I am currently writing a book manuscript, with the working title Altering the Fault Lines: How Neurodiversity Shapes Moral Responsibility.
Philosophers have long sought to identify the essential human capacities that allow us to hold one another morally responsible: to blame one another when we do something wrong and to give each other credit when credit is due. In doing so, they have often invoked examples of people with psychological disabilities as outlier cases who lack some allegedly essential capacity of human agency and are therefore to be pitied rather than blamed. But this methodology has left us with an impoverished conceptual landscape for navigating real-world questions of responsibility across dimensions of human psychological variance. This book lays the groundwork for a paradigm shift.
For the first time, it puts this literature in conversation with the burgeoning field of neurodiversity studies, which critiques the notion that people with psychological disabilities are defective versions of some depoliticized notion of the ideally functioning person. I argue that conventions that unfairly privilege certain ways of being psychologically constituted over others color our default assumptions about all aspects of our responsibility practices. This ranges from what we take a person’s behavior to reveal about them, to when we think responsibility has shifted, to our expectations that others will read and respond to our emotions. I make the case for a radically new approach to how we should hold one another responsible that makes a person’s relationship to these default assumptions central in answering questions about the aptness of our responses. In doing so, I show how we can avoid the pitfalls of the standard approach and redistribute the burdens entailed by the norms that lay at the foundation of our current practices of praise and blame.
The book will answer key questions like:
What role can social norms about psychological disability play in a theory of moral responsibility that is committed to the objective reality of morality and of responsibility? How can a theory that takes the social context seriously avoid sliding into a problematic form of cultural relativism?
How would our responsibility practices be different if everyone in the world had Tourette syndrome, or clinical depression? If everyone was autistic? How can this inform our understanding of our real-world practices?
To what degree are people responsible for their own memory, attention spans, and executive functioning abilities?
What role do stigma, side-effects, and lack of access to mental health support play in shaping the expectations it is fair to have about one another?
How cautious should we be in interpreting another person’s behavior for the purposes of blaming them? How cautious is it possible to be while still holding one another accountable?
Chapter 1: A Paradigm Shift
The first chapter of the book introduces a new neurodiversity-informed paradigm for thinking about the relationship between psychological disability and moral responsibility, and contrasts it with the existing paradigm. It proceeds by way of analogy: it was long assumed that everyone had the ability to visualize things in their “mind’s eye” and that this worked roughly the same way for everyone, unless the person had some defect. Recent studies show that this is not true; visualizing abilities naturally range across a spectrum from complete mind-blindness to movie-like accuracy. It’s easy enough to make the case that we ought to update our ethical practices accordingly: we could decide to withhold judgment from anyone who can’t visualize what their spouse’s face looks like, or we could make it very easy and stigma-free to disclose one’s mind-blindness. I argue that a similar update is required to our practices of holding one another responsible, given spectrums of difference that exist in regard to attention, memory, executive function, compulsivity, emotional ‘mindreading’ ability, and the impact of trauma. I show that the necessity of this change has been harder to see on the current paradigm because, unlike visualizing, these capacities are assumed to be essential to what it means to be able to be a responsible agent. I critique the current paradigm by elucidating some of the epistemic and social factors at play that have led to these assumptions. I then set the groundwork for how to think about moral responsibility when we relax these assumptions, and argue that doing so is necessary to be able to answer the real-world questions that we need to answer about navigating moral life across psychological difference.
Chapter 2: The Boundaries of the Responsible Agent
This chapter introduces a new way to think about when a person’s behavior is or is not something that expresses something about them that we can appraise them for. We tend to think, for example, that the average person who loudly taps her foot at the opera is blameworthy for being rude, while the person who does it because she has a foot-tapping compulsion is not. The orthodox explanation holds that there is a threshold degree of control that normal humans have over their actions, and people with compulsions, tics, and sensory aversions sadly lack the capacity to control what they do. By contrast, the view I advance in this chapter holds that these sorts of mental urges are continuous with urges like itches and exhaustion, and are properly conceived of as part of an agent’s environmental conditions rather than her agency. I argue that acting on these urges does not express a person’s agency, and so she cannot be held responsible in a direct sense. However, I argue, a person can be responsible for managing her urge, given her circumstance, much like she might be responsible for managing other elements of a situation.
