Darwall, Empathy, and the Psychology of the 2nd-Person - Midsouth Philosophy Conference 2008

In response to compatiblist claims in the determinism debate, it was P.F. Strawson (1962) who first suggested that Consequentialist reasons, those based on the preferences of consequences an act may advance, are the wrong sort of reasons to evaluate the normative status of an action. Put another way, it might be thought that notions of morality that stipulate ‘if P action yields desirable consequences then P must be moral’, are initially attractive. However, Strawson’s wrong kind of reasons problem says that while ‘if P yields desirable consequences therefore P’ is a good justification for ‘desiring P’, it is an entirely fallacious justification for ‘P’ itself. If we take Strawson’s point, the reasons to justify moral responsibility “should appear in the content of the attitude for which they are reasons” (1962). So, instead, Strawson argues for what he takes to be the right reasons to ground moral responsibility, what he calls the reactive attitudes. In a sense, reactive attitudes are indeed quite familiar, arising from our personal interactions with other members of the moral community. That is, in response to another’s behavior, personal reactive attitudes like gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings as well as impersonal reactive attitudes like indignation, disapprobation, guilt, and remorse are essential to how we hold others morally responsible.

Along these (decidedly Deontological) lines, in The Second Person Standpoint, Stephen Darwall adopts a Strawsonian explanation of accountability. The goal, of course, is to show that moral obligation has an irreducible 2nd personal aspect that arises from our responsibilities to each other as members of the moral community. The argument depends on the premise from Strawson, that reactive attitudes are an indicator of moral accountability. Of course, the primary relationship that Darwall is addressing is the signifying relation: reactive attitudes signify that moral accountability is being attributed, as reactive attitudes presuppose the attribution of moral accountability.

Beyond this general picture of moral obligation Darwall advances lies a complicated way in which the 2nd personal address actually determines moral accountability, and what it presupposes. The second-person standpoint is instantiated when one is forced to acknowledge the claims or demands others have on your behavior in 2nd personal address. So, suppose I were to purposely step on Carolyn’s foot. She would express a reactive attitude (most likely resentment) and demand that I remove my foot. She would demand this not as a third-person or agent neutral critique about the morality of universal foot-smashing so applied, but solely on the basis of her competence in giving 2nd person reasons that arise from her reactive attitudes; and in making the demand explicit in reactive attitudes, one presupposes that the other has this competence. From this point, I must, as the foot-smasher, identify that there has been a reactive attitude in Carolyn, and a resulting 2nd person reason has been issued to me, quite in the imperative. However, the next step requires something more than just my awareness of Carolyn as I step on her toes. What is essential is Darwall’s notion of reciprocal recognition. So, when Carolyn (as the foot-smashed) issues an address, it is essential that I (the addressee) am able to take the prospective as the foot-smashed (the addressor), and then recognize two things. First I must be aware that there was a reactive attitude of some particular content, and also that the resulting demand based on this content is a rational one. In doing this, I must next put myself in the (rather crushed) shoes of the addresser and evaluate the address from the standpoint of the addressor. Thus reciprocal recognition in this way involves that the addresser and the addressee are both aware of our mutual 2nd personal relating (Darwall 2006, 44) as well as empathy, the ability to take Carolyn’s second personal reasons as my own and then evaluate them in making the choice to act.

Many objections have been raised in the area of 2nd personal "competence" and what constitutes moral community membership criteria, and for obvious reasons. However, what I want to focus on is here is the aspect of reciprocal recognition and how empathy works. If empathy is required, what is required of it, and what mechanism guarantees its success in the psychology of the second person?

Darwall likens the (essential) role of empathy in the Second-Person Standpoint in terms of that common sentiment from To Kill a Mockingbird, “walking in another man’s shoes,” and quickly explains the mental mechanism by appealing to a particular brand of folk psychology. Now, generally speaking, folk psychology gives us the ability to describe, explain, interpret, and predict others and ourselves in intentional terms (and note, object-oriented belief and desire involve theoretical reasoning, not practical reasoning). That is to say, folk psychology shows how, given mental states like belief and desire, we can come to form certain ideas related to behavior. However, generally speaking, there is a large dispute in the philosophy of mind as to the specific cognitive mechanisms underlying this ability. Darwall mentions Robert Gordon and Alvin Goldman’s respective accounts of this ability, what has been come to known as simulation theory. Simulation theory states “in predicting, explaining or interpreting other people we simulate them by using part of our own cognitive systems off-line” (Nichols-Stich 1992). That is, in interpreting mental states, simulation does not rely on any implicitly held epistemic theories or any internalized knowledge structures. Instead, we use ourselves as a model for the target person’s behavior we are trying to understand and simulate that behavior, given artificial mental states, running on our own preexisting databases. Then, “in this off-line mode, you can feed the decision making system some hypothetical or ‘pretend’ belief and desire [reactive attitude in Darwall’s case]…that you do not actually have, but the person whose behavior [2nd personal reasons] you are trying to understand does…and let the system generate a decision” (Goldman 1986, 231). So, in the case before when I stepped on Carolyn’s foot, Carolyn expresses a 2nd personal reason to me, a demand that I ought to move my foot from atop of hers. To make sense of this 2nd personal reason that has been addressed, I enact the off-line simulationist model by adopting her reactive attitude (again, clearly resentment) as my own, and then by running it through my own moral-cognitive system and introspect the result. Of course, since we have disconnected this process from my action center module, the 2nd personal reason I reach from this procedure does not become my own 2nd personal reason, but instead allows me to retain my own states, with the added prospective from Carolyn’s point of view. Again, loosely, this is what is generally meant by introspection, 'being in someone else’s shoes,' and empathy in the relevant sense.

From the outset, we might note that a simulationist account of empathy is probably the preferable folk psychological theory to apply to the 2nd person standpoint. This is because in such a picture, there is a minimal appeal to theoretical reasoning or third-person perspectives, but simply practical reasoning based on the point of view of the agents within the address. Indeed, with the inherent absence of any law like structures or appeals to Theory-Theory (Stich-Nichols 1993), simulation accounts seem to have a natural 2nd personal feel. While I have many objections to both simulation theory in general FP discussions, I have also many objections to the ways this might work to fit Darwall's account of the psychology of the 2nd person. I will be presenting these arguments at the Midsouth Philosophy Conference 2008 in Memphis Tennessee the weekend of February 22nd, see more info here (forthcoming). And also, on our blog if there is interest!

That said, it might well be true that many of our most popular folk psychological theories, properly applied to the 2nd-Person Standpoint might well invoke a theoretical prospective on a second-personally competent agent, rather than addressing them in a second-personal fashion.