For the sake of argument, suppose that each premise of the ability argument is true: implicit attitudes are uncontrollable, these uncontrollable states cause behavior, and moral responsibility for a behavior requires control of that behavior. Accepting these premises does not guarantee the conclusion that we are not morally responsible for implicitly biased behavior. To see why, notice that the premise regarding control pertains to the state p, not the action ϕ. For controllability to follow for ϕ from p, an additional premise is needed linking the properties that a cause has to the properties of its effect. Call this the control transfer principle:

(CTP) If p causes ϕ then the inability to control p entails the inability to control ϕ.

This premise would render the ability argument against moral responsibility for implicitly biased behavior valid. However intuitive the principle might seem initially, though, there are strong reasons to reject it. In what follows, I argue that it should be rejected on logical, empirical, and conceptual grounds.

First, the principle should be rejected on logical grounds familiar to discussions of free will and moral responsibility. The present principle involves whether lacking control of a state entails that something that follows as a consequence of it was uncontrollable. Put this way, the principle closely resembles arguments against free will, and in particular, Peter van Inwagen’s consequence argument for incompatiblism between determinism and free will (Campbell 2017; van Inwagen 1983, 1989). Briefly stated, the consequence argument is that:

If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequence of laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it’s not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us (van Inwagen 1983: 56).

The present discussion about implicit attitudes does not assume that determinism is true of course, but it does have a similar structure to van Inwagen’s argument. Much like the laws of nature and past events, it might be thought, behavior is also not freely chosen if it is a consequence of implicit mental states beyond our ability to choose or to control. This connects the inability to control implicit attitudes to the inability to control behavior that follows from them.

Essential to the consequence argument is van Inwagen’s well-known “Beta Principle” (van Inwagen 1989: 404–405). Given that “Np” stands for “p and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p” it says that:

(Beta) From Np and N(p ⊃ q), deduce Nq.

In short, if you have no choice p is true, and you have no choice that p implies q is true, then you have no choice that q is true.

However, the Beta Principle, as stated above at least, has been challenged by several theorists. Specifically, theorists have offered counterexamples demonstrating that it is invalid (Huemer 2000; McKay and Johnson 1996; Widerker 1987). One counterexample by Michael Huemer, for instance, asks us to imagine a device that shoots “R-particles” into a basket if and only if you freely decide to activate it (2000: 532–533). However you cannot control which half of the basket the particles will hit once it is turned on: there is a 50/50 chance that the participles will land on the left side or the right side of the basket. Further imagine that you decide not to activate the device. Given this initial setup, now consider the following propositions given by Huemer:

(A) No R-particle lands in the left half of the basket.

(C) No R-particle lands in the basket.

Since you have no choice which side of the basket would be hit if you turned on the device, you have no choice that A is true. For the same reason, you cannot choose whether A ⊃ C is true. Negating A ⊃ C is logically equivalent to A & ~ C, and thus to falsify would require you to guarantee that R-participles hit the right side of the basket. Nonetheless, you can choose whether C is true, by simply choosing to turn on the device, which in turn, falsifies Beta and undermines the consequence argument.

This research suggests that if CTP is understood in terms of choice, then it is false. Understood in this way, having no choice about holding an implicit bias would imply that one has no choice about what follows as a consequence of it, namely, that the behavior it causes is inevitable. The consequence argument was one formal attempt to establish the conclusion that future outcomes are inevitable given that they are a consequence of determinism and other prior states of affairs that were not chosen. Counterexamples from this line of research suggest that, even after assuming determinism is true, the inevitability of ϕ would not follow from having no choice whether p. This gives us a logical reason to reject the similar pattern of inference operationalized in the discussion of moral responsibility for behavior caused by implicit attitudes we supposedly did not choose.

