Karl Persson de Fine Licht

Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt by laymen. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken— theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are subject to a number of surprising factors, sometimes yielding apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is, roughly, to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility.

Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Studies by Nichols and Knobe (2007) suggest that whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in a deterministic scenario depends on whether these actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression these actions seem to represent. Studies by Nahmias et. al. (2007) show that the kind of determinism involved can affect assignments of responsibility. When deterministic scenarios were described using reductionist explanations of action, subjects were significantly less prone to ascribe responsibility than when the deterministic laws were described as involving ordinary psychological concepts. Finally, a study by Knobe (2003) suggests that people are significantly more inclined to hold an agent responsible for bringing about bad side effects than for bringing about good side effects when the agent just doesn’t care about these side effects.

Elsewhere (Björnsson & Persson ms), we have presented an analysis of our everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, accounting for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility.

Björnsson, G.; Persson, K. (ms) The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility. Forthcoming in Noûs
Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93.
Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI
Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions. Noûs 41:4, 663-685