Toward a Post-Cartesian Theology, Part 4: Moral Responsibility

This will be my last post overviewing Frankfurt's ideas in Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right. After this discussion of moral responsibility from a Frankfurtian perspective, I'm going to draw out a couple of implications for soteriology, ecclesiology, and theodicy. I might even, if you're nice, talk about the theology of politics.

Rather than bore you with a review, I'm going to jump right in and assume you've read all my prior posts in this series.

What does moral responsibility look like from Frankfurt's perspective? Framed in my terminology, what does a weak volitional model of moral responsibility look like?

Often, moral responsibility is linked to strong volitional models. That is, we tend to think that if a choice were determined we can't really blame the actor. She could not have done otherwise. So, if Frankfurt reconfigures freedom, how do notions of moral responsibility get adjusted?

Recall that Frankfurt sets aside the free will versus determinism debate in favor of a psychological account of freedom: Volitional unanimity, freedom as doing what we want to do. Frankfurt continues this approach when he addresses moral responsibility:

"Becoming responsible for one’s character is not essentially a matter of producing that character but of taking responsibility for it. This happens when a person selectively identifies with certain of his own attitudes and dispositions, whether or not it was he that caused himself to have them. In identifying with them, he incorporates those attitudes and dispositions into himself and makes them his own. What counts is our current effort to define and to manage ourselves, and not the story of how we came to be in the situation with which we are now attempting to cope."

Let's unpack this. What does it mean to "take responsibility"?

In a very superficial sense, taking responsibility is often simply recognizing one's causal influence in an event:

"Who broke the window?"
"I did."

This is often all that is required.

However, this kind of "taking responsibility" is rarely seen as moral. Moral responsibility has to do with your dispositions and choices as a reflective, deliberating creature. Accidents aside, "taking responsibility" has mainly to do with your inner life and its structure.

In short, moral responsibility is about you. How you exist as a moral creature.

Thus, if you are forced to act in an immoral manner due to an external coercion (e.g., I'm holding a gun to your head), we don't hold you morally responsible for your actions. Your actions don't reflect your own, freely willed, inner nature.

So, setting aside accidents and external coercion, let's look inside ourselves to see what it means to take moral responsibility. According to Frankfurt, we act freely when we will what we want to will. This is freedom as volitional unanimity. So, let's say you act in a premeditated way to perform some immoral or illegal act. In this, you act freely. You want to do this deed. In the language of law, you have mens rea, a "guilty mind" or "criminal intent."

If you have mens rea you are acting, according to Frankfurt, freely. It doesn't really matter if you are determined to do this act. As Frankfurt notes, the story behind your actions is largely irrelevant. For finite creatures like ourselves, the only coherent question we can ask about moral freedom is simply this: Did you WANT to do this? If so, if mens rea is present, then you acted freely. And you are held morally responsible for your actions.

Another way to frame this is to say that, in a weak volitional world, we hold people morally responsible when we desire communal input into their volitional structure. If you WANT to do these bad thing then we hold you responsible. That is, again borrowing from Frankfurt, you identify with these impulses and actions. You own them. Given your volitional configuration, we have quibbles with you. Your self-identification prompts us intervene because if we don't stop you you will not stop yourself.

However, there are times when people claim that they are internally overthrown by impulses. They act harmfully and/or immorality but they don't identify with the act. The are ashamed of it. They claim they resisted acting in this way to their full power. In short, they inform us that they did not have volitional unanimity. They were not free.

Are these people morally responsible? Because we need a notion of freedom to hold people responsible.

The answer is, sometimes yes and sometimes no. These are the sticky cases. They are sticky because we know what an irresistible impulse can do to us. Think of insanity or addictions. We know what it feels like to be internally terrorized by renegade impulses. So, in case law some people are held less accountable on just these grounds. The trouble is, people could be lying to us. Or, someone can make up some unheard of irresistible impulse and argue that this is what overthrew them (e.g., road rage). On such things lawyers debate and ponder. The best we can do is hear the evidence--expert or otherwise--and make reasonable community discernments about how irresistible that irresistible impulse really was. It's a messy, error-prone process, but there is no better way to do it.

To conclude. The point of all this is that robust notions of moral responsibility are fully compatible with weak volitional models or even strict determinism. That is, yes, notions of freedom are integral to notions of moral responsibility. However, that freedom doesn't have to be free will. Volitional unanimity seems to be enough.

Well, that's it for Frankfurt. Next week I'll build some theological structures on top of this foundation (as problematic as it is).

Have a wonderful weekend. Keep your glucose levels up.