294 Revisionism and Some Remaining Issues
his mother to her doctor’s appointment. But he got drunk and did not so decide.
He’s responsible for not making this decision, but only derivatively from his
responsibility for getting drunk
But in his book Who Knew, George Sher (2009) considers the possibility of
responsibility for omissions and their outcomes in cases in which the epistemic
conditions on responsibility appear not to be satisfied. He sets out a number of
examples to illustrate this phenomenon, and here is one of them:
Alessandra, a soccer mom, has gone to pick up her children at their elemen-
tary school. As usual, Alessandra is accompanied by the family’s border
collie, Bathsheba, who rides in the back of the van. Although it is very hot,
the pick- up has never taken long, so Alessandra leaves Sheba in the van
while she goes to gather her children. This time, however, Alessandra is
greeted by a tangled tale of misbehavior, ill- considered punishment, and
administrative bungling which requires several hours of indignant sorting
out. During that time, Sheba languishes, forgotten, in the locked car. When
Alessandra and her children finally make it to the parking lot, they find
Sheba unconscious from heat prostration. (Sher, 2009: 24)Alessandra is intuitively morally responsible for not deciding to take measures
to ensure the dog’s safety, and for the bad outcome. One might propose that her
blameworthiness is derivative of what Holly Smith refers to as a benighting act,
an act in which the agent “fails to improve (or positively impairs) his cognitive
position” so as to evidently result in a risk of performing the action at issue
(Sher, 2009: 34; H. Smith, 1983). However, Sher argues that there are cases of
negligence for which we hold agents morally responsible that lack this feature.
When Alessandra arrived at school with the dog, “the dispute that she encoun-
tered was not one that she could have anticipated. Because she had no previous
reason to expect to be distracted, she also had no previous reason to take precau-
tion against being distracted.” (2009: 35–6; Clarke, 2014b).^5 One might propose
that Alessandra has a morally defective quality of will—for instance, she does
not care enough about her dog—and her having been aware that she should care
more about the dog and not caring more grounds her blameworthiness (Sher,
2016). Against this, Sher observes that people in these sorts of situations usually
feel very bad about what has happened, which counts against failure of care.
Nevertheless, we hold the agent morally responsible for the outcome.
Sher’s solution is to propose that an agent can be morally responsible for an
outcome even if it did not derive from a state of hers of which she was aware
(2009: 121). Alessandra is blameworthy because her action flows from the
enduring causal structure that constitutes her, even though in this case the part of
causal structure at issue does not feature anything of which she is aware that can
ground her responsibility, whether it be something that immediately precedes the
act, or something that occurred earlier to which the responsibility might then be
traced. An objection to this proposal is that to preserve our ordinary tendency to
judge Alessandra blameworthy, it takes a radical adjustment to our practice of