Distributing Responsibility

Abstract

A widespread view in moral, legal, and political philosophy, as well as in public discourse, is that responsibility makes a difference to the fair allocation or distribution of things that are valuable or disvaluable independently of responsibility. For example, the fairness of punishing a person for wrongdoing varies with her responsibility for wrongdoing; the fairness of requiring a person to pay compensation varies with her responsibility for the harm that she caused; the fairness of one person being worse off than another varies with her responsibility for being worse off; the fairness of inflicting defensive harm on a person to avert a threat varies with her responsibility for causing or posing the threat; and so on. Little attention has been paid to the central issue of this article: the allocation and distribution of responsibility itself. How can responsibility be allocated or distributed? The social structures of a society, and the choices that individuals make within them, make a difference to who will be responsible for what and how responsible they will be. A person's responsibility for wrongful actions, imprudent actions, prudent actions, good actions, supererogatory actions, and so on, is itself influenced by social structures and choices. Given their impact on what people will be responsible for, how should these social structures be developed, and choices be made? The allocation and distribution of responsibility can be fair or unfair: responsibility for conduct itself, I argue, makes decisions just or unjust, and that affects the just distribution of other things, such as welfare-generating resources. Furthermore, the potential injustice of inequalities in responsibility can be counterbalanced by reverse inequalities in welfare-generating resources. This second idea has radical implications for the relationship between welfare or resources on the one hand and responsibility on the other—in distributive justice, there is at least some pressure to allocate welfare or resources to those who are responsible for wrongdoing, and away from those who are responsible for good deeds. Grasping the idea that responsibility can be allocated or distributed involves understanding responsibility. I am concerned with one sense of responsibility—the sense involved in attributing actions to people. This sense of responsibility is invoked in propositions like: Mark Chapman was responsible for killing John Lennon; Jane Austen was responsible for writing Pride and Prejudice; Marie Curie was responsible for discovering the theory of radioactivity; and so on. I don't have space for a detailed defense of any particular view of responsibility. However, I will make some assumptions about it. I assume compatibilism: that responsibility is compatible with determinism. I also assume that people are responsible for their conduct in the wide range of circumstances that roughly corresponds to the folk view. Absent exemptions or excuses, people are normally responsible for what they do intentionally, voluntarily, recklessly, negligently, and so on. One reason for these assumptions is that I have compatibilist sympathies, as do most people who write about responsibility, including those who are concerned with the role of responsibility in matters of justice. And most compatibilists, including me, don't have extremely revisionist views about who is responsible for what in the real world. Furthermore, compatibilism helps us to brightly illuminate the distributive problems that I will raise. In Section IX, I briefly explore the question I am concerned with for libertarians. Here is a more precise and complete statement of my assumptions. A person is responsible for her conduct because her acts are caused by certain agential facts—what I will just call “the relevant agential facts.” Compatibilists disagree about these facts. Some think that people are responsible for acts because they issue from the correspondence of first- and second-order preferences or desires; others because their acts issue from what they value, or from their character; others because they were able to do otherwise (in some sense compatible with determinism); and others because their actions were governed by suitably reason-responsive mechanisms. I remain neutral on that issue. I also assume that some standard responses to a person because she was responsible for her conduct are apt, though not that any particular response is warranted. The range of responses include certain conversational practices about a person's wrongdoing, certain emotional responses to the person such as resentment, anger, indignation, sadness, and some kinds of blame. I assume a similar thing about responsibility for intentional good acts—that gratitude and praise, for example, are apt because the person was responsible for her good acts.11 Though the article is cryptic, Peter F. Strawson's essay, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), did a great deal to stimulate interest in this idea. Prominent defenders of this approach include Gary Watson, Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Thomas M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 6; Thomas M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), chap. 4. Even some who are skeptical that we can deserve blame, because we lack the free will needed, think that some practices like these can be apt. See, for example, Derk Pereboom, “A Notion of Moral Responsibility Immune from the Threat from Causal Determination,” in The Nature of Moral Responsibility: New Essays, eds. Randolph Clarke, Michael McKenna, and Angela M. