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.