Contribution
It separates two questions that the free-will literature usually runs together: what makes responsibility deep rather than merely causal, and what makes it moral. It then argues that the deep kind is mostly a matter of attributability, which reaches nonmoral traits and works of art, and that accountability is a separate kind, not a deeper level.
Key insight
The usual route to metaphysical worry is that accountability needs control on top of self-disclosure, and control is where determinism bites. If accountability is independent of self-disclosure and needs only ordinary avoidability, the depth has to be looked for elsewhere: in what kind of self is disclosed.
Assumptions
- The reactive attitudes, after Strawson, mark the participant stance; Wolf reads “participation” broadly: the target is one of us “in some wider or other sense” (p. 10).
- Ordinary reactions to nonmoral traits and art (love, admiration, chilliness) are reactive attitudes in Strawson’s sense (pp. 7–9).
- The psychopath is a stipulated figure: lacking empathy and conscience, but able to control his behaviour by prudence. Wolf calls this “a possibly fictitious and inaccurate conception” (p. 17).
Key results
- The two distinctions inside the causal vs moral contrast (p. 2).
- Three categories of nonmoral responsibility: executive virtues and vices, “aesthetic” traits such as humour or pretension, and art (pp. 3–4).
- Excuses work the same way across moral and nonmoral cases: the ransacked home, the accidental painting (pp. 4–5).
- Watson’s two-level view stated (p. 13), with control at the second level glossed in footnote 5 as “At least, regulative control”, citing Fischer and Ravizza’s Responsibility and Control (LIT-684).
- Its rejection (pp. 15–19). The pie-taker cases show accountability does not depend on which self the act discloses. The psychopath is accountable for acts whose source is not attributable to him.
- The intelligent-self hunch and its fit with three cases: the psychopath, El Greco’s rumoured astigmatism, and Strawson’s participant stance (pp. 21–23).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | The causal/moral contrast conflates shallow/deep with nonmoral/moral | moderate | conceptual argument with cases |
| C2 | We are deeply responsible for some nonmoral traits and for art | moderate | parallels in excusing conditions and in reactive attitudes; Wolf notes a sceptical reply (p. 12) |
| C3 | Attributability and accountability are independent, not levels | moderate | pie-taker and psychopath cases, the latter stipulated |
| C4 | Accountability may need only ordinary avoidability | weak | ”not obvious” that more is needed (p. 19); not argued further |
| C5 | A fit target of reactive attitudes is an intelligent self | weak | offered as a “hunch”; fitted to three cases |
Concepts
- deep responsibility — responsibility beyond the merely causal, where the result “expresses or reflects” the agent’s self (p. 5).
- self-disclosure view — Watson’s name for responsibility as what is “governed by and expressive of one’s self” (pp. 5–6).
- attributability / accountability — entitlement to attribute a trait or act to a person’s self, vs liability to blame, punishment, and demands for compensation or apology (pp. 12–13).
- intelligent self — a self with “the same (or better) powers of perception, reason, and imagination that we do, so that when she responds to the world, it is the same world as ours to which she responds” (p. 22).
Connections
It works from Watson’s “Two Faces of Responsibility” (1996) and Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment”; neither is in the record. Footnote 5 cites Fischer and Ravizza (LIT-684, unread) for regulative control. The lecture does not cite Freedom Within Reason (LIT-685) or restate its Reason View.
Bearing on the record
Source of THEORY-147.
- THEORY-122 (the Reason View, second-hand). Its
promote_whensays the account is refuted as a claim about responsibility by an argument that an agent who cannot recognise moral reasons is still fit for accountability blame. This lecture, by Wolf, comes close to that: her psychopath, with no conscience, may be accountable because he knew the act was forbidden and could control it. But it is not the attributionist argument thepromote_whennames, and her accountability conditions include being “in a position to know that he ought not to so act”. Whether that knowledge is the normative competence THEORY-122 means is not settled by the text. The record’s reading: in 2013 Wolf attaches the appreciation requirement to fitness for the reactive attitudes, not to accountability. No relation is declared. - THEORY-118 (the asymmetry) and THEORY-121 (guidance control). Condition (3), that acting so “was up to him”, is an avoidability condition for accountability, consistent with THEORY-118’s blame condition. Wolf doubts it needs anything “metaphysically robust”, which is nearer to THEORY-121’s compatibilism than the asymmetry is usually read. The lecture argues neither point at length.
For the owner’s essay:
- §8 and §8.1. The essay uses Wolf’s JoJo for normative competence. This lecture offers a different handle: the fit target of reactive attitudes perceives and understands the world as we do. That is a condition on responsiveness to the world’s reasons, not only to information, which is §8.1’s distinction.
- Organizations (the record’s question, not Wolf’s). The lecture says nothing about groups. Its split suggests two separate questions for a corporation: whether it can be accountable, which on these conditions needs knowledge of the rule and control (compare THEORY-139), and whether it is a fit target of resentment or admiration, which needs an intelligent self.
Limitations
The positive view is explicitly a hunch, offered because it is “also to early [sic] in my thinking about these questions” to defend an answer (p. 21). The psychopath is stipulated and makes no empirical claim. Wolf is “uncertain” whether the intelligent-self reading recovers depth or bears on determinism (p. 23). The typescript, not the published text, was read.
Open questions
What makes features of a person part of her self, and which beings have selves of the relevant kind (children, animals, psychopaths), which Wolf raises and leaves open (p. 20). Whether the intelligent self is the same condition as the earlier sanity condition, which a reading of LIT-685 would show.