Anti-Climacus

WELL: I promised to come back to this normblog post with more substantive commentary. Well, here we are:

"It all happened, as the phrase is, on Rumsfeld's watch. Even if he didn't know, he should have known; he should have made it his business to know."

I take it that norm here is offering up a version of the positive argument of free will that says that you're morally responsible for relevant could've-done-otherwises that were within your power to change. I think the underlying principle to assigning moral blame on this basis is troublesome, if not in this case, then in some imaginable cases.

Uncontroversially, we can all agree that someone like Rumsfeld would be responsible in two cases: where he expressly created or approved a policy of torture (or whatever you like), and the one in which he was aware of instances of torture but chose to ignore them. Obviously he has to go then, but not because of this special case of could've-done-otherwise (he should've known, but didn't)--this is just the regular case.

But there are two counterfactual cases that should be troublesome:

1. Torture, or whatever you like, is going on, and Rumsfeld is making inquiries to various military types, who tell him nothing's going on, send reports that nothing's going on, and all the relevant parties agree not to let him in on what's happening. It doesn't seem like you can hold him responsible in that situation, because he had no way of knowing*.

2. Rumsfeld is actually being quite scrupulous in checking to make sure that all the relevant units aren't engaging in torture or the like, being so thorough, in fact, that he's hasn't gotten to the ones that have tortured by the time they do. You can't really seem to fault him for not trying or not caring in that hypothetical case: at best, you can argue he went to the wrong places first.

But what looks like the best reason to reject this particular form of moral responsibility is that there's just a lot of stuff he has to know about, a lot of people he has to keep tabs on. It seems inevitable that given enough people and enough time, you'll get torture, and getting your attention to the right place at the right time is probably immensely difficult.

I'm not trying to let him off the hook--merely pointing out that it looks like norm's particular criterion accomplishes nothing that the regular could've-done-otherwise criterion doesn't do, but it does manage to generate a few prominent complicating cases.

*To deflect the natural Nazi analogy: it's not the same as making the argument that what the Nazis did was okay because they grew up in a culture that was normatively warped, so they couldn't possibly have known (these two positions get conflated on some occasions in the philosophical literature on free will). The key difference is that hypothetical-Rumsfeld isn't engaging in the actions himself. We all agree (presumably: if we don't, that's a different argument than this one) that if Rumsfeld knew, he'd have the same moral revulsion the rest of us have.