Module 5: Responsibility PDF

1 Module 5: Responsibility Learning Outcomes At the end of this module, the students should be able to: 1. Define the levels of Intention; 2. Determine the modifiers of Responsibility 3. Apply the principles of double effect/indirect voluntary This module discusses the Levels of Intenti...

1 Module 5: Responsibility Learning Outcomes At the end of this module, the students should be able to: 1. Define the levels of Intention; 2. Determine the modifiers of Responsibility 3. Apply the principles of double effect/indirect voluntary This module discusses the Levels of Intention, Levels of Willing and Not Willing, Modifiers of Responsibility, Ignorance, Intellectual fear, Force, Habit and Fear PROBLEM From the acts humans perform we have separated out those over which a person has control or mastery. We have fixed the point of control in the consent of the will, prepared for by the deliberation of the intellect on the basis of the value perceived. If the consent can be given to any available alternative, the individual person is the cause of his or her own choice and is therefore responsible for the act chosen. The only reason why this act was done rather than not done or why this act was done rather than some other possible act is that the person, by a personal choice under the guiding light of his or her own intellect, made the act to be. The act is that per: son's own act precisely because and insofar as that person did it Is a person equally responsible for all the acts over which he or she has control, that is to say, for all his or her human acts? Not all knowledge is equally clear, nor does the will always consent with total decisiveness. In addition, what proceeds from the will may be closely or remotely connected with the willed act itself and may share in its voluntariness in varying degrees. We must now examine the factors that enhance or limit a person's responsibility by increasing or diminishing his or her control, making the act more or less human, more or less than persons. The following questions will guide us in understanding these factors: 1. What are the main kinds of voluntariness? 2. What precludes or weakens our responsibility? 3. Are unwanted but foreseen consequences voluntary? 4. When may one permit foreseen evil con sequences? 5. Must we avoid contributing to others' moral harm? 2 LEVELS OF WILLING AND NOT WILLING There is a difference between not willing to do something and willing not to do something in the first case there is no act of the will and therefore no voluntariness. In the second case there is an act of the will, an act of deliberate omission or refusal, and this is quite voluntary. Hence voluntariness can be positive or negative, according as we will to do something or to omit something, and both of these kinds of voluntariness are different from a state of non- voluntariness, which is an alliance of willing. Some writers reserve the word involuntary for what happens against our will and use non voluntary for what we have no attitude toward, but this usage is not consistently observed. The state of not willing is often psychologically impossible to maintain. We do not will so long as the doing of an act does not even cross our mind. Once we think of it, and especially after we have reflected on it and deliberated about it, we must do one of two things: either take it or leave it, either will to do it or will not to do it. One course is as volunteer as the other. Thus negative voluntariness is not the same as no voluntariness, much as a negative number is not the same as zero. For my act to be voluntary I must will it knowingly. But must my mind be focused on the act at the very moment I am doing it? Can I be responsible for an act done in a state of complete distraction? For any responsibility to remain, must a previous decision to act still influence my behaviour, or may it have entirely ceased its influence? Can I be responsible for something that I never did will but presumably would have willed if I ever thought of it? To answer such questions it is customary to distinguish four levels of intention with which an act is performed, representing a progressive diminution of voluntariness. 1. An actual or active intention is one that a person is conscious of at the moment he or she performs the intended action. The person pays attention not merely to what he or she is doing but also to the fact of here and now willing it. 2. A virtual intention is one that was once made and continues to influence the act now being done, but it is not present in the person's consciousness at the moment of performing the act. Thus a woman walks to a definite destination; her intention was actual on starting out but soon becomes virtual as her mind drifts onto other subjects while she takes the right turns and ar. rives at where she wanted to go. What she willed was the whole series of acts that would bring her there, but she need not be thinking of her destination every step of the way. After her first decision the subsequent acts could be carried out while her mind is completely distracted from its original purpose. 