Moral Responsibility

Sometimes ignorance is a legitimate excuse for morally wrong behavior, and sometimes it isn’t. If someone has secretly replaced my sugar with arsenic, then I’m blameless for putting arsenic in your tea. But if I put arsenic in your tea because I keep arsenic and sugar jars on the same shelf and don’t label them, then I’m blameworthy for poisoning you. Why is my ignorance in the first case a legitimate excuse, but my ignorance in the second case isn’t? This (...) essay explores the relationship between ignorance and blameworthiness. (shrink)

Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. By Callard Agnes.

This is a draft of my chapter on Negligence for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook in Moral Psychology. It discusses philosophical, psychological, and legal approaches to the attribution of culpability in cases of negligent wrongdoing.

A gunman intends to shoot and kill Victim. He shoots and misses his target, but the gunshot startles a group of water buffalo, causing them to trample the victim to death. The gunman brings about the intended effect, Victim’s death, but in a “deviant” way rather than the one planned. This paper argues that such causal structures, deviant causal chains, pose serious problems for several key legal concepts. -/- I show that deviant causal chains pose problems for the legal distinction (...) between attempts and completed crimes, and also for the distinction between attempts and mere preparations. I then suggest that cases of deviant causation undermine notions of legal liability for completed crimes in terms of actus reus and mens rea, and argue that natural accounts of negligence misclassify some cases involving deviant causal chains. After diagnosing several conceptual vulnerabilities in the law revealed by deviant causal chains, I show that natural strategies for shoring up legal theories in the face of these examples are unpromising. (shrink)

Martin Luther affirms his theological position by saying “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Supposing that Luther’s claim is true, he lacks alternative possibilities at the moment of choice. Even so, many libertarians have the intuition that he is morally responsible for his action. One way to make sense of this intuition is to assert that Luther’s action is indirectly free, because his action inherits its freedom and moral responsibility from earlier actions when he had alternative possibilities and (...) those earlier directly free actions formed him into the kind of person who must refrain from recanting. Surprisingly, libertarians have not developed a full account of indirectly free actions. I provide a more developed account. First, I explain the metaphysical nature of indirectly free actions such as Luther’s. Second, I examine the kind of metaphysical and epistemic connections that must occur between past directly free actions and the indirectly free action. Third, I argue that an attractive way to understand the kind of derivative moral responsibility at issue involves affirming the existence of resultant moral luck. (shrink)

In this paper I intend to analyse the meaning of harm as well as the strength of the reasons against harming provided by harm-states. I will argue that there are two kinds of harms: absolute harms and relative harms. Also, I will argue that when certain harm has been completely covered by considering such harm as absolute, the consideration of such harm as –also– relative is displaced. Such considerations should be taken into account when the suffered harms cannot be entirely (...) explained by considerations regarding absolute harms. If these claims are right, we will have guidelines to measure, among other things, the agent´s moral responsibility in different kind of cases. -/- En este trabajo me propongo analizar tanto qué significa sufrir un daño como la fuerza de las razones en contra de dañar que se derivan de los estados de daño. Argumentaré que existen distintos tipos de daño: absolutos y relativos, y que los primeros son cualitativamente más graves que los segundos. Argumentaré también que, si los daños sufridos pueden ser explicados enteramente en términos de daños absolutos, las consideraciones referidas a los daños relativos no deben entrar en juego. Tales consideraciones sólo deben ser tenidas en cuenta cuando los daños sufridos no puedan ser explicados enteramente en términos de daños absolutos. Si estas afirmaciones son correctas, contaremos con lineamientos que pueden servir de guía para, entre otras cosas, graduar la responsabilidad de los agentes en diferente clase de casos. (shrink)

Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Kinds of moral luck are differentiated by the source of lack of control such as the results of her actions, the circumstances in which she finds herself, and the way in which she is constituted. Many philosophers accept the existence of some of these kinds of moral luck but not others, because, in their view, the existence of only some of them would (...) make morality unfair. I, however, argue that this intermediary approach is unstable, because either morality is fair in ways that rule out resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck (and this leads to moral responsibility skepticism), or morality is unfair in ways that permit the existence of those kinds of moral luck. Thus, such intermediary approaches lack the motivation that their proponents have long taken them to have. In the appendix, I point to ways in which morality is unfair concerning the scope of moral responsibility, moral obligation, moral taint, being a good or bad person, and flourishing. (shrink)