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). I do not assume any normative or axiological relationship between welfare and responsibility: that it is better, or more just, that those who are responsible for wrongdoing are (or are made) worse off, or that those who are responsible for good deeds are (or are made) better off. One of my aims is to explore those issues.22 Some think that there is a sense or kind of responsibility that involves a person deserving to be better or worse off as a result of the relevant agential facts. I doubt that this is right. For discussion, see Victor Tadros, “Responsibility as Personal Significance” (unpublished manuscript). If I am wrong, I do not assume that we have this kind of responsibility. Determinism: Determinism is true in some world if the complete state of that world at any time, t1, and the physical laws that apply to it, makes the complete state of that world at all later times inevitable. As how a person acts is part of the complete state of the world at the time at which they act, compatibilism is thus understood as the view that a person can be responsible for what she has done even though it was inevitable that she acted as she did given the state of the world prior to her birth, and the physical laws that apply to it. If these assumptions are true, responsibility is obviously socially dependent. Indeed, it is socially dependent on any plausible view of responsibility that is not radically revisionist. How many people are responsible for wrongdoing, and who these people are, depends on geography, architecture, resource distribution, parenting, education, employment opportunities, and so on. These things either involve social and political decisions, or their allocation and distribution stem from social and political decisions. For example, the rate of violent wrongdoing is much higher in poor urban communities than in wealthy rural villages. Social and political decisions determine how many people grow up in which communities and what they are like. A different set of decisions by politicians, urban planners, and voters would have exacerbated or ameliorated criminogenic differences in social circumstances that people grow up in, resulting in different rates and distributions of wrongdoing. Only radical skeptics about responsibility conclude that the social determinants of wrongdoing undermine responsibility completely, so these social and political decisions, in conjunction with other facts, determine the rate and distribution of responsibility for wrongdoing. Cases of large-scale social planning involve tricky nonidentity issues—which people exist, and then act wrongly, depends on large-scale social and political decisions about wealth, geography, and architecture. I limit my focus to cases where identity is fixed. Social and political decisions obviously affect who is responsible for wrongdoing in such cases too. Here is a striking example. As Elizabeth Hinton shows, two distinct approaches were used to deal with young offenders in the United States in the 1970s.33 See Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), chap. 6. A more rehabilitative approach tended to be used for white young offenders, while a more punitive approach tended to be used for blacks. There is significant evidence that the more rehabilitative approach resulted in less recidivism and escalation of criminal activity, partly because the punitive approach involved incarceration, which created communities of offenders. This may well have resulted in black young offenders in the 1970s committing more crimes than white young offenders later in life. Again, only a radical skeptic about responsibility concludes that these black people are not responsible for their wrongful conduct later in life because of the decision to incarcerate them rather than rehabilitate them when they were young. Yet the racist decisions to incarcerate blacks rather than whites were obviously unjust. Part of the injustice is that incarceration increased the chance that these people would act wrongly later in life. As young black offenders had a powerful interest in not acting wrongly later in life, they had an interest in being rehabilitated rather than incarcerated and that made the decisions unjust. Or so I will argue. Similar examples are widespread and familiar. Social policies are often designed to prevent wrongdoing or are criticized for failing to do so. Erosion of educational and social facilities for young people are criticized because they make a difference to whether young people offend; transitional processes, practices, and institutions for military personnel, as well as those who have been incarcerated, are needed in part because these people are especially likely to offend or reoffend; urban environments and school buildings need to be restored and protected, because erosion of those environments causes crime; and so on. The interests of potential victims of wrongdoing are relevant to these decisions, but so are the interests of potential wrongdoers in being guided away from wrongdoing. Social policies also aim to ensure that people act well. Education and parenting can foster a sense of justice and are criticized if they fail to do so. Noble deeds and valuable discoveries are celebrated to inspire people to emulate and go beyond the achievements of others. The distribution of educational resources, support to parents, and accolades determines the rate of valuable acts, and who will perform them. But people are nevertheless responsible for the good deeds that result from these social policies. Policies, practices, and decisions that determine the rate and distribution of responsibility create conflicts of interest, because they require resources. Where those resources are scarce, decisions must be taken about their distribution. How much should be spent on preventing wrongful conduct, and how much on supporting good conduct? And what principles make the distribution of resources to bring about responsibility for good and bad acts just? These questions have received little attention in debates about distributive justice. And these familiar social questions are themselves particular instances of a much