Moral Information and Responsibility

Wolf argues those who are morally incompetent are insane, I want to clarify that.

Are you morally responsible if you are insane? One may say the answer is clearly “No,” but let us see if that answer holds once we have taken on Susan Wolf’s slightly modified sense of sanity defined in her article “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility.”

Wolf’s Sanity

Wolf explains her conception of moral sanity through a proposed hypothetical. She asks you to imagine the situation as follows:

JoJo is the favorite son of Jo the First, an evil and sadistic dictator of a small, undeveloped country. Because of his father's special feelings for the boy, JoJo is given a special education and is allowed to accompany his father and observe his daily routine. In light of this treatment, it is not surprising that little JoJo takes his father as a role model and develops values very much like Dad’s. As an adult, he does many of the same sorts of things his father did, including sending people to prison or to death or to torture chambers on the basis of whim. He is not coerced to do these things, he acts according to his own desires. Moreover, these are desires he wholly wants to have. When he steps back and asks, “Do l really want to be this sort of person?” his answer is resoundingly "Yes," for this way of life expresses a crazy sort of power that forms part of his deepest ideal.

To Wolf, Jojo is clearly insane. He was never given the chance to access “good” morals or develop a “virtuous” moral framework. Instead he was poisoned since birth by his father and driven insane. And because of all that, Wolf finds Jojo not morally responsible for his actions. How could we find him so when he never had a chance to be different, when his deepest self has been twisted into some monstrous form?

Is Jojo Responsible?

I intuitively find this conclusion to be lacking.¹

Intuitively, JoJo is clearly not responsible for, as Wolf would put it, his lack of relative sanity to us. Under his father’s tutelage, he was raised in an upside down world where wrong is right. Yet there are quite a few oddities that surface with this viewpoint. How far does this lack of responsibility spread? Suppose someone is raised with typical values except for one caveat, they are raised to view stealing as permissible. We would then be more forgiving when they steal, but would we not still judge them like a sane individual if they were to commit murder?

So it is not as if someone is completely sane or insane. Instead, they have insane streaks in regards to certain issues and are sane in other matters. Not only that, but when we say they are sane in a specific manner do we mean so completely? Let us suppose that society generally considers it as immoral to commit murder as it is to steal a million dollars. Given this unlikely premise, we could then say someone is insane if they think that it is as immoral to commit murder as it is to steal a million and one dollars. But clearly, this is distinct from the situation wherein someone thinks it as immoral to murder as it is to steal one dollar. This means that, even within a specific knowledge base, there are degrees of sanity.

Given all this, there are different ways to be insane and in each way there are different measures of sanity. Such an explanation has gotten us one step closer to confirming what is really meant by sanity in Wolf’s view: Sanity is dependent on access to information.

The simplicity in the requirement allows us to expand our view of responsibility. When one throws a ball over a fence and it shatters an unseen window, how culpable are they? Well, let us do an analysis on his access to information. While he may not have seen the window directly, he could see the roof of the building. If he did not mean to throw it in that direction, then he should have known his own capabilities. But each of these is not a form of full knowledge, but instead an addendum that should have informed his decision making. So if he could not see the roof, then he would be that much less responsible. If that was his first time throwing a ball, then he would be considered even less so. These are the strengths of the consideration of information as opposed to sanity.

Is Moral Information Equivalent to Sanity?

So why did Wolf decide on using our conception of sanity? This is because “moral” information is much more tricky. How does one learn about morality? Is this just through disciplining in childhood, those slaps on the wrists? Here the issues with referring to this as information feel at best incomplete and at worst completely misguided. When one is punished as a child for being mean, what is conveyed to them? To them, it is only conveyed that they will be treated poorly if they break the rules. In essence, if a child is only punished it is comparable to training a dog.² But there is another element, what happens when the punishments are paired with an explanation?

This is where the mysterious intuitions matured people have about morality start to be relevant. When provided these explanations, children are then given the opportunity of shaping their ethical feelings. This is where the information lies and becomes equivalent to sanity. And if we assume that all our moral “knowledge” stems from externally sourced moral information, then we can see the exact congruence between moral information and sanity as concepts.

Given this, it seems like Jojo was only given “bad” information and ergo he would be completely off the hook. Yet ad absurdum, he still seems somewhat blameworthy. Therefore, we must rely on the strengths of the information view and buck the concept of sanity. So what piece of information keeps him partly on the hook?

Moral Kernel

Clearly this would require some innate moral information that we possess merely because of our humanity. Let us call this our moral kernel whos existence seems more than intuitive to me. While I could foresee some differentiation in what any individual’s moral kernel looks like, I would wager they always have one and they tend to be pretty similar across the board. Now what does this proposed kernel do for our view of responsibility?

If people are born with such a thing, then that would be some information (moral intuition being a kind of information) that would give them some base level information that also comes with some base level responsibility. When we move to take an action and feel that it is wrong, some part of that would be the moral kernel informing us that it is wrong.

Let us then return to the case of poor Jojo. When he was born, his kernel sat unaffected. But as his father raised him, he built off this kernel with bad³ moral reasoning. And all Jojo's life, all he was given was these poisonous arguments that led him to construct a false framework built off these once good ideas. If he ever desired to dig down and reveal this better information then he could be saved, and since that is possible he is responsible for never digging. His willingness to wallow in his toxic surface level ideals built off of rotten ideas is why he is ultimately, at some level, culpable.

We cannot hold him accountable for his framework, we cannot hold him responsible for most of his actions done without thought, but we can judge him for not giving his existence any deeper introspection and ignoring the good information he had all along. Jojo is guilty of lacking proper introspection.

Hope y’all found that convincing, if not please let me know why. Thanks for reading!

1. My response may be viewed as a mere gripe on the binary notion of sanity, and I think this criticism is warranted. Yet there is benefit to be had at producing more clarificatory language that makes nuance that much easier to be had. I also find the use of information also makes the discussion clearer.

2. This is equivalent to the objective form of reactive attitudes outlined in Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment.”

3. Or false, dependent on your persuasion towards moral realism.