Omitting and responsibility

People are responsible for what they do but are they also responsible for what they omit to do? That’s what I want to discuss in this blog.
Omitting is not acting in a situation where you could have acted. Omitting can also be described as allowing that something happens. A man beats his wife and nobody interferes. A child has fallen in a canal and a passer-by who sees it refrains from jumping after her or looking for help. There can be good reasons for doing nothing but if someone refrains from acting where s/he could and should, we call it “omission” and s/he can be blamed for it. If that’s right, we can ask the question of responsibility also in cases of omitting, and not only when someone actively performs an action.
Take now these cases:
Case 1: Victim is drowning and Agent is the only person around. The sea is infested with sharks and Agent just had seen one swimming by. Agent decides not to spring in the water and help Victim, and Victim dies. Since it would have been almost certain that the sharks would have attacked Agent and would have prevented Agent from saving Victim, I think that nobody will blame Agent for omitting to act and hold him responsible for the death of Victim.
Case 2: Same situation but agent does not know that the sea is infested with sharks and he hasn’t seen one. Again Agent decides to do nothing and Victim dies. Is Victim to be blamed for that and to be hold responsible for Victim’s death? Some philosophers say “no”, for the death of Victim couldn’t have been prevented, anyhow. As Willemsen (2020), p. 233 (who doesn’t endorse this view as such) explains: “In order to be morally responsible for the consequences of an omission … the agent needs to be able to perform a relevant action that would have prevented the outcome”, and that’s not the case. Although this sounds reasonable, nevertheless it’s a bit counterintuitive and I think that many readers of this blog will not agree.
What’s the problem then? Why are we hesitating to say that in Case 2 Agent is not responsible for Victim’s death? In order to make this clear, let’s look a bit closer at the cases. Then we see that they are different in an important way. In Case 1 Agent refrained from acting because it would have made no sense to do so and he knew it. If he had tried to save Victim and had sprung in the sea, sharks would have attacked him and might have killed him. Therefore, his omitting to act was involuntarily. Case 2 says nothing about the reasons why Agent didn’t act, but given the description of the case as it is, it would have been reasonable for Agent to spring in the water, for he didn’t know about the sharks. At least he could have tried to save Victim. The sharks would have attacked him and let’s hope that he would have escaped, but Agent in Case 2 didn’t know that this could happen. So, it’s true that Agent in Case 2 cannot be held responsible – at least morally responsible – for the death of Victim, but we can hold him (morally) responsible for not having tried to safe Victim. In Case 1, however, Agent knew already in advance that trying to save Victim would have no sense, and so for him trying was no option. Therefore Agent cannot be held (morally) responsible for not having given it a try in Case 1.
In an important sense we cannot hold Agent responsible for Victim’s death in both cases: He didn’t bring him in his perilous situation. Nonetheless, we can ask whether Agent was morally responsible for Victim’s death in the sense that Agent could have prevented it. When doing so we must realize that “moral responsibility” can be understood in two ways. It can refer to the results or consequences of an action (consequential moral responsibility) or it can refer to the action as such (actional responsibility). In the former sense Agent is not responsible for Victim’s death, neither in Case 1, nor in Case 2. In Case 2, however, we can hold Agent responsible in the latter sense, while in Case 1 nothing can be held against Agent that way. 

Source and inspiration
- Pascale Willemsen, “The Relevance of Alternate Possibilities for Moral Responsibility for Actions and Omissions”, in Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. Volume Three. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; pp. 232-274.

Random quote

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

W.I.Thomas (1863-1947)

