Class 6.2: Attributive Responsibility

Both of our last two classes have drawn on philosophical literature about freedom and responsibility, and that theme continues in today’s reading, from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Whereas Strawson tries to argue that we are free in the sense that matters by arguing that it’s not an intelligible option to mean anything else by ‘free’ that could possible matter to us, Frankfurt tries to argue that we are free in the sense that matters by showing that there are really differences in ordinary cases between free and unfree actions. The ideas in this paper from 50 years ago ended up launching their own substantial literature independent of the responses to Strawson.

Harry Frankfurt discussing bullshit with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show

Harry Frankfurt

Harry Frankfurt was an influential philosopher of action and theorist about responsibility, love, and relationships. His earliest and most influential papers, from the early 1970s, are are freedom and responsibility, and we are reading one of them for this class. Frankfurt is most famous outside of philosophy for publishing a very short book called On Bullshit, which he proceeded to go on The Daily Show to discuss with Jon Stewart, and which was one of the inspirations for Stephen Colbert’s bit about “truthiness” on The Colbert Report. Who says philosophy doesn’t have applications?

Attributive Responsibility

In the last 30 years, philosophers have come to draw a distinction between the kind of moral responsibility that Strawson was interested in, according to which if you are responsible for something you deserve some kind of response, and responsibility of the kind that Frankfurt is interested in, according to which if you are responsible for something that that thing belongs to you in a more interesting sense than things that you are not responsible belong to you. The philosopher Gary Watson calls Strawson-style responsibility “accountability”, and Frankfurt-style responsibility “attributability”. And when Shoemaker refers to “true self” ideas in his paper from Monday, he is talking about ideas like Frankfurt’s.

Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person

In the paper that we are reading for today, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, Frankfurt tries to argue based on simple cases that there is a real distinction between having the kind of choice over our actions for which we hold people responsible as persons, and not having such control. He thinks that we can figure out what gives us the right kind of ownership over our actions by reflecting on what it means to be a person in the first place. You may not follow every point or argument in this paper, but within the space of philosophy papers, it is on the easier end to read and follow.

Quiz Time!