Assholes
Page 11
That, at any rate, is reason to look into less dramatic proposals about the basic preconditions of blame. The asshole must indeed have freedom of will. But this is just to say that he must be the sort of person who is properly credited with his acts as his own. His behavior must be properly attributed to him, rather than to the world around him or to so many subpersonal forces—whether homunculi or states of his brain—at work in his head. Here it won’t suffice that the person behaves in certain ways, whether in the spontaneous and “free” ways that all animals move or in involuntary bodily functions or knee-jerk reactions. The behavior of my arm going up only counts as my action—as my raising my arm, instead of my arm’s being pushed from behind—when it reflects my intentions. My intention to raise my arm will usually be based in what I take to be some sort of reason, a reason I could often give you if you asked why I did what I did (e.g., I raise my arm in order to reach for a jelly jar or in order to vote “aye” in a meeting). But, we suggest, to be the kind of person who is suited for such intentional conduct is all that is necessary for a person to be properly credited with and potentially blameworthy for his or her deeds. For the asshole to be the appropriate object of blame he must be the sort of person who does what he does for what he thinks are good reasons. As long as he is motivated to act by his own sense of what are or are not good enough reasons for action, as long as he would defend them as good enough for action if he were asked, his deeds are his. When he’s done well, then he’s rightly thanked or praised. When his assumed reasons are not in fact good enough, he’s rightly to blame.
To elaborate, our basic theory in chapter 1 says, in effect, that the asshole has a certain view about what reasons he has or doesn’t have. Fully cooperative people take themselves to have sufficient reason to abide by the expectations of conduct that normally apply among moral equals. The fact that such expectations require something is regarded not only as a good reason for action but as a reason that is good enough to outweigh or rule out other competing considerations, such as the inconvenience of acting in the expected way. The asshole shares this view of other people’s reasons for action but makes an exception of himself by insisting that the normally applicable expectations do not, in his case, apply. To summarize, here, then, is the asshole’s view of things:
Thinking Like an Asshole: The man takes it as given (perhaps subconsciously or inchoately) that he is justified in allowing himself special advantages in social relations, in light of his special entitlement to them. That is, his sense of special entitlement tells him that he has no reason or insufficient reason to abide by the expectations of conduct that normally apply among moral equals.
So while the fully cooperative person takes there to be good and normally sufficient reasons to queue up in good order when a line has formed, the asshole sees no reason he should wait, or at least no reason sufficiently good to justify the inconvenience. His line-cutting action is thus his action, simply because it reflects his normative views: he’d defend them if we asked him why he thought it should be acceptable. To the extent he is also wrong about what reasons he has or doesn’t have, to the extent he has a mistaken normative perspective, he is the appropriate object of blame. He is the appropriate object of blame just because he thinks like an asshole, just because his actions flow from that (mistaken) set of moral views. He is to blame because, in that attitudinal sense, he fails to recognize others as the equals they are, by failing to recognize what treating them as equals calls for.
PSYCHOPATHS AND MORAL BLINDNESS
In our proposal, the asshole is blameworthy because of a failure of seeing. But here one might object that the bare fact of having certain mistaken moral views cannot be the whole story. It might seem to matter why the asshole fails to see what he fails to see. Suppose, for instance, that he is morally blind, really and truly incapable of taking in the appropriate facts about what he has most reason to do or not do. Would he not then be off the moral hook? If so, then when he is on the hook, it follows that he has certain capacities to figure out what moral reasons he in fact has. The asshole would then be blameworthy only because he in fact has that moral capacity, where this is something more than simply having asshole moral views. No capacity, no responsibility. “Ought,” as they say, implies “can.”
The philosopher Gary Watson presents an argument like this one as regards the psychopath.11 As Watson reads the psychological evidence, psychopaths are marked by two key features:
(1) they act with malice, deliberately and callously harming others, without coercion or psychosis; and
(2) they are incapable of recognizing the interests of others as claims on their conduct.
The fact that psychopaths act with malice, as according to (1), means they are unlike mere animals that must be controlled but cannot be blamed. It feels natural for us to blame the psychopath for a horrific murder and indeed to want to hold him accountable for his conduct, whether through punishment, strong criticism, or indignation. On the other hand, Watson argues, the fact that psychopaths are incapable of recognizing others as sources of valid claims on their conduct, as according to (2), means that ways of seeking to hold them accountable to moral expectations are misplaced. We therefore find them deeply disquieting. We recoil in indignation at the callous murders committed by Robert Alton Harris (he kidnapped, taunted, and shot two teenagers, then bragged about it while finishing the lunches they had been eating). But we can also find ourselves in a more detached, objective mode when we think through his truly terrible upbringing. We naturally waffle on whether he is in fact morally responsible, depending on whether we think of the child he was or the man he became.12 Ultimately, though, the psychopath isn’t responsible, because he finally isn’t capable of seeing that he owes people something better.
