Baby, Jackknife, Bad Weather) it is a product of unadorned poor judgment. In two of the latter cases (Colicky Baby, Jackknife), the defective judging occurs when the agent is assessing the facts, while in the third (Bad Weather), it occurs when he is thinking through his moral beliefs.

Because the patterns of error are quite diverse, and because each one is instantly recognizable, the range of counterexamples to the searchlight view can already be seen to be broad.” (Sher 2009, 28–29.)

Thus, overall, according to Sher, the searchlight view is an inadequate description of our intuitions and practices concerning moral responsibility. In many cases the searchlight view suffices to account for our intuitions, but apparently there seems to be situations where the searchlight view fails to account for them. Namely, as illustrated, these are situations where we seem to deem agents morally responsible without awareness for their (1) involuntary lapses of judgment, (2) poor judgment, and (3) lack of moral insight (Sher 2009, 23; Zimmerman 2009, 249). According to Sher, in most of the example cases “the agent would definitely be blamed and might well be liable to punishment” (Sher 2009, 24–28).⁵⁷

Of course, the possible existence of these kinds of cases doesn’t settle the question of whether the searchlight view should be expanded upon. Rather, the question now becomes: should we try to adjust our intuitions to better match with the searchlight view or something similar, or should we try to accommodate these kinds of intuitions within our thesis concerning the role of awareness, and knowledge, in moral responsibility? (Sher 2009, 24, 33–39; Zimmerman 2009, 250.)