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CRUEL JOKES AND NORMATIVE COMPETENCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2018

David Shoemaker
David Shoemaker*
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Tulane University
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Abstract:

Some moral responsibility theorists think that certain agents (like psychopaths) can be morally responsible—and morally criticizable—for their actions and attitudes even though they lack any competence in grasping or responding to moral norms (a blindness to moral reasons that is typically called “normative incompetence” or, more accurately, “moral incompetence”). In this essay, I provide a new argument against these theorists by exploring the intersection between two normative domains, the funny and the moral. There are, it turns out, interesting and significant ways that properties from each domain bear on reasons to respond in the other, and so there are interesting and significant ways in which people’s responses to cruel jokes or insult humor may be criticizable. I then survey various personality and psychological impairments that seem to undercut criticizability in this intersecting domain. Learning about these people and their impairments yields a wealth of information about what true normative competence actually requires, as well as why competence of the specifically moral variety really is required for moral criticizability.

Keywords

normative competencemoral competencemoral responsibilitymoral criticismhumormoralistic fallacyDark Triadautism
Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , Summer 2018 , pp. 173 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2018 

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Footnotes

*

For really helpful comments on a previous draft of this essay, I’m grateful to Justin D’Arms and Elinor Mason. Michael McKenna went above and beyond by giving detailed and insightful feedback on three drafts. I also got helpful feedback from discussion of the essay with reading groups at the Gothenburg Responsibility Project, at Stockholm University, and at Uppsala University. In particular, from that Swedish tour I’d like to thank Erik Angner, Jessica Brown, Erik Carlson, Sofia Jeppsson, Jens Johansson, Ben Matheson, Per Milam, Jonas Olson, Katherina Berndt Rasmussen, Andrew Reisner, Olle Risberg, Paul Russell, and Andras Szigeti. I got great feedback on the essay from Chad Van Schoelandt, Peter Railton, Cristina Bicchieri, Dan Kelly, Jerry Gaus, John Thrasher, and Ryan Muldoon, among others. And conversations with Michael McKenna, Shaun Nichols, Bas Van Der Vossen, and Steve Wall were particularly productive and had the greatest influence on the final version of the essay.

References

1 Wallace, R. Jay, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 1.Google Scholar Others who essentially accept this formulation as is include David O. Brink, “Immaturity, Normative Competence, and Juvenile Transfer: How (Not) to Punish Minors for Major Crimes,” Texas Law Review 82 (2004): 1569; Kay Nelkin, Dana, Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and McKenna, Michael, Conversation and Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gary Watson also adopts this as one form of normative competence; see Watson, Gary, Agency and Answerability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 152–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Wolf, Susan, “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility,” in Schoeman, Ferdinand, ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 56.Google Scholar

3 Wolf, Susan, Freedom Within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 129.Google Scholar

4 Benson, Paul, “Freedom and Value,” Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 465–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For discussion of the explicit connection between the agential and appraiser characterizations, see Russell, Paul, “Responsibility and the Condition of Moral Sense,” Philosophical Topics 32 (2004): 287–305; McKenna, Conversation and Responsibility; and (more implicitly) Watson, Agency and Answerability.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Albeit not necessarily performed under that description. See Arpaly, Nomy, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Dwyer, Susan, “Moral Competence,” in Murasugi, K. and Stainton, R., eds., Philosophy and Linguistics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999);Google Scholar Nichols, Shaun and Knobe, Joshua, “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions,” Nous 41 (2007): 663–85; andCrossRefGoogle Scholar Talbert, Matthew, “Moral Competence, Moral Blame, and Protest,” The Journal of Ethics 16 (2012): 89–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Brink, 1569.

8 Another appeals to the superficiality of any kind of responsibility that is absent such a condition. See Wolf, “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Moral Responsibility,” and Freedom Within Reason, 39–45.

