Scepticism about moral responsibility is the view that individuals are unable to fulfil a variety of prerequisites for responsible agency. A number of responsibility theorists have claimed that one of these prerequisites is accurate self-reflection. The difficulty with this view, as Doris suggests by drawing on research in cognitive and social psychology, is that seemingly rational choices can be determined by automatic processes. Because these processes are often accompanied by little cognitive elaboration and by inaccurate awareness of the causal history of behaviour, one might be tempted to deny the possibility of responsible agency. Doris, however, does not. He endorses the reflectivist's view that theory of agency provides the appropriate standpoint for assessing responsibility. Yet he argues that what we need for responsible agency is not self-reflection, which falls prey to agency defeaters and the practice of confabulation, but self-direction.
Self-direction is the capacity to express one's values with a justificatory status and a determinative role to play in practical planning (compare Bratman Reference Bratman2007). It is through collaboration that people's underlying desires for acting the way they do are articulated and expressed in the form of values. People come up with morally relevant explanations (“rationalisations”) of their behaviour as part of a dialogical process of negotiation with other agents, a form of social discourse by which they give and ask others for reasons. This proposal echoes Scanlon's well-known conception that morality is a system of co-deliberation, motivated by the need to justify people's behaviour mutually (Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998). Participation in dialogical endeavours provides a scaffolding for moral reasoning, but it may not take us any closer to knowledge of the true causes of behaviour than solitary thinking does. Collaboration has a practical, rather than an epistemic, role to play in moral reasoning: people forge their present identity and shape future behaviours by committing themselves to the values emerging from social interactions. Doris's argument for collaborativism thus puts us in a different position to counter the sceptic than canonical arguments for responsibility.
Collaborativism forges an interesting link between current trends in the philosophy of mind and morality and cognate fields of research, where the participatory dimension of individual thought and agency has become prominent in theorising about the social mind (Kiverstein Reference Kiverstein2016). But the merits of this proposal can be strengthened by more fully articulating the explanatory potential of collaborativism and by suggesting a possible line of development. Doris's view is based on the belief that responsible behaviour cannot just be the expression of alleged stable traits of the individual, and that external factors are not confined to the role of mere distractors, as Real Self theorists have claimed (cf. Arpaly & Schroeder Reference Arpaly and Schroeder1999). According to Doris, individuals are unlikely to have all of the internal resources they need to direct behaviour towards certain goals. The example of nicotine is a good case in point (Doris Reference Doris2015b, p. 123). It would be hard to misconceive the positive effects of public health campaigns on changing individuals' attitudes towards tobacco consumption as the mere expression of one's own inner citadel. Responsible agency is tailored to acts of self-direction that facilitate the expression of values through collaboration. Put differently, moral agency is inherently collaborative. But what is the scope of this core claim of collaborativism?
Collaborativism is the view, not just that (moral) reasoning is socially embedded, but that it gets better when it is socially embedded (Doris Reference Doris2015b, p. 119). Doris hints at two ways of interpreting this claim, which depend on how one takes sociality to facilitate the exchange of individual rationalisations. One is to say that dialogical endeavours are shaped by transfer of information between individuals. But there is more to the fact that optimal reasoning is socially embedded than the informational role of sociality, because mental activities recruit and process socially acquired information no matter whether the relevant activity is done socially or alone. Another interpretation would construe Doris's view as a version of the oft-quoted saying “two heads are better than one.” People join forces because they can achieve better results as a group. Yet the fact that there are so many things in daily life that can only be done together does not mean that groups are smarter than individuals. Indeed, there is no conclusive evidence that group reasoning per se is more accurate, or delivers better results, than an aggregate of individuals working in isolation (Doris Reference Doris2015b, p. 117). What makes moral reasoning optimal through collaboration is its explicitly interactive dimension. It is not the number of agents that shapes role-appropriate behaviour, but the fact that they do it together. The actions by which we hold someone responsible reflect values grounded in intersubjective exchanges in accord with the expectations and the norms that govern social roles.
Still, we may wonder: What is so special about doing things together, that is, creating narratives intersubjectively? While joining forces may not make us more likely to find out what the accurate drivers of behaviour are, thinking and acting together can allow us to create a shared space of thought and action, a mental space of communal access where the results of our negotiations become meaningful to us all and enacted accordingly. There is an important element of novelty here, which is hinted at by Doris without being fully elaborated. We contend that what is shared could simply not be reached for and attended to if not for our minds “meeting” in a suitable way. Cognising – or emoting, or intending, and so forth – does not necessarily enable optimal group performance, as we have seen, but it does give rise to new rationalisations, that is, mental contents which would be unavailable in thought, hence in dialog, to the single agents introspecting upon themselves. This is very much in line with Doris's remarks that there is a constructive element in building relationships of all sorts together, from the private up to the societal level, and that participation is the keyword in moral cognition and agency (Doris Reference Doris2015b, p. 148). “Participation” is to be construed in the specific sense that taking part in the facts of life together does make a difference in that it gives us, each individually, new resources to live through those moments, to think and talk about, and act upon them.