For our purposes, it is crucial to understand why Watson thinks the psychopath’s inability to see the force of moral claims means that resentment or indignation is misplaced: his moral incapacity means there is no possibility of getting through, no possibility of getting him to even understand, let alone accept, that he has reason to respect the moral claims of others. But, according to Watson, the act of seeking to hold someone accountable, as opposed to simply trying to deter future bad behavior or otherwise keep him under control, is precisely that of trying to elicit an internal understanding and acceptance that the claims of others bear on his conduct. Reactive feelings such as resentment and indignation, for Watson, have just this implicit goal: to get their target to listen and understand. That means that resenting a psychopath is ultimately misplaced. It is in a basic way like Mr. Magoo’s “ordering” a fence post to get off his property. A message is sent but cannot be received.13
In a moment we will apply this argument to the asshole, albeit in a localized way. We should first consider why the argument doesn’t apply as it stands. As we noted in chapter 2, the main way the asshole differs from the psychopath is that the asshole is capable of using moral concepts and is motivated to action by his use of them.14 He might reason impeccably when his interests aren’t at stake, and in a normatively engaged way. He can advise a friend about whether a certain debt should be repaid or promise kept, and he takes offense at a transgression in a way that shows his ability to appreciate the transgressed expectations as providing powerful reasons for action. His moral reasoning and its motivational pull are distorted only when he figures in the practical equation, when it then matters that he has entitlements that others (such as the advised friend) do not enjoy. Even then, he might reason just fine about his own actions on a good day or be generally reliable, say, in his family life. (Most assholes are not complete assholes. While assholes are generally “systematic” across many social contexts, only those who are assholes in almost every area of life are complete assholes.) What makes an asshole an asshole is the way he uses his real moral capacity. He puts that capacity in the dedicated service of confidence in his entitlement to special advantages by reasoning morally but without morality’s impartiality.
&nb
sp; We are admitting, then, that the asshole has certain general moral capacities of judgment and motivation. Is this to revise our initial proposal that the asshole is blameworthy simply because he has certain moral views? Not exactly. That proposal took for granted that the views are indeed his views, in a certain robust sense: they must be “attributable” to him, in current philosophical parlance. We are saying that general moral capacities come along with the package, but that isn’t yet to say—and this is crucial for present purposes—that the asshole has capacities to see specific things in a certain situation (e.g., not to speak too loudly in public) as required of him.
To probe further: if a sense of entitlement to cut in line were implanted in your mind by a nefarious neuroscientist, it would not necessarily reflect your moral views, even if it effectively prompted you to cut into the line at the post office. The action is still not yours in the sense needed to blame you for doing this particular deed. (We might blame the neuroscientist instead; he made you do it.) So if the asshole’s views are to be his own, they have to be part of his mind in the right way; they have to be owned or his own. And since they are moral views (about his special entitlements), they have to come along with any general capacities of moral reasoning needed for us to intelligibly ascribe to the asshole any moral attitudes at all. Philosophers call this the “holism” of the mental. In general, attitudes are always someone’s attitudes. (Thus Descartes could infer his existence from his thoughts, with cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”) But attitudes such as thoughts, beliefs, and feelings do not come one attitude at a time. We intelligibly ascribe any particular attitude to a person (e.g., a moral belief) only against the background of a web of other attitudes, the web needed for the ascription to make sense as part of a person’s point of view (other moral attitudes and capacities). It sometimes seems that we have a wholly alien thought or feeling, wholly disconnected from anything else we think or feel (e.g., a passing thought of hitting someone one deeply respects over the head), but Freud nicely explained how we can usually tell a story that makes sense of a seemingly alien attitude, whether in terms of a deeper past or things below the surface of conscious awareness. (And, yes, as Freud suggested, it might somehow be about sex. After all, what isn’t?)
Now, even if assholes have certain general moral capacities, we can still apply Watson’s argument about psychopaths in a restricted way. If the asshole is to be properly held responsible for cutting in line, we may say, it isn’t sufficient that he has general capacities to reason morally. He needs the specific capacity to see the particular moral reasons he has not to do the particular thing we blame him for doing; he must be able to see his particular reasons not to cut into this particular line, in this train station, on this afternoon. But now suppose that some asshole can’t see that he is not special when it comes to line cutting, or line cutting in this particular place, or on this particular day. Perhaps that inability results from something in his distant past; he was raised with terrible beatings under oppressive rules and so now bucks against social rules, or—more likely these days—he was constantly told that he could do no wrong, that he and everything he did were completely wonderful.15 Now further suppose we are trying to hold this asshole accountable, where this means trying to get him to understand and perhaps accept that he has sufficient reason to wait in line like everyone else. Well, in that case, ex hypothesi, he won’t get it. Since he won’t be able to understand, it will be misguided to demand that he see things otherwise, just as it will be pointless to morally argue with a psychopath and confused for Mr. Magoo to give orders to a fence post.
What should we say here? Troubling implications loom. Could an asshole simply be making a lot of these innocent mistakes and so never or rarely be an inappropriate object of blame? Could his entrenched sense of entitlement itself make him incapable of seeing that he owes it to others to wait in line? Could he be blameless for being an asshole precisely because he is an asshole?