9 See, e.g., Wallace, and Nelkin.

10 They are led by Scanlon, T. M., in What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998);Google Scholar Smith, Angela M., in “Moral Blame and Moral Protest,” in Justin Coates, D. and Tognazzini, Neal A., eds., Blame: Its Nature and Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 27–48; andGoogle Scholar Talbert, Matt, “Blame and Responsiveness to Moral Reasons: Are Psychopaths Blameworthy?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2008): 516–35, and “Moral Competence, Moral Blame, and Moral Protest.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 See Smith, Angela M., “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: In Defense of a Unified Account,” Ethics 122 (2012): 575–89, and “Moral Blame and Moral Protest”; Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other; and Talbert, “Blame and Responsiveness to Moral Reasons,” and “Moral Competence, Moral Blame, and Protest.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Hieronymi, Pamela, “The Force and Fairness of Blame,” Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 115–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Talbert, “Moral Competence, Moral Blame, and Protest,” 91–93.

14 Ibid., 95–97.

15 Cf., Scanlon, chap. 6.

16 See in particular Shoemaker, David, “Moral Address, Moral Responsibility, and the Boundaries of the Moral Community,” Ethics 118 (2011): 70–108;CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Psychopathy, Responsibility, and the Moral/Conventional Distinction,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49, Supplement (2011): 99–124; and Responsibility from the Margins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 2 and part II.

17 Cf., Jacobson, Daniel, “In Praise of Immoral Art,” Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 I prefer talk of blaming anger for a couple of reasons that I’ve spelled out elsewhere. First, it aptly captures more cases of the blameworthy than mere “resentment” and “indignation.” These latter are cognitively sharpened versions of anger (see D’Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel, “The Significance of Recalcitrant Emotion [or, Anti-quasijudgmentalism],” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 [2003]: 127–45;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Anthropocentric Constraints on Human Value,” Oxford Studies in Metaethics 1 [2006]: 99–126). But there are some cases where anger is apt as a blaming emotion with no cognitive sharpening. Of course, some might think anger captures too much, as it also may seem appropriate for nonagents like computers and the weather. Here I distinguish between two forms of anger—goal-frustration anger and blaming anger—in terms of their distinctive sorts of action tendencies (the former aims at avoiding or eliminating the blockage; the latter aims at communicating the anger, often in a retaliatory way). I then adopt only the latter for talk about responsibility, which is what I’ll do in this essay. See Shoemaker, Responsibility from the Margins, 90–91. See also David Shoemaker, “You Oughta Know! Defending Blaming Anger,” forthcoming in Myisha Cherry and Owen Flanagan, eds., The Moral Psychology of Anger (New York: Rowman and Littlefield); and “The Forgiven,” forthcoming in Michael McKenna, Dana Nelkin, and Brandon Warmke, eds., Forgiveness (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

19 One obviously doesn’t have to be amused to see apt reason for amusement. Consider professional comedians who respond to each others’ jokes by saying, in a completely deadpan way, “That’s funny.”

20 Recently some responsibility theorists have been challenging this claim on metaphysical grounds, maintaining that blaming anger presupposes the kind of libertarian agential capacities we very likely lack. See, e.g., Pereboom, Derk, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gregg Caruso, “Free Will Skepticism and its Implications: An Argument for Optimism,” in Elizabeth Shaw and Derk Pereboom, eds., Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society, forthcoming. I don’t have space here to respond to this sort of worry, but I do so at length in “You Oughta Know! Defending Angry Blame.”

21 McGraw, Peter A. and Warren, Caleb, “Benign Violations Making Immoral Behavior Funny,” Psychological Science 21, no. 8 (2010): 1141–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Many would point to Darwall, Stephen (The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006])Google Scholar as a leading proponent of this view. But Wallace seems an early and influential proponent as well.

23 See Olin, Lauren, “Questions for a Theory of Humor,” Philosophy Compass 11 (2016): 338–50, at 344.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Driver, Julia, “The Suberogatory,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (1992): 286–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Note that these may still, arguably, be wrongs. But they surely aren’t wrongings. If a stranger asks me for a minor favor (like tell her the time), she has no claim on me whatsoever that I do so. Nevertheless, my failing to do so is apt grounds for her blaming anger.

