Abstract
This paper aims to further examine the relationship between self-awareness and agency by focusing on the role that emotional awareness plays in prominent conceptions of responsibility. One promising way of approaching this task is by focusing on individuals who display impairments in emotional awareness and then examining the effects (if any) that these impairments have on their apparent responsibility for the actions that they perform. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as well as other clinical groups who evince high degrees of the personality construct known as alexithymia, I will argue, do, in fact, display impairments in emotional self-awareness, and, so, may provide some insight into the relationship between this awareness and the capacity for responsible agency. More specifically, individuals with ASD may provide us with evidence that robust emotional self-awareness is not a necessary condition for responsible agency or that lacking such a capacity could undermine some otherwise plausible sufficient conditions for responsibility. The aim of the paper, then, is twofold. First, it will aim to show that ASD ought to be understood, in part, as a disorder of emotional self-awareness. Section 2 presents evidence relating to the emotional profile characteristic of individuals with ASD and argues that the most striking feature of this profile is the way in which the individual seems to be separated from his or her emotions in an important sense. Second, the paper aims to show that this distinctive feature of the emotions in ASD casts serious doubt on some prominent accounts of moral responsibility. To this end, section 3.1 presents a challenge to some widely accepted “subjective conditions” for responsibility, namely those articulated by John Martin Fischer and Ravizza (1998) and makes a case, based on the empirical data regarding autism, that these conditions actually are not necessary for one’s being a responsible agent. Section 3.2 then presents a challenge for theories of responsible agency which assign primary importance to the connection between an agent’s actions and her judgment-sensitive attitudes. I argue there that the evidence from autism suggests that these theories fail in their efforts to provide sufficient conditions for responsibility.
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Notes
Though agency and responsible agency are distinct concepts, the two are closely related. I focus on responsibility here because, it seems to me, the exercise of responsible agency is what we most care about when assessing whether one is an agent at all. That is, we tend to care about the feeling of agency insofar as we tend to feel that the actions we perform are actions for which we can be held responsible.
Another means of reconciling this data, of course, is by positing some other cognitive basis of ASD which could play a causal role in the primary deficit identified by the above theories. One such view, the Intense World theory, that has been proposed recently, for example, claims that the deficits observed are the result of perceptual hypersensitivity which causes withdrawal from one’s surroundings early on in development (Markram et al. 2007; Markram and Markram 2010). Elsewhere (Stout 2016b, c), I have argued that a deficit in counterfactual representation may be a primary deficit in ASD.
Importantly, one could also add the question, “How, if at all, does the individual respond to the emotions of others?” However, as this is primarily a question about the capacity for empathy (of, perhaps, various types) it has less direct relevance for the question of self-awareness that is at issue here. I address this question at length in Stout 2016b.
This is the phrase used in the DSM-III-R as discussed by Capps et al. 1993.
See Begeer et al. 2008 for a discussion of these.
See Nuske et al. 2013 for a helpful review on this matter.
Note that the authors often refer to embarrassment, shame, and coyness as having the same essential basis, namely, that something about the subject is being observed by an audience, and, therefore, to experience any of these three requires sensitivity to the perceptions of the audience.
See Hobson et al. 2006, chapter 4.
See Hobson et al. 2006, chapter 5.
For example, in order to test pride, children were asked to draw a house. The drawing was complemented by the evaluator who then asked the children to show the drawing to another evaluator who was sitting across the room. The second evaluator offered effusive praise for the drawing, and the reaction of the child was scored.
The TAS-20 is a self-report questionnaire which consists of three sections designed to test for difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, and externally-oriented thinking. Questions are answered on a 5-point Likert scale, and some of the questions are negatively keyed.
Of course, this highly reflective view of self-awareness is contentious, and many authors argue that reflection of this sort is not a necessary condition for one’s being self-aware. For example, Legrand (2006) argues for the presence of a pre-reflective, bodily self-consciousness in which one experiences and is aware of one’s body even absent reflecting on one’s body as the object of one’s awareness. I grant that the reflective self-awareness stipulated here may not fully characterize the nature of self-awareness, and it may well be true that individuals with ASD and alexithymia are emotionally self-aware in this pre-reflective sense when they experience the physiological sensations of any particular emotional episode. I wish to stay agnostic with regard to the debate over what, precisely self-awareness consists in. Since my aim here is to examine how impaired emotional awareness might impact theories of responsible agency, my focus is on the more reflective variety as no theorist, to my knowledge, endorses an account of responsible agency on which the pre-reflective variety would be sufficient for an agent’s being responsible for her actions. I’m grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me to address this point.
