A responsibility asymmetry

Discussion of my previous post has made me realize that, it seems, we’re more apt to be skeptical about the culpability of someone whose evil actions arose from a poor upbringing than of the praiseworthiness of someone whose good actions arose from a good upbringing.

This probably isn’t due to any general erring in favor of positive judgments. We’re not that nice (e.g., think of the research that shows that people are going to say that the CEO who doesn’t care about the environment but institutes profitable policies that happen to pollute is intentionally polluting, while the CEO who doesn’t care about the environment but institutes profitable policies that happen to be good for the environment is not intentionally helping the environment).

Here are two complementary stories that would make the apparent asymmetry reasonable:

• Virtue makes one free while vice enslaves.

• The person raised badly may be non-blameworthily ignorant of what is right. The person raised well knows what is right, though may deserve no credit for the knowledge. But non-blameworthy ignorance takes away responsibility, while knowledge gained without credit is good enough for responsibility for the actions flowing from that knowledge.

The noise from this asymmetry suggests that we may want to be careful when discussing free will and determinism to include both positive and negative actions evenhandedly in our examples.