Topics Ethics

Question Can we really blame drunk drivers? Doesn't the very state which makes them dangerous on the road (i.e. inebriation) also absolve them of responsibility for having decided to drive?

Accepted:
June 25, 2011

Comments

The more drunk a person is, the more his responsibility for what he decides to do diminishes -- and when the person is really extremely drunk, he may not be capable of decisions and not at all responsible for the movements of his body).

Even if this is conceded, it does not follow that a drunk driver is not to blame. The reason is that this persons can take reasonable steps while he is sober to prevent himself from driving drunk. He can refrain from getting drunk, he can leave his car at home, he can give his car key to a dedicated driver (whom he can trust to keep her commitment not to drink), he can rent a hotel room near the place where he'll drink, and so on. By doing none of these things, the person is culpably (in a state where he is fully responsible for his decisions) causing a substantial risk to others: the risk that he will end up driving drunk in a state of diminished responsibility.

They are responsible for putting themselves in that drunken state in which they may have very little control over themselves.

I just want to supplement Tom Pogge's response. Some approaches to responsibility view responsibility as a historical concept whose application depends not just on what's true of the agent at the time of action but also how the agent came to be that way. Some historical approaches to responsibility embrace a "tracing principle" that allows us to trace an agent's responsibility through time to earlier crucial decisions. On one such view, lacking suitable competence or control is not sufficient to excuse an agent if she is responsible for lacking competence or control. Tom discusses the normal case in which someone who gets sufficiently drunk loses competence and control but is presumably responsible for becoming irresponsible because she was competent and in control before she got drunk and could have drunk less, arranged for alternative transportation, etc. In such a case the tracing principle implies that the agent is responsible for the harm she does while drunk even though she was not responsible at the time. However, the tracing principle would reach a different verdict if the agent was not responsible for becoming irresponsible -- if, for example, unbeknownst to her, someone put a mickey in her soda. Because we can't trace a path from her wrongdoing to her earlier responsible decisions, she is not responsible for the harm she causes in a drunken state, even though she is just as impaired as the person in the normal case.

A different approach to responsibility is ahistorical. It says that what matters to responsibility for some wrong or harm just depends on the agent's capacities and control at the time of action, not how she came to be that way. Such a view is committed to saying that once drunk the agent is not responsible for the wrongs she does or the harms she commits. But that needn't let her off the hook. In the standard case, which Tom describes, she is responsible for something else, namely for failing to take precautions to avoid getting drunk and for failing to protect others from risks of her being drunk (e.g. by taking a cab or arranging for a designated driver). In short, though she is not responsible for the particular harms she causes while drunk, she is responsible for reckless endangerment.

So neither historical nor ahistorical approaches to responsibility acquits the agent of responsibility in the normal case, though what exactly she is responsible for is different on the two approaches.

Question Can we really blame drunk drivers? Doesn't the very state which makes them dangerous on the road (i.e. inebriation) also absolve them of responsibility for having decided to drive? Accepted:June 25, 2011

Question Can we really blame drunk drivers? Doesn't the very state which makes them dangerous on the road (i.e. inebriation) also absolve them of responsibility for having decided to drive?

Accepted:
June 25, 2011