Malcolm Budd • on responsible thought
An important part of our attitudes towards other people is determined by the way in which we think of their actions. We think of people as being responsible or not responsi- ble for the things that they do, and we feel towards and treat them accordingly. Moreover, we conceive of a person's responsibility for what he does as being susceptible of degrees; and it is the extent to which a person is responsible for his behaviour, as well as the importance of what occurs, that determines the attitude we take, or the course of action we adopt, towards him.
Reflection of an elementary kind is all that is needed to reveal the existence of a cluster of problems contained in our way of thought about a person's responsibility for his ac- tions. Under precisely which conditions is it right to hold someone responsible for what he has done? Why is it that these are the conditions that determine moral responsibility? How should praise and blame, reward and punishment, be allocated? What is it for a person's responsibility for his actions to be diminished in virtue of his suffering from a certain kind of mental illness? I suppose that many people have at one time or another thought about at least some of these related matters, in particular about questions con- cerning the justice and the justifications of punishment.
One factor that has sometimes been thought to enter into all our thought about responsibility is the deterministic thesis that all human behaviour is governed by causal laws. Philosophers have adopted very different attitudes towards its truth, none of which has gained general acceptance. There has, however, always been one line of thought that has been found particularly at- tractive—the belief that acceptance of the truth of- determinism would be inconsistent with the ascription to people of responsibility for their actions. For if determinism should be true, then, it is said, nobody can ever do anything other than what in fact he does do, whereas it is a condition of holding a person responsible for what he has done that it should have been possible for him to have acted otherwise than he did. And, on this view, it might be thought more civilised and less barbarous to abandon altogether the practice of making moral judgments on people's actions.
The relevance, of determinism to the ascription of responsibility is one of the many problems that Mr Glover deals with in an exemplary fashion in his excellent book on the topics of moral and legal responsibility. It is indicative of the subtlety of Mr Glover's book that his solution to this problem is not susceptible of easy statements in summary form. In general, his book is distinguished by its clarity of statement and counter-statement, its courtesy, generosity, justice and honesty. There is no attempt to disguise the status of some of his claims: to present them as being capable of proof, rather than as expressions of fundamental moral principles over which there can legitimately be disagreement. Mr Glover also shows great skill at eliciting criteria which can be used to draw lines in the right places between cases we wish to treat differently, and manifests a welcome readiness to make clear exactly what needs to be argued against in order to overthrow the views he advocates. As a result, many issues that have remained clouded for so long a time are thrown into light.
A rare merit of the book is the knowledge with which it is infused of the specialist disciplines—especially psychiatry and the law—which are also concerned with the con- cept of responsibility. In fact, Mr Glover's book demonstrates that, for at least some problems of moral philosophy, it is necessary that one should have some knowledge of those sciences that study the causes of people's behaviour, and of the medical and legal criteria necessary for estimating psychological incapacities or criminal responsibility. More important, perhaps, he shows that the thinking of psychiatrists and lawyers about these problems will almost inevitably be distorted by the unexamined assumptions that they bring to them unless they are capable of that kind of reflective thought that can properly be called philosophical.
Mr Glover urges that the techniques of philosophical criticism be made a central part of education. His book is a vindication of his own claim that 'common sense about morality retreats before philosophical argu- ment in the way that superstitions about illness retreat before medical research'. It provides a model for all who aspire to clarity of thought about the concepts that we use in our dealings with one another.
Dr Malcolm Budd is Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, London.
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