We study whether robots can satisfy the conditions for agents fit to be held responsible in a normative sense, with a focus on autonomy and self-control. An analogy between robots and human groups enables us to modify arguments concerning collective responsibility for studying questions of robot responsibility. On the basis of Alfred R. Mele’s history-sensitive account of autonomy and responsibility it can be argued that even if robots were to have all the capacities usually required of moral agency, their history (...) as products of engineering would undermine their autonomy and thus responsibility. (shrink)

When explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes. What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others? The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor's environment. Study 1 found that high-prejudice participants were much more likely to endorse non-agential explanations of an erotic same-sex encounter, such as that one of the (...) men endured a stressful event earlier that day. Study 2 manipulated participants' beliefs about how the agent's behavior depended on features of his environment, finding that such beliefs played no clear role in modeling participants' explanatory preferences. This result emerged both with low- and high-prejudice, US and Indian participants, suggesting that these findings probably reflect a species-typical feature of human psychology. Study 3 found that moral attitudes also predicted explanations for a woman's decision to abort her pregnancy (3a) and a person's decision to convert to Islam (3b). Study 4 found that luck in an action's etiology tends to undermine perceptions of blame more readily than perceptions of praise. Finally, Study 5 found that when explaining support for a rival ideology, both Liberals and Conservatives downplay agential causes while emphasizing environmental ones. Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves. Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self. There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative. (shrink)

I argue that we are sometimes morally responsible for having and using (or not using) our concepts, despite the fact that we generally do not choose to have them or have full or direct voluntary control over how we use them. I do so by extending an argument of Angela Smith's; the same features that she says make us morally responsible for some of our attitudes also make us morally responsible for some of our concepts. Specifically, like attitudes, concepts can (...) be (a) conceptually and rationally connected to our evaluative judgments, (b) in principle subject to rational revision (reasons‐responsive), and (c) the basis for actual and potential moral assessments of people that we have good reasons to endorse. Thus, we are open to moral appraisal on the basis of having and using (or not using) our concepts when they reflect our evaluative judgments, though even then it is not always appropriate to praise or blame us on that basis. (shrink)

Different societies came to consider certain behaviors as morally wrong, and, in time, due to a more or less general practice, those behaviors have also become legally prohibited. While, nowadays, the existence of legal responsibility of states and individuals for certain reprehensible acts committed during an armed conflict, international or non-international, is hard to be disputed, an inquiry into the manner in which the behavior of the belligerents has come to be considered reveals long discussions in the field of morals (...) and theory of morality, and, especially, regarding the different manner of establishing the elements to whom obedience is rather owed (the divinity, the sovereign, the law) and the relations between these. Hence, the present paper aims at analyzing the connections between moral responsibility and legal responsibility for wrongful behaviur during war in a diachronic approach, along with the major shifts in paradigm (codification and individual liability). Understanding morality as practice, convention, custom, we are arguing that the nowadays requirement of liability for war crimes appeared due to an assumed intention and practice of the decision-making entities (the sovereign, the state) and, ultimately, to a decision-making process of the most influential states. (shrink)

In this encyclopedia entry I sketch the way contemporary theorists understand moral responsibility -- its varieties, its requirements, and its puzzles.

Acting morally comes at a price. The fewer people act morally, the dearer moral acts will be to those who perform them. Even if it could be proven that a certain moral norm were valid, the question might still be open whether, under certain circumstances, the demand to follow it meant asking too much. The validity of a moral norm is independent from actual compliance. In that regard, moral norms differ from legal rules. A law that nobody obeys has eroded (...) and thus lost validity; a moral norm that nobody keeps, however, may still be valid. Yet the latter point does not render the question obsolete whether demanding obedience to a specific moral norm, under certain circumstances, could mean asking too much. The costs incurred might be, on the one hand, individual costs. But there may, on the other hand, also be moral costs of obeying a certain moral norm. For an individual might also have responsibilities towards others near her, e.g., her family or peers; acting in accordance with the strict moral standard, then, could do harm not just to her but also to those who rely, and must rely upon her. Yet to define moral limits to following moral rules appears to be self-defeating. (shrink)

Acting morally comes at a price. The fewer people act morally, the dearer moral acts will be to those who perform them. Even if it could be proven that a certain moral norm were valid, the question might still be open whether, under certain circumstances, the demand to follow it meant asking too much. The validity of a moral norm is independent from actual compliance. In that regard, moral norms differ from legal rules. A law that nobody obeys has eroded (...) and thus lost validity; a moral norm that nobody keeps, however, may still be valid. Yet the latter point does not render the question obsolete whether demanding obedience to a specific moral norm, under certain circumstances, could mean asking too much. The costs incurred might be, on the one hand, individual costs. But there may, on the other hand, also be moral costs of obeying a certain moral norm. For an individual might also have responsibilities towards others near her, e.g., her family or peers; acting in accordance with the strict moral standard, then, could do harm not just to her but also to those who rely, and must rely upon her. Yet to define moral limits to following moral rules appears to be self-defeating. (shrink)