26 I’ve given multiple arguments for why “slights” is indeed the best gloss on “the immoral” for purposes of blaming anger. See Shoemaker, David, “Qualities of Will,” Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (2013): 95–120;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Responsibility from the Margins, chap. 3; “You Oughta Know! Defending Angry Blame”; and “The Forgiven.” In my discussion about the distinct types of reasons in play here, what their role is, and how they contribute to all-things-considered reasons, I am drawing on a series of insightful and influential articles by D’Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel, including: “The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of Emotions,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000): 65–90;CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Anthropocentric Constraints on Human Value”; and “Wrong Kinds of Reason and the Opacity of Normative Force,” Oxford Studies in Metaethics 9 (2014): 215–44.

27 D’Arms and Jacobson, “The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of the Emotions.”

28 Ibid., 68–69.

29 Ronald de Sousa takes a line like this in The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

30 See, e.g., Rabinowicz, Wlodek and Rønnow-Rasmussen, Toni, “The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-attitudes and Value,” Ethics 114 (2004): 391–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I should also add that it’s just false that one can’t be amused by a racist or sexist joke without sharing in the objectionable assumption behind the joke. One can instead recognize the racist or sexist assumption and find the joke funny in light of it even when one doesn’t share in the assumption. For this point, see David Benatar, “Taking Humour (Ethics) Seriously, but Not too Seriously,” Journal of Practical Ethics 2 (2014): 24–43.

31 For powerful arguments against the aesthetic moralists who believe otherwise, see Jacobson, “In Praise of Immoral Art”; D’Arms and Jacobson, “The Moralistic Fallacy”; and D’Arms and Jacobson, “Wrong Kinds of Reason and the Opacity of Normative Force.”

32 For example, in roasting William Shatner for a Comedy Central Roast in 2006, Jeffrey Ross said to a fairly plump Shatner, “You’ve let yourself boldly go.”

33 I’m not saying that for an insult to be a slight it has to have ill intent; there are of course insults involving unintended slights. What I’m saying instead is that the lack of ill intent is often sufficient to make it the case that the insult isn’t a slight, albeit likely in combination with other features (which I won’t detail) of the social context. Indeed, social context is quite relevant sometimes. If a white guy were to walk into the black barbershop and try saying some of the same things as the black guys, it may not be funny at all. I’m grateful to Katherina Berndt Rasmussen and Matt Talbert for discussion of these points.

34 As did Jonas Olson, in conversation.

35 Perhaps the prank’s comic reasons were just outweighed (heavily) by the slighting reasons? Perhaps, in other words, the cruelty actually provided greater all-things-considered reasons to be angry (and not amused)? This might be true, and I don’t want to rely overly much on my response in the text. Indeed, uncertainty here about the “real” story—about whether there are comic reasons for amusement that are outweighed by the slighting reasons or whether there are no comic properties at all in light of the cruelty—is a function of what D’Arms and Jacobson call “normative opacity” (in “Wrong Kinds of Reason and the Opacity of Normative Force”). But if this case doesn’t work for you, surely you can concoct a better one in which there are no comic properties at all in place even though the event had a joke-like structure. Perhaps while in a museum one sees the strange angle of a skeleton’s skull in relation to its body in a comic light until one reads the placard saying that this is what happened when a Nazi broke a Jew’s neck.

36 I’m very grateful to Justin D’Arms for discussion of the points in this and a few previous paragraphs, and I’m also grateful for his suggestion to phrase these as “feints in the direction of a joke.” I’m also grateful to an anonymous referee for making various helpful suggestions about how to express these points more clearly than I had. I should stress again that I’m by no means suggesting that some cruel jokes aren’t funny, only that this sort of cruel “joke” wasn’t.

