Responsibility for Implicitly-Biased Actions: A Strawsonian Approach

Abstract

In this dissertation I argue that we are responsible and blameworthy for actions caused by implicit biases. And that we are responsible for these actions because we are blameworthy for them. I argue for this in two parts. I first survey existing accounts explaining our responsibility for our implicit biases and find them wanting. Our existing accounts both don’t pay enough attention to more recent empirical information concerning the fickleness of the indirect control we have over our biases, and further, the changes made by these accounts to explain responsibility for implicit bias often result in significant disadvantages when trying to explain responsibility for more standard actions. In the second part, I argue that the conditions of blameworthiness are conceptually prior to the conditions of moral responsibility – on my view, to be morally responsible for an action is to fulfill a set of normative conditions, and not for your action to have been caused in a way constitutive of agency. I then develop and defend a view of this type to show how the challenges inherent in explaining why we’re morally responsible for actions caused by implicit biases are better resolved by the “blameworthiness- first” theory of moral responsibility I advocate for. On the view I’ll defend, moral responsibility for our actions is grounded on the kinds of normative considerations that explain what we morally owe to one another. To be morally responsible for an action is for our action to violate the duties we owe to another in a way that cannot be excused by reference to those same duties. What makes an agent morally responsible for their action is not that their action is produced by their agential capacities in the right kind of way, but that we are justified in taking a certain practical stance towards them because of their behavior. The conditions of blameworthiness are the conditions of fairly taking that kind of stance, and so play a more central role in attributions of moral responsibility than the conditions of agential responsibility. Importantly, this allows us to give explanations for what makes us responsible for our actions that do not require explaining the causal story behind producing them. And if we’re able to do this, we can sidestep all the major problems existing accounts face when explaining why we might be responsible for actions caused by implicit racial biases.