RogerSH wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 7:41 pm
I am puzzled that so many writers assume – usually with no attempt at justification – that moral responsibility has something to do with determinism, or more specifically with being an “ultimate cause”. What makes this puzzling is that it seems to be almost universally accepted in common usage that the possibility of being
morally responsible is confined to conscious beings. An earthquake, for example, may be “responsible” (in another sense) for much suffering, but (aside from animism) the earth is never held responsible in a moral sense. So a sound theory of moral responsibility has to be founded on the role of consciousness.
A similar objection can be rendered from your method too.
You statement is just question begging. Responsibility does not arise from consciousness, since consciousness is not an end point or starting point. Consciosusness is just a conduit to a muliplicity of causality. A single isolated consciousness could not possibly have any thoughts about moral responsibility. QED it does not arise from consciousness in any meaningful way.
I saw a documentary about Pompeii last night in which the narrator told of people who had returned to Pompeii between eruptions erroneously thnking that it was all over, subsequently dying. She described this as a "deception" imparting Vesuvius with a consciousness. What it was, in fact was a delusion on the part of the people. Here we have an example of a consciousness- Margaret Mede the narrator attributing morality where none should exist.
It is highly likely that the Pompeians thought that Vesuvius was in fact deceiving them, another case of consciousness attributing morality where none exists.
So whilst it is clear that morality or a sense of it is a attribute of consicousness I have to say that our entire conception of all aspects of reality are also consciousness based. And so this seems to leave your assertion as an empty platitude.
Like everything else humans do morality requires consciousness. I might also like to add that it requires conscience too. It might be better to start from that point?
But conscience is also just another conduit in a long and complex chain of causality for which there are not simple "ultimate" termini.
It is also worth pointing out that possession of consciousness does not necessarily provide a conscience. There is a clear body of evidence that a significant percentage of people have psychopathic tendancies and can only understand moral ideas intellecually and fail to grasp their emotional significance.
Consciousness is a necessary but not sufficient cause of morality, and is derived from the interacions of humans living with other humans.
How would that work? Firstly, let us clear up an obvious source of confusion here, because “responsibility” is used in two different senses, a binary (yes/no) sense and a sense that is a matter of degree. For convenience I will confine the term “responsibility” to the former sense, and refer to the “how much?” sense as "culpability" (or “praiseworthiness” as the case may be). The courts have long distinguished between the verdict and the sentence, so philosophers should have no problem distinguishing the fact of responsibility for a bad act, from the degree of culpability for it. A person may be clearly responsible for an act but with such strong mitigating circumstances that they can hardly be regarded as culpable.
Initially, the fact of responsibility has to be defined in the first person, since that is where consciousness is first identified. If I am conscious of choosing an act, from among other acts that would be possible given that I chose them, then I have a relationship to that act, and that is the relationship that we call “responsibility”. So networks of causes do not have to be traced back any further than the point at which consciousness of this relationship entered into the process by which the act was chosen.
Once we have a concept of moral responsibility in the first-person, the third-person meaning can be derived from it, by virtue of our ability to recognize and thus to identify with consciousness in others. I hold another person responsible for an act if I believe that he chose it while conscious that he was making a choice.
So now let us briefly look at “culpability”: the fact of responsibility but with mitigation taken into account. Without going into further detail, we can acknowledge that mitigation typically stems from any of three things: lack of competence to make the choice, psychological pressures of many kinds, and genuine repentance. What is relevant here is that all of these involve consciousness. If we could read a perpetrator’s mind perfectly, there would be no need to enquire further. However, psychological identification is not the same as being psychologically identical: I can mentally step into another’s shoes, but not see life through her eyes, so to speak. Hence we have to use proxies to provide pointers to the relevant features of another person’s mind, namely the objective circumstances which gave rise to her conscious experience. Nothing in this, however, provides any grounds for metaphysical enquiries into original causation or the like.
This is necessarily an extremely compressed account of the theory I am advocating: for example, the social construction of responsibility has to be added to the picture. (Chapter 8 of my e-book “New Thoughts on Free Will” provides a more comprehensive account.)