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NARRATIVE CAPACITY AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2019

Meghan Griffith
Meghan Griffith*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Davidson College
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Abstract:

My main aim in this essay is to argue that “narrative capacity” is a genuine feature of our mental lives and a skill that enables us to become full-fledged morally responsible agents. I approach the issue from the standpoint of reasons-responsiveness. Reasons-responsiveness theories center on the idea that moral responsibility requires sufficient sensitivity to reasons. I argue that our capacity to understand and tell stories has an important role to play in this sensitivity. Without such skill we would be cut off from the full range of reasons to which moral agents need access and/or we would be deficient in the ability to weigh the reasons that we recognize. After arguing for the relevance of narrative skill, I argue that understanding the connection between reasons-sensitivity and narrative confers additional benefits. It illuminates important psychological structures (sometimes said to be missing from reasons-responsive accounts) and helps to explain some cases of diminished blame.

Keywords

moral responsibilitynarrativereasons-responsivenessagencyblameworthiness
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Summer 2019 , pp. 93 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2019 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the other contributors to this volume for very helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. Special thanks go to Michael McKenna for extremely helpful written comments on my draft. Special thanks also to an anonymous referee for this journal for a rigorous and insightful set of comments. Some of the research utilized here was undertaken for a project on self-control generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation and administered by Florida State University under the direction of Alfred Mele. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

References

1 Fischer, John Martin, My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility (New York: Oxford, 2006), 120.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., 116. I discuss this narrative aspect of Fischer’s account in Griffith, Meghan, “Based on a True Story: Narrative and the Value of Acting Freely,” Social Theory and Practice 37, no. 1 (2011): 19–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Kane, Robert, “Responsibility, Luck, and Chance: Reflections on Free Will and Indeterminism,” Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 5 (1999): 240.Google Scholar

4 McKenna, Michael, “Reasons-Responsive Theories of Freedom,” in Timpe, Kevin, Griffith, Meghan, and Levy, Neil, eds., Routledge Companion to Free Will (New York: Routledge, 2017), 27–40;Google Scholar Michael McKenna and Chad Van Schoelandt, “Crossing a Mesh Theory with a Reasons-Responsive Theory: Unholy Spawn of an Impending Apocalypse or Love Child of a New Dawn?” in Buckareff, Andrei, Moya, Carlos, and Rosell, Sergi, eds., Agency, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 44–64. Some reasons-responsiveness theories areGoogle Scholar Fischer, John Martin and Ravizza, Mark, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998),CrossRefGoogle Scholar Haji, Ishtayique, Moral Appraisability (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),Google Scholar Nelkin, Dana, Making Sense of Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sartorio, Carolina, Causation and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016),CrossRefGoogle Scholar Vihvelin, Kadri, Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), andCrossRefGoogle Scholar Wolf, Susan, Freedom within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).Google Scholar As McKenna points out, although reasons-responsive theories are often associated with compatibilism, either side of the compatibilist/incompatibilist debate can adopt reasons-responsiveness (with the incompatibilist adding lack of determinism as an additional necessary condition). I will not take a stand on this debate here.

5 Thus, I leave it open that there may be other ways of explaining or enabling our reasons-responsiveness in certain cases. Many thanks to Michael McKenna for extremely helpful comments and suggestions concerning this distinction and this way of framing my thesis. I also leave it open that there are agents who never develop robust narrative skill (or who lose it) but nevertheless can be held responsible for a number of their actions. But my thinking here suggests that these agents have a narrowed range of responsible actions because they have a narrowed range of reasons to which they are sensitive, and/or these agents are less blameworthy when responsible because it is more difficult for them to do what they ought. (I say more about this below).

6 See Rubin, David C. and Greenberg, Daniel L., “The Role of Narrative in Recollection: A View from Cognitive Psychology and Neuropsychology,” in Fireman, Gary D., McVay, Ted E. Jr., and Flanagan, Owen J., eds., Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar for interesting discussion about how, once in place, narrative reasoning can be difficult to disrupt. It is typically preserved in aphasia as well as in a number of kinds of memory loss (70-71). It can occur without language, through images (62), and appears (for reasons I hope are clear in my discussion) to be distinct from mere causal reasoning.

7 See David Velleman, J., “Narrative Explanation,” Philosophical Review 112, no. 1 (2003): 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See Rubin and Greenberg, “The Role of Narrative in Recollection,” 62.

