The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility (MIT Press) by Bruce N. Waller

Author:Bruce N. Waller [Waller, Bruce N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2014-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

This distinction itself would require us to regard some agents as the passive victims of their faulty judgments. … I think this is a dangerously patronizing and disrespectful stance to take toward another human being, one that we should be very reluctant to resort to in practice. (2008, 390)

Locking Harris in a cage until we drag him out and strap him down in an execution chamber: this shows respect for him as a human being. But recognizing that Harris is, like all of us, shaped by forces that were ultimately beyond his control: that is a patronizing and disrespectful stance. There is no doubt that Angela Smith would harshly condemn the horrific treatment of Robert Harris, from the cruel treatment he received from his infancy through his adolescence through his imprisoned young adulthood and his death as a terrified and utterly helpless person awaiting the deliberate machinations of the executioner. But this argument concerning “disrespect” is precisely the argument used by theorists from Herbert Morris (1968) to C. S. Lewis (1971) to Michael S. Moore (1997) to justify harsh criminal punishment, including capital punishment. Thus Lewis: “But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better,’ is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image” (1971, 246). Robert Harris lived and died as a rational person who can think and plan and who has his own values and who meets the standards of competence and who is thus qualified for admission to the “plateau of moral responsibility.” Certainly it would be wrong and disrespectful to treat Harris as a nonrational being. Robert Harris’s sister, for example, recognized that he had become a cruel person who had no concern for others; but she also recognized that he could reason, and she did not adopt an objective attitude toward him, instead regarding him as a badly misshapen person with his own brutal values and even his own narrative account of his life and character (as one who had purposefully chosen “the road to hell”).

Robert Harris was not morally responsible for his flawed character, his harsh attitudes, or his vicious behavior, but that is not because he was demented and wholly nonrational and, thus, fit only for objective attitudes; rather, it is because when we look carefully at Harris’s character and capacities, we recognize that his rationality—in common with our own—is not a transcendent, limitless power capable of overcoming all forces, triumphing over everything that had shaped him, and transforming him into a new being. Robert Harris has rational abilities, certainly; he can make plans, and he can to some degree reflectively approve of his own brutal character; indeed, by his sister’s report, he may have regarded himself as a fiercely independent man who chose evil as his good: “He told me he had his chance, he took the road to hell and there’s nothing more to say” (Watson 1987, 270). In any case, Robert Harris could reflect on and approve of his own cruel nature.

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