more general problem: given that responsibility for good and bad acts is itself caused by social and political decisions, how should responsibility be distributed, and how does its distribution interact with the distribution of other things that are a matter of justice? The examples just outlined have many distracting features that make it harder to focus on the distribution of responsibility as such. The decision to incarcerate young black people rather than whites, for example, is unjust independently of its effects on responsibility for wrongdoing. In what follows I reflect on cleaner cases to show four things. First, in this section, I show that it is disvaluable for a person to be responsible for wrongdoing both for instrumental reasons and as such. This helps to establish that responsibility is part of the currency of justice, because justice is mainly concerned with the allocation or distribution of things that matter independently of justice. Second, in Section IV, I show that familiar issues in distributive justice apply to responsibility itself. Third, in Section V, I show that what is just overall depends on intrapersonal and interpersonal tradeoffs between different interests relevant to justice. And that supports my fourth conclusion: the initially strongly counterintuitive view that there are reasons of distributive justice to provide more welfare-generating resources to those who are responsible for wrongdoing than those who are not other things equal. I then explore the relationship between distributive justice and other normative considerations to indicate the complexity of the relationship between the distributive considerations considered here and other features of justice. The argument in Section VI suggests that similar conclusions to those defended on compatiblist assumptions are true if incompatibilism about responsibility is true. Seating Arrangement: Billy and Bobby start a new school at age 7, and are very similar. On their first day, Teacher sits them in two free seats in class. In World 1, where Teacher sits Billy next to Jack, Jack becomes Billy's best friend. In a nearby world, World 2, Teacher sits Billy next to John and John becomes Billy's best friend. Things are vice versa for Bobby. In World 1, Jack is a bad influence on Billy. When they are 20, he persuades Billy to commit a single crime—a serious assault on Jeff—which Billy does intentionally and without excuse. This does not happen in World 2: Billy does not commit any serious wrongs in that world, as John is a good influence on Billy. Again, things are vice versa for Bobby. Other things are equal. Recall that we are assuming Determinism. Let us also assume that the difference between World 1 and World 2 at the time that Billy and Bobby are seated just arises from the decision that Teacher makes. Future differences between these worlds depend on Teacher's decision. The world where Teacher decides to sit Billy next to Jack is World 1. It is inevitable in that world, at the moment that he is seated, that Billy will assault Jeff, and Bobby will not. But, obviously, Billy is not responsible, at the moment that he sits next to Jack, for anything that he does in the future. He is not morally responsible for anything at the age of 7. The world where Teacher decides to sit Billy next to John is World 2. It is inevitable in that world, at the moment that he is seated, that Bobby will assault Jeff, and Billy will not. Suppose further that the difference between World 1 and World 2 is the most minimal thing that gives rise to Teacher making the different decisions that she makes in World 1 and World 2 (say, for example, that her head is slightly turned to Billy when the boys enter the classroom in World 1 where it is slightly turned to Bobby in World 2). That thing has no moral salience beyond its effect on her decision. Given the assumptions outlined in Section I, although Billy's assault on Jeff counterfactually depends on Teacher's decision, and Billy is not responsible for that, he is responsible for assaulting Jeff. All compatibilists should be comfortable with this conclusion; the case is much less controversial than cases that have been used to challenge compatibilism, such as manipulation cases.44 Perhaps the most influential challenge of this kind is Derk Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 4. Our intuitions about manipulation cases are less reliable, both because we find manipulation morally significant and because our intuitions are partly explained by the impression that the cases create that there is a difference in responsibility between the manipulators and those who are manipulated. Even with respect to those cases, many people continue to think that responsibility is not threatened. Furthermore, even those who think that it is focus on a narrow conception of responsibility—that concerned with basic desert. For further discussion, see, for example, Michael McKenna, “A Hard Line Reply to Pereboom's Four-Case Argument,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (2008): 142; Carolina Sartorio, Causation and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Victor Tadros, Wrongs and Crimes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 5. Unlike most real-world cases, there are no victim-centered reasons that affect the value of who sits where—Jeff will suffer the same fate whoever sits next to Jack. This helps to focus our attention on the interests of Billy and Bobby in responsibility without being distracted by the difference that responsibility for wrongdoing makes for others. In this subsection, I show that World 1 is less valuable for Billy than World 2. I make no claims about well-being in particular. There is a great deal of dispute about what well-being includes. On some views, responsibility for wrongdoing is a negative component of well-being. I do not defend this idea: only the idea that responsibility for