9 See Nelson, Katherine, “Narrative and the Emergence of a Consciousness of Self,” in Fireman, Gary D., McVay, Ted E. Jr., and Flanagan, Owen J., eds., Narrative and Consciousness: Literature, Psychology, and the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25.Google Scholar

10 Habermas, Tilmann and Bluck, Susan, “Getting a Life: The Emergence of the Life Story in Adolescence,” Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000): 752.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

11 See Nelson, “Narrative and the Emergence of a Consciousness of Self,” who adopts these terms from Bruner.

12 Rubin and Greenberg highlight this feature, citing the work of Kintsch and Van Dijk (1975) in Rubin and Greenberg, “The Role of Narrative in Recollection,” 60.

13 This term comes from Rosati, Connie, “The Story of a Life,” Social Philosophy and Policy 30, nos. 1-2 (2013): 34.Google Scholar

14 Although they do not highlight the emotional component, Habermas and Bluck categorize the coherence of narratives in terms of temporal, causal, thematic, and biographical (which refers to how well one understands the “cultural norms of biography”) (750-51).

15 This idea of events being “conditioned” by their context comes from Marya Schechtman, who provides a narrative account of personal identity. See Schechtman, Marya, “Stories, Lives, and Basic Survival: A Refinement and Defense of the Narrative View,” in Hutto, Daniel D., ed., Narrative and Understanding Persons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 162.Google Scholar This also echoes the Velleman account utilized by Fischer in discussing the value of self-expression. See Fischer, My Way, 116 (quoted above).

16 Hutto, Daniel, “The Narrative Practice Hypothesis: Origins and Applications of Folk Psychology,” in Hutto, Daniel D., ed., Narrative and Understanding Persons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 47. See alsoCrossRefGoogle Scholar Fivush, Robin, “The Development of Autobiographical Memory,” Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 559–82.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

17 Fivush, “The Development of Autobiographical Memory,” 566.

18 Hutto, “The Narrative Practice Hypothesis,” 53. Hutto uses this to argue against the “theory theory” of folk psychology. By appealing to his claims here I do not mean to be taking a side in that particular debate.

19 Kennett, Jeanette and Matthews, Steve, “Mental Time Travel, Agency and Responsibility,” in Broome, Matthew and Bortolotti, Lisa, eds., Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience: Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 330.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 333. See also Rubin and Greenberg, “The Role of Narrative in Recollection,” 62, for the claim that autobiographical memory can occur as specific memories with no narrative structure. Following Kennett and Matthews, I am distinguishing this from mental time travel.

21 See Fivush, “The Development of Autobiographical Memory,” 573.

22 I avoid the use of the term “autobiographical memory” because it is used inconsistently. Sometimes it is used synonymously with mental time travel, sometimes with the life story capacity, and sometimes with neither—such as in autobiographical memories with no narrative structure at all—e.g., the “snapshot” memories mentioned above.

23 McAdams, Dan P., “The Psychology of Life Stories, Review of General Psychology 5, no. 2 (2001): 100–122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Habermas, Tilmann and Silveira, Cybele de, “The Development of Global Coherence in Life Narratives Across Adolescence: Temporal, Causal, and Thematic Aspects,” Developmental Psychology 44, no. 3 (2008): 719.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

25 Her view in some ways is similar to Hutto’s in that she is arguing against “theory-theory.” She is also arguing against simulation theory.

26 McGeer, Victoria, “Psycho-practice, Psycho-theory and the Contrastive Case of Autism: How Practices of Mind become Second-Nature,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 5–7 (2001): 111.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 120. She here also discusses Gilbert Ryle’s concept of “knowing how.”

28 As I see it, narrative capacity has some overlap with McGeer’s understanding of folk psychological practices, but is not the same capacity.

29 See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control.

30 Ibid., 65–66.

31 Ibid., 76.

32 Many thanks to Jenann Ismael for this example and for the very helpful articulation of this point that explanations at the level of action seem to require us to use narrative.

33 Much of my thinking here is inspired by Kennett and Matthews who argue persuasively and insightfully that mental time travel is needed for moral agency and governance. See Kennett and Matthews, “Mental Time Travel, Agency and Responsibility.”

34 Thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection.

35 McGeer, Victoria, “Varieties of Moral Agency: Lessons from Autism (and Psychopathy),” Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ed., Moral Psychology, Volume 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotions, Brain Disorders, and Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 230.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 233. Neil Levy has a somewhat different take. He argues that psychopaths “cannot understand the impairment to autonomy their actions cause, because they cannot understand what it is to be fully autonomous.” See Levy, Neil, “Psychopaths and Blame: The Argument from Content,” Philosophical Psychology 27, no. 3 (2014): 363.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

37 But perhaps there is a worry from the other direction. In other words, couldn’t it be that those without narrative ability might still have the ability to act on moral reasons (for instance those with impairments in theory of mind or impairments in memory)? (Thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection). Santiago Amaya mentions the famous case of a patient with no episodic memory and no mental time travel ability who is nonetheless able to perform as well as healthy subjects on moral judgment tests (and, surprisingly, future discounting tests!). As mentioned at the outset, my view can accommodate these possibilities. Those deficient in narrative can likely figure out alternative methods to arrive at a recognition of moral reasons. Amaya makes the intriguing suggestion that perhaps certain capacities are only needed when we are learning. But in any case, I do not think these cases show that narrative capacity is not how we are able to be sensitive to reasons in the typical cases. Furthermore, even if someone no longer needs narrative capacity in most cases, it seems unlikely that there would not be cases in which it is either difficult to recognize the right reasons or difficult to weight them properly.

