According to Hume, for one to be responsible for an action, the action must flow from one’s character. But the actions that we praise people for the most include cases where someone breaks free from a corrupt character and changes for the good. These cases are not merely cases of slight responsibility, but are central cases of responsibility.
A Humean can, of course, say that there was some hidden determining cause in the convert’s character that triggered the action—perhaps some inconsistency in the corruption. But given determinism, why should we think that this hidden determining cause was indeed in the agent’s character, rather than being some cause outside of the character—some glitch in the brain, say? That the hidden determining cause was in the character is an empirical thesis for which we have very little evidence. So on the Humean view, we ought to be quite skeptical that the person who radically changes from bad to good is praiseworthy. We definitely should not take such cases to be among paradigm cases of praiseworthiness.
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That one is only responsible for actions that flow from one’s character seems false, insofar as it is possible to act outside of one’s character as I believe most people would say. If what we refer to as “character” is the general patterns in one’s conduct across some unspecified but considerable amount of time, then clearly must allow in our account for us being responsible for actions that are not aligned with these general patterns.
It seems to me that the reason we tend to hand out lavish praise to people for acting in ways that are vastly out of what we consider to be a bad character, is because it is promissory in a vaguely defined sense and likely also to provide some incentive to continue on a path to a different character. It is worth noting that many people in these instances will not praise that person’s character but will reserve their praise specifically for the action itself. This latter route seems to me to be the most sound action to take and one that effectively circumnavigates the whole issue you are discussing; it arguably deflates the importance of it as a subject matter altogether.
A brief note on your remarks on the causal relations at play in scenarios like the ones you are describing: It seems clear that it cannot be a “glitch in the brain”, whatever that means precisely, that could account for an act that is considered praiseworthy by many. An act that is considered praiseworthy by many will, by its very nature, require some value judgment made on the part of the actor and a willingness to act in ways that many would refrain from if they found themselves in similar circumstances. If my account of what it takes do something praiseworthy is approximately correct, then it must say something about the person’s constitution, if not their character, and as such a mere glitch does not suffice as an explanation. A truly praiseworthy act must speak to or indicate something about the actor’s internalized values, even if these internalized values do not frequently guide this actor’s behavior and hence do not indicate something about the actor’s character. And, just to be clear, if one does not have some set of justified reasons to know the value judgment that motivated the actor to take the action in the first place, then one cannot know if the act was praiseworthy, I believe, because then one cannot rule out opportunism of a disproportionately selfish sort.
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