In this paper I reject the view that the famous ‘Knobe effect’ reveals an asymmetry within people’s judgments concerning actions with good or bad side effects. I agree with interpretations that see the ascriptions made by survey subjects as moral judgments rather than ascriptions of intentionality. On this basis, I aim at providing an explanation as to why people are right in blaming and ‘expraising’ agents that acted on unacceptable motives, but praise and excuse agents who meet intersubjective expectations by (...) acting on acceptable motives. The asymmetry only arises when blameworthiness and praiseworthiness are seen as instances of one and the same concept: moral responsibility. This analysis is backed by a study of Joshua Shepherd who extended and varied Knobe’s original vignettes. (shrink)

Les pensées de l’action de Weil et de Camus se heurtent à une même antinomie : la volonté d’agir raisonnablement implique à la fois de renoncer à toute action, car une action ne peut être efficace que si elle est potentiellement violente, et d’agir, car s’abstenir de toute action signifie accepter la violence présente. L’agent doit dès lors justifier la violence qu’il met en œuvre. En conséquence, cet article confronte la manière dont ces deux auteurs s’efforcent de résoudre cette difficulté. (...) Une telle confrontation nous permet, d’une part, de trouver chez Weil les fondements philosophiques qui manquent à la pensée camusienne. D’autre part, la lecture de Camus nous prémunit contre une interprétation erronée de la justification weilienne de moyens violents par une fin raisonnable. (shrink)

The article begins with the redefinition of complexity and risk. Indeed, phenomena such as earthquakes, pandemics, ecological emergencies, and issues related to the development of technology highlight the unique and reciprocal relationship between complexity and risk. However, modernity endeavoured to simplify complexity and to erase the connection of the latter with any issue concerning risk. Despite its negative results, whose ineffectiveness and dangerousness have at the present become unmistakably clear, the attitude in favour of simplification succeeded in becoming the forma (...) mentis of modern science, politics, culture, ethics, etc. Yet, in the last decades a new trend seems to have arisen, namely the one focusing on the “governance” of complexity and of the related risks. If considered under a socio-political point of view, its aim is to succeed in efficiency, whilst maintaining democracy. This can be achieved through the advancement of dialogue, the appreciation of diversities, and the enhancement of pluralism. Hence, the pars construens of the article focuses on the notion of responsibility, and tries to highlight its fruitfulness for the socio-political “governance” of complexity. (shrink)

Some have objected to human enhancement on the grounds that it violates the autonomy of the enhanced. These objections, however, overlook the interesting possibility that autonomy itself could be enhanced. How, exactly, to enhance autonomy is a difficult problem due to the numerous and diverse accounts of autonomy in the literature. Existing accounts of autonomy enhancement rely on narrow and controversial conceptions of autonomy. However, we identify one feature of autonomy common to many mainstream accounts: reasoning ability. Autonomy can then (...) be enhanced by improving people’s reasoning ability, in particular through cognitive enhancement; given how valuable autonomy is usually taken to be, this gives us extra reason to pursue such cognitive enhancements. Moreover, autonomy-based objections will be especially weak against such enhancements. As we will argue, those who are worried that enhancements will inhibit people’s autonomy should actually embrace those enhancements that will improve autonomy. (shrink)

In a recent paper, John Fischer develops a new argument against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) based on a deterministic scenario. Fischer uses this result (i) to rebut the Dilemma Defense - a well-known incompatibilist response to Frankfurt-type counterexamples to PAP; and (ii) to maintain that: If causal determinism rules out moral responsibility, it is not just in virtue of eliminating alternative possibilities. In this article, we argue that Fischer's new argument against PAP fails, thus leaving points (i) and (...) (ii) unsupported. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the question (...) of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)

There are many different meanings of sustainability and precaution and no evident connection between the new normative concepts and the traditional moral theories. We seek an ethical basis for sustainability and precaution—a common framework that can serve as a means of resolving the conceptual ambiguities of the new normative concepts and the conflicts between new and traditional moral concepts and theories. We employ a systemic approach to analyze the past and possible future extension of ethics and establish an inclusive framework (...) of ethical extension. This framework forms the basis for what we call a systemic ethic. (shrink)

