THE IMPORTANCE OF AWARENESS
Neil Levy
This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2013); the Australasian Journal of Philosophy is available online at:http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/.
Abstract: A number of philosophers have recently argued that agents need not be conscious of the reasons for which they act or the moral significance of their actions in order to be morally responsible for them. In this paper, I identify a kind of awareness that, I claim, agents must have in order to be responsible for their actions. I argue that conscious information processing differs from unconscious in a manner that makes the following two claims true: (1) an agent’s values ought to be identified with attitudes of which she is conscious, because having a value entails having a set of dispositions produced by conscious attitudes alone, and (2) that only actions settled upon by conscious deliberation are deeply attributable to agents, because only such actions express the agent’s evaluative stance.
Keywords: moral responsibility; consciousness; attributability; values; deliberation.
1. Introduction
At least implicitly, philosophers have typically assumed that consciousness of the moral significance of one’s actions is a necessary condition of moral responsibility for them. The claim seems, as George Sher points out, so much taken for granted that no one has bothered to offer an explicit defence of it [Sher 2009: 8]. Today, however, it stands in need of defence. Reflection on cases, on our everyday practices, and on the difficulties which apparently face accounts of moral responsibility that incorporate some kind of consciousness thesis have motivated an increasing number of philosophers to reject it. Consider three representative examples from the recent philosophical literature.
1. Huck Finn, Nomy Arpaly argues, is not conscious of the reasons why he ought to help Jim escape from slavery. Quite the contrary; he is conscious of what he takes to be the moral requirement that he turn Jim in. Yet he aids Jim’s escape, and he does so for the right reasons. He is morally praiseworthy for his action; therefore we need not be conscious of the reasons that make our actions right in order to be praiseworthy for them [Arpaly 2002: 75-78].
2. Agents who forget their friends’ birthdays and therefore omit to offer them good wishes cannot be conscious of the reasons that make their actions wrong, as Angela Smith [2005] reminds us. Yet they can be blameworthy for their omissions. Hence we need not be conscious of the reasons that make our omissions wrong in order to be blameworthy for them.
3. Ryland, a character in one of George Sher’s examples, is too self-absorbed to notice that ‘her rambling anecdote about a childless couple, a handicapped person, and a financial failure is not well received by an audience that includes a childless couple, a handicapped person, and a financial failure’ [Sher 2009: 28]. Obviously, Ryland was not conscious of the reasons that made her action wrong, yet she is blameworthy for it. Hence we need not be conscious of the reasons which make our actions wrong in order to be blameworthy for them.
In all three cases, because the agent fails to be conscious of the reasons that make her actions right or wrong, she fails to be conscious of the moral significance of her action.
It is important to emphasize that what is in question here is the agent’s direct moral responsibility for her actions. Many philosophers would agree with Arpaly, Sher and Smith that agents are (typically) responsible for actions like these, but would ground the moral responsibility in some earlier action or pattern of actions, with regard to which the agents were conscious of facts making them right or wrong. Perhaps the agents have cultivated good or bad habits, for instance. Arpaly, Sher and Smith deny that agents like these are responsible in virtue of some earlier action or omission, with regard to which they were conscious. Rather, they claim, these agents are directly responsible for what they did or failed to do. The failure to be conscious of the moral significance of their action or of the facts that made them right or wrong does not exempt them from moral responsibility for it.
In this paper, I shall defend the claim that consciousness of the moral significance of one’s actions is a necessary condition of direct moral responsibility for them (call this the consciousness thesis). My approach to defending the consciousness thesis will be indirect: I will articulate some of the building blocks of a picture of moral agency upon which consciousness is central to such agency. I shall claim that our conscious values – those we consciously take ourselves to have – have a special claim to be identified as our genuine values, even if we have conflicting attitudes which sometimes cause behaviour. Further, I shall suggest that the contents of consciousness play a special, and especially significant, role in the mental processes that lead to our actions, and that this role gives us good reason to think that the more our actions express our conscious states the more deeply attributable to us they are.
The claims advanced here constitute only a partial defence of the claim that consciousness (in a sense I will define) is necessary for moral responsibility because I here assume without argument a view of moral responsibility according to which a necessary condition of moral responsibility is some kind of deep attributability of the act to the agent. It is worth noting that this is an assumption that I share with most of the philosophers who have attacked the consciousness thesis.[1] They deny that consciousness of the moral significance of one’s actions is necessary for an agent to express who she is through her actions. Since proponents of rival views generally (if only implicitly) accept the claim that consciousness is necessary for moral responsibility, addressing my arguments to these philosophers is a less urgent concern. That said, I will offer a few remarks why proponents of the major rival view of moral responsibility, the control-based view, ought to accept the consciousness thesis too.
2. What Kind of Consciousness?
When philosophers talk about consciousness, it is typically phenomenal consciousness they have in mind, where a state is phenomenally conscious if there is something it is like to be in it; if, that is, it is a state with some kind of qualitative feel. Inasmuch as that is the main target of philosophers of mind, attention to their debates threatens to mislead, since that conception of consciousness is not the one at issue here. When Arpaly says that Huck is morally praiseworthy despite not being conscious of the facts to which his action is a response, she does not mean that he lacks some kind of phenomenal experience. Rather, she means that he fails to have certain thoughts. What is at issue is the availability of certain kinds of representations to the agent, not whether they experience qualia. Inasmuch as it is phenomenal consciousness which generates so many of the central puzzles of philosophy of mind, such as the so-called hard problem [Chalmers 1996], the fact that it is not our concern is good news: it makes our problem more tractable. Proponents of the consciousness thesis assert, while their opponents deny, that agents need access to certain facts concerning the moral significance of their actions in order to be morally responsible for their actions.