Chapter 3: Failure to Act ≠ Failure to Care
This chapter moves from the topic of whether or not a person’s behavior can express something about that person to the question of, when it can express something, just what we interpret that behavior as saying. The process of making these interpretive inferences can be fairly invisible in cases in which we blame someone for their action but is more explicit in cases in which we blame someone for failing to act. For example, we might blame a friend who forgets to reach out on our birthday because, we think, if she cared enough about us, she would have remembered. I focus on the latter types of cases, examining cases of negligent-seeming omissions due to dementia and depression, to illustrate a broader point about how we tend to fail to take into account human variation in memory, attention, and executive function in interpretation of one another’s behavior. I show how what we set as our default assumptions about what certain actions or omissions reveal about a person is a political matter, with the burdens of psychological management falling disproportionately on people with certain psychological configurations. I sketch what our practices might look like if they were reconfigured to involve more customization of our interpretation of one another’s behavior in our close relationships and more caution in our judgment of those we are not intimately acquainted with.
In this chapter I argue that a neurodiversity lens should play an important role in shaping not just whether and how we hold a particular person responsible, but also in setting the norms for who is responsible for what. Building on Chapters 2 and 3, I show that there are certain cases in which even though forgetting to do something morally important needn’t imply that a person cared less, or performing a tic that happens to be a slur needn’t imply hatred for a minority group, we can nevertheless blame that person for insufficiently managing their own psychology even once we’ve adequately challenged our assumptions about “normal functioning” (ex. failing to practice an easy therapeutic technique for redirecting tics because one doesn’t mind that their tics insult minorities). However, this obligation is complicated by the fact that this kind of psychological management is often hampered by stigma and lack of access to resources. I argue that an overlooked source of our collective obligation to fix these access problems is that it would make it easier for our blaming practices to more cleanly track actual fault. I show how, in the non-ideal world where being able to manage one’s psychological configuration is neither easy nor equitable, we can use consent as a useful vehicle to shift responsibility from one party to another in order to customize our interpersonal agreements about responsibility (ex. we might consent to not hold our autistic friends responsible for responding to emotions we’re having that we don’t explicitly state) But, I argue, these consent systems have to be careful to take into account neurodiversity too in setting how consent is signaled.
Chapter 4: Whose Responsibility?
A central debate in the philosophy of moral responsibility concerns whether or not the fact that a wrongdoer has a traumatic history can in any way exempt her from blame. Standard theories about why we should withhold blame in these cases aim to show that people who experience unimaginable horrors at an early age might fail to develop some capacity thought to be crucial to being a responsible agent. In this chapter I argue that once we think of the degree to which a person’s behaviors are influenced by past traumas as a spectrum, we can see that actions that take a particular form because they are, at least in part, reactions to trauma, are often deep expressions of our agency. Exemption of agents from responsibility on the basis of their actions’ connections to past trauma can serve to stigmatize and silence these forms of expression. Instead, I posit that the reason we have to temper our blame in these cases comes from our own diminished standing to blame traumatized people, given our complicity in a society that seriously underserves victims of trauma.
Chapter 5: Blame and Traumatic Histories
Throughout the book I articulate ways in which we ought to modify our practices of moral responsibility by adopting a more cautionary stance that questions predominant norms in attaching meanings to behaviors. In this chapter I respond to skepticism that such modification is even possible. According to a prominent tradition, moral responsibility is constituted by our proneness to hardwired reactive attitudes that assume that our relationships have a measure-for-measure reciprocal nature. It is important that we are constantly monitoring each other subconsciously through emotional ‘mindreading,’ and the ubiquitous automatic responses we have to one another’s attitudes are an essential component of participatory interpersonal relationships. I argue that this is false, and point to the fact that autistic communities navigate rich interpersonal relationships among themselves without engaging in this sort of monitoring. I end by making the case for the ethical importance of distancing ourselves from certain gut reactions that have long been accepted as “natural” in order to sustain more equitable relationships that are asymmetric in regards to psychological constitution.