928615130

Professor: Casper Hare

TA: Brendan Dill
Philosophy 24.00
18 November 2014
The aware sane deep self view
In The Importance of What We Care About, Harry Frankfurt asserts that in order to be
morally responsible for your actions, you need to identify with such actions. Susan Wolfe later
challenges this view in her paper Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility, where she
contends that Frankfurts argument is wrong because it is missing a crucial condition. In this
paper, I will argue that both Frankfurt and Wolf are incorrect because they fail to give the
sufficient conditions for moral responsibility.
In The Importance of What We Care About, Frankfurt argues that in order to be morally
responsible for an action, you need to identify with such action. Identifying with an action means
that you not only have a desire to do the action, but also a desire to be the type of person who is
moved by his or her desire to do such action. For example, if you identify with the action of
eating healthy food, you not only have a desire to eat healthy food, but also have a desire to be
motivated by your desire to actually eat healthy food. And so, Frankfurt asserts that in order to be
morally responsible for an action, it is necessary and sufficient to identify with that action. We
can make the structure of Frankfurts argument more evident as follows:
(P1) Q desires to do action X.
(P2) Q desires that his desire to do action X moves him to act and do X.
(C) Q is morally responsible for X.

Nevertheless, this reasoning is mistaken because it does not give the sufficient conditions
for moral responsibility. Susan Wolf tries to explain what Frankfurt is missing in her paper
Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility. She claims that Frankfurts theory of moral
responsibility, which she refers to as the deep self view, is mistaken because it is possible to
identify with your actions and not be morally responsible for them. In order to illustrate this, she
uses a counterexample. The counterexample pictures a boy named Jojo, who is the son of an evil
dictator. Jojo is the dictators favorite son, and receives a lot of love and attention from him.
Therefore, inevitably, Jojo looks up to his father and learns from him. As an adult, Jojo ends up
being just like his father, cruel and degenerate to almost everyone in the kingdom.
In this case, Jojo thinks that his brutal and unjust actions are morally correct. He is
blinded to see what is right and what is wrong because of a rearing he was powerless to
control. So, it does not make sense to say he is morally responsible for his actions.
Nevertheless, according to Frankfurts deep-self view, he is morally responsible for his actions
because he identifies with his actions. But, as Wolf explains, this is not right because it is not his
fault that he was raised by a vicious man. Therefore, Wolf concludes that an extra condition must
be added to the deep self view. The condition she proposes is that the person in question must be
sane. Wolf describes sane as having the ability to understand the world around you and having
the ability to discern between right and wrong. Wolfs argument, the sane deep self view, can be
simplified as follows:
(P1) Q desires to do action X.
(P2) Q desires that his desire to do action X moves him to act and do X.
(P3) Q is sane.
(C) Q is morally responsible for X.

Wolf is right in that Frankfurts two original conditions are not sufficient for moral
responsibility, but just adding her new condition is not sufficient either. I will prove this by a
counterexample. Imagine Tom is a generous man who decides to buy chocolate chip cookies,
and take them to an orphanage. In the orphanage, a girl named Anna asks Tom if the cookies
have nuts, because she is very allergic to nuts, and Tom says no, because he has tried them
before. Nevertheless, after Anna eats the cookies, she starts choking and has to rush to the
hospital, but it is too late and she passes away. It turns out that the cookies did contain some sort
of nuts that were neither visible nor strong enough to taste. In this case, Tom met all the
conditions of Wolfs sane deep self view. He desired to give cookies to kids in an orphanage, he
desires to be the kind of person that is moved to give cookies to kids in orphanages, and he is
perfectly sane in Wolfs sense. However, it does not seem right to say that Tom is morally
responsible for Annas death. He was only trying to be nice to the kids, and had generous
intentions. Consequently, another condition must be added to that of the sane deep self view: not
being ignorant of the consequences of your action. In order to be morally responsible for an
action, you need to know that the action in question was wrong. Only having the ability to
distinguish between right and wrong is not sufficient, because sometimes this ability is not
enough to foresee all the consequences of your actions. My argument can be reconstructed as
follows:
(P1) Q desires to do action X.
(P2) Q desires that his desire to do action X moves him to act and do X.
(P3) Q is sane.
(P4) Q is not ignorant of the consequences (either good or bad) of X.
(C) Q is morally responsible for X.

Someone might argue that my proposition does not work because it renders everybody
the possibility of doing wrong actions because they simply didnt know. When a person does
something, it is his or her responsibility to think about the consequences his or her actions may
bring upon and choose accordingly. For instance, in the case of Tom, he shouldnt have rashly
told Anna the cookies did not contain any nuts; he should have told her he could not be certain.
Since he did not take the time to actually make sure the cookies did not contain any sort of nuts,
he is morally responsible for being reckless and giving Anna a cookie she was allergic to. My
response to this objection is that it is not plausible because nobody can ever be a 100% sure of
what his or her actions may bring upon. There is always some uncertainty about the
consequences of our actions that we cannot account for, and it is not under anybodys control.
Even if you tried to be uncommonly cautious, there is always one small possibility that
something out of your control may occur. Therefore, it does not make sense to consider someone
morally responsible for an action, if he or she was ignorant of what the action entailed.
In conclusion, I have argued that both Frankfurts and Wolfs arguments give necessary
but not sufficient conditions for moral responsibility. Therefore, I proposed to add one final
condition for moral responsibility: not being ignorant of the consequences of your actions. This
fourth condition creates an aware sane deep self view, which presents the necessary and
sufficient conditions for moral responsibility.

Works Cited
Frankfurt, Harry. "The importance of what we care about." Synthese 53.2 (1982): 257-272.
Wolf, Susan. "Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility." 1987 (1987): 46-62.