Assholes (14 page)

Perhaps, however, we needn’t be able to identify a previous stage of life in which “full control” was exercised. It is enough, one might say, that we are each now fully in control of ourselves by virtue of powers that everyone beyond the age of reason enjoys: after a certain age, we may say, persons are suited to wholly determine their conduct, from a place outside culture and nature. That, we may say, is what freedom of will consists of. To the extent culture or nature has an influence, it merely shapes what we Freely Choose through and by our own Freedom of Will.

The capitalized words are necessary here because it is notoriously difficult to specify in further terms what the suggested powers would be. That isn’t a fatal blow (in the end, not
everything
can be explained). The more important point is that, if we really want to underwrite our right to blame the asshole, this is not the surest guarantor. We can dogmatically assert the existence of powers of Freedom of Will, pounding the table with our fist, but then dogmatism is all we are left with. When we then
ask for a philosophical account of what is going on—even just a plausible sketch—it is pretty easy to be skeptical about whether anyone actually has powers to act into the order of nature and culture from someplace outside. In effect, we would have to be, like God, prime movers unmoved.
¹⁰
But is that really necessary? Should we really say that the asshole
must
be a prime mover simply in order to be appropriately blamed for an insulting remark? Maybe this breathtaking view of human nature will turn out to be true. But it is a tall order to insist that it
must
be true in order for us to be rightly pissed off at an asshole who parked his luxury car in two parking places.

That, at any rate, is reason to look into less dramatic proposals about the basic preconditions of blame. The asshole must indeed have freedom of will. But this is just to say that he must be the sort of person who is properly
credited
with his acts as his own. His behavior must be properly attributed to
him
, rather than to the world around him or to so many subpersonal forces—whether homunculi or states of his brain—at work in his head. Here it won’t suffice that the person
behaves
in certain ways, whether in the spontaneous and “free” ways that all animals move or in involuntary bodily functions or knee-jerk reactions. The behavior of my arm going up only counts as my
action
—as
my
raising my arm, instead of my arm’s being pushed from behind—when it reflects my intentions. My intention to raise my arm will usually be based in what I take to be some sort of reason, a reason I could often give you if you asked why I did what I did (e.g., I raise my arm in order to reach for a jelly jar or
in order to vote “aye” in a meeting). But, we suggest, to be the kind of person who is suited for such intentional conduct is all that is necessary for a person to be properly credited with and potentially blameworthy for his or her deeds. For the asshole to be the appropriate object of blame he must be the sort of person who
does what he does for what he thinks are good reasons
. As long as he is motivated to act by his own sense of what are or are not good enough reasons for action, as long as he would defend them as good enough for action if he were asked, his deeds are
his
. When he’s done well, then he’s rightly thanked or praised. When his assumed reasons are not in fact good enough, he’s rightly to blame.

To elaborate, our basic theory in
chapter 1
says, in effect, that the asshole has a certain view about what reasons he has or doesn’t have. Fully cooperative people take themselves to have sufficient reason to abide by the expectations of conduct that normally apply among moral equals. The fact that such expectations require something is regarded not only as a good reason for action but as a reason that is good enough to outweigh or rule out other competing considerations, such as the inconvenience of acting in the expected way. The asshole shares this view of
other people’s
reasons for action but makes an exception of himself by insisting that the normally applicable expectations do not, in his case, apply. To summarize, here, then, is the asshole’s view of things:

So while the fully cooperative person takes there to be good and normally sufficient reasons to queue up in good order when a line has formed, the asshole sees no reason he should wait, or at least no reason sufficiently good to justify the inconvenience. His line-cutting action is thus
his
action, simply because it reflects his normative views: he’d defend them if we asked him why he thought it should be acceptable. To the extent he is also wrong about what reasons he has or doesn’t have, to the extent he has a mistaken normative perspective, he is the appropriate object of blame. He is the appropriate object of blame
just because he thinks like an asshole
, just because his actions flow from that (mistaken) set of moral views. He is to blame because, in that attitudinal sense, he fails to recognize others as the equals they are, by failing to recognize what treating them as equals calls for.

In our proposal, the asshole is blameworthy because of a failure of seeing. But here one might object that the bare fact of
having certain mistaken moral views
cannot be the whole story. It might seem to matter
why
the asshole fails to see what he fails to see. Suppose, for instance, that he is morally blind, really and truly
incapable
of taking in the appropriate facts about what he has most reason to do or not do. Would he not then be off the moral hook? If so, then when he is
on
the hook, it follows that he
has
certain capacities to figure out what moral reasons he in fact has. The asshole would then be blameworthy only because he
in
fact has that moral capacity
, where this is something more than
simply
having asshole moral views. No capacity, no responsibility. “Ought,” as they say, implies “can.”

The philosopher Gary Watson presents an argument like this one as regards the psychopath.
¹¹
As Watson reads the psychological evidence, psychopaths are marked by two key features:

The fact that psychopaths act with malice, as according to (1), means they are unlike mere animals that must be controlled but cannot be blamed. It feels natural for us to
blame
the psychopath for a horrific murder and indeed to want to hold him accountable for his conduct, whether through punishment, strong criticism, or indignation. On the other hand, Watson argues, the fact that psychopaths are
incapable
of recognizing others as sources of valid claims on their conduct, as according to (2), means that ways of seeking to hold them accountable to moral expectations are misplaced. We therefore find them deeply disquieting. We recoil in indignation at the callous murders committed by Robert Alton Harris (he kidnapped, taunted, and shot two teenagers, then bragged about it while finishing
the lunches they had been eating). But we can also find ourselves in a more detached, objective mode when we think through his truly terrible upbringing. We naturally waffle on whether he is in fact morally responsible, depending on whether we think of the child he was or the man he became.
¹²
Ultimately, though, the psychopath isn’t responsible, because he finally isn’t capable of seeing that he owes people something better.

