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SORITES ISSN 1135-1349 Issue #09. April 1998. Pp. 47-52. «Frankfurt, Failure, and Finding Fault» Copyright © by SORITES and V. Alan White |
Frankfurt,
Failure, and Finding Fault
V.
Alan White
Harry
Frankfurt has long argued that examples of overdetermined moral agents prove
that reasonable claims of moral responsibility against them do not entail that
the agents involved could have acted otherwise (stated as a necessary condition
of responsibility, Frankfurt calls this the Principle of Alternative
Possibilities, or PAP; [1]). However, recent clarifications of certain of
his examples reveal the subtle presence of ceteris paribus assumptions
at work in them that, when examined more carefully, either call his entire
project into question or at least require a narrower claim for what the
examples establish.
In an attempted response to some criticisms
by Peter van Inwagen ([4]) to the effect that Frankfurt's arguments do not
address questions of the responsibility of failures to act, Frankfurt
([3]) offers the example of an automobile driver Q who fails to drive
attentively due to his preference to look left at scenery during a crucial
moment. Frankfurt adds overdetermining conditions that counterfactually
necessitate Q's looking left at that time. He then remarks: «In these
circumstances, Q cannot keep his eyes straight ahead. Is he morally responsible
for failing to do so? Of course he is! The fact that he cannot avoid failing
has no bearing on his moral responsibility for the failure, since it plays
no role in leading him to fail.» ([3], 292, latter emphasis mine.)
Frankfurt believes that this latter claim is justified because while the
overdetermining conditions in Q's case stand as redundant sufficient
conditions for Q's failure, they are not at all necessary for Q's
failing in the actual sequence of events, as opposed to necessary conditions
external to an agent that were absent in a consequences-oriented example van
Inwagen offered, and thus accounted (in part) for van Inwagen's agent's moral
failure. Frankfurt concludes that judgments of moral failures such as that of Q
are therefore completely justified without resort to either a PAP-like
principle or reference to any existing (but actually inoperative)
overdetermining conditions:
«Failing
to keep one's eyes straight ahead is exclusively a matter of what movements a
person makes; it is constituted by what the person himself does, and
what the person does is therefore both a necessary and sufficient condition for
it. It cannot be said, then, that Q's failure would have occurred no matter
what he had done — i.e., regardless of what bodily movements he made. If he had
not moved his eyes to the left at all he would have not failed.» ([3], 292-293)
This
passage bundles together not only much of the force of Frankfurt's
counterexamples against PAP, but the basis of his psychologically-structured
compatibilism as well [2]. For here he states quite powerfully what he takes to
be the moral sufficiency of agents who act even in overdetermined conditions:
«[f]ailing to keep one's eyes straight ahead is exclusively a matter of
what movements a person makes» in such circumstances that do not bring
peripheral (i.e., non-agent-related) but actually present necessary conditions
of moral action into play. It is the «moral purity» of the example of Q apart
from surrounding circumstances that so effectively fixes our gaze upon Q as the
only entity supposedly responsible for the failure.
However,
as is the case with all Frankfurt-style examples, the intuitive judgment of Q's
responsibility is mainly driven by the apparent irrelevance of all
surrounding circumstances, even ones of overdetermination, no matter what their
counterfactual significance. The one subtlest factor in all this is that Q's
act in the given example is stipulated to be a failure. This begs some
critical attention be paid to the fundamental issue of what a failure is, as
well as how Q in Frankfurt's example is specifically judged to fail.
Again,
intuitively, it would appear that any agent's failure arises because of an
absence of some normatively expected act or consequences of an act. Since
Frankfurt's example requires that Q's act be a failure in some sense, it should
be made clear in what sense that act constitutes an absence of some normatively
expected act. In Q's case clearly this is that Q should have kept his eyes
fixed on the road ahead during the time period he was actually judged to have
failed. Note, however, that the normative expectation here is two-fold, both
generally and specifically. Generally we expect that drivers attend to driving,
ceteris paribus. Specifically a driver fails to be attentive if this
expectation is unmet without qualification to the ceteris paribus
specification — i.e., if there are no circumstances mitigating our normative
judgment of failure. If we do discover such mitigating circumstances, then
we may find a particular driver absolved of failure, such as when a driver is
maliciously drugged or suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by a passenger. The
driver may not have been properly attentive to driving in such a case, but we
do not attribute a failure to her. (Footnote 1)
Of
course, in the case of Q Frankfurt argues that there are no such mitigating
circumstances, and thus we may hold Q responsible for failure. In so arguing
Frankfurt draws a distinction between «personal» and «impersonal» unavoidable
behaviors:
«Now
there are two ways in which a person's action, or his failure to act, or a
consequence of what he has done, may be unavoidable. It may be unavoidable in
virtue of making certain movements which the person makes and which he cannot
avoid making; or it may be unavoidable because of events or states of affairs
that are bound to occur or to obtain no matter what the person himself does. .