What is at issue is therefore a certain kind of access to a certain kind of information. I shall take these components in turn. First, what kind of access is required for moral responsibility? Roughly, the information must be available for report. Report is only a rough criterion for the right kind of availability, however, for two reasons. First, sometimes agents may be incapable of reporting a state (due to problems with speech production, say) and yet be conscious of that state. Second, it may sometimes happen that we can report a state without first being conscious of it (perhaps we only become conscious of it via report).[2] Availability for report is a good heuristic for the kind of consciousness at issue, but it is no more than a good heuristic.
Information is conscious in the right kind of way, I suggest, when it is personally available. But what is personal availability? Information is personally available when the agent is able to effortlessly retrieve it for use in reasoning and it is occurently online, actually guiding behavior or mental processes, prior to retrieval. Both conditions are needed. If the information so retrieved only guides behavior as a consequence of retrieval, it does not count as personally available until it is retrieved. But being online is insufficient for personal availability because unconscious states often guide behavior without our being aware of their contents or their effects. It is the conjunction of effortless retrievability and being online that is needed. It is likely that online information is available for effortless retrieval when it is available to a broad set of systems, including systems involved in reasoning; availability for retrieval is a reliable indicator of availability for use in reasoning. Personal availability is thus closely akin to Ned Block’s [1995] notion of access-consciousness. For Block, information is access conscious if it is poised for rational control of speech and action. When information is personally available, it actually guides behavior and is available to be cited by the agent as her reason for acting in response to probing.[3]
I will say that when an agent has such information personally available to her, either because she is introspectively aware of it or can easily become introspectively aware of it, she is *aware of it. My claim, then, is that agents need to be *aware of (some of) the reasons for which they act in order to be (directly) morally responsible for an action (for stylistic reasons, I will sometimes use the word ‘conscious’ and its cognates in what follows, rather than *awareness. Unless otherwise stated, ‘consciousness’ should be understood as equivalent to *awareness).[4]
Of course, agents are rarely *aware of all their reasons for action. Unconscious processes play a broad and deep role in guiding our actions, and much of the information processing involved is inaccessible to us. Which reasons must agents be *aware of in order to be morally responsible? I claim that agents must be *aware of facts sufficient, given their beliefs, to render their action or omission morally right or wrong. It is not necessary to be *aware of all the morally relevant facts to be morally responsible. Consider the Knave of Hearts. In stealing the Queen’s tarts, he not only deprived her of her lawful possessions, he might also have embarrassed her in front of the visiting Diamonds. We can blame him for his theft (assuming that the other conditions of moral responsibility are satisfied) if he was *aware that his action constituted theft; he need not also be *aware that he would cause the Queen embarrassment. The degree of praise or blame an agent merits is a function, at least in important part, of the facts of which he is *aware. If the tarts were in fact prescribed by the Heart’s doctor as a cure for the King’s gout, and their absence entailed that the King suffered great pain, the Knave might not be due any blame for this fact, if he was *unaware of it. He might merit only the lesser degree of blame that attends being *aware that he was engaging in theft.[5]
The claim that agents must be *aware, in the sense defined, of the facts that make their actions morally significant in order to be morally responsible for them has the clear advantage of sharpening the debate between opponents of the consciousness thesis and the view urged here. In the cases cited by opponents of the consciousness thesis, the agents who are alleged to be morally responsible are all *unaware of the relevant facts making their actions morally significant. Thus something substantive turns on the question whether *awareness is required for moral responsibility.[6]
In what follows, I will advance two lines of argument for the claim that *awareness is required for moral responsibility. I shall argue that we ought to identify the morally responsible self with the deliberative perspective, and that perspective is constituted by states of which the agent is *aware. Moreover, and for closely related reasons, I shall argue that agents’ values are to be identified with certain of their attitudes of which they are *aware. I shall begin with this latter claim.
3. Values and Consciousness
Notoriously, the unconscious contains much of which we don’t approve. For Freud, the unconscious was (among other things) the repository of the repressed, of all the thoughts we could not, or did not want to, acknowledge. Contemporary cognitive science has typically been concerned with the cognitive unconscious: the unconscious as information processor. However, it has also shown that the unconscious is a repository of beliefs, or (perhaps more accurately) of dispositions which are partially constitutive of beliefs, that the subject may explicitly disavow and of which she is sometimes unaware. Here I shall mention just one central line of research: work on implicit associations. Implicit association tests have provided persuasive evidence that the majority of Americans have racist and sexist attitudes; this includes many people of whom we have no reason to doubt their sincerity when they claim to be passionately opposed to racism and sexism [Dasgupta 2004]. We do not easily escape from the effects of enculturation; it leaves its mark on the contents of the unconscious. A dramatic illustration of this claim comes from the fact that Black Americans sometimes show a negative association with black faces [Nosek et al. 2002].