3. An unrevoked intention is one that was once made and not retracted, but it does not influence the performance of the act intended at present. For example, a man fully resolves to kill his enemy but is prevented by circumstances from carrying out his intent, though he never revokes it; later, while hunting, he shoots at what he thinks is an animal but finds 3 that he has accidentally shot his enemy. He is responsible for intending to kill an animal, not for killing his enemy. In this instance he had no intention of killing his enemy 4. An interpretative or presumed intention is one that has not been made but presumably would have been made if the person were aware of the circumstances. If, for example, the literal application of a law would cause more harm than good, one might interpret the intention of the lawgiver and relax the law in this particular case. For an act to be voluntary an actual intention is not necessary; a virtual intention suffices. The unrevoked and interpretative intentions have much less importance. They indicate that the person's will (either once actually had or merely presumed) is objectively carried out, but not by the person's own voluntary act. MODIFIERS OF RESPONSIBILITY Voluntariness is said to be complete or perfect if the agent has full knowledge and full consent. It is diminished or imperfect if there is something wanting in the agent's knowledge or consent or both, provided he or she has both in some significant degree. If either the knowledge were wholly lacking or the consent were wholly lacking, there could be no voluntariness at all. The question now arises: What sorts of things render voluntariness imperfect, reducing the specifically human character of the act and making the agent less responsible? Since we are not interested here in the psychological strength of the act but in the degree of the agent's self-control, we shall call them modifiers of responsibility. There are five Main modifiers: 1. Ignorance, affecting the knowledge 2. Strong emotion, affecting the consent of the will 3. Intellectual fear, opposing to the will a contrary wish 4. Force, actual use of physical compulsion. 5. Habit, a tendency acquired by repetition Ignorance We are interested in ignorance only to the degree that lack of knowledge affects the voluntariness of a human act so as to make the act less a human act. Since voluntariness is the measure of the degree of responsibility, the less voluntary the act, the less responsible the agent is for that act. The only ignorance that has ethical import is ignorance an agent ought not to have, an ignorance that ought not to exist. There are three kinds of such ignorance: 4 1. Ignorance that can be overcome by acquiring the requisite knowledge is called vincible ignorance. 2. Ignorance that cannot be overcome because the requisite knowledge cannot be acquired is called invincible ignorance. 3. Ignorance deliberately cultivated in order to avoid knowing what ought to be known is called affected or studied ignorance. These three kinds of ignorance can be looked atlas three degrees of lack of knowledge thereby affecting the agent's voluntariness and his or her responsibility. 1. Invincible ignorance precludes responsibility. Knowledge is requisite for voluntariness, and in the case of invincible ignorance this knowledge is simply unobtainable. A person can be invincibly ignorant for one of two reasons: (1), being unaware of his or her ignorance, the person does not know there is any knowledge to be acquired or (2) being aware of his or her ignorance, the person's efforts to obtain the knowledge are of no avail. Since in either case the knowledge is unobtainable and since no one can be held to do the impossible, what is done in invincible ignorance is not voluntary, and so the agent is not responsible. A woman, for example, who pays for something with counterfeit money, not even suspecting that the money is counterfeit, does no wrong. The act of paying is voluntary, but not her paying in counterfeit money. 2. Vincible ignorance does not preclude re responsibility, but lessens it. The person knows that he or she is ignorant and that the knowledge is obtainable. If such a person deliberately fails to make sufficient effort to overcome the ignorance and so allows the ignorance to remain, the effects that follow from such ignorance are indirectly voluntary. By willing to remain in ignorance, the person is responsible for the consequences that he or she foresees will or may follow from that ignorance. If a surgeon, knowing that he or she does not have sufficient knowledge for a difficult operation that can be postponed, performs the operation anyway and the patient dies as a result, then even though the surgeon did not want the patient to die, we must say that he or she deliberately exposed the patient to serious and un necessary danger and is therefore responsible for the death. Still, though the surgeon is aware of being ignorant, he or she is not sure of the effects of such ignorance. Consequently we can say that the surgeon is less responsible than one who would deliberately plan to kill a patient in this way. The blameworthiness of vincible ignorance depends on the amount of effort put forth to overcome it, and the amount of effort called for depends on the importance of the matter and the obligation of the agent to possess such knowledge. The person who makes a little effort, but not enough, shows some goodwill but insufficient perseverance. One may know that the knowledge can be obtained but is too lazy or careless to search for it. Another may doubt whether the knowledge can be obtained and, after a little effort, may hastily but wrongly judge that the knowledge is unobtainable. Still another may make no