Reactive Attitudes Research Articles

Compatibilism and Truly Minimal Morality

Abstract I formulate a compatibilism that is distinctively responsive to skeptical worries about the justification of punishment and other moral responsibility practices. I begin with an evolutionary story explaining why backward-looking reactive attitudes are “given” in human society. Cooperative society plausibly could not be sustained without such practices. The necessary accountability practices have complex internal standards. These internal standards may fully ground the appropriateness of reactive attitudes. Following a recent analogy, we can similarly hold that there are no external standards for what is funny; the norms of comedy are complex, but funny is funny. However, this is compatible with moral reasons to change the practices themselves, and therefore change what is fitting within them: in the first instance, a moralistic “that's not funny” is ill-fitting, but “that shouldn't be funny” can be apt. The analogous reformist position prescribes practices constituting the minimal responsibility norms necessary for cooperative society.

Reactive Attitudes and AI-Agents – Making Sense of Responsibility and Control Gaps

Responsibility gaps occur when autonomous machines cause harms for which nobody can be justifiably held morally responsible. The debate around responsibility gaps has focused primarily on the question of responsibility, but other approaches focus on the victims of the associated harms. In this paper I consider how the victims of ‘AI-harm’—by which I mean harms implicated in responsibility gap cases and caused by AI-agents—can make sense of what has happened to them. The reactive attitudes have an important role here. I argue that regulating our reactive attitudes—withdrawing or sustaining them as our understanding of the actions, motives, status, and character of others develops—is an important part of the way in which we make sense of the harms we suffer. But, I argue, AI-agents can disrupt standard practices of regulating the reactive attitudes. This can lead victims of AI-harm to suffer a secondary hermeneutic harm (in addition to the primary AI-harm). This harm, which the responsibility gap and AI ethics literatures have neglected, can occur whether responsibility gaps are real or not.

Una propuesta filosófica desde el personalismo analítico strawsoniano

The version of analytical personalism that can be discerned in the descriptive metaphysics of the contemporary British philosopher Peter F. Strawson recognizes the primitive status of the concept of “persons,” as opposed to Cartesian dualism and the subjectless theory of the self advanced by some in the 1930s. On the other hand, the attention that this philosopher devotes to reactive attitudes or moral feelings in a work from 1962 (Freedom and Resentment), helps not to overlook the fact that people are not only agents, but also patients. Based on these considerations, this work underlines the decisive character of love in the construction of people's identity. The logic of donation implied in loving interpersonal relationships allows for an adequate understanding of love, according to which the loving experience is not reduced to an emotion. This step forward, which involves recourse to love in the elucidation of persons from analytical personalism, presupposes the recognition of the other as a person. The article concludes by reinforcing the moral scope of this movement, through a version of the argument of consequence.

Blame as participant anger: extending moral claimant competence to young children and nonhuman animals

ABSTRACT Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many agents commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued to be manifested in communicative exchanges between a claimant and a defendant. While many human and nonhuman agents are justifiably exempted from ascriptions of moral responsibility, this does not necessarily exclude such agents from the community of moral agents altogether. Toddlers and dogs, for instance, seem capable of other-directed reactive attitudes, like resentment, and could, therefore, qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices with respect to the claimant position. Therefore, we may have reason to adopt a distinct claimant-directed participant stance to some beings, even if they fail to qualify as apt targets of blame. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency is argued to make explicit further normative considerations.

Robots and reactive attitudes: a defense of the moral and interpersonal status of non-conscious agents

Robots and reactive attitudes: a defense of the moral and interpersonal status of non-conscious agents