A meaningful life, we shall argue, is a life upon which a certain sort of valuable pattern has been imposed by the person in question?a pattern which involves in serious ways the person having an effect upon the world. Meaningfulness is thus a special kind of value which a human life can bear. Two interrelated difficulties face ths proposal. One concerns responsiblity: how are we to account for the fact that a life that satisfies the above criteria can have more (...) meaning than a life with the same positive outcomes but which lacks responsiblity on the part of the agent? The other turns on these outcomes themselves: how can the meaningfulness engendered by actions you perform now be affected by what those actions go on to produce in the future, perhaps even after your death? We provide a response to both of these difficulties. (shrink)

IN her work on the distinction between freedom and voluntariness, Serena Olsaretti suggests the following definition of voluntary action: an action is voluntary if it is not non-voluntary, and non-voluntary if it is performed because there are no acceptable alternatives, where ‘acceptable’ means conforming to some objective standard (which Olsaretti suggests might be well-being). Olsaretti suggests that ascriptions of responsibility are underwritten by judgments of voluntariness, rather than freedom. Also, Olsaretti notes that a concern for voluntary choice might be grounded (...) in respect for autonomy. So, two important questions in political philosophy – when an agent is responsible for her actions and what we must do if we want agents to live autonomous lives – hang upon whether Olsaretti's account of voluntariness is correct once it has been developed in detail. This article is a contribution to that development. I show that well-informedness about our options is crucial to whether we act voluntarily or not, and I argue that we should restrict the scope of what we consider relevantly unacceptable to include only things which involve serious prudential harm. Inevitably there are some questions left unanswered, but what follows indicates what I take to be the strongest form of Olsaretti's theory, and one which can play the role described for it above. (shrink)

In the paper, I defend the skeptical view that no one is ever morally responsible in the basic desert sense since luck universally undermines responsibility-level control. I begin in Section 1 by defining a number of different varieties of luck and examining their relevance to moral responsibility. I then turn, in Section 2, to outlining and defending what I consider to be the best argument for the skeptical view--the luck pincer (Levy 2011). I conclude in Section 3 by addressing Robert (...) Hartman's (2017) numerous objections to the luck pincer. I argue that the luck pincer emerges unscathed and the pervasiveness of luck (still) undermines moral responsibility. (shrink)

Excuses are commonplace. Making and accepting excuses is part of our practice of holding each other morally responsible. But excuses are also curious. They have normative force. Whether someone has an excuse for something they have done matters for how we should respond to their action. An excuse can make it appropriate to forgo blame, to revise judgments of blameworthiness, to feel compassion and pity instead of anger and resentment. The considerations we appeal to when making excuses are a motley (...) bunch: tiredness, stress, a looming work deadline, a wailing infant, poverty, duress, ignorance. What unifies these various considerations as a class? In virtue of what can they all excuse? And what does their normative force consist in? This paper aims to develop a unified account of excuses: what they are and what they do. In a nutshell, I argue that excuses are considerations that show that an agent’s wrongdoing does not manifest a specific motivational failing: namely, the lack of a morally adequate present-directed intention. What do excuses do? I suggest that they function as responsibility-modifiers. They alter how the wrongdoer, the wronged party, bystanders may morally respond to a wrong, without negating that it remains appropriate to respond in some way. (shrink)

The “morality system,” Bernard Williams writes, is “a deeply rooted and still powerful misconception of life.” It combines, in ways that Williams finds problematic, certain quite special conceptions of value, motivation, obligation, practical necessity, responsibility, voluntariness, blame, and guilt. But why does the morality system combine just these ideas in the way it does? And what exactly is wrong with it? This essay seeks to answer these questions by reconstructing the morality system from the ground up, starting by explaining why (...) the ideas it harnesses are there to be harnessed in the first place. The first part (§1) considers vindicatory explanations, in terms of highly generic and near universal needs, of four crucial building blocks for the morality system: the moral/non-moral distinction, the idea of obligation, the voluntary/involuntary distinction, and the practice of blame. This part performs a double function: it explains why these conceptual practices are there to be harnessed by the system in the first place, and it offers us a way of making sense of them that is independent of the system. The second part (§2) is a vindicatory explanation, relative to the need for ultimate fairness, of the way in which the morality system combines and refines these building blocks in order to provide a shelter from luck. Reconstructing the system in light of this organizing ambition gives us a good grasp on why it has the shape it has, and what the different components of the system contribute. The third part (§3) is a critique of the resulting construction: I argue that the ultimate problem with the morality system is its frictionless purity. It robs valuable concepts of their grip on the kind of world we live in, and, by insisting on purity from contingency, threatens to issue in nihilism about value and scepticism about agency. To overcome these problems, it is not enough to accept that contingency and luck pervade human life. We also need to revise our understanding of what the facts of contingency and luck entail. In particular, we need to abandon the purist attitude that blinds us to alternative ways of making sense of human values and agency—alternatives that naturalistic but vindicatory explanations can provide. (shrink)

This paper discusses a puzzling tension in attributions of moral responsibility in cases of resultant moral luck: we seem to hold agents fully morally responsible for unlucky outcomes, but less-than-fully-responsible for unlucky outcomes brought about differently than intended. This tension cannot be easily discharged or explained, but it does shed light on a famous puzzle about causation and responsibility, the Thirsty Traveler.