effort at all, either with full knowledge that the ignorance is vincible or not caring whether it is or not. 5 3. Affected ignorance in a way lessens, in a way increases, responsibility. Such ignorance lessens responsibility, as does all lack of knowledge, since the person does not see clearly the full import of what he or she is doing. The ignorance, deliberately cultivated, increases the re responsibility if the person intends to use the ignorance as an excuse, for example, to lessen the risk of punishment or to avoid having to carry out a known duty. Here the person is not only willing the act but also willing the ignorance as a means of facilitating the act. The increase of voluntariness and therefore of responsibility in this latter respect is usually more important than the lessening of voluntariness in the former respect. Strong Emotion Emotion, if felt very strongly, may make us will something more intensely than we otherwise would and will it with less self-control than we would have when our emotions were more calm. Strong emotion increases the force of the willed act, but to the degree such emotion lessens voluntariness it also lessens responsibility, and so the act is to that degree less a human act. Our emotions may arise quite spontaneously before the will has acted. Remember that our emotions mix and mingle with our senses constantly. When an object is sensed, our emotions are operating along with the senses and pick up the beauty or ugliness, for example, in what we are sensing. We stir emotionally in the very pro cess of sensing something and respond almost automatically with a sudden feeling of joy or dis gust. We are simply responding with our emotions to what we have come in contact with in the sensed object. Sudden feelings of Joy, anger, hatred, grief, shame, pity, disgust, and the like are the emotions we are talking about. If they are very strong or violent, they can modify the responsibility we have for what we will when we generate such strong emotions. And, when such emotion is generated before the will can act, we call emotion of this kind antecedent emotion. We can also deliberately choose to generate very strong emotions, for example, by brooding or focusing on the objects that arouse them. We can actually make ourselves angry by rehearsing insults in our imagination or frightened by re calling the details of a particularly frightening experience from the past. This kind of deliver lately aroused emotion is called consequent because we generate it after and as a result of our own choice. Antecedent emotion is involuntary, whereas consequent emotion is voluntary and so is a human act. Antecedent emotion becomes consequent when it is recognized for what it is and then deliberately retained or fostered. 1. Very strong or violent antecedent emotion may preclude responsibility. If the emotion is so sudden or violent as wholly to block the use of our intelligence, it makes deliberation impossible, and the act performed under the influence of such emotion is then neither free nor voluntary. If the act is not voluntary at all, then the person is not responsible for the act. Such complete loss of control happens rarely. 6 2. Very strong or violent antecedent emotion usually lessens responsibility. In most cases even when moved strongly by emotion, we remain in control of our acts. Enough knowledge and con sent remain for the act to be both voluntary and free, and so the person is held responsible for his or her act. Calm, intellectual deliberation becomes more difficult, the motives on each side, cannot be weighed with careful impartiality, the will is predisposed more strongly toward one side rather than the other, and thus the person's freedom of action is pampered. As a consequence an act done under the influence of strong or violent emotion, when free, is less free than one done knowingly and with no disturbing emotions. Without calm judgment on the part of the intellect the choice of the will cannot be as voluntary and free. Responsibility is therefore lessened to the degree that voluntariness is lessened. 3. Strong or violent consequent emotion does no lessen responsibility but may increase it. When the strong or violent emotion is deliberately aroused or fostered, we voluntarily put ourselves in that emotional state. The acts we perform under the influence of such deliberately aroused or fostered emotion are either directly voluntary or voluntary only indirectly voluntary acts will be examined and explained later in this chapter). For example, a person intentionally (deliberately) broods over an insult in order to work up to an act of revenge; the person is using the emotion as a means to accomplish the goal of revenge, and so both the emotion deliberately worked up and the revenge taken are directly voluntary. An indirectly voluntary act, however, is quite different. Take a man, for example, who does not want to kill but foresees that his continual brooding over supposed wrongs done to him will get himself into such a frenzy that he will very likely kill; yet he deliberately continues to nurse his anger and, as a result, becomes in sane with rage and kills his enemy. His emotional state is directly voluntary, for he deliberately put himself into that very state by brooding on the supposed wrongs; his act of killing is indirectly voluntary, because he foresaw what very likely would happen and did nothing to keep from falling into the