.I shall refer to the first type of unavoidability as «personal» and to the
second as «impersonal». ([3], 293)
Frankfurt
argues that Q's unavoidable failure is personal, and thus he is «fully
responsible for his failure» ([3], 292). Why? Though Q's act is overdetermined
by external otiose circumstances, he fails due to his own behavior — not only
because of some external condition or situation that requires failure come what
may (as in van Inwagen's own imagined «impersonal» case, involving an apathetic
agent unaware that a telephone he should have used was actually broken). Recall
that it is Frankfurt's belief that «[i]t cannot be said, then, that Q's failure
would have occurred no matter what he had done — i.e., regardless of what
bodily movements he made. If he had not moved his eyes to the left at all he
would have not failed» (emphasis mine). Hence Frankfurt argues that Q, and
only Q, is responsible for his failure.
However,
it is instructive to note that in this latter supportive remark that Frankfurt
appeals to something like a ceteris paribus case of (some) Q's failure!
In Lewisian modal language, the possible Q referred to in this latter statement
(the «he» of the counterfactual antecedent) is a counterpart quite remote from
the Q of Frankfurt's example — a counterpart Q who presumably is not
overdetermined to fail (otherwise the consequent of the counterfactual would be
false). It is this «modally remote» Q who may truly be said to have failed ceteris
paribus, and that counterfactual reference to failure reveals that at least
some of these ceteris paribus assumptions involve conditions surrounding
that Q — namely that he is not overdetermined to fail, and so does not
if he does not move his eyes to the left at all. Besides the dubious — I would
say equivocal — slide from arguing about Frankfurt's Q to appealing to a
«modally remote» counterpart Q, this raises the question of how such ceteris
paribus assumptions work — or are ignored — in the consideration of
Frankfurt's overdetermined Q.
In
general, what could be the nature of these assumptions? Appealing to familiar
kinds of cases somewhat like Q's, as suggested above, they are of two
varieties: one, that the agent involved is of rather ordinary character and
behavioral capacity; two, that the agent is not coerced to act or otherwise
interfered with in acting. In the case of Frankfurt's Q, both of these,
Frankfurt would argue, are intact, and most importantly for Frankfurt's
example, in spite of the presence of overdetermining conditions. I would urge,
however, that this latter claim overlooks some commonly-held views on what
constitutes freedom from interference.
Interferences
in another's affairs are of two kinds. One is direct and causal, as in cases of
forceful physical or psychological coercion. Obviously Frankfurt's
overdetermining conditions for Q are irrelevant here, and assist the
plausibility of his example. But another kind of interference is indirect and
(at least potentially) more passive, as in cases of clandestine conspiracy.
These cases constitute interference not because they are necessarily directly
invasive, but because they transgress a basic concept of fairness — agents
should be left completely alone to do as they, and they alone, see fit. Of
course, Frankfurt could rightly point out that the overdetermining conditions
for Q were, in fact, unneeded — Q did act as he saw fit. How then could
these conditions constitute interference?
I
insist to the contrary that our basic moral concept of fairness is not as
restricted as that. Consider the case of a gambler who unwittingly agrees to a
certain series of bets against a roulette wheel fixed by the house, which would
be used near the end of the series of bets to assure that the gambler loses. As
it turns out, however, the gambler's luck just happens to be so bad that the
means of assured loss are never invoked. If we discover this arrangement
afterwards, do we excuse the house from blame completely? I would think most
certainly not — the house conspired against a player, and thus it was not
possible for the gambler to win. Our sense of fairness is offended, and we may
well argue that the gambler's losses should be returned. Note, moreover, that
this sense of fairness is built upon something like the very PAP Frankfurt
disdains, though it is not a PAP directly related to questions of personal
character. For the gambler, given ordinary conditions, very likely would not
have acted otherwise given his proclivity to waste money. Rather, the situation
wasn't fair because the wider conditions didn't provide any possibility for the
gambler to win, irrespective of his character.