37 Martin, Rod A., et al., “Individual Differences in Uses of Humor and Their Relation to Psychological Well-Being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire,” Journal of Research in Personality 37 (2003): 48–75;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Veselka, Livia, et al., “Relations Between Humor Styles and the Dark Triad Traits of Personality,” Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010): 772–74;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Martin, Rod A., et al., “Relationships Between the Dark Triad and Humor Styles: A Replication and Extension,” Personality and Individual Differences 52 (2012): 178–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Martin et al., “Individual Differences in Uses of Humor.”

39 While I will occasionally make this explicit in the text, I will be talking here and throughout essentially just about those on the higher end of the autism spectrum.

40 Reddy, Vasudevi, Williams, Emma, and Vaughan, Amy, “Sharing Humor and Laughter in Autism and Down’s Syndrome,” British Journal of Psychology 93 (2002): 219–42, at 228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Samson, Andrea C., Oswald Huber, and Willibald Ruch, “Seven Decades after Hans Asperger’s Observations: A Comprehensive Study of Humor in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders,” Humor 26 (2013): 441–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 Reddy et al., 230.

42 Ibid., 220, 235–36.

43 Holmes, Elizabeth and Willoughby, Teena, “Play Behaviour of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders,” Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability 30 (2005): 156–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Jarrold, Christopher, “A Review of Research into Pretend Play in Autism,” Autism 7 (2003): 379–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

45 Heerey, Erin A., et al., “Understanding Teasing: Lessons from Children with Autism,” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 33 (2005): 55–68, at 62; Samson et al., “Seven Decades after Hans Asperger’s Observations.”CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

46 Wu, Ching-Lin, et al., “Do Individuals with Autism Lack a Sense of Humor? A Study of Humor Comprehension, Appreciation, and Styles among High School Students with Autism,” Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 8 (2014): 1386–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Ibid., 1392. See also Andrea C. Samson, Oswald Huber, and Willibald Ruch, “Teasing, Ridiculing and the Relation to the Fear of Being Laughed at in Individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 41 (2011): 475–83, at 480, who point out that children on the autism spectrum are four times more likely to be bullied than those not on the spectrum.

48 This is not to say that there is an objective fact of the matter about the funny that is being missed; rather, it could be an intersubjective fact that is a function of our humor sensibilities. I discuss these metaethical matters in “Response-Dependent Responsibility; or, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Blame,” Philosophical Review 126 (2017): 481–527.

49 I will use the phrase “incompetence” simply to refer to “quite less than full competence.” It’s a matter of degree I’m talking about when talking about real life marginal agents, as should be obvious. The degree of the “incompetence” will then tend to correspond to the degree of its related psychological impairment.

50 Heerey et al., “Understanding Teasing: Lessons from Children with Autism.”

51 Ibid.

52 Bui, Peter, et al., “The Effects of Empathy on Disparagement Humor,” Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research 21 (2016): 119–26;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Samson, et al., “Teasing, Ridiculing and the Relation to the Fear of Being Laughed at in Individuals with Asperger’s syndrome.”

53 Emmons, Robert, “Factor Analysis and Construct Validity of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory,” Journal of Personality Assessment 48 (1984): 291–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 Hare, R. D., “Comparison of Procedures for the Assessment of Psychopathy,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 53 (1985): 7–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 Martin, , et al., “Relationships between the Dark Triad and Humor Styles: A Replication and Extension,” 178; see also R. Christie and F. L. Geis, Studies in Machiavellianism (New York: Academic Press, 1970).Google Scholar

56 Veselka, “Relations between Humor Styles and the Dark Triad Traits of Personality,” 773.

57 Jones, Daniel N. and Paulhus, Delroy L., “Differentiating the Dark Triad within the Interpersonal Circumplex,” Handbook of Interpersonal Psychology: Theory, Research, Assessment, and Therapeutic Interventions (2011): 249–69.Google Scholar

58 Ibid., 253.

59 Furnham, Adrian, Richards, Steven C., Paulhus, Delroy L., “The Dark Triad of Personality: A 10 Year Review,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7 (2013): 199–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60 Jones, Daniel Nelson and Figueredo, Aurelio Jose, “The Core of Darkness: Uncovering the Heart of the Dark Triad,” European Journal of Personality 27 (2013): 521–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 Jones and Paulhus, “Differentiating the Dark Triad within the Interpersonal Circumplex.”

