Drunk Driving & Tracing
Hello everyone! Apologies for my absence, it has been a busy semester.
I just got home from a colloquium given at Arizona State University by John Fischer of UC Riverside. It was about “tracing,” a concept formerly unknown to me. To make a long story painfully short, the idea is that, even if an agent doesn’t meet some criteria for moral responsibility in a situation at that time, we might nonetheless be able attribute responsibility to her in virtue of some other previous decision of hers over which she had control and which influenced the present situation. That is, we trace back the causal chain to the prior decision in order to find responsibility.
This colloquium really helped me make sense of a discussion we had here at EM a while back: drunk driving & mens rea. A paradigmatic example of this sort of responsibility attribution is the case of drunken driving. A drunken driver might lack control over her actions at the time of an accident, but we can trace back to her decision to drink in order to attribute responsibility for a moral failing (as many objectors of mine noted).
I do, of course, understand this move; it seems a natural one. I suppose that my main point was this: where ordinarily such tracing might be possible, I find it problematic that the drunken driver is physiologically impaired in addition to being temporally removed from the decision to drink at the time of the accident. In order for some kind of “tracing” to go through, the intermediate states between the decision and the action must be properly ordered in some way or other. Fischer invoked a notion of epistemic continuity which facilitates the tracing (unfortunately, I am in no position to elaborate on what exactly that is without thoroughly botching it). I suggest that being in an altered brain state owing to alcohol consumption might disrupt the continuity (or perhaps whatever other notion of ‘properly ordered’ one wishes to invoke) necessary for tracing.
Anyway, just thought that would shed a little more light on this issue. It continues to interest me.
(Disclaimer: no, I do not condone drunk driving. I am merely interested in the mechanics of the attribution of moral responsibility)
I promise I have other thoughts too… will hopefully post again soon.
~ by PJS on November 30, 2007.
Posted in Ethics, Posts by Pam Stubbart
Interesting, Pam.
One thing you might say to preserve the point you made in the previous post is this: Certainly a tracing can take place between the driver’s impaired state to the driver’s decision to drink. But that doesn’t mean a tracing can take place between the driver’s decision to drive to a state in which the driver was not impaired. It might be that the driver never intended to drive when she was sober, and that that decision was made only after she became severely impaired. Consider the following case intended to be analogous to the above situation. Imagine that Smith has a root canal this afternoon. She drives to the appointment herself, and her friend Jones (who lives in her building and works near her dentist’s office) agrees to walk to her dentist’s office and drive her in her car back to their building. Unfortunately, Jones gets caught up at work, and cannot make it to the dentist’s office in time. Smith turned her cell phone off while the procedure was taking place and hasn’t turned it back on yet. Smith is very impaired, and thinks that Jones is meeting her outside the office. She tells this to the receptionist and the receptionist lets her leave. Smith doesn’t see Jones when she goes outside, and for whatever reason she just decides to drive herself home. She gets into an accident. Two questions: Is there a tracing in this case? Does she have mens rea?
My intuition is that a tracing cannot take place in this case and that she doesn’t have mens rea. You might think the same thing mutatis mutandis for some cases of drunk driving.
Thanks for the comment, Errol. I like your analogous case. I’m sure I will borrow it in the future.