Source
Wolf (2015), LIT-747, read in the author’s typescript of the 2013 lecture in NOTE-565. Page references are the typescript’s.
What was actually shown
Wolf argues it in a lecture, in three steps.
- Depth is not morality. The contrast of causal with moral responsibility blends two distinctions, shallow vs deep and nonmoral vs moral (p. 2). Excuses work alike for a rude push and a messy home, and love for an artist’s work is a reactive attitude as much as resentment is (pp. 4–9). On the self-disclosure view, which she takes from Watson, one is deeply responsible for what expresses one’s self, and the self is more than one’s moral attitudes (pp. 5–6).
- Attributability and accountability come apart. On the two-level view, accountability needs self-disclosure plus control, “At least, regulative control” (p. 14, n. 5). Wolf rejects it (p. 15). What makes the older pie-taker accountable is not which self his act discloses but that “(1) he acts as he ought not to, (2) he was in a position to know that he ought not to so act, and (3) it was up to him whether to act in that way or not” (p. 17). Her psychopath, without empathy or conscience but able to control himself by prudence, “may be accountable for his psychopathic behavior without his psychopathic character being attributable to him at all” (p. 18). Whether accountability then needs “anything metaphysically robust” is “not obvious” (p. 19).
- The hunch. The fit object of reactive attitudes is “an ‘intelligent’ self”, one with “the same (or better) powers of perception, reason, and imagination that we do” (pp. 21–22). It fits the psychopath, who “can’t get it”, the case of El Greco, and Strawson’s participant stance. Any depth in responsibility may lie in “the manifestation or disclosing of an intelligent self’s unimpeded response to the world” (p. 23).
What this does not say
- Not the Reason View restated. The lecture does not use “Reason View”, “the True and the Good” or “sanity”, and does not cite Freedom Within Reason (LIT-685, unread). Whether the intelligent self is the sanity condition under another name is a question for a reading of that book. This account does not attribute the link to Wolf.
- Not a worked-out theory. Wolf calls the positive view a hunch, and is “uncertain” that it recovers depth (p. 23).
- Not about real psychopaths. The case is “a possibly fictitious and inaccurate conception” (p. 17).
- Not about groups. The lecture never mentions collective agents.
- Not that accountability is easy. It keeps knowledge and control; it doubts only that the control must be metaphysically deep.
Connections
- THEORY-122 (the Reason View, second-hand). It says responsibility requires the competence to recognise and act on the True and the Good. This account, from a later Wolf text, puts a capacity of that kind (to understand and appreciate the world) on the side of attributability and the reactive attitudes, and gives accountability thinner conditions. It does not contradict THEORY-122 outright: condition (2), being in a position to know, may be where competence re-enters. No relation is declared; the record’s reading is that THEORY-122 may need to say which kind of responsibility it is about.
- THEORY-118 and THEORY-121. Condition (3) is an avoidability condition on accountability, consistent with THEORY-118’s condition on blame. Its doubt about metaphysical robustness is nearer to THEORY-121’s compatibilism. Footnote 5 cites Fischer and Ravizza (LIT-684, unread) only for the regulative/guidance distinction. No relation.
- The owner’s essay. §8 uses Wolf’s JoJo for normative competence; this gives §8.1 a condition on perceiving and understanding the world, not only on responding to information. For corporations (§7.1, and THEORY-139) it separates two questions the essay could keep apart: accountability, and fitness for resentment or admiration. That application is the record’s, not Wolf’s.