Man in the Space of Freedom and Resentment: Symbolic Correlation of Existentials

Purpose. The article aims to problematize the forms of correlation between the fundamental category of freedom and the phenomenon of resentment in the context of the formation of ethical discourse, as well as to consider the symbolic mechanisms of the collective imagination in the formation of a picture of the human world. Theoretical basis. The study uses the method of historical and philosophical analysis and methods of the humanities – hermeneutics and phenomenology. Originality. An attempt is made to comprehend the correlation between freedom as a category of philosophical anthropology and practical philosophy and the phenomenon of resentment. Conclusions. The ethical category of freedom, explicitly or implicitly, significantly shapes the content of the process of choice and social action by a person, which can be manifested in discursive practices and narratives of ideologies, public opinion and collective imagination. Symbolic mechanisms of human consciousness record the paradoxical correlation and at the same time the antithesis of reality reception and meaning generation between rational awareness and existential experience, humanization and appropriation of freedom and emotional-affective, reactive attitude of a person to narratives, motives, symbols and images of resentment. At the same time, freedom can presuppose the conscious content of resentment, while resentment deforms the concept of freedom into arbitrariness or violence, appealing not only to the archaic values of tribalism, but also to the rational basis of individual freedom of the individual, on which the philosophical tradition of the West is based. The resentful forms of thinking and emotional reception of reality function as symbolic constructions, that is, they can have a wide and internally contradictory field of interpretations. Western philosophical thought has a significant potential to reinterpret the challenges of the phenomenon of resentment based on the tradition of ontotheology and ethics of discourse due to the specific rationalism of the vision of the philosophy of freedom.

Consequentialism, Collective Action, and Blame

Abstract Several important questions in applied ethics – like whether to switch to a plant-based diet, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or vote in elections – seem to share the following structure: if enough people ‘cooperate’ and become vegan for example, we bring about a better outcome; but what you do as an individual seems to make no difference whatsoever. Such collective action problems are often thought to pose a serious challenge to consequentialism. In response, I defend the Reactive Attitude Approach: rather than focus only on the deontic status of (non-)cooperative acts – as existing consequentialist responses mostly do – consequentialists should also focus on when to praise or blame individuals. For example, even if your veganism does not change the overall outcome, consequentialists might still recommend praising you for your cooperative behavior. I make a consequentialist case for including praise and blame in our ethical practices around collective action and argue that doing so helps us capture important intuitions. I develop and defend these arguments by drawing on recent instrumentalist theories of blame and responsibility.

Internalizing rules

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to give an account of what it is to internalize a rule. I claim that internalization is the process of redistributing the burden of instruction from the teacher to the student. The process is complete when instruction is no longer needed, and the rule has reshaped perceptual classification of the circumstances in which it applies. Teaching a rule is the initiation of this process. We internalize rules by simulating instruction coming from someone else. Running these simulations enables us to toggle between the perspective of the instructor and our own perspective. By doing this we coordinate our perspectives with that of the teacher. The account given here provides a deeper explanation of why internalizing a rule involves the dispositions and reactive attitudes proponents of Rule Consequentialism often say it does, why moral reflection is variably demanding, how intergenerational moral progress is made possible by our cognitive architectures, and why the adoption of a rule should be understood in terms of teaching that rule.

Forgiveness and Negative Partiality

Forgiveness has traditionally been characterized an affective response to a wrongdoing, i.e. a psychological process that involves ridding oneself of resentment or other negative reactive attitudes. In contrast to the prevailing model, this paper advocates for the emerging position that forgiveness should be understood as a normative power akin to a promise. In particular, I argue that forgiveness involves surrendering the right to discount the interests of a perpetrator (a special permission the victim acquires in virtue of having been wronged). I argue that this model fits and/or explains important features of forgiveness, such as the idea that forgiveness is a personal response to a blameworthy wrong, that forgiveness re-establishes a relation of equality, and that forgiveness is ‘normatively significant’. I further develop the position by showing how it can provide a unified case of paradigmatic forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and third-party forgiveness—this explanatory power distinguishes the view from previous articulations of the idea that forgiveness is a normative power. The final section further explores these distinctions by delimiting the scope of forgiveness to exclude powers related to apologies, compensation, or ‘redemption’.

Feeling Responsible: On Regret for Others’ Harms

AbstractThis paper investigates the moral emotion of being socially, but non-agentially connected to a harm. I propose understanding the emotion of an affiliated onlooker as a species of regret called ‘social-regret’. Breaking from existing guilt- and shame-based accounts, I argue that social-regret can be a fitting, expressive, and revelatory reactive attitude that opens the way for deliberation over accountability for others’ harms. When we feel social-regret, our attention is directed towards the moral salience of our social relations and the expectations that undergird them, as well as possibilities for ameliorative action. I consider several existing accounts of affiliated onlookers’ emotions (including embarrassment, guilt, and shame), and I highlight the advantages of supplementing these with a regret-based account. Social-regret provides a novel way to understand negative, self-directed emotions in response to others’ harms as rational, expressive, and potentially reason-giving experiences.