Frankfurt
might protest that this example is similar to van Inwagen's in crucial
respects, and for that reason is similarly irrelevant as a criticism of his Q
example. He could try to argue that the house's conspiratorial action against
the gambler constituted matters over which the gambler had no control, and thus
necessitated the gambler's losses. Hence, the gambler's «failure to win» was
«impersonal», as was van Inwagen's apathetic agent (and for that reason the
gambler is not fully responsible for losing his money). (Footnote 2) However, I
would counter that such an argument depends on considering the relevance of
overdetermining conditions that Frankfurt himself usually questions by
focussing on the actual sequence of events — namely, that in fact the
gambler lost of his own foul luck and the overdetermining conditions were not
needed, and thus played no role in the gambler's actually losing. Hence, in the
actual sequence of events the gambler's «failure to win» was personal — he
wanted to gamble and it turned out that he lost his money on fair spins of the
roulette wheel. My point specifically is that the fixed roulette wheel was not
used because the conspiratorial house «got lucky» and needed to do nothing, and
yet our moral intuitions of fairness cannot exempt the house from
responsibility based on the simple fact that the gambler couldn't win in any
case. Note that I do not have to claim that the gambler is not at least
partially responsible here — his wantonness about money need not be ignored
completely. But the gambler cannot be held fully accountable for losing, which
is all I must demonstrate. Our intuitions about Q, I insist, must be parallel.
And generally I would say that this situation about the gambler draws out the
key defect in all Frankfurt-style scenarios: there are always, according to
Frankfurt, unindictable individuals or circumstances that in fact «got lucky»
and needed to do nothing to bring about a certain end result. But, I insist
that it is their very indictment that our sense of fairness requires, and that
in turn dilutes the attribution of responsibility we apportion to the «unlucky»
evil-doer (as being a sort of unwitting «free» stooge).
Hence,
I would argue that Frankfurt's Q should not be held responsible for failure, or
at least not fully responsible for it, as long as we consider that something or
someone «conspired against» him to fail. Generalizing from this point, I would
also argue that Frankfurt examples as a whole ignore the role PAP plays in our
ordinary ideas of fairness: we require in general that our morally responsible
actions are not merely our own, but fairly so, apart from a
conspiratorial set of even actually otiose circumstances that would otherwise
guarantee a particular kind of outcome. So PAP remains a necessary condition
for full moral responsibility in that wider sense, even if Frankfurt's examples
do serve to show — as with a more ordinary ceteris paribus case of our
gambler — that PAP need not apply to agent's characters in order to hold them
accountable. (Footnote 3)
REFERENCES
[1] Frankfurt,
Harry G., «Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,» Journal of
Philosophy, 45 (1969), 829-39.
[2] Frankfurt,
Harry G., «Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,» Journal of
Philosophy, 68 (1971), 5-20.
[3] Frankfurt,
Harry G., «What We Are Morally Responsible For,» in John Martin Fischer and
Mark Ravizza, eds., Perspectives on Moral Responsibility (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993), 292-93.
[4] Van Inwagen,
Peter, «Ability and Responsibility,» Philosophical Review, 87 (1978),
201-24.
V. Alan White
Professor
of Philosophy
University
of Wisconsin — Manitowoc
awhite@uwc.edu
Footnote 1 Throughout his
discussion, Frankfurt equates the event of Q's looking left at scenery with his
failure to remain attentive. This collapsing together of descriptive and
normative elements of the examples — essentially an equivocation fallacy — is
what at bottom allows Frankfurt to attend most closely to those agent-related
matters that seem so irrelevant to PAP, and diverts attention from matters of
surrounding circumstances that, as I argue here, are tightly tied to PAPish
assessments of fairness.
Footnote 2 I have enclosed my
references to the instance of the gambler's actually losing as «failure to win»
because I wish to clearly indicate that I do not literally want the gambling
loss to be construed as a failure in the same sense that Q may have been
claimed to fail. The force of my argument concerns the surrounding
circumstances that are comparable between the gambler and the case of Q, and
does not crucially depend upon equivocating these obviously separate senses of
«failure».
Footnote 3 No doubt Frankfurt
would hold that my argument constitutes a non sequitur because PAP as he
defines and discusses it relates only to his favored (psychologically
structural) concept of free will, and any reference to a PAP-like principle
beyond the purview of an agent's psychological makeup is an illicit attempt to
associate matters foreign to that concept however relevant they might be to
ulterior moral considerations (see similar comments in [3], 294). I would
retort that such a claim itself misses my point. Free will, I insist, in
its most fundamental meaning and usage must refer in part to morally relevant
conditions that encompass circumstances surrounding an agent as well as
those involving an agent's psychological states and history. As I see it,
Frankfurt-style examples merely construct a sort of modal set of blinders that
illegitimately screen off matters quite relevant to an adequate moral model of
free will.