Nagel, Freedom, and Moral Responbisbility

**This is from guest blogger, Dan S.**

I should start off by saying that I really shouldn’t have picked Nagel as one of my blog posts, because in the past I’ve often agreed with quite a few things that he’s said in ethics, and it turns out, that this paper is another instance of that agreement. So, instead of just simply agreeing with the things that he says and providing just an exposition of his argument, I’m going to play the devil’s advocate!

I, personally, believe that it is a necessary condition for a person to be “free” in order for them to be morally responsible. In that regards I agree with the Control Principle, which states, “We are morally assessable only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends on factors under our control”. Thus, if this holds true, a person is not morally responsible for an act that is outside of their control. In playing devil’s advocate, however, why should we believe that it is a necessary condition for a person to be free in order for them to be morally responsible? Let’s say that we imagine a man that goes and kills someone, and seems to do it out of his own free will. We convict the man to life in prison, finding that he murdered the person without any outside factors influencing his actions. A few weeks later, we find out that determinism is, in fact, actually true, and that free will does not exist. What do we do? Do we actually go and let the person out of prison because we found out that he didn’t murder the person freely? It doesn’t seem like we do. The person still killed someone, even though they were morally unlucky that they pulled the wrong deterministic straw. I imagine that we would still hold the person morally accountable for his/her actions even though they might not have committed the act freely. Here’s a different thought experiment. Let’s assume that there is a guy holding a gun to your head, and he tells you that if you do not shoot the person in front of you, he will kill both you and the other person. If you shoot the guy, he will let you live and he will turn himself in, absolutely admitting that he indirectly murdered the person who you shot and taking all blame for any immoral actions he forced you to do. So, let’s say just for the sake of the argument, you shoot the guy. Even though you were not free in your action, you’re still going to feel completely like crap because you were the one that pulled the trigger, or at least, I know I would feel terrible. Perhaps one of the reasons that you feel so absolutely terrible about what you did is because you in some way hold yourself morally responsible for the death of the person whom you were forced to shoot. Even though you think that you shouldn’t hold yourself morally responsible for the man’s death, you can’t help but partially blame yourself.

Perhaps the distinction, at least in the second thought experiment, might be seen between subjective and objective moral responsibility? You hold yourself morally responsible on a subjective level, but on an objective level you know that you weren’t morally responsible? I guess I’d like to hear what you guys think, as to whether or not you think that we could not be free, but still be morally accountable for our actions.

Unfortunate Luck

**This is from guest blogger, Will P.**

In "Moral Luck" Thomas Nagel espouses a moral responsibility incompatibilist complaint against both Kant's idea of moral judgment and an intuitive idea of moral judgment most clearly found in the legal system. According to Kant, moral judgment should not take "luck" (or aspects of an act that are out of an agent's control) into account. The only relevant issue is the "will" or intent of an agent. Nagel contrasts this view with the legal fact that attempted murder is punished to a lesser degree than murder, which indicates that people intuitively make moral judgments primarily based on the results of actions that could be out of an agent's control, not primarily based on intent. He doesn't consider the possibility that legal punishment is a separate judgment from moral judgment, or, alternatively, if they are the same sort of judgment, that Kant could have grounds to object to our legal system based on these discrepancies. He considers multiple ways in which the objects of moral judgments (actions, results of actions, and/or agents themselves) can be out of the control of any given agent. These are what is meant by "moral luck." According to Nagel, if determinism is true, then moral judgments that take intention to be of primary concern are untenable and moral responsibility cannot be ascribed to agents. This is why I take him to be a moral responsibility incompatibilist. Even without determinism being true, there are situations in which the results of actions, which are out of the control of agents, determine the moral judgments of them, and these situations should thereby undermine the judgments if they are meant to be based on personal agency. (He uses the example of reckless driving which may or may not result in killing someone, depending on one's moral luck.) This case can be construed as more persuasive, since it doesn't require one to concede full-scale determinism. Kant or any other defender of the view that intentions, not results, are the rational grounds for moral judgment could insist that these judgments, which are influenced by results, are irrational and should not be made by rational people. Kant's claim is normative, so Nagel's examples don't do very much to combat it. This is the issue when Nagel says, "We may be persuaded that these moral judgements are irrational, but they reappear involuntarily as soon as the argument is over." If Nagel or anyone else "involuntarily" makes irrational judgments, it is really no strike against Kant's normative claim. Nagel points out a legitimate conflict between two commonly held ideas about morality (namely Kant's and the legal system's), but I don't see any indication to suggest that one is more "intuitively acceptable" than the other. In other words, I don't think that Nagel has valid reasons to reject Kant's normative instead of the "involuntary" judgments that people make based on results, especially if determinism is not granted to be true.