Reclaiming misandry from misogynistic rhetoric

In recent years, misogyny has become a central concept in philosophy as well as an established concept in public discourse and political policy. But where is misogyny’s supposed counterpart, namely, misandry? In this article, I argue for an ameliorative analysis of ‘misandry’, arguing that it can be reformulated in an effort to reclaim it from misogynistic weaponisation. The term ‘misandry’ is used almost exclusively as a misogynistic rhetorical device for attributing unjust anger, hatred or other similar emotions to a speaker, thereby undermining their epistemic authority. Rather than dismissing the term as conceptually flawed and politically problematic, I argue that we ought to ameliorate misandry to instead refer to a felt anger, hostility or fear towards the patriarchal social order and its valorisation and/or expression in misogynistic and machismo behaviour. To support these claims, I begin with a discussion of Kate Manne’s analysis of misogyny before reflecting on how this can inform our understanding of misandry. I then demonstrate the various ways in which misandry is rhetorically deployed as a means of silencing speakers who express dissent against the patriarchy. Following this, I argue that we should ameliorate the term, not only to undermine these misogynistic practices but also to articulate a legitimate affective and reactive attitude against the patriarchal imposition of a hierarchical gender binary.

CULTURE SHOCK SANTRI ASAL KANGEAN DI PONDOK PESANTREN SALAFIYAH SYAFI’IYAH SUKOREJO SITUBONDO


 This article discusses the culture shock of students from Kangean at the Salafiyah Syafi'iyah
 Islamic Boarding School in Sukorejo, Situbondo. Culture shock is a situation where a person is
 not familiar with the social habits of a new culture, so that an
 individual cannot display behavior
 that is in accordance with the rules in the new environment. The students from Kangean, who are
 from the island of Madura, are students who tend to be tough in character. But he will love people
 who don't hurt him. It is
 important to know about the community's background in terms of area
 and geographical conditions because people from the beach have a different character from people
 from the mountains. From the beach every day they fight the waves, feel the hot atmosphere
 with
 the hot sun so that psychologically they are associated with a reactive attitude towards something.
 When entering a new environment, namely an Islamic boarding school in Java, it was interesting
 to see how this Satri from Kangean communicated with peo
 ple of a different culture, and reached
 the level of culture shock.
 This research uses a descriptive qualitative research method. A method
 for examining the status of a group of people, an object, a condition, a system of thought, or a class
 of events in t
 he present. The aim of this descriptive research is to create a systematic, factual and
 accurate description, picture or painting of the facts, characteristics and relationships between the
 phenomena being investigated. The results of this research are tha
 t in the adaptation process,
 Kangean students go through phases of cultural adaptation, such as the honeymoon phase where
 students from Kangean experience a move so that they will feel happy because they are in a new
 atmosphere, the Disintegration phase of
 culture shock where students from Kangean will
 experience a the feeling of discomfort caused by differences, then the adjustment phase
 (Reintegration) where the students from Kangean begin to open themselves up to cultural
 differences, then the Autonomy p
 hase (familiarity with the situation) phase where a person
 becomes increasingly able to adapt because he has passed the previous phases like his anxiety and
 restlessness can be accepted and he accepts all the differences that exist. And the last one is the
 Independence phase, a phase where they enjoy the existing differences and a person is more
 confident when faced with the rhythm of a new environment and existing challenges
 
 
 

P.F. Strawson on Punishment and the Hypothesis of Symbolic Retribution

Abstract Strawson's view on punishment has been either neglected or recoiled from in contemporary scholarship on ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (FR). Strawson's alleged retributivism has made his view suspect and troublesome. In this article, we first argue, against the mainstream, that the punishment passage is an indispensable part of the main argument in FR (section 1) and elucidate in what sense Strawson can be called ‘a retributivist’ (section 2). We then elaborate our own hypothesis of symbolic retribution to explain the continuum between moral reactive attitudes and punishment that Strawson only adumbrates (section 3). After this justification of the punitive response to wrongdoing, we compare and contrast our specific kind of retributivist hypothesis with other positions in the so-called ‘new retributivism’ (section 4). Our hypothesis differs from other subvarieties of expressive retributivism in putting centre stage the idea of punishment as taking up a reverential stance towards the victim.