wrongdoing matters for the sake of the responsible person. Here are three reasons why his responsibility for wrongdoing matters for the sake of Billy, and thus that he has reason to value World 2 over World 1. The first is instrumental. People inflict harms and other costs on wrongdoers. They are subject to defensive, punitive, and compensatory harm, for example, and they are publicly criticized, shunned, and socially ostracized. Some of these responses may be warranted; others are not. But warranted or not, people have good reason to disvalue being responsible for wrongdoing because of these effects. These effects do not establish that responsibility fundamentally matters for distributive justice—only that it typically affects other things that fundamentally matter. Second, it matters for the sake of a person that certain responses to them are (or are not) apt. For example, a person has reason to disvalue it being apt to blame her for her conduct, for others to resent her, and for her to feel guilty at what she has done, independently of whether anyone has these reactions. People often want to do things that are worthy of respect, and not worthy of contempt, not just because of the things that make these reactions apt, but because of the aptness of these reactions themselves. For example, a child might be motivated not to act in a way that would disappoint his parents, or to act in a way that they would approve of, even after his parents have died. But these motivations are warranted only if their reactions to his conduct would be apt. Third, and most importantly for our purposes, it is disvaluable for a person's sake that she is responsible for wrongdoing as such, independently of the actual or likely consequences of being responsible, or what it makes apt. To see this, suppose that you are Billy's parent. Parents have stronger reason to hope that the world is valuable for their children than they have to hope that it is valuable for strangers, and typically do so. You have good reason to hope that Billy rather than Bobby will not be responsible for wrongdoing, quite independently of any further bad consequences that this will have for Billy, or the reactions that others would be justified in having to his conduct. For this reason, you hope, for Billy's sake, that you live in World 2, where Teacher sits Billy next to John. Amnesia: As Seating Arrangement, except that everyone in World 1, including Billy and Bobby, thinks that Bobby has assaulted Jeff. This is because Billy and Bobby were drunk on the night in question; drunk enough that they cannot remember what happened, but not so drunk that they lacked responsibility for what they did. Furthermore, it appears to Jeff that Bobby rather than Billy assaults him, which he then reports. And the incident is caught on camera in a way that makes the culprit look more like Bobby than Billy, so there is good evidence that Bobby was the wrongdoer. All of the bad effects that anyone gets from the judgment that a person is responsible for the assault, such as the bad feelings, the punishment, and the legal obligation to pay compensation, thus fall on Bobby. The feelings of guilt are not very severe, and the burdens that he suffers through punishment and compensation are not awful. In World 2, things are vice versa between Bobby and Billy. Which world is more valuable for Billy? To test this, imagine again that you are Billy's parent. I take it that parents have powerful reasons to hope that their children will not be wrongly accused, convicted, and punished for wrongdoing. Not only is Billy worse off in these respects in World 2, he is unjustly worse off. So, there are powerful reasons for Billy's parents to favor World 1, where Billy was responsible for wrongdoing, but is not accused, convicted, and punished for it. Nevertheless, overall, were I Billy's parent, I would prefer World 2, where although Billy is accused, convicted, and punished for something he didn't do, he wasn't responsible for wrongdoing. Having asked many people this question, only a small minority prefer World 1 to World 2 for Billy's sake.55 At several points in the article, I will indicate that certain intuitions are widely shared or supported. This is the impressionistic result of discussion with many people about the cases in seminars, lectures, and more informally. This is admittedly unscientific! Even those who conclude that Billy's well-being is greater in World 1 than World 2 tend to think that well-being is not all that matters, and that responsibility for wrongdoing counterbalances differences in the loss of well-being and the unjust treatment that Billy faces in World 2. Furthermore, even those who think that World 1 is preferable for Billy's sake find the question difficult, which suggests that something powerful counterbalances the bad effects of being wrongly accused of wrongdoing in World 2. Perhaps some may put this intuitive reaction down to the fact that a parent fails in her parental responsibilities if her child is a wrongdoer. But a similar thing is intuitive from the first-person perspective. Suppose that you wake up from a coma, knowing that you have been involved in a serious assault, but not knowing whether you committed the assault or were the victim of it. As long as the consequences are not awful, I would much prefer to be the victim of the assault. The vast majority of those I have asked share this view. Some might argue that it is wrongdoing, rather than responsibility for wrongdoing, that explains our reaction. To test for this, suppose that on waking up from a coma, you know that you and one other person have assaulted a person together. Only one of you was responsible because the other was hypnotized. I hope that I was the one who was hypnotized and this view is also widely shared. Perhaps it might be argued that these things are true because of the ways in which it is apt to respond to those who are