These resources (values) are socially embedded and shaped in exchanges between individuals. More subtly, they become available by way of people sharing attitudes and dispositions and, therefore, creating a shared history of explanatory and justificatory narratives. How does this work? How can people move back and forth from their individual “confabulatory” perspective on things, to the collective system of morality that facilitates responsible thinking and acting? Recent work in social cognition reveals that when people engage in social interactions, collaboration unfolds through processes of alignment, whereby the relevant sharing is effected by exchanging and processing information at different levels (Dale et al. Reference Dale, Fusaroli, Duran, Richardson and Ross2013; Gallotti et al. Reference Gallotti, Fairhurst and Frith2017). By adjusting to each other, gradually and dynamically, agents' repertoires of understandings, expectations and options for responsible action are expanded. Your reasons and criteria for holding someone responsible become part of my way of seeing things, and vice versa, so that we can operate on the basis of a collectively accepted infrastructure of values and rationality criteria.
The research on alignment and shared intentionality promises to be a valuable ally of Doris's collaborativism on several grounds. First, alignment does not necessarily require the recruitment of self-reflection. As interacting systems, individuals do not think and act together as if they were sharing perspectives on the world; they share perspectives in a pre-reflective manner. Of course, the relevant shared representations can rise to the level of conscious report, but they need not do so (Frith Reference Frith2012). Second, while the emphasis in the social cognitive literature is often put on interactions being online and direct, shared perspectives can be reinforced by mechanisms of offline social cognition, whereby the community's moral norms are regarded as objectified and publicly available (Tomasello Reference Tomasello2016). In line with Doris's suggestion, when people assume the perspective of their community, they experience both the pressure to offer sensible explanations of behaviour, as well as the sense of commitment essential for responsible agency. However, such collaboration can only be pursued by those who display the capacity to align at various levels of interaction. It is not by accident that we tend to exclude, from the set of subjects who are apt recipients of Strawsonian participant reactive attitudes, those creatures – e.g., psychopaths, non-human animals, and infants – who are (still) unable to engage in those dialogic interactions (Strawson Reference Strawson1962).
Arguing for a participatory dimension of individual responsibility, Doris provides an original response to the sceptic by sketching a theory of how morality works socially. Moral cognition and agency develop and acquire their contents in virtue of individuals' engagement in social interactions, by negotiating values and redefining the contours of their own personal biographies. We have suggested that more needs to be said about the mechanics of collaborativism, how it comes about, and why it helps articulate a cognitively oriented participatory approach to morality.
Scepticism about moral responsibility is the view that individuals are unable to fulfil a variety of prerequisites for responsible agency. A number of responsibility theorists have claimed that one of these prerequisites is accurate self-reflection. The difficulty with this view, as Doris suggests by drawing on research in cognitive and social psychology, is that seemingly rational choices can be determined by automatic processes. Because these processes are often accompanied by little cognitive elaboration and by inaccurate awareness of the causal history of behaviour, one might be tempted to deny the possibility of responsible agency. Doris, however, does not. He endorses the reflectivist's view that theory of agency provides the appropriate standpoint for assessing responsibility. Yet he argues that what we need for responsible agency is not self-reflection, which falls prey to agency defeaters and the practice of confabulation, but self-direction.
Self-direction is the capacity to express one's values with a justificatory status and a determinative role to play in practical planning (compare Bratman Reference Bratman2007). It is through collaboration that people's underlying desires for acting the way they do are articulated and expressed in the form of values. People come up with morally relevant explanations (“rationalisations”) of their behaviour as part of a dialogical process of negotiation with other agents, a form of social discourse by which they give and ask others for reasons. This proposal echoes Scanlon's well-known conception that morality is a system of co-deliberation, motivated by the need to justify people's behaviour mutually (Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998). Participation in dialogical endeavours provides a scaffolding for moral reasoning, but it may not take us any closer to knowledge of the true causes of behaviour than solitary thinking does. Collaboration has a practical, rather than an epistemic, role to play in moral reasoning: people forge their present identity and shape future behaviours by committing themselves to the values emerging from social interactions. Doris's argument for collaborativism thus puts us in a different position to counter the sceptic than canonical arguments for responsibility.
Collaborativism forges an interesting link between current trends in the philosophy of mind and morality and cognate fields of research, where the participatory dimension of individual thought and agency has become prominent in theorising about the social mind (Kiverstein Reference Kiverstein2016). But the merits of this proposal can be strengthened by more fully articulating the explanatory potential of collaborativism and by suggesting a possible line of development. Doris's view is based on the belief that responsible behaviour cannot just be the expression of alleged stable traits of the individual, and that external factors are not confined to the role of mere distractors, as Real Self theorists have claimed (cf. Arpaly & Schroeder Reference Arpaly and Schroeder1999). According to Doris, individuals are unlikely to have all of the internal resources they need to direct behaviour towards certain goals. The example of nicotine is a good case in point (Doris Reference Doris2015b, p. 123). It would be hard to misconceive the positive effects of public health campaigns on changing individuals' attitudes towards tobacco consumption as the mere expression of one's own inner citadel. Responsible agency is tailored to acts of self-direction that facilitate the expression of values through collaboration. Put differently, moral agency is inherently collaborative. But what is the scope of this core claim of collaborativism?