Retributive Emotions and Punishment

This article is a reflection on the role of emotions in legal decisions related to punishment determination. Drawing on a literature that attributes an evaluative-cognitive function to emotions, I will argue that emotions are cues about what we socially value, which is important for substantive and design-level decision making in the criminal justice system. In this sense, I will claim that emotions point to value judgements that are worth bearing in mind, although, to do so, it is necessary to clarify: a) on the one hand, which of them are appropriate and can be a reliable guide to punishment, its incidence and severity; and b) on the other hand, which of them are inappropriate, even if they are, in fact, operating as guides to punitive deliberation. Punishments play a social role that is not only linked to the idea of prevention, but also to reactive attitudes and emotions to the harm that is caused by criminal behavior. This paper is an effort to highlight the potential of the study of emotions in areas of law where they have been relegated and even presented as obstacles in the delivery of justice.

Why Care About Freedom and Agency?

Abstract In ethical systems that focus on apportioning praise and blame, a key consideration is often whether or not the individual is a free agent since individuals are only held to be responsible for what they freely choose. As various critiques indicate, if it were to be the case that freedom is in some way illusory or radically restricted, these systems would have a significant problem since reactive attitudes would involve holding individuals responsible for actions that they did not freely choose. I will argue that the problem may run even deeper: even if there is such a thing as free agency, it is a mistake to think that autonomous individuals uniquely instantiate this agency. I will draw on arguments from Pratyabhijñā Śaivism, which state that although there is ultimately no such thing as a praise or blameworthy individual agent, free agency is the precondition for manifestation itself. Worlds, not individuals, are the proper unit of analysis for ethical theories. This position picks up on many of the critiques of the kind of substantial self that stands apart from the world that were offered by various Buddhist traditions in the Classical Sanskritic context. At the same time, it does not fall prey to these objections precisely because the self that Pratyabhijñā theorists argue for is neither an unchanging substance nor a minimally thin kind of self-awareness that could be accommodated by no-self theorists. Pratyabhijñā theorists’ particular way of understanding agency, then, presents a productive exchange between some of the most ethically salient ramifications of Buddhist no-self theories and insights into why, nevertheless, freedom and agency are inextricably bound up in our worlds.

Reasoning Through Narrative

AbstractA peculiar feature of our species is that we settle what to believe, value, and do by reasoning through narratives. A narrative is adiachronic, information-rich story that contains persons, objects, and at least one event. When we reason through narrative, we usenarrative to settle what to do, to make predictions, to guide normative expectations, and to ground which reactive attitudes we think areappropriate in a situation. Narratives explain, justify, and provide understanding. Narratives play a ubiquitous role in human reasoning. Andyet, narratives do not seem up to the task. Narratives are often unmoored representations (either because they are do not purport to referto the actual world, or because they are grossly oversimplified, or because are known to be literally false). Against this, I argue thatnarratives guide our reasoning by shaping our grasp of modal structure: what is possible, probable, plausible, permissible, required,relevant, desirable and good. Narratives are good guides to reasoning when they guide us to accurate judgments about modal space. Icall this the modal model of narrative. In this paper, I develop an account of how narratives function in reasoning, as well as an account ofwhen reasoning through narrative counts as good reasoning.