38 See Shoemaker, David, “Empathic Self-Control,” forthcoming in Mele, Alfred, ed., Surrounding Self-Control (New York: Oxford University Press),Google Scholar Shoemaker, David, Responsibility from the Margins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), Kennett and Matthews, “Mental Time Travel, Agency and Responsibility,” andCrossRefGoogle Scholar Talbert, Matthew, “Blame and Responsiveness to Moral Reasons: Are Psychopaths Blameworthy?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2008): 516–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although “caring” and “empathy” are not synonymous, I group them together here on the assumption that the psychopath’s failure to have emotional empathy is closely connected to his failure to care about himself or others (thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection).

39 Kennett and Matthews, “Mental Time Travel, Agency and Responsibility,” 346. For a discussion about the relevance of their claims with respect to self-control, see Griffith, “Children, Responsibility for Self-Control Failures, and Narrative Capacity,” forthcoming in Alfred R. Mele, ed., Surrounding Self-Control (New York: Oxford University Press).

40 Kennett and Matthews, “Mental Time Travel, Agency and Responsibility, 346.

41 See Talbert, “Blame and Responsiveness to Moral Reasons,” for an interesting argument to the conclusion that psychopaths are not exempt from responsibility. One of Talbert’s claims is that their reasoning is sufficient in the required ways (they can achieve goals, reason in terms of ends and means, and so on). It is worth pointing out that (setting aside the requirement for moral reasons receptivity) whether psychopaths are exempt will rely on empirical information about their ability to reason. And it is plausible to think that perhaps some psychopaths are more capable of the relevant reasoning than others.

42 Thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection.

43 This is why we are able to hold a very weak-willed individual responsible for what she does. This has caused some controversy for their view, however, based on examples of weak reactivity in which we intuitively find no responsibility. So, for example, a highly agoraphobic person might be able to leave his house if it were on fire, but not in any other circumstance (See Mele, Alfred R., “Fischer and Ravizza on Moral Responsibility,” The Journal of Ethics 10, no. 3 [2006]: 283–94.).CrossRefGoogle Scholar If this is the only circumstance, we might think that this agent is too much in the grips of his phobia to be responsible, even though the agent is weakly reactive. Fischer has, I think, conceded this point. But it is a difficult question. Where do we draw the line for the appropriate amount of reactivity?

44 Although it is not synonymous with reactivity for various reasons, I argue elsewhere that narrative capacity bolsters self-control in a number of important ways. See Meghan Griffith, “Children, Responsibility for Self-Control Failures, and Narrative Capacity.” My argument in that paper is also influenced by Kennett and Matthews, “Mental Time Travel, Agency and Responsibility.”

45 See Hofmann, Wilhelm, Friese, Malte, Schmeichel, Brandon J., and Baddeley, Alan D., “Working Memory and Self-Regulation,” in Baumeister, Roy F. and Vohs, Kathleen D., eds., Handbook of Self-Regulation, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2011) andGoogle Scholar Rosario Rueda, M., Posner, Michael I., and Rothbart, Mary K., “Attentional Control and Self-Regulation,” in Baumeister, Roy F. and Vohs, Kathleen D., eds., Handbook of Self-Regulation, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2011).Google Scholar

46 Kennett and Matthews, “Mental Time Travel, Agency and Responsibility,” 346.

47 See Shoemaker, Responsibility from the Margins.

48 See Alexander Soutschek, Christian C. Ruff, Tina Strombach, Tobias Kalenscher, and Philippe N. Tobler, “Brain Stimulation Reveals Crucial Role of Overcoming Self-Centeredness in Self-Control,” Science Advances 2, no. 10 (2016). Ed Yong, “Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self,” The Atlantic, October 6, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/self-control-is-just-empathy-with-a-future-you/509726/; Shoemaker, Responsibility from the Margins; and Shoemaker, “Empathic Self-Control.”

