Moral responsibility

Moral responsibility is a duty or obligation to behave in a 'good' manner and refrain from behaving in a 'bad' manner. The classification of 'good' and 'bad' is a subject for ethics and metaethics, and from an anthropological standpoint, the specifics vary considerably from one group to another.

A large part of the discussion of 'moral responsibility' is focused upon whether or not humans can actually control their actions, and if they can, to what extent and under what circumstances. Resolution of that issue is the philosophical subject of free will, a continuing debate that began millennia ago and seems destined to continue indefinitely. Evidently, should it be decided that humans' control over their actions is severely limited in some circumstances, any requirement attributing moral responsibility where there is only curtailed agency is mitigated. While awaiting the (probably very nuanced) resolution of this issue, we can inquire what else can be said about the nature of 'moral responsibility'

Moral relativism

Adopting the view that 'moral responsibility' "attributes duties and obligations to a person that devolve from moral, legal, or ritual imperatives", moral philosophy is a key to much that is so attributed. The implications of anthropology for moral philosophy largely fall under the topic of moral relativism. According to Gowans, moral relativism concerns two broad categories:

Descriptive Moral Relativism: As a matter of empirical fact, there are deep and widespread moral disagreements across different societies, and these disagreements are much more significant than whatever agreements there may be.

The last claim about the significance of disagreement is controversial, but the first claim is not. The other form of moral relativism is:

Metaethical Moral Relativism: The truth or falsity of moral judgments, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but is relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons.

This position can be contrasted with moral objectivism, the view "that moral judgments are ordinarily true or false in an absolute or universal sense, that some of them are true, and that people sometimes are justified in accepting true moral judgments (and rejecting false ones) on the basis of evidence available to any reasonable and well-informed person."

Reactions

Although a great deal is written about moral responsibility, a surprising number of authors do not define the term. Richard Double suggests that there is no such thing as 'moral responsibility', that the term is "merely honorific and subjective" and cannot be "counted as [a candidate] among the class of real entities". He bases what he calls this nonrealist view upon the huge variety of factors "pragmatic, ideological, conventional, aesthetic, psychological, and/or idiosyncratic" and all fundamentally "non-objectively grounded" that enter a decision about 'moral responsibility', and suggests that no form of words captures the "deep senses" of the term, its "visceral" emotional source.

Other authors do not define 'moral responsibility' itself, but rely for its identification upon exactly these visceral responses. According to Bruce Waller:

"As I use the phrase..."moral responsibility" is the essential (necessary, if not sufficient) condition for justified blame and punishment."

He quotes Michael McKenna as stating:

"what most everyone is hunting for ... is the sort of moral responsibility that is desert entailing, the kind the makes blaming and punishing as well as praising and rewarding justified."

and he also quotes Randolph Clarke as saying:

"If any agent is truly responsible...that fact provides us with a specific type of justification for ...praise or blame, with finite rewards or punishments. To be a morally responsible human agent is to be truly deserving of these sorts of responses, and deserving in a way that no agent is that is not morally responsible."

This last excerpt is quoted by K.E. Boxer as well.

The problem with this approach is that of defining an itch as something mitigated by scratching. It addresses the topic only symptomatically, indirectly, and leaves us wondering if we have really reached the root of the matter when the same action moves some enormously, even to violence, while leaving others unmoved.