Being responsible for what you do

Whether an agent is responsible for what s/he does depends on whether s/he did what s/he did intentionally or whether what s/he did happened to him or her. We have seen this in my last blog. In my argument I referred to Donald Davidson and, without saying so, I have also made use of what Davidson has written about the subject, although I didn’t fully follow his line of reasoning. Davidson was one of those who discussed the relationship between intentionally acting and responsibility from an analytical philosophical perspective, but as such the theme is already as old as philosophy. Look for example what Aristotle said about it at the beginning of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics:
“Since virtue is concerned with passions and actions, and on voluntary passions and actions praise and blame are bestowed, on those that are involuntary pardon, and sometimes also pity, to distinguish the voluntary and the involuntary is presumably necessary for those who are studying the nature of virtue, and useful also for legislators with a view to the assigning both of honours and of punishments. Those things, then, are thought involuntary, which take place under compulsion or owing to ignorance; and that is compulsory of which the moving principle is outside, being a principle in which nothing is contributed by the person who is acting or is feeling the passion, e.g. if he were to be carried somewhere by a wind, or by men who had him in their power.” (III 1109b30-1110a4)
So, according to Aristotle, actions are voluntary or they are involuntary and this makes whether we are or are not responsible for them. So simple it is. Or isn’t it? As I have argued in some old blogs (for example in Digging your garden alone or Do pure individual intentions and actions exist?) actions rarely are isolated events but usually they are embedded in or at least depend on what others do or have done. This has also been seen by Aristotle, for next he says:
“With regard to the things that are done from fear of greater evils or for some noble object (e.g. if a tyrant were to order one to do something base, having one's parents and children in his power, and if one did the action they were to be saved, but otherwise would be put to death), it may be debated whether such actions are involuntary or voluntary.” (III 1110a4-8) In other words, you can be forced by the circumstances to do what you don’t like to do, even if in theory you are free to act in a different way, although no one expects you to do so. Usually things are not as simple as a dichotomy can make you think they are. Pure dichotomies are exceptional.
Rather than going on with what Aristotle says about the question, I want to give some examples in order to clarify the present problem a bit (the examples are taken from Manninen 2019).
The first example is rather clear: A person gets in her car and goes driving. Suddenly she gets a stroke and loses the control of her car and causes a collision that results in fatalities. Then the driver is causally responsible for the collision, but most of us will agree that morally she isn’t: The collision happened by factors beyond the driver’s control.
The second example is the much-discussed Eichmann case. Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death for his contribution to the holocaust. He stated, however (again I follow Manninen here): “There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders.” Orders are orders, aren’t they? Not so, it was judged, and Eichmann was hanged, among other things on account of the Nuremberg Principle IV, saying: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” So, even if you are ordered to do something, you remain personally responsible for the moral consequences of what you do, unless there is reasonably no escape. The “unless” is crucial and gives ground for discussion about when and whether an agent really has acted freely. That’s why the Eichmann case has been so much discussed.
The upshot is that responsibility for what you do often depends on the context in which the deed is done, for the context often makes whether what you do is an intentional action or something that happens to you. Whether a deed is intentional depends on how it seems to others, rightly or mistakenly. 

Sources
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.mb.txt.
- Tuomas W. Manninen, “Diminished Responsibility”, in Arp, Robert; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019; pp. 145-148.

Random Quote

Every society as a whole learns that happiness cannot be equated with development.

Michel de Certeau (1925-1986)

Action, deed and responsibility

The question what an action is has long been a hot topic in action theory. Recently yet, I have written a blog about it (see my blog “What is an action?”). But take now this case: A hired assassin kills the wrong person, a thing that now and then happens. To keep my example simple, let’s say that the assassin kills by mistake a passer-by, when pointing at his intended victim. Then the question is: What action did the shooter perform? This is not only a philosophical question, but it is also important to know if we want to ascribe responsibility and administer punishment.Generally we can say that an action is a piece of behaviour with an intention, as I have explained in my blog just mentioned. But suppose that a policeman pushed the shooter in his back at the moment that the man pulled the trigger. It made that the shooter missed his intended victim and killed by accident the passer-by. Can we attribute then the killing of the passer-by to the shooter? For isn’t it so that the shooter did not intend to do so and that he didn’t aim at the passer-by and that he was pushed in his back?Take this: A woman has a cup of coffee in her hand and she spills the coffee. She can have done it intentionally, she can have done it unintentionally, someone pushed intentionally against her hand, someone did this unintentionally, etc. In the third and fourth cases we wouldn’t say that it was the woman who spilled the coffee. In the same way, we can say that in case the shooter got a push in his back it wasn’t he who killed the passer-by. If it was someone who killed the passer-by, it was the pusher, so the policeman. Right? Is this true even if the policeman wanted to prevent that the shooter would kill the intended victim? Maybe, we should say the policeman should have been more careful and that he can be blamed for that, but nevertheless we would say that it was the shooter who killed the passer-by. Even more, the shooter can be punished for having killed the passer-by. Why? For isn’t it so that the shooter didn’t intend to kill the passer-by, as we have seen, and wouldn’t have shot if he had known before that he would have been pushed in his back?Let’s compare again the coffee spiller and the shooter. The coffee spiller did not intend to spill the coffee, i.e. she did not intend to move her hand that way that she would spill the coffee. Moreover, she couldn’t expect that someone would push against his hand. So far, the cases of the shooter and the coffee spiller are analogous: both do what they do unintentionally, at least if we look at the consequences of what they do. The shooter, however, did have the intention to move his hand that way that he would shoot, albeit in a different manner. He hadn’t expected that someone would push his back, indeed, but the shooting as such was intentional, or, as I want to say, the deed of shooting was intentional. On the other hand, the spilling of the coffee was simply a movement of her hand for the spiller: It happened to her. The hand movement wasn’t a deed of hers The shooting, however, didn’t merely happen but was done by the shooter himself and someone who shoots knows that by shooting much can go wrong, like that there is a chance that he will miss. This shooting that made that a passer-by was killed was an intentional act, while the hand movement that led to spilling the coffee was not (for the coffee spiller). And, as Donald Davidson says: “a man is the agent of an act if what he does can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional.” (p. 46) Therefore, although in a sense we can say that the killing of the passer-by was not an action the shooter performed (for it wasn’t his intention to perform this action), it was something that the shooter did, while the spilling the coffee was not something that the coffee spiller did, since it merely happened to her. That is why the shooter is responsible for the consequences of his shooting while the coffee spiller isn’t. And maybe the punishment for the shooter will be even more severe for having killed an innocent man than if he had killed his intended victim. But that’s what the court decides. 