49 There appear to be similarities to arguments for the practical necessity of unified agency. See, for example, Christine M. Korsgaard, “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 18, no. 2 (1989): 101–132. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point and this reference. I do not see such views as in competition with mine. From what I can tell, the two kinds of views are consistent with one another, but serve somewhat diverging aims. For example, as I understand her, Korsgaard aims to show what our conceptions of personhood and agency require (103), whereas I aim to show how we are able to respond to the right kinds of reasons so as to become morally responsible agents. Narrative capacity is a skill. Its status as a skill also highlights how an increase in proficiency enables important capabilities other than agential unity.

50 McKenna and Van Schoelandt, “Crossing a Mesh Theory with a Reasons-Responsive Theory,” 45.

51 Ibid., 53.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., 55.

54 Ibid.

55 Nelkin, Dana Kay, “Difficulty and Degrees of Moral Praiseworthiness and Blameworthiness,” Nous 50, no. 2 (2016): 356–78, doi: 10.1111/nous.12079, andCrossRefGoogle Scholar Faraci, David and Shoemaker, David, “Huck vs. JoJo: Moral Ignorance and the (A)symmetry of Praise and Blame,” in Lombrozo, Tania, Knobe, Joshua, and Nichols, Shaun, eds., Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56 See Fischer and Ravizza, Responsibility and Control, 80.

57 Shoemaker, Responsibility from the Margins, 76.

58 See Pasupathi, Monisha and Wainryb, Cecilia, “Developing Moral Agency through Narrative,” Human Development 53 (2010): 60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mixed cases involve competing moral and nonmoral considerations. Moral concerns, such as considerations of fairness or of the needs of others, are weighed against things like personal desires, traditions, or “conventional goals” (59).

59 Shoemaker, Responsibility from the Margins, 75.

60 Ibid., 75.

61 Wainryb, Cecilia, Brehl, Beverly A., Matwin, Sonia, Sokol, Bryan W., and Hammond, Stuart, “Being Hurt and Hurting Others: Children’s Narrative Accounts and Moral Judgments of Their Own Interpersonal Conflicts,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 70, no. 3 (2005): 67.Google ScholarPubMed

62 We might need to be careful here in terms of thinking about general capacities and one’s ability to exercise them. See Nelkin, Dana, Making Sense of Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar But the main point here is that when adults have trouble weighing reasons, it is not always the result of some capacity that is not yet fully developed, whereas in many cases with children, it will be.

63 One question is whether the narrative account does not capture the phenomenon of alienation because it depends too heavily on the subjective attitudes of the agent (thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection). I am not sure, and I think more work needs to be done on this question. But there may be ways for the narrative theorist to allow for wants or evaluations that exist below the level of conscious assessment but that nonetheless require a context for such assessment. In any case, I am not sure this is an entirely unique problem for the narrative account as compared to some mesh views.

64 Frankfurt, Harry, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” The Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (1971): 5–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65 Thanks to Michael McKenna for this suggestion.

66 Thanks to David Shoemaker for a helpful comment (on a different paper) on this distinction.

67 We need to be a bit careful here, though. The right reasons for my action should be other-regarding, not self-regarding (thanks to Dana Nelkin for this point). But I think we can still say that the weights of such other-regarding reasons can be legitimately influenced by considerations about the kind of agent I want to be.

68 Perhaps supportive of this point is Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis, which Dana Nelkin discusses within the context of her “rational abilities” view of responsibility. Nelkin says that “according to this theory . . . the absence of emotional markers makes it harder to assign value and disvalue to various alternatives, and decision making suffers dramatically as a result” (see Nelkin, Making Sense of Responsibility, 23). Agnieszka Jaworska also discusses Damasio’s work and the connection between secondary emotions and the ability to govern behavior (see Jaworska, Agnieszka, “Caring and Internality,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74, no. 3 [2007]: 529–68).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Nelkin argues that her “rational abilities” view is able to accommodate the role of emotional capacities. She suggests that the rational abilities required for responsibility may “require a range of perceptual, cognitive and emotional capacities, at least for human beings” (Nelkin, Making Sense of Responsibility, 27). This is consistent, I think, with my claim that narrative capacities are required for reasons-responsiveness.

69 This is not to imply that reasons-type views of responsibility do not already do this. Dana Nelkin provides a “rational abilities” view, similar in some ways to the Fischer-Ravizza view, but also importantly distinct. She claims that the rational abilities we need for moral responsibility “may in turn require a range of perceptual, cognitive and emotional capacities, at least for human beings” (see Nelkin, Making Sense of Responsibility, 27) and spends some time discussing kinds of abilities.

70 Thanks to Sean McKeever for a discussion about narrative as undermining self-governance.

71 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Notes from Underground, trans. Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa (New York: Vintage Classics, 1993), 126–27.Google Scholar

72 Paul Bloom argues that empathy can have significant problematic effects on behavior. See, for example, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Ecco, 2016).