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Assessing whether someone is morally responsible and holding others accountable for their behavior and for the consequences their action create is the basis of moral ethics and human relationships. The assumption that an individual is morally responsible for their behavior involves conferring certain potential on that individual and claiming that their behavior derives from what personal qualities and experience they have. Jefferson (2019) writes that “morally responsible agency consists in susceptibility to having one’s moral agency developed and sustained by moral influence” (p. 565) but can that be said about everyone? Most adults may possess the aforementioned capacities, whilst animals, young children, and those who suffer from dementia or severe developmental disabilities lack them for evident reasons.
The issue with moral responsibility is that humans are held morally responsible for their behavior even though they lack free will since their actions are considered to be causally determined. The decision an individual makes is the result of their interest and desire, whereas that interest and desire are normally determined by personal traits and experience. These factors are, undoubtedly, outside the individual’s control, including their upbringing, the environment they live in, their background, and genetics. According to this theory, a person’s actions cannot be considered the result of free will. Ultimately, there are two alternatives: either an individual has free will, which means that their actions are not determined by any factors, or an individual does not have free will, which implies that nobody is held responsible for their actions. That is seemingly the most complicated aspect of moral responsibility.
Additionally, there is a difference between moral responsibility and causal responsibility. Everyone can be held causally responsible for some sort of outcome. Nevertheless, the sources required for moral responsibility vary from an individual’s causal powers, so it is impossible to infer one’s moral responsibility based on their causal responsibility. For example, young children do not meet the requirements of general moral responsibility, therefore, judging them or holding them accountable for their actions according to causal responsibility is inappropriate. The determinist point of view on moral responsibility says that there is some sort of power or control implying that an individual could have acted differently instead of performing a certain action. The essence of determinism entails that an individual’s actions are beyond their control since some circumstances and consequences are uncontrollable or inevitable. In terms of determinism, human actions are the implications of the natural law or events which took place some time ago. However, it is physically impossible to control what has happened in the past, and neither is it possible to control the laws of nature. Hence, the consequences of those acts do not depend on people. Causal determinism, on the other hand, argues that any event is inevitable because it was destined to happen based on the information about the past before it even took place in the present tense. For that reason, free will is often considered to be incompatible with causal determinism.
Responsibility naturally appears when there is a duty or an expectation an agent must fulfill or meet, or a punishment that will be applied if the agent does not complete the said duty. Certain tasks and circumstances instigate responsibility, and it depends on the individual whether they possess the understanding and comprehension that they should act responsibly. For example, if a student has an important test coming up, they have to study diligently; otherwise, they will not pass it and fail the class. That is one of the cases, but punishments and rewards influence an agent in a way that they evoke motivation and make them act responsibly.
Forward-looking approaches to moral responsibility focus on the benefits and positive consequences that can be achieved by using these practices. Forward-looking perspectives emphasize that an individual’s relation to determinism does not imply that they are in any way related to the restrictions that force them to behave regardless of their choices or beliefs. In this situation, it may be useful to implement such incentives as praising, blaming, and simply treating individuals as responsible. Therefore, this method can encourage individuals to make choices that will be beneficial for them and will result in a positive outcome.
The Reactive Attitudes Approach focuses on the emotions and feelings, or the reactive attitudes, which play the main role in the practice of accountability and responsibility. This approach implies that emotional intelligence is the main evidence of an individual’s openness to praise and blame. It also emphasizes how much attention individuals pay to how others treat them and what their intentions are because it is in human nature to worry about where other people are coming from — honesty, affection, indifference, profit motives, etc. It is also important to bring attention to the genuine causes of individuals’ behavior and particularly to situations where an individual acted for their motives.
The Reasons-responsiveness methods have been especially attentive to such cases. Brink, Meyer, and Shields (2018) research states that “reasons-responsiveness represents a significant way in which we are not just passive, but active; we are not just passive objects or spectators of our desires, but, rather, we are agents” (p. 217). There are many various ways in which individuals can be morally responsible for how they act and the consequences of their actions. The classification of contexts and methods is very diverse and complex, and so is the differentiation of responsibility and human behavior. Still, it exists to help people understand each other better, give an explanation to an individual’s motive, hold each other accountable for their actions and teach each other the norm of conduct in the society.
References
Brink, D. O., Meyer, S. S., Shields., C. (Eds.). (2018). Virtue, happiness, knowledge: Themes from the work of Gail Fine and Terence Irwin. UK, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jefferson, A. (2019). Instrumentalism about Moral Responsibility Revisited.The Philosophical Quarterly, 69(276), 555–573. Web.
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