insane rage. He is responsible for the death of the person, and the rage, having been deliberately fostered, increases his responsibility for the killing. Obviously we do not mean to give emotion a bad name by what we have said above. Our emotions are very important because they are the basic powers we have to get in contact with what is valuable or worthwhile in ourselves and in our world. Human consciousness is an emotional consciousness as well as being a consciousness that senses, conceptualizes, deliberates, and wills. Reflective deliberation does not have to be emo tionless intellect aloofly observing the whirl of our emotions, nor does it have to govern those emotions as a tyrant who is afraid of being over thrown. Reflection is a conscious act that we as persons perform. Our emotions are intimately involved in the reflection along with the intellect. Our intellectual powers share in the activity of our emotions, which constitute the importances (values) in our lives, by giving our emotions ad vice and direction that they often would not have on their own just because of their immediacy and impatience. Since whatever emotions we do have are our emotions, we must acknowledge them as ours and take responsibility for the way we choose to integrate them into our self- image and attitude toward the world, ourselves, and other persons. 7 Fear Fear is the emotion that apprehends impending evil and manifests itself in the desire to get away, avoid, or escape as far as possible from the impending threat. The aim of fear is to protect the self from the anticipated evil. We can also have an intellectual fear, comprising an understanding of a threatened evil and a movement of the will to avoid this evil by rationally devised means. This intellectual kind of fear may have no easily discernible emotional component. Someone may coldly decide to steal, for example, because of fear of living in poverty, to lie because of being afraid to be disgraced, to murder because of fear of being blackmailed. This kind of fear deserves attention as a separate modifier of responsibility. To estimate its effect on responsibility, we must consider intellectual fear relatively to the person and his or her circumstances. What would produce a slight fear in one person may produce grave fear in another; some people are naturally cautious, whereas others are bold; some have little aversion to a condition that others would find intolerable. A lesser evil threatening us now may produce more fear than a greater evil still far off. What we are calling intellectual fear is a modifier of responsibility only when we act from fear as a motive for acting and not merely with fear as an accompaniment of our act. A soldier deserting his post in battle because of cowardice is motivated by fear and acts from fear; if he stays this post despite the danger, he may have just as much fear, but even though he acts with fear, he does not let that fear influence his conduct. 1. Intellectual fear does not preclude responsibility. This kind of fear does not produce panic and loss of self-control. The person calmly looks about for an escape from the threatening evil and makes a deliberate choice. He or she could choose to face the evil but chooses instead to yield to the fear rather than resist it and therefore wills what he or she does. Fear of this sort thus does not necessarily preclude responsibility. 2. Intellectual fear lessens responsibility. An act motivated by intellectual fear is one that we deliberately will; however, we would not will it except for the fear we experience. This reluctance weakens the consent of the will, leaving us with a divided mind and a hankering after alternatives the situation does not have. This reluctance and hankering lessen our self-control. If my choice is clear-cut and straightforward so that I act without regret or reluctance, my act is voluntary and I am responsible. But when I act regretfully and reluctantly, when I choose something I would rather not be obliged to do, there is a conflict, so to speak, between my will and my wish. My will is what I deliberately choose; my wish is what I would like if circumstances permitted. A time-honored example is that of the sea captain who throws his cargo overboard to save his ship in a storm. The act contains both a voluntary and an involuntary aspect: voluntary in the sense that he jettisons his cargo deliberately and intentionally with sufficient knowledge and consent, for he could refuse to do so and try to weather the storm or even let the ship sink; involuntary in the sense that he would rather not have to this and, if there were no storm, certainly would not do it. He wills to jettison his cargo, wishing that he did not need to do 8 so. Despite the contrary wish the captain is held responsible for this act of jettisoning the cargo but not as responsible as he would be were there no contrary wish present. Acts done under duress and intimidation have what we are calling intellectual fear as a motive. These acts are extorted under threat of evil to be inflicted by another human will. Unless the person becomes so upset as to become temporarily unable to control his or her acts, acts done under duress and intimidation are responsible acts, for the person could have refused and taken the consequences. Contracts unjustly extorted through fear can be nullified by positive law, not because the parties are never responsible but because the