Source
Davidson, Donald, “Agency”, in Essays on actions and events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; pp. 43-61.

Random quote

We like to give a beautiful name to what belongs to us and to use mean words for what belongs to others. 

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)

The Covid Paradox

When browsing the internet, I stumbled on a Covid paradox. Some examples:

1) “The World Health Organization’s Europe director Hans Kluge said Thursday the continent is in the midst of what he calls the COVID-19 ‘pandemic paradox,’ in which vaccine programs offer remarkable hope, while emerging variants present greater uncertainty and risk. … ‘This paradox, where communities sense an end is in sight with the vaccine, but at the same time are called to adhere to restrictive measures in the face of a new threat, is causing tension, angst, fatigue and confusion…,’ Kluge said.” (see note 1).
2) Another article, titled “The COVID Paradox” (see note 2), says that nobody should overstate the “pain and loss of this era in human history. … When organisational life is normal, patterns often continue because they existed before. When crisis happens, however, what was once intractable becomes open. Cultural norms can be analysed and adjusted. Leaders who did not have time or appetite for change demand new ways of thinking and working.” In other words, the pandemic doesn’t bring only misery, but, paradoxically, it creates also chances for new developments.
3) In another article titled “The Covid Paradox” (see note 3), the tenor is the same, although the accent is somewhat different: “While in the short run, one would arguably return to pre-Covid behavior patterns quite quickly, we are likely to see more fundamental changes play out in the long run. The long-term impact of Covid is likely to be far more significant than its immediate effect in the next year or two. Reactive change tends to feel significant, but is not necessarily durable, but the Covid experience will produce organic shifts in mindsets that will make themselves manifest over a much longer period of time. Covid will be transformative, but not in the way that it was imagined a few months ago.” 

Actually, we have different paradoxes here. The COVID-19 pandemic paradox in 1) says that the assumed solution of the pandemic doesn’t bring a solution. This sounds paradoxical, indeed, but I think that we cannot speak of a paradox here. The present vaccines help to stop only one strain of the coronavirus, but not possible new strains, so they solve only a part of the problem, and there is nothing paradoxical in this. We simply need better solutions, like improved vaccines, and then as yet the restrictions can be lifted.
Cases 2 and 3 have more the air of being paradoxes, and in a sense they are. On the other hand, they simply describe normal facts of life. The difference is that the scale of the pandemic is much larger. When the road to the left is blocked, we choose the road to the right. When in a supermarket the shelf with rice is empty, we buy millet or potatoes. Your attention is drawn to new options and maybe it leads to new behaviour. Nobody calls this paradoxical.

 Nevertheless, there is at least one a paradox that is relevant in this pandemic: the Sorites paradox. Sooner or later the number of coronavirus infections will go down, be it because the restrictions will be effective, or, what is more likely, be it because vaccinations will end the pandemic, or be it because the pandemic will end in a natural way. Then the question is: When can we say that the pandemic has ended? How many patients make the difference between a pandemic and a “normal” situation in which some people are ill and most are not, and in which the chance that the coronavirus will spread again has been minimalized? The Sorites paradox is about an analogous question: How many grains of sand make a heap? Or, formulated in a way that is more relevant to the present pandemic: How many grains must we remove from a heap of sand till it is no longer a heap? Remove one grain and you’ll still call it a heap. Take away another grain, and it is still a heap. But what, if you have removed, one by one, thousand grains? Or a million? Do we then still have a heap? At some point, the heap will not be a heap any longer, but how many grains must be removed until we have reached that point? Until now, nobody has given a convincing answer to this question. Actually such an answer doesn’t exist. It is a matter of subjective decision and definition.
In case of the present pandemic, we basically have the same question as in the Sorites paradox. When the number of Covid-19 patients goes down, finally we’ll not have a pandemic any longer, but when we’ll have reached that point? This question is important in order to determine when the restrictions can be lifted and to what extent, but in fact nobody knows the answer. Each country has its own ideas about it. It is just a matter of policy (making choices) and politics (the execution of choices); a matter of intelligent guesswork and of establishing safe standards. It’s better to stay on the safe side and to maintain the restrictions that must contain the pandemic too long than too short. But being overcautious in view of the pandemic can be dangerous in other respects, like for the mental health of the population and for its economic health (which in the end also affects the mental and physical health of a population). It will be a wise person who knows what to do.

Notes
1) https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/who-europe-chief-says-region-midst-covid-19-pandemic-paradox
2) https://www.russellreynolds.com/newsroom/the-covid-paradox
3) https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/Citycitybangbang/the-covid-paradox/