62 Dozois, David J. A., Martin, Rod A., and Faulkner, Breanne, “Early Maladaptive Schemas, Styles of Humor and Aggression,” Humor 26 (2013): 97–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 Veselka et al., “Relations between Humor Styles and the Dark Triad Traits of Personality”; Martin, et al., “Relationships between the Dark Triad and Humor Styles: A Replication and Extension.” Machiavellianism and psychopathy, but not narcissism, also correlate significantly and positively with self-defeating humor (see ibid.).

64 Hampes, William P., “The Relation between Humor Styles and Empathy,” Europe’s Journal of Psychology 6 (2010): 34–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65 Yip, Jeremy A. and Martin, Rod A., “Sense of Humor, Emotional Intelligence, and Social Competence,” Journal of Research in Personality 40 (2006): 1202–1208, at 1206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66 Ibid. See also Salovey, P. and Mayer, J. D., “Emotional Intelligence,” Imagination, Cognition, and Personality 9 (1990): 185–211;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Salovey, P., Mayer, J. D., and Caruso, D., “The Positive Psychology of Emotional Intelligence,” in Snyder, C. R. and Lopez, S. J., eds., Handbook of Positive Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

67 Izard, C., et al., “Emotion Knowledge as a Predictor of Social Behavior and Academic Competence in Children at Risk,” Psychological Science 12 (2001): 18–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

68 Levine, J., and Zigler, E., “Humor Responses of High and Low Premorbid Competence Alcoholic and Nonalcoholic Patients,” Addictive Behaviors 1 (1976): 139–49;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Masten, A. S., “Humor and Competence in School-Aged Children,” Child Development 57 (1986): 461–73;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pellegrini, D. S., et al., “Correlates of Social and Academic Competence in Middle Childhood,” Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 28 (1987): 699–714;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed and Yip and Martin, “Sense of Humor, Emotional Intelligence, and Social Competence.”

69 Talbert, “Blame and Responsiveness to Moral Reasons: Are Psychopaths Blameworthy?”; Matthew Talbert, “Accountability, Aliens, and Psychopaths: A Reply to Shoemaker,” Ethics 122 (2012): 562–74; Scanlon, T. M., Moral Dimensions (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 178;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Smith, “Moral Blame and Moral Protest.”

70 Collected from discussion with Michael McKenna, Matt Talbert, and Steve Wall.

71 Smith, Angela, in “Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life,” Ethics 115 (2005): 236–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is an exception, as she uses “moral responsibility” to refer to “attributability,” which obtains just in case some action or attitude depends on one’s evaluative judgments. This means one may be “morally responsible” for all sorts of nonmoral actions or attitudes. In her “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment,” Philosophical Studies 138 (2008): 367–92, she discusses her terminology and suggests that the type of responsibility grounding genuine moral criticism is deep, which is a matter of the content of the norms being violated, namely, those articulating what we owe to each other. Take this to be the restricted domain of moral criticizability I’m referring to in the text, then.

72 For discussion of cases in this neighborhood, see Jacobson, “In Praise of Immoral Art.”

73 Paul Russell has criticized the standard view of normative competence as well, adding what I think is the very plausible condition that a genuinely normatively competent agent must not just be able to meet certain agential requirements for being responsible but must also be able competently to hold others responsible. This is to have a true “moral sense” (Russell, “Responsibility and the Condition of Moral Sense”; and “Moral Sense and the Foundations of Responsibility,” in Robert Kane, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011]; see also McKenna). I completely agree. Think of my arguments here as piling on top of Russell’s.