common good requires that extortion be made unprofitable. These points can be looked at more carefully if we examine the relation of force to responsibility. Force Force, violence, or compulsion is physical power used to make someone do something against his or her will. In common language, one who yields to a threat of violence is said to be forced, yet this is not really force but fear, and the person's voluntariness and therefore responsibility is to be judged by the criteria for fear. Now we must consider force in its strictest sense as not merely a threat but as the actual use of physical might If I hand over my money to a thug because he thrusts a gun at me, that is fear; if he physically overpowers me and rifles my pockets, that is force. Force in this physical sense cannot reach the will directly, for physical action cannot touch the act of the will. We can continue to will the op positive, no matter how violently we are forced to do the act. Hence the act we are forced to do is involuntary, so long as we do not will it. Someone may have the physical strength to make us do something, but he cannot make us will it. The act a violent aggressor is trying to make us do may or may not be evil in itself. If it is not, we may yield to it and comply with the aggressor's demands; our rights are outraged and injustice is done against us, but we ourselves are not doing wrong, only saving ourselves further harm. One who is kidnapped, for example, need not struggle (and this is true of acting from fear as well as force), for there is no moral wrong in merely going off to another place. But in a case such as rape, where consent would involve moral wrong, resistance is required. What counts as resistance and how much is required? At least internal resistance, withholding the consent of the will, and passive external resistance, non-cooperation with the aggressor, is required. Active external resistance, consisting in positively fighting the aggressor, is also necessary when without it the withholding of consent world be too difficult to maintain. This is not required when it would be useless or when there is no danger of consent The victim of force has no responsibility if he or she does not consent. If the victim consents reluctantly, he or she has reduced responsibility because of the contrary wish. If a person actually wants to do what he or she is being forced to do and, for example, pretends to resist, he or she is not truly a victim of force and has complete responsibility, or if he or she would not have done the act without being forced, nearly complete responsibility. 9 Habit The nature and kinds of habit will be discussed later in the chapter on habit; here we are interested only in the way habit may affect our responsibility for an act. For our present purpose we may define a habit as a constant way of acting acquired by repetition of the same act. When a habit has been acquired, the actions follow from it spontaneously, almost automatically, so that de liberate guidance becomes unnecessary and, in a sense, even difficult. 1. We may set out deliberately to acquire a habit, as when we try to learn how to play a game or how to pick pockets. Then the habit is directly voluntary, and the acts resulting from it are either directly voluntary if performed with the intention of acquiring the habit or at least indirectly voluntary if they are the unintended but foreseen consequences of the habit. We are completely responsible for the habit and the acts resulting from it 2. We may not intend to acquire a habit for its own sake but voluntarily perform acts that we know are habit forming, as when a person takes up smoking or drugs. Here the acts done are directly voluntary, and the forming of the habit is indirectly voluntary, since we know that we cannot do habit-forming acts without getting the habit. After the habit has been acquired, acts unintentionally following from it are also indirectly voluntary. We are completely responsible for the habit and the acts resulting from it. 3. We may discover that we have unintentional ally acquired a habit, either because we did not realize that we had done the same thing in the same way so often, or because it did not occur to us that such actions were habit-forming. Most of our habits of speech and gesture are of this type. In this case we are not responsible for the existence of the habit or for the acts that unintentionally follow from it, so long as we remain ignorant that we have the habit. A rather gross lack of reflectiveness may cause this condition to remain about a great many patterns of action even over a long time In whatever way we may have acquired the habit, as soon as we fully recognize that we have it, we face the choice of either keeping the habit or trying to get rid of it. In either case a new act of the will is called for; the act of getting a habit and the act of keeping it are two distinct acts, and each may be voluntary. If we decide to let the habit remain, our possession of the habit now becomes directly vol unitary, and the acts that unintentionally follow from the habit are indirectly voluntary. The habit, however acquired, is now deliberately kept, and we are completely responsible both for the habit itself and for its effects. If we decide to get rid of the habit, we are now the victim of two opposite pulls, the voluntary decision of our will to suppress or get rid of the habit and the involuntary