Nagel on Moral Luck

**This is from guest blogger, Claire S.**

Nagel’s article on Moral Luck evoked many responses in me, which I will share with you all. I am eager to hear your responses.

My first reaction to Nagel’s article concerns determinism and more specifically incompatabilism. If “hard” determinism is true – the view that the truth of determinism means that no agent is ever free – then it seems like all action an agent may take are out of that agent’s control because it is not the case that, given the antecedent causal events, that agent could have acted other than they did. If we want to accept incompatabilism and still talk about moral luck, then it seems like we would have to hold that no one is morally accountable for any actions they take because they were determined to take these actions and could not have acted other than they did. But this seems wrong. For example, even if we hold that hard determinism is true then agent A who murdered someone and agent B who didn’t murder someone were equally determined and constrained to act as they did, yet we still think that agent A is morally responsible for her actions.

Next I want to talk about the legal aspect of Nagel’s article. Nagel asks, why do we punish agent A who successfully murders her husband more severely than agent B who unsuccessfully murders her husband? My answer to this question is firstly that in the legal system we base punishment on the outcome of the situation, so since in the case of agent A a man was murdered and in the case of agent B a man was not murdered, we punish agent A for the murder of her husband. I think the reason this is true of our legal system and of the way we react to the two different cases is because there is a difference in the victim. In the case of agent A a man is a victim of murder and he is gone forever. As restitution for the victim agent A is given a more harsh punishment in order to make up for the loss she caused. Another question that I must ask to this is, would it even be possible or how could we punish people for what might have happened, for what they intended to do, if it did not in fact happen? This goes along with the case of the man in Germany who becomes a Nazi simply by being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and the (say, the exact same) man who leaves Germany just in time to prevent him from becoming a Nazi. How could we punish the man who would have become a Nazi but just wasn’t there at the time to do it? I think it’s fair to only punish the man who did become the Nazi, even if this was just bad luck for him. Even if we did think that it was justified to punish the man who doesn’t become a Nazi, how would our legal system look? It would certainly be more complicated than it is now – and that is bad for lawyers. That is why I think we focus mostly on the outcome and the victim when it comes to the legal system. Lastly, I think perhaps we actually do account for moral luck to some degree in the legal system – for there are plenty of times when circumstantial evidence is included in the case to determine the level of guilt of the person on trial. This circumstantial evidence can be used both for the defense and the prosecution, and I think sometimes it does affect what the verdict ends up being. Can anyone else think of any specific court cases or written laws where circumstances can get you off the hook?

Another reaction I have to Nagel’s article is, so what? Moral luck just is a fact of life, some people are born into worse situations than others and some people are in the wrong place at the wrong time. How could we account for this in the legal system? And I’m not sure we even should account for it (in most cases) – people should still try to make the best decisions they can, given what circumstances they have to deal with, and they still have the ultimate choice in how they should act. A place where I think that actually there should be a difference in punishment (and I’m pretty sure there isn’t) is say, if agent A and agent B are both caught stealing food from the grocery store. Only, agent A is a ten-year-old kid whose parents are drug addicts and don’t provide food for thei child, and agent B is someone with the means to buy the food. It seems like there should be a different level of blameworthiness for the two agents given their circumstances. But again, this is not something that the legal system directly does, I believe both agents would be equally punished.

Now I ask myself and you all, is this fair? No, it probably isn’t fair, but that is just the way things are a lot of the time. It doesn’t seem like we can be “fair” unless we all take an incompatabilist view and say that it applies to everyone than nothing is in their control and no one should be blamed or punished for their actions. But I personally cannot accept the incompatabilist view because what would society look like if we did? There would be no incentive to act morally and there would be no punishment for not acting morally. How do you all feel about it?