For our purposes, it is crucial to understand why Watson thinks the psychopath’s inability to see the force of moral claims means that resentment or indignation is misplaced: his moral incapacity means there is no possibility of getting through, no possibility of getting him to even
understand
, let alone accept, that he has reason to respect the moral claims of others. But, according to Watson, the act of seeking to
hold someone accountable
, as opposed to simply trying to deter future bad behavior or otherwise keep him under control, is precisely that of trying to elicit an
internal
understanding and acceptance that the claims of others bear on his conduct. Reactive feelings such as resentment and indignation, for Watson, have just this implicit goal: to get their target to listen and understand. That means that resenting a psychopath is ultimately misplaced. It is in a basic way like Mr. Magoo’s “ordering” a fence post to get off his property. A message is sent but cannot be received.
¹³

In a moment we will apply this argument to the asshole, albeit in a localized way. We should first consider why the argument doesn’t apply as it stands. As we noted in
chapter 2
, the main way the asshole differs from the psychopath is that the asshole is capable of using moral concepts and is motivated to
action by his use of them.
¹⁴
He might reason impeccably when his interests aren’t at stake, and in a normatively engaged way. He can advise a friend about whether a certain debt should be repaid or promise kept, and he takes offense at a transgression in a way that shows his ability to appreciate the transgressed expectations as providing powerful reasons for action. His moral reasoning and its motivational pull are distorted only when
he
figures in the practical equation, when it then matters that he has entitlements that others (such as the advised friend) do not enjoy. Even then, he might reason just fine about his own actions on a good day or be generally reliable, say, in his family life. (Most assholes are not complete assholes. While assholes are generally “systematic” across many social contexts, only those who are assholes in almost every area of life are
complete assholes
.) What makes an asshole an asshole is the
way
he uses his real moral capacity. He puts that capacity in the dedicated service of confidence in his entitlement to special advantages by reasoning morally but without morality’s impartiality.

We are admitting, then, that the asshole has certain
general
moral capacities of judgment and motivation. Is this to revise our initial proposal that the asshole is blameworthy simply because he has certain moral views? Not exactly. That proposal took for granted that the views are indeed
his
views, in a certain robust sense: they must be “attributable” to him, in current philosophical parlance. We are saying that
general
moral capacities come along with the package, but that isn’t yet to say—and this
is crucial for present purposes—that the asshole has capacities to see
specific
things in a certain situation (e.g., not to speak too loudly in public) as required of him.

To probe further: if a sense of entitlement to cut in line were implanted in your mind by a nefarious neuroscientist, it would not necessarily reflect
your
moral views, even if it effectively prompted you to cut into the line at the post office. The action is still not yours in the sense needed to blame
you
for doing this particular deed. (We might blame the neuroscientist instead;
he
made you do it.) So if the asshole’s views are to be his own, they have to be part of his mind in the right way; they have to be owned or his own. And since they are
moral
views (about his special entitlements), they have to come along with any general capacities of moral reasoning needed for us to intelligibly ascribe to the asshole any moral attitudes at all. Philosophers call this the “holism” of the mental. In general, attitudes are always
someone’s
attitudes. (Thus Descartes could infer his existence from his thoughts, with
cogito, ergo sum
, “I think, therefore I am.”) But attitudes such as thoughts, beliefs, and feelings do not come one attitude at a time. We intelligibly ascribe any particular attitude to a person (e.g., a moral belief) only against the background of a web of other attitudes, the web needed for the ascription to make sense as part of a person’s point of view (other moral attitudes and capacities). It sometimes
seems
that we have a wholly alien thought or feeling, wholly disconnected from anything else we think or feel (e.g., a passing thought of hitting someone one deeply respects over the head), but Freud nicely explained how we can usually tell a story that makes sense of a seemingly alien attitude, whether in terms of a deeper past or things below the surface of conscious awareness. (And, yes, as Freud suggested, it might somehow be about sex. After all, what isn’t?)

Now, even if assholes have certain general moral capacities, we can still apply Watson’s argument about psychopaths in a restricted way. If the asshole is to be properly held responsible for cutting in line, we may say, it isn’t sufficient that he has
general
capacities to reason morally. He needs the
specific
capacity to see the particular moral reasons he has not to do the particular thing we blame him for doing; he must be able to see his particular reasons not to cut into this particular line, in this train station, on this afternoon. But now suppose that some asshole
can’t
see that he is not special when it comes to line cutting, or line cutting in this particular place, or on this particular day. Perhaps that inability results from something in his distant past; he was raised with terrible beatings under oppressive rules and so now bucks against social rules, or—more likely these days—he was constantly told that he could do no wrong, that he and everything he did were completely wonderful.
¹⁵
Now further suppose we are trying to hold this asshole accountable, where this means trying to get him to understand and perhaps accept that he has sufficient reason to wait in line like everyone else. Well, in that case, ex hypothesi, he won’t get it. Since he won’t be able to understand, it will be misguided to demand that he see things otherwise, just as it will be pointless to morally argue with a psychopath and confused for Mr. Magoo to give orders to a fence post.