Law enforcement, social demands and reputation risks as drivers of compliance functions: a comparative analysis of the largest banks’ disclosures in the UK and Brazil

Given the recent recurring cases of financial crime worldwide, national and international regulators have enacted new regulatory instruments intended to prevent or inhibit unlawful acts by banks and their representatives. These stricter regulations regarding the operations of financial institutions have reinforced the importance of best practices and the role of compliance within banks. Nonetheless, regulations regarding compliance structures and functions are not yet mandatory and give great flexibility to banks to define how they will set their compliance programmes. This research aims to understand how compliance functions have been implemented in the two largest banks in the UK and Brazil as a governance mechanism to fight financial crimes such as bribery and corruption. Document analyses of websites and financial reports of these banks examine disclosures provided by these corporations and shed light on the main drivers influencing their transparency regarding compliance functions, roles and responsibilities and their connections to the bank’s operations and profitability goals. This research demonstrates that the implementation and enhancement of compliance functions in UK and Brazilian banks are driven by attempts to respond to regulatory requirements, social demands and as a reputational risk instrument, reflecting different levels of development in each institution. The maturity of these disclosures demonstrates that Brazilian banks present a more reactive attitude, justifying their investments in compliance according to minimum law requirements, while banks in the UK tend to have a more proactive perspective on their compliance initiatives, reinforcing their importance for the bank’s competitive advantage and long-term continuity beyond regulatory compliance.

Comparing deterministic agents: A new argument for compatibilism

ABSTRACT This paper offers a new argument for compatibilism about moral responsibility by drawing attention to some overlooked implications of incompatibilism. More specifically, I argue that incompatibilists are committed to some unsavory claims about pairs of agents in deterministic worlds. These include comparative claims about moral responsibility, blameworthiness, desert, punishment, and the fittingness of reactive attitudes. I argue that we have good reasons to reject such comparisons because they fail to account for key differences between deterministic agents. This provides us with reason to embrace compatibilism and reject incompatibilism.

Personal Reactive Attitudes and Partial Responses to Others

This paper argues for a new understanding of Strawson’s distinction between personal, impersonal, and self-reactive attitudes. Many Strawsonians take these basic reactive attitude types to be distinguished by two factors. Is it the self or another who is treated with good- or ill-will? And is it the self or another who displays good- or ill-will? On this picture, when someone else wrongs me, my reactive attitude is personal; when someone else wrongs someone else, my reactive attitude is impersonal; and when I wrong someone else, my attitude is self-reactive. Against this account, I argue that the basic reactive attitude types are better distinguished according to whether they express partial or impartial concern. This fits Strawson’s discussion in “Freedom and Resentment”, and it allows us to see an important point that the alternative approach obscures. Namely, while attitudes like resentment, gratitude, shame, and pride can arise as responses to our own treatment and behavior, they can also arise as third-party responses to the treatment and behavior of our family members, romantic partners, and close friends. Similarly, attitudes like moral indignation and disapprobation also have a wider scope than is often acknowledged; they can arise as responses to others’ treatment, but they can also arise as responses to our own treatment when we react impartially to circumstances involving ourselves.

Forgive or complain: Interpersonal distance modulates reactive attitudes and neural responses toward wrongdoers

While the effect of interpersonal distance on forgiveness has been investigated over the past few years, it remains unclear whether this facilitating effect holds even when measured implicitly. Meanwhile, though cognitive control and the corresponding prefrontal cortex play a prominent role in forgiveness processing, the neural mechanism underlying forgiveness toward varied wrongdoers is largely unexplored. Here, forty-two participants initially underwent noise offense either from their friend or stranger, followed by a word identification test to examine their implicit attitude, during which they were presented with word-name combinations and required to categorize forgive- or complain-label words while ignoring the names of their friends or strangers below. A shorter reaction time reflects more congruence with one’s implicit attitude. Electroencephalogram was recorded during the word identification test. Behaviorally, while individuals reacted faster to forgive-friend relative to complain-friend pairings, no such reaction bias was found for the stranger-wrongdoer, which suggests that individuals were more inclined to forgive someone close. Regarding the EEG/ERP results, forgive-friend elicited lower alpha oscillation and more negative frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) value than complain-friend combinations, suggesting increased and dominant activity in the right prefrontal network during forgiveness toward friends. Whereas complain- relative to forgive-stranger combinations elicited larger P3 amplitudes, suggesting a neural encoding bias to information associated with complaints about stranger-wrongdoer. These multimodal findings provide evidence for the benefits of closeness in forgiveness and shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying forgiveness toward different types of wrongdoers.