If that did follow, it would be so odd that we should assume something has gone awry. A good strategy for getting out of a muddle is to carefully review one’s assumptions. To do that, we might ask what is wrong with simply taking a hard line: it makes no difference, we may say, whether or not the asshole has a specific capacity to see what others are particularly owed. We have sufficient grounds for blaming the asshole for cutting in line in the mere fact that he does so while being motivated by certain moral views; he thinks like an asshole, with whatever general moral capacities come along with that sort of moral point of view. As for why he is special when he cuts in line, he mainly makes something up. Simply having his faulty moral perspective is itself enough to render him a proper object of blame, even if he can’t see the moral line-cutting situation in a different way.
To see how this might be right, consider more carefully what blaming the asshole might include. It might of course involve openly addressing him with a specific communicative message, such as “Hey, asshole, there’s a line here. Get to the back of it, asshole.” But there are other ways of blaming. You could avert your eyes when he approaches with a smile. You could refuse to shake his hand. You might withdraw a posture of goodwill that would have otherwise made you hope that things go well for him. You might even resent him, or well up with indignation, but without trying to send him a message of disapproval. You might be resentful or indignant without trying to get him to understand or accept your rightful claims or equal moral status. All these reactions seem to count as ways of blaming him. But none of them depends upon the assumption that he isn’t, in a particular case, simply morally blind. You could avoid him, withdraw goodwill, or resent him all the same.16
If that seems promising, we might then question why accountability should take center stage. Suppose Watson is quite correct that holding someone to account involves an implicit demand that the addressed person recognize one’s status and rightful claims. We are suggesting that one can still rightly blame the asshole, in any number of ways, without trying to hold him accountable. We can even explain why holding the asshole to account should seem to matter: it is a way of seeking recognition, a way of trying to get him to see that we or others are owed certain things. But, as we will see in chapter 5, the quest for recognition needn’t take only that form. Even if the asshole will not or even cannot listen, a minor act of protest can be a way of recognizing oneself by affirming one’s claim to better treatment in a way that any reasonable onlooker would agree with. One might simply swear “asshole!” under one’s breath or in mere thought, for much the same reason one swears out loud while alone in a car: the swearing is itself a way of taking a stand. We can blame and seek recognition, then, whether or not we try to hold him accountable.17
BLAMING INCORRIGIBLES
Our basic proposal, then, is that the asshole is properly blamed simply because he thinks like an asshole—that is, because he has certain mistaken moral views about what he is entitled to. He may even be incapable of seeing, in a particular situation, that he has good and sufficient reason to abide by the particular expectations that normally govern moral equals. Even with such moral blind spots, he is rightly blamed for those very errors in judgment.
We should now consider a different way of resisting this conclusion. One may say that, even if the asshole is incapable of seeing in some particular case, his failure may and often will trace back to his earlier decisions about how seriously to take the claims of others. The asshole is responsible for his particular failure of seeing, in this view, because it reflects that earlier morally culpable decision, much in the way one may be blameworthy for drunk driving and the consequent death of a child because one decided to get behind the wheel instead of calling a cab.
There is something to this, which we will explore in a moment. Yet to say that this is the only way an asshole can be responsible for his moral blind spots would be to unduly limit when we can blame him. The asshole must then have at some point made a previous decision that explains how he could now be morally obli
vious much of the time. But the appropriateness of resenting the guy who has just swerved through three lanes of traffic does not seem to depend on the assumption that he decided to be a guy of that kind in a clear-eyed moment of choice an hour or year or decade before.18 He needn’t even have negligently overlooked how his life would affect others in any grand decision about what kind of person to be. As we suggested above, many assholes are overgrown teenagers who never faced up to the morality of disregarding others in any general and conscious way. (They certainly won’t have chosen a life under the description “life of disregarding others.” They might have said to themselves, “Fuck them!,” which comes to much the same thing.) Still, these assholes are rightly blamed, even if they can’t now see their reasons not to treat others as equals, and even if they never made a decision to become morally oblivious in this way.
Is this unfair? Is it unfair to blame the asshole for failing to see things he perhaps cannot see, as a result of being a kind of person he may have never decided to become? No, this isn’t unfair at all: we treat non-assholes on the same terms. Everyone has the occasional moral lapse. There is something we just didn’t see (I should have said “thank you.” I should have been more careful with a friend’s confidences). Perhaps one couldn’t have seen without hindsight. Still, one is rightly blamed. The friend with compromised confidences will be miffed, and one will naturally apologize for the mistake. That is true even when one has generally made a huge effort at conscientiousness, being on the lookout for important things one knows one doesn’t yet know. Such larger efforts will mitigate blame in a given lapse, perhaps to an extent that no one will make a big deal of it. Perhaps the lapse doesn’t seem especially reflective of the person more generally, and friends will blow it off by saying that “everyone makes mistakes.” Still, we are indeed blameworthy for the lapse, only to a lesser extent. That is why we apologize.