Collaborativism is the view, not just that (moral) reasoning is socially embedded, but that it gets better when it is socially embedded (Doris Reference Doris2015b, p. 119). Doris hints at two ways of interpreting this claim, which depend on how one takes sociality to facilitate the exchange of individual rationalisations. One is to say that dialogical endeavours are shaped by transfer of information between individuals. But there is more to the fact that optimal reasoning is socially embedded than the informational role of sociality, because mental activities recruit and process socially acquired information no matter whether the relevant activity is done socially or alone. Another interpretation would construe Doris's view as a version of the oft-quoted saying “two heads are better than one.” People join forces because they can achieve better results as a group. Yet the fact that there are so many things in daily life that can only be done together does not mean that groups are smarter than individuals. Indeed, there is no conclusive evidence that group reasoning per se is more accurate, or delivers better results, than an aggregate of individuals working in isolation (Doris Reference Doris2015b, p. 117). What makes moral reasoning optimal through collaboration is its explicitly interactive dimension. It is not the number of agents that shapes role-appropriate behaviour, but the fact that they do it together. The actions by which we hold someone responsible reflect values grounded in intersubjective exchanges in accord with the expectations and the norms that govern social roles.
Still, we may wonder: What is so special about doing things together, that is, creating narratives intersubjectively? While joining forces may not make us more likely to find out what the accurate drivers of behaviour are, thinking and acting together can allow us to create a shared space of thought and action, a mental space of communal access where the results of our negotiations become meaningful to us all and enacted accordingly. There is an important element of novelty here, which is hinted at by Doris without being fully elaborated. We contend that what is shared could simply not be reached for and attended to if not for our minds “meeting” in a suitable way. Cognising – or emoting, or intending, and so forth – does not necessarily enable optimal group performance, as we have seen, but it does give rise to new rationalisations, that is, mental contents which would be unavailable in thought, hence in dialog, to the single agents introspecting upon themselves. This is very much in line with Doris's remarks that there is a constructive element in building relationships of all sorts together, from the private up to the societal level, and that participation is the keyword in moral cognition and agency (Doris Reference Doris2015b, p. 148). “Participation” is to be construed in the specific sense that taking part in the facts of life together does make a difference in that it gives us, each individually, new resources to live through those moments, to think and talk about, and act upon them.
These resources (values) are socially embedded and shaped in exchanges between individuals. More subtly, they become available by way of people sharing attitudes and dispositions and, therefore, creating a shared history of explanatory and justificatory narratives. How does this work? How can people move back and forth from their individual “confabulatory” perspective on things, to the collective system of morality that facilitates responsible thinking and acting? Recent work in social cognition reveals that when people engage in social interactions, collaboration unfolds through processes of alignment, whereby the relevant sharing is effected by exchanging and processing information at different levels (Dale et al. Reference Dale, Fusaroli, Duran, Richardson and Ross2013; Gallotti et al. Reference Gallotti, Fairhurst and Frith2017). By adjusting to each other, gradually and dynamically, agents' repertoires of understandings, expectations and options for responsible action are expanded. Your reasons and criteria for holding someone responsible become part of my way of seeing things, and vice versa, so that we can operate on the basis of a collectively accepted infrastructure of values and rationality criteria.
The research on alignment and shared intentionality promises to be a valuable ally of Doris's collaborativism on several grounds. First, alignment does not necessarily require the recruitment of self-reflection. As interacting systems, individuals do not think and act together as if they were sharing perspectives on the world; they share perspectives in a pre-reflective manner. Of course, the relevant shared representations can rise to the level of conscious report, but they need not do so (Frith Reference Frith2012). Second, while the emphasis in the social cognitive literature is often put on interactions being online and direct, shared perspectives can be reinforced by mechanisms of offline social cognition, whereby the community's moral norms are regarded as objectified and publicly available (Tomasello Reference Tomasello2016). In line with Doris's suggestion, when people assume the perspective of their community, they experience both the pressure to offer sensible explanations of behaviour, as well as the sense of commitment essential for responsible agency. However, such collaboration can only be pursued by those who display the capacity to align at various levels of interaction. It is not by accident that we tend to exclude, from the set of subjects who are apt recipients of Strawsonian participant reactive attitudes, those creatures – e.g., psychopaths, non-human animals, and infants – who are (still) unable to engage in those dialogic interactions (Strawson Reference Strawson1962).
Arguing for a participatory dimension of individual responsibility, Doris provides an original response to the sceptic by sketching a theory of how morality works socially. Moral cognition and agency develop and acquire their contents in virtue of individuals' engagement in social interactions, by negotiating values and redefining the contours of their own personal biographies. We have suggested that more needs to be said about the mechanics of collaborativism, how it comes about, and why it helps articulate a cognitively oriented participatory approach to morality.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Many thanks to Gunnar Björnsson and Bryce Huebner for their generous comments.