Belcher (2015) provides compelling footage of high-functioning autistic women discussing their late diagnoses and the problems that their autism has posed throughout their life. These first personal accounts, I think, provide strong support for the intuition that these women are indeed responsible agents.
It is an interesting question just how Rachel might come to know this. Unfortunately, exploring this question in any detail is beyond the scope of this paper. However, some comments are necessary here. First, the empirical literature on moral judgment in ASD seems to show rather clearly that individuals with ASD are able to differentiate between moral and conventional norms ( Blair 1996; Leslie et al. 2006). Moreover, many have argued that individuals with ASD are highly rule-driven and, thus, see moral rules as carrying a great deal of weight (see, for example, McGeer 2008). In other work (Stout 2016a), I have argued that this preference for rule-guided moral judgment arises as a result of a greater reliance on model-based, feedback-based judgments. No matter the psychological basis for such judgments, though, that Rachel would see the rule, “you ought to let people know when you will be late” as normatively binding seems to me to be uncontroversial.
My thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
Paul Russell (2004) argues compellingly for this view, saying that in order for an agent to be responsible she must have a “moral sense” which is partly a function of being able to hold others responsible by experiencing the reactive attitudes. Michael McKenna (2012) makes a similar argument as well.
It is true, nonetheless, that Rachel would still be able to see herself as the source of her actions and would satisfy Fischer and Ravizza’s first criterion in this weak sense. However, this does not seem to me to be sufficient for taking responsibility in Fischer and Ravizza’s sense. In discussing how children become moral agents, for example, they write, “The relevant notion of ‘agency’ is a rather minimal notion, according to which the child sees himself as the source …of certain upshots in the world … The child is brought to see that his desires, beliefs, and intentions result in actions and upshots in the world; these upshots are not the results of freakish accidents or other agents.” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 208) Moreover, bringing this notion of agency to bear on the subjective conditions, they state, “the individual must see himself as an agent; he must see that his choices and actions are efficacious in the world. The agent thus sees that his motivational states are the causal source – in certain characteristic ways – of upshots in the world.” (211) Thus, it seems to me that simply seeing oneself as a source of actions is not, by itself, the crucial feature of this first criterion. Rather, it is just as important that the agent understand the effects of her actions in the world, and it is this ability that I am arguing may be truncated in agents like Rachel.
As one anonymous referee points out, this case might lead us to think Rachel is only partially responsible for her failure in this case, or that her responsibility is somewhat diminished, given her impairments. I am open to this reading of the case. However, even on this weaker interpretation this type of case will still prove problematic for Fischer and Ravizza’s view. If Rachel fails to meet conditions (1) and (2), as I have argued, then it is hard to see how Fischer and Ravizza can justify holding her even partially responsible on their view.
Describing this sort of view as an answerability theory is intended to help distinguish it from theories of attributability such as Harry Frankfurt’s (1998) now famous hierarchical theory of the control required for responsibility. Frankfurt claims that all that is needed for an agent to be morally responsible is for an action to be attributable to the agent’s real self. I will use this terminology in the rest of this section since it is how both Scanlon and Smith refer to their views.
By “judgments,” Smith has in mind something much more expansive than consciously held judgments. Take, for example, the case of anger. Agent A may become angry with agent B without ever consciously entertaining any judgment with respect to B’s actions. Nevertheless, the mere fact that A becomes angry entails that A has judged that B has slighted A (or some other judgment on which we might take anger to be based). So, using Smith’s terminology, the evaluative judgment that one has been slighted is implicit in one’s holding the attitude of anger. Using Scanlon’s terminology, anger is a judgment-sensitive attitude insofar as its presence in an agent is sensitive to some judgment that the agent makes regarding slights. These conceptions are similar enough that they may be used roughly interchangeably.
Smith might respond here that the fear that is being experienced in Jones’ case is something closer to a phobia, which on her account would be both non-rational and non-attributable to Jones. However, this response seems to me implausible. Jones’ fear in this case is not disordered to the point of being non-rational as in the case of a phobia. The fear itself is identical to the fear that any neurotypical agent might feel in Jones’ case. The only difference is that Jones can’t identify what it is that he’s feeling.
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Stout, N. Emotional Awareness and Responsible Agency. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 337–362 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0368-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0368-x