Blame and uncertainty

[Please help save the life and career of my friend by signing the petition here]

Rosen has an argument for blame skepticism- the view that, at least in most cases, we do not have enough information to blame anyone for wrongdoing. The paper is several thousand words long, so clearly I won’t be able to do it justice here, and there’s a regress element that adds complexity, but essentially the idea is this:

What must you think in order to judge that Bill, for example, is responsible for lying to his wife? You must think that at the time of action, either he knew that he had decisive reason not to lie, or if he did not know this, that his ignorance was the upshot of some prior bad action done in full knowledge of every pertinent fact or norm. You must think, in other words, that his bad action either is, or derives from, an episode of genuine, full-strength akrasia.

To be clear the argument is not we lack free will, therefore we are never to blame for anything. That would be an important argument, but one that is already done to death. Rather, Rosen’s argument is that even granted the existence of free will, we never know in any particular case whether wrongdoing was freely, knowingly chosen out of weakness of the will, and hence culpable.

I once heard a philosopher comment that when you start playing Rosen’s game and arguing about the exactitudes of knowledge you’re bound to lose, and instead, you have to just insist that Bill is to blame.

But I think, maybe on somewhat different grounds to Rosen, that it’s often genuinely an open question whether someone engaged in deliberate wrongdoing. Unlike Rosen, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to hold this is a typical condition of evaluating wrongdoing, but I think it holds in some of the most important cases- cases of radical wrongdoing- war crimes, Jeffrey Dahmer, that sort of thing.

Unlike Rosen, I’m not sure I’d frame things in terms of Akrasia. I don’t have a fully-fledged view of what it takes to do wrong, although I am a compatibilist. Let me lay it out this way instead, we will be neutral with respect to the question of what the correct theory of intentional wrongdoing is:

Consider a person who has at face value, intentionally committed a very serious wrong. There is considerable uncertainty in my mind as to whether an idealized version of myself who:

1. Knew all the facts of the case, including what the wrongdoer was thinking and their process of deliberation.

2. Held the ‘final theory’ of wrongful action- the theory that I would accept after a process of total reflective equilibrium on all moral feelings, linguistic facts, and empirical truths would hold.

Would say that the wrongdoer did wrong intentionally and was blameworthy.

Partly this is based on my uncertainty about the correct theory of wrongdoing, but mostly it reflects a deep conviction of mine that we know far less about psychology and the wellsprings of actions than we realize. The heart is deceitful in all things. Partly also it reflects having read through a bunch of criminal cases and left with more uncertainty than I came in with about what exactly the wrongdoer was thinking and how they understood what they were doing- especially in the moment, and not just when grappling with memory later.

We don’t really understand how people see themselves and their situation while they are committing horrific crimes. Even in the simplest cases, Human psychology at is a mystery to us, and this is more true than ever in ‘unusual’ cases. It is plausible to me that many, for example, murders are committed in a state of ignorance or temporary insanity due to the strange and overwhelming pressures of that situation and those selves. To adopt an evolutionary perspective for a moment, there might be good reasons the brain would ‘turn off’ normal decision-making methods in such contexts.

Now I could be wrong about any of this. Maybe someone who has made a deeper study of criminal psychology than me can confirm, one way or the other, how people in these situations typically think, and moreover, it will seem to us that they are acting wrongfully at least if anyone ever does. But as of the time of writing this post, I genuinely do not have this information one way or the other- and I suspect no one does.

I really don’t think this is mere intransigence on my part. Think about the depth of the twin mysteries involved:

1. The question of how an idealized version of yourself would understand blame.

2. The depths of forensic psychology and human psychology in general.

My fellow Substackers: Isha Yiras Hashem and Rebbetzin Devorah Fastag wrote a piece once that I often think about: Stop Baseless Hatred. Essentially their argument, which they draw from the Jewish tradition is that almost all hatred is baseless hatred, in the sense that the epistemic conditions are not met, because most of the things that make us hate others are not truly grounded in evil or maliciousness by the other person. This is part of a very long religious tradition that extends far beyond Abrahamic monotheisms according to which we shouldn’t judge because we have less than total evidence and there are other, more competent supernatural appraisers available. But I think our evidence goes far below the bar of total evidence- I’m not even wholly convinced it’s 50-50.

What about the practical matter of blaming day-to-day? When it comes to practical blame, I take a position similar to Susan Wolf. Sometimes people do things that is expressive of their long-term tendencies, not a result of medical problems, not of situational weirdness, etc., and in such cases, we should punish them for broadly pragmatic reasons- general and specific deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation, etc. But when it comes to the higher question of punishing to correct a cosmic imbalance, I don’t believe we have sufficient certainty. Indeed, I have a paper under review arguing that the correct bar for punishment just done for the sake of punishment is absolute certainty something no one should ever feel about any empirical matter, and arguably not even about the a priori. Even were the bar far below absolute certainty- for example, “beyond reasonable doubt” my sense is, that we still would not reach the requirements needed for retributive punishment.