Comments on “Responding to Cyr’s Challenge: A Defense of Historicism”

2024 UIGPS Conference

 

Comments on “Responding to Cyr’s Challenge: A Defense of Historicism”

 

Hyeongyun Kim (The University of Iowa)

 

In the paper, the author engages in a debate between the structuralist and historicist accounts of moral responsibility and defends the latter against Cyr’s three challenges. Structuralism, according to the author, claims that facts about an agent’s internal condition (i.e., structural facts) are sufficient for determining moral responsibility, whereas historicism holds that an agent’s history is necessary for such assessment. The manipulation case is often considered prima facie evidence for making historicism more plausible than structuralism.

In response to this counterexample, Cyr makes the argument from constitutive luck and claims that it threatens both historicism (in that manipulated victims can be regarded morally responsible agents that are entirely constitutively lucky) and structuralism (in that structuralists neglect the fact that constitutive luck mitigates moral responsibility to some extent). In a nutshell, historicism is wrong because Beth is morally responsible for what she does; structuralism is wrong because Beth is less morally responsible than Ann for what she does. Cyr calls this account History-sensitive Structuralism by which he means that an agent’s historical facts can affect the degree of their moral responsibility while maintaining the claim that their structural facts are only a sufficient condition for determining moral responsibility.

Given my limited background knowledge of this debate, I shall begin with a clarifying question. If my understanding is correct, the author makes a case for negative historicism, which assesses the manipulation case as follows: Beth, unlike Cyr’s analysis, bears no moral responsibility at all due to a specific historical fact―that Beth is a victim of manipulation. And “[a]ccording to negative historicism, […] agents must lack certain historical facts to be not morally responsible” (p. 3). But given the presented case, would it be more plausible to suggest that agents must lack certain historical facts to be morally responsible?

Secondly, I was wondering whether specific criteria exist for distinguishing between cases where certain historical facts exempt agents from moral responsibility and cases where they merely mitigate moral responsibility. Even if we acknowledge the claim that both historical and structural facts can affect the degree of moral responsibility, there must be a difference between historical facts that make responsibility 0% (where an agent bears no responsibility) and 1% (where an agent is morally responsible). For instance, the author and Mele argue that Beth bears no responsibility, whereas Carl does, notwithstanding the fact that both are victims of manipulation (p. 9). Then, what makes this significant difference? I think further explanation is needed to avoid arbitrariness.

Finally, I’m not sure “Mele’s (2020) attempt to explain how Beth’s moral responsibility is restored” (pp. 10-11) is truly effective. According to Mele and the author’s explanation, “it takes time for Beth to embrace and identify with her newly manipulated values so that they are well integrated with the rest of her character.” (p. 11). Put simply, Beth autonomously possessed those values that once non-autonomously acquired through the manipulation (p. 11). However, doesn’t this imply that Beth’s internal condition is not identical to Ann’s internal condition? For Ann autonomously possessed, embraced, and identified those values (and presumably Ann would know this fact), it seems to me that the original case no longer effectively challenges structuralism.