Speaking of retribution… I was teaching my interview with Galen Strawson in my intro to ethics class last week and was struck by something that never occurred to me before. It’s in the discussion of his remark that “even Hitler is off the hook” if we deny moral responsibility: (I’m going to quote him at length but the crucial part for the purposes of this post comes towards the end):
“Me: So how should we regard Hitler and Stalin and other villains of history? Should we view them like we view the Lisbon earthquake, or the Plague?
Galen: In the end, and in a sense: yes. Obviously it’s wildly hard to accept. For some people I think it’s impossible to accept, given their temperament (they might not be able to make sense of their lives anymore). As I said, I can’t really accept it myself—I can’t live it all the time. If someone harmed or tortured or killed one of my children I’d feel everything almost anyone else would feel. I’d probably have intense feelings of revenge. But these feelings would fade. In the end they’re small and self-concerned. Only the grief would last.
Maybe one way to put it is this: People in themselves aren’t evil, there’s no such thing as moral evil in that sense, but evil exists, great evil, and people can be carriers of great evil. You might reply, Look, if they’re carriers of evil they just are evil, face the facts. But I would have to say that your response is in the end superficial. After all, we don’t call natural disasters evil.
There’s another thing to say about the Hitler case. Our sense that he must be held to be utterly responsible for what he did is both cognitive and emotional, and it usually seems to us that these two factors can’t possibly come apart. The cognitive part, the sense that it is just an absolute objective fact that he is wholly responsible in the strongest possible way, seems inseparable from the non-cognitive part, the moral nausea, the disgust, the anger, I don’t know what to call it. They seem inseparable in the way that blood is inseparable from a living body (that was Shylock’s problem). And since the non-cognitive emotional part is plainly a completely appropriate reaction it can seem that the cognitive part must be, too.
Nevertheless, I think they can come apart. Many of our emotional responses can stay in place when we confront the fact that there is no ultimate moral responsibility. We don’t stop retching involuntarily when we realize that there is nothing objectively disgusting about a smell of decay. No doubt some of our emotional responses are essentially connected to belief in ultimate moral responsibility. But I think even the most emotionally intense desires for revenge and retribution, say, can be felt in a way that does not presuppose ultimate moral responsibility.”
There are a number of ways to interpret Galen here. Originally, I thought Galen was highlighting the irrational and distorting effects of our retributive emotions—they can mislead us into thinking that someone like Hitler is objectively morally responsible. That, I believed, was the purpose of involuntary retching analogy. This is an idea we see a lot around here (I may have defended it myself at one point, or maybe several): retributive emotions had important adaptive functions and therefore have a powerful tough-to-shake influence on our beliefs and judgments. But in search for the truth about moral responsibility and desert, we need to bracket these emotions and minimize their distorting effects.
But a funny thing struck me about the retching analogy when I read through it again in class. I looked at it and thought: wait, what does that mean—“there’s nothing objectively disgusting about the smell of decay?” Really? There’s nothing objectively disgusting about a rotting corpse? What could possibly be objectively disgusting if a rotting corpse isn’t? I couldn’t think of anything. And this made me think that Galen was misconstruing what we mean by ‘objectively disgusting.’ All we mean when we say that something is ‘objectively disgusting’ is that most normal people are disposed to do things like wretch involuntarily when encountering it. That’s all there is to ‘disgusting.’ If a disgust skeptic or nihilist came along and argued that nothing could have the metaphysical properties required to be ‘truly disgusting,’ I would reply that he was overintellectualizing the facts, that the metaphysics in this case was in the eyes of the metaphysician.
(Hopefully, you see where this is heading now...) But this is precisely what a certain famous father of Galen's argued about moral responsibility! For someone to be morally responsible just means that people are disposed to have a certain kind of emotional response to them. Any further metaphysical requirement--say, the demand for ultimate responsibility—is in the eye of the metaphysician. According to Strawson, the moral responsibility skeptic is ‘overintellectualizing the facts.’
So here’s my question. Assuming that the disgust skeptic has an overinflated idea about what it takes to be ‘truly disgusting,’ what (if anything) makes judgments about moral responsibility any different? Why isn’t P.F. Strawson’s reply to Galen and other skeptics just as effective as the reply to the disgust skeptic? Where’s the disanalogy?
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