Researchers continue to debate whether alternative formulations of Beta are valid or whether there are other counterexamples to the consequence argument (Bailey 2012; Blum 2003; Vihvelin 2011). One response, for example, is that counterexamples can be avoided if the principle is adapted using modal verbs or the concept of alterability (van Inwagen 2000: 9, 2015: 19). Instead of invoking the inevitability of p, the revised principle invokes the notion of a “humanly unalterable truth that p”, such that there is nothing a human being is or is ever able to do that “might” or “possibly” alter p. Further research is required to chart the implications of adapted Beta principles for the application to discussions of implicit bias. From the outset, however, such an adaptation appears unlikely to succeed in the present context. The ability argument against moral responsibility is premised on the claim that we lack the ability to control behavior caused by implicit attitudes, not that there is nothing humans can do that might alter behavior they cause. There are many things one can do to alter implicitly biased behaviors. And even if one is not fully convinced by the efficacy of experimental manipulations for implicit bias change on offer to date applied to various contexts, current evidence indicates, at the very least, that there is something an agent can do that might or possibly alter them.

It might be objected however, that framing the discussion in terms of conditionalization and logical consequence does not accurately characterize what is intuitive about CTP and what is at stake in the ability argument. Instead, it might be thought, CTP is a principle about how causation works in the world between specific sorts of mental states and behaviors. Refocusing the discussion in this way, it might be thought that CTP should be replaced by a more specific principle concerning behavior and implicit attitudes in particular. Call this the implicit control transfer principle:

(ICTP) If implicit attitude p causes ϕ then the inability to control p entails the inability to control ϕ.

In other words, perhaps we cannot control actions caused specifically by implicit attitudes that we cannot control. After refocusing the discussion in this way, however, ICTP should be rejected in light of what we know so far about implicit attitudes and how they likely influence behavior. As reviewed above, there is insufficient evident that implicit attitudes are uncontrollable or causal. Furthermore, current findings suggest that if implicit attitudes do cause behavior, their causal influence will most likely be small. Of course, the fact that an effect is small does not necessarily mean it is not significant or important. But it does suggest something about causation and control on the individual level. Namely, we should expect that if implicit attitudes do cause behavior, they will almost certainly only ever partially cause it, along with all the other mechanisms, situational factors, external influences, beliefs, desires, and judgments relevant to human decision-making. As a result of this, even if a behavior was “caused” by an implicit attitude, and controllability did transfer from causal relata in the relevant way in the case of implicit attitudes specifically as in ICTP, it is doubtful that their causal contribution would be shown to come close to undermining control individuals ultimately had over their behavior.

In other words, it is unlikely that the causal impact of implicit bias on behavior is inevitable or unalterable, that the behavior in question owes its moral character to an implicit attitude, or that implicitly biased agents lack so-called “responsibility-level control” of their behavior.Footnote 3 To render these claims plausible, it would need to be demonstrated that these states impact us in ways that compromise significant amounts of freedom or agency. To show this, future research in both cognitive science and philosophy is needed to demonstrate both the causal impact of specific biases and to provide a theoretical framework specifying the threshold at which what are very likely to be small causal forces selectively undermine moral responsibility.

Some researchers have noted the issue of causal impact or behavioral prediction but have not recognized its full significance. Levy, for example, in arguing against moral responsibility correctly notes that “there is ongoing debate about what proportion of behavior is predicted by implicit attitudes” (2017: 6). He does not engage with this debate, however, on the grounds that it only involves the matter of “how often” implicit attitudes cause morally relevant behavior rather than “whether” they cause it. Yet it is odd to bracket a debate about whether implicit attitudes can predict behavior for the purposes of analyzing an imagined case in which a behavior supposedly owes the entirety of its moral character to an implicit attitude. It is odd because the fact that there is a debatable relationship between these things questions the very idea any such behavior determined solely in that way exists. Conversely, it is more probable that no behavior owes its entire character to implicit attitudes and that vague causal language has exaggerated their influence on the control we ultimately retain over our behavior.