responsible for wrongdoing. It is difficult to test for this, but when reflecting on Amnesia, it doesn't seem that the reason for our preferring World 2 for Billy's sake is mainly to do with the apt reaction to Billy's conduct, rather than responsibility for wrongdoing itself. Seating Arrangement (Good Variation): As Seating Arrangement but Jack is a good influence, so that rather than assaulting Jeff, Billy but not Bobby performs a supererogatory life-saving act in World 1, whereas Bobby but not Billy does so in World 2. Billy's parents have reason to hope that Billy is in World 1. That is also true in Amnesia (Good Variation) where if Billy performs the supererogatory act, Bobby gets the credit. As before, these judgments are warranted because responsibility for supererogatory acts matters as such and not just because of the consequences, or what the considerations make apt. Furthermore, as before, we can see that responsibility has value from the fact that Billy has reason to hope that if he performs the supererogatory rescue, he does so voluntarily, and not, for example, from hypnosis. Why do people have a reason to prefer that they are responsible for good deeds, and not responsible for wrongdoing? This is a difficult question, and nothing I say depends on any particular answer. But I can sketch a suggestion. As well as their capacity for pleasure and pain, people have distinctive and significant moral value and moral status because they are able to critically reflect on values and reasons for action, and respond to them appropriately. The exercise of these abilities is in keeping with what makes the person have moral status when they are exercised well, and it is in conflict with what makes the person have moral status when they are exercised badly. Where a person acts wrongly, she either fails to critically reflect on values and reasons for action appropriately, or she fails to respond appropriately. And that gives her life less value because her conduct is in conflict with what gives her moral status. When a person acts very well, the contrary is true. When I say that the person's life has less or more value, I don't mean that her life is less important from a moral point of view, or that people have less reason to care about what happens to her. As we shall see, there is some sense in which the opposite is true. The importance of a person's life depends on her moral status, and not on what she does. I mean, rather, that her life is less good, and she therefore has less reason to value the fact that her life is lived in that way. Having established that being responsible for conduct is valuable for the sake of the responsible person (in the case of supererogatory acts) or disvaluable for the sake of the responsible person (in the case of wrongful acts) in itself, I turn from evaluative to normative questions. Because responsibility has value or disvalue for a person, and responsibility counterfactually depends on decisions of others, responsibility itself can be distributed justly or unjustly. The real-world examples offered in Section II already suggest this. But the view can be more clearly and powerfully exemplified and supported using hypothetical cases. In the real world we are often uncertain whether our social decisions will result in particular people being responsible for wrongdoing. For example, those who incarcerated black people in the 1970s did not know that any particular person would be responsible for wrongdoing as a result of their decisions, even if they had evidence that a larger proportion of the incarcerated population than the non-incarcerated population would be. This can create the misleading impression that future wrongdoing was the result of choices made by the incarcerated population rather than the decision to incarcerate them. The temptation to see things this way arises because we have the pre-theoretical intuition that if our conduct is chosen, it is not fully determined by events prior to choice. But, assuming compatibilism, the right way to understand these cases is as follows: some people's wrongdoing counterfactually depends on the decision to incarcerate them; that decision was a feature of the state of the world prior to their wrongdoing that makes their wrongdoing inevitable; and yet that is compatible with their choosing to act wrongly, and being responsible for their wrongdoing. To avoid the distracting incompatibilist temptations, let us consider cases where it is clear that social decisions prior to a person being responsible for anything make the difference between it being inevitable that she is responsible for wrongdoing in the future and it being inevitable that she is not. And such cases have a further virtue. There are powerful arguments that in a deterministic world there are no objective probabilities.66 David Lewis, for example, thought it obvious that there are no objective chances (other than one or zero) in a deterministic world. See David Lewis, “Postscripts to ‘A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance’,” in Philosophical Papers Volume II, ed. David Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 118–21. For a more developed analysis, see Jonathan Schaffer, “Deterministic Chance?,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (2007): 113. And even if there are, they make no difference to who is responsible for what. Furthermore, after a person is responsible for wrongdoing, we can be virtually certain that her responsibility counterfactually depended on earlier social decisions. We may be uncertain about which decisions made the relevant difference (although we are sometimes confident about that too). But all conduct is caused by, or counterfactually depends on, prior social decisions of others; responsibility for wrongdoing is no exception. Vision: As Seating Arrangement, except Teacher has a highly credible and true vision of the future just prior to s