persistence of the habit itself. Long-standing habits of some types are not overcome in a day or by a few days' effort and when our vigilance is relaxed, will inadvertently reappear 10 in the corresponding act. Success in this struggle is bought only by constant watchfulness and effort. If we let down our guard, we shall soon find ourselves drifting back to the old familiar way. Our responsibility for these particular acts depends on the amount of advertence at the moment when the act is performed and also on the amount of effort expended to get rid of the habit. Here, just as in the dispelling of vincible ignorance, we are obliged to put in an amount of effort proportional to importance of the matter. Depending on these factors and on our sincerity in the particular instance, we may have complete responsibility for acts done from habit, or only some, or even none at all. Additional Modifiers To these five modifiers of responsibility it is possible to add others, such as sleeping, sickness, pain, alcohol, drugs, and other conditions that reduce awareness and self-control. They are very important, but since they produce their effect on voluntariness by involving one or more of the five modifiers already discussed, no new principles need be added to those explained above. Abnormal mental states will, of course, seriously affect the capacity of a person to perform human acts. The lighter neuroses will probably only lessen voluntariness, whereas the deeper psychoses may preclude it entirely. The mentally disturbed may have complete self-control at times or along certain lines and little or none at other times or in other forms of behavior. A klepto maniac may be a very rational person except when under the spell of this particular compulsion; these acts are involuntary but not the other acts the person performs. Each case is different and must be judged by itself. In order to make a judgment in a particular case we have to know how the individual abnormal state affects voluntariness, because the degree of voluntariness is the measure of the degree of responsibility. The same principles seem applicable also to the refined methods of physical, mental, and social torture used for political purposes, beginning with "brainwashing" and aiming at total "thought control." It is said that in such a long, drawn-out process everyone has his or her breaking point. If so, the victim has full responsibility at the start, suffers a gradual diminution of it as the inhuman routine continues, and after the breaking point, if there really is one, the victim ceases to be a responsible person. A person need not be reduced to insanity, It is sufficient that one cannot control one's moral judgments or the actions resulting from them. Whether any moral responsibility is left only the victim really knows, though a psychologist might be able to make a good inference. Nothing has been said about the unconscious, about the drives, complexes, and motivations sunk beneath the threshold of our awareness, which are such powerful influences affecting our behavior. They are indeed of the greatest importance in the development of our personality and have much to do with our ethical life, especially with our moral principles and attitudes. They may explain why some have such a keen, and others such a blunted, sense of moral values. Since such urges are unconscious, however, they exist in us involuntarily and do not make the act human by what they contribute. They 11 are much like habits inadvertently developed. We cannot be responsible for them until we recognize them, and by that time they have been dredged up from the unconscious to a condition of conscious awareness. Then we are faced with the problem of what we shall choose to do about them. They may supply the real motivation of acts that we attribute to other motives, but since at the time we choose the act as we see it, we are responsible for the act as seen and chosen, and not in terms of the hidden motives from which it may actually stem. Neither Freud nor the psychoanalytic movement has strengthened the force of traditional morality. By showing the weakness of conscious ness before the unconscious, the psychoanalytic movement has left is less able to believe in our moral freedom. We find ourselves perhaps talking more in terms of neuroses and complexes than in terms of virtues and vices. But we still go about our everyday lives guided by moral will, and we make judgments in its terms. We do distinguish among people we know in terms of their virtues and vices; for example, we speak of the almost scrupulous honesty of one, of another as well nigh incapable of telling the truth, and of another as being the very embodiment of kindness and understanding. And we deal with people in these terms. We forgive people for occasional failings, but almost never do we find ourselves excusing them because they are neurotic about something or have such and such a complex over which they have no control. If we do discover some neurosis or complex in ourselves, we have become conscious of it and can begin to understand how it affects our behavior. The point is that the neurosis or complex is no longer unconscious but is now a part of our conscious awareness. Now we are responsible for what we do about it, for how we integrate it into our lives, for the impact we let it have on our behavior. As long as we do not know something, we cannot be responsible in regard to it.