Lastly, the principle should be rejected on conceptual grounds stemming from ordinary evaluations of behavior and uncontrollable states more broadly. In the mental realm, it’s not only possible but quite common to attribute the ability to control actions even though those actions happen to have been caused by mental states beyond control. For example, suppose hearing an insult causes an agent to become angry and this anger causes them to make an inappropriate comment towards a coworker. Further suppose this anger is beyond their control, and is the sole cause of their behavior. But that state of anger entails little about whether or not they had the ability to refrain from making the inappropriate comment towards the coworker or whether we hold them morally responsible for making it. In fact, controlling the behavior in spite of having the uncontrollable state is often referred to as “doing the right thing” and we often do hold others responsible for not doing that. And while we probably wouldn’t blame the agent for becoming angry when insulted, we probably would blame or otherwise criticize the agent for behaving wrongly towards others in light of it.

The same is true for actions caused by many different kinds of mental states including explicit beliefs. For example, consider agents who hold explicit prejudicial beliefs as the result of some combination of upbringing, lack of education, and a lifetime of indoctrination. Continue to grant for the sake of argument that they are unable to change these beliefs and that these beliefs end up being the sole cause of prejudicial behavior. Tracking these features of a belief might help us to understand where the belief came from or why it continues to persist. But the causal etiology tells us very little about their abilities to have behaved otherwise. And the fact such agents cannot control that belief does not mean these individuals have no responsibility for prejudicial or racist actions.

Similar counterexamples exist in attitude control cases involving addiction. Suppose an agent has an uncontrollable desire to drink. And on many occasions, that desire does happen to be the sole cause of their drinking. Try as they might, they cannot change the desire. In fact, the desire might have deep physiological or psychological roots impervious to reason or intention. This desire, of course might make it extremely difficult for the agent to avoid drinking in excess, and in many cases, that might happen. But having an uncontrollable desire does not itself rule out the ability to act in addiction-discordant ways. The fact that addiction-concordant behaviors are not guaranteed by an addiction underlies positive treatments and outcomes of addiction.

If there can be control for behaviors that follow as a consequence of a range of mental states and other phenomena, including uncontrollable beliefs, desires, emotions, or even some cases of addiction, then it is unclear why the same cannot be said for behavioral consequences of implicit attitudes. Moreover, we regularly ascribe moral responsibility for behaviors these mental states cause. Of course, appealing to uncontrollable states can sometimes serve as legitimate excuses that mitigate blame or punishment for a behavior, in for example, some cases of addiction. But this is not to say that the possibility of moral responsibility being present is ruled out. These facts suggest that controllable behavior can follow from uncontrollable states.

Though there is reason to reject the claim that actions caused by uncontrollable states in general, or implicit attitudes specifically, entails that those actions are uncontrollable, this argument also has limitations. Rejecting this claim does not entail that there is no implicitly caused behavior we cannot control. For example, future research might find that some specific kinds of behavior are beyond control. The present discussion focuses primarily on complex or relatively high-level discriminatory behaviors of ethical concern, such as hiring or policing. However, it is possible that implicit attitudes could cause low-level behaviors that are themselves independently at the threshold of conscious awareness very difficult or impossible to fully control, such as minor adjustments to eye contact or tone of voice. To assess this possibility, future research is needed to isolate a unique causal role of implicit attitudes in these matters, evaluate whether behaviors such as speaking in a slightly lower tone of voice to someone is beyond our ability to control, and argue that these behaviors are morally evaluable with but not without that ability.Footnote 4

To review, the ability argument against moral responsibility is invalid because it requires a premise transferring the controllability of attitudes to the controllability of behavior. Adding this premise renders the ability argument valid but attempts to defend it are not promising. As a logical matter, it remains unclear whether the fact that one proposition is uncontrollable entails another proposition is uncontrollable because it is a consequence of it. As an empirical matter, if implicit attitudes do cause behavior, evidence to date suggests they are likely to be just one among many other causes, including explicit attitudes, which questions their ability to undermine control. And lastly, the fact an uncontrollable state happens to cause a behavior does not rule out the possibility of control for that behavior because uncontrollable attitudes do not guarantee behavioral outcomes.