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over (...) which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms. For one, it can account for the fact that one’s having had control over whether one was to φ is a necessary condition for one’s being fittingly blamed for having φ-ed. For another, it can account for why, unlike fitting shame, fitting blame is always deserved, which in turn explains why there is something morally problematic about ridding oneself of one’s fitting self-blame (e.g., one’s fitting guilt). (shrink)

It is almost unanimously accepted that Kant denies resultant moral luck—that is, he denies that the lucky consequence of a person’s action can affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Philosophers often point to the famous good will passage at the beginning of the Groundwork to justify this claim. I argue, however, that this passage does not support Kant’s denial of resultant moral luck. Subsequently, I argue that Kant allows agents to be morally responsible for certain kinds of lucky (...) consequences. Even so, I argue that it is unclear whether Kant ultimately endorses resultant moral luck. The reason is that Kant does not write enough on moral responsibility for consequences to determine definitively whether he thinks that the lucky consequence for which an agent is morally responsible can add to her degree of praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. The clear upshot, however, is that Kant does not deny resultant moral luck. (shrink)

One way to frame the problem of moral luck is as a contradiction in our ordinary ideas about moral responsibility. In the case of two identical reckless drivers where one kills a pedestrian and the other does not, we tend to intuit that they are and are not equally blameworthy. The Character Response sorts these intuitions in part by providing an account of moral responsibility: the drivers must be equally blameworthy, because they have identical character traits and people are originally (...) praiseworthy and blameworthy in virtue of and only in virtue of their character traits. After explicating two versions of the Character Response, I argue that they both involve implausible accounts of moral responsibility and fail to provide a good solution to the problem of moral luck. I close by noting how proponents of moral luck can preserve a kernel of truth from the Character Response to explain away the intuition that the drivers are equally blameworthy. (shrink)

Given the unwittingness of negligence, personal responsibility for negligent conduct is puzzling. After all, how is it that one is responsible for what one did not intend to do or was unaware that one was doing? How, therefore, is one’s agency involved with one’s negligence so as to ground one’s responsibility for it? Negligence is an unwitting failure in agency to meet a standard requiring conduct that falls within one’s competency. Accordingly, negligent conduct involves agency in that negligence is a (...) manifestation of agency failure. Now, nobody’s perfect. Human agency is innately fallible, and a measure of agency failure is, therefore, unavoidable. The more one’s negligence manifests failure in one’s agency as an individual, the more one is responsible for it. In contrast, the more one’s negligence involves the shortcomings innate to all human agency the less responsible one becomes, because one’s agency as an individual is less and less involved in one’s failure. Determinative of the measure of individual and of human failings mixed into an instance of negligent phi-ing is the background quality of one’s agency at meeting one’s competency at phi-ing. That is, how able one is at delivering on what one is able to competently do. The more able, the less one’s occasional instances of negligence involve manifestations of failures of one’s agency as an individual – nobody’s perfect – and are more manifestations of one’s agency’s innate human fallibility, making one less and less responsible for one’s negligence. (shrink)

Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame oneself in the (...) attributability sense, it will be argued, is to feel shame and feeling shame is also to suffer. The different control conditions cannot be explained by a difference in the harm of blame. Instead, this paper argues that accountability and attributability are governed by different kinds of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if S deserves to feel guilty; an agent S is attributability blameworthy for X only if it is fitting that S feels shame for X. (shrink)

The actualism/possibilism debate in ethics concerns the relationship between an agent’s free actions and her moral obligations. The actualist affirms, while the possibilist denies, that facts about what agents would freely do in certain circumstances partly determines that agent’s moral obligations. This paper assesses the plausibility of actualism and possibilism in light of desiderata about accounts of blameworthiness. This paper first argues that actualism cannot straightforwardly accommodate certain very plausible desiderata before offering a few independent solutions on behalf of the (...) actualist. This paper then argues that, contrary to initial appearances, possibilism is subject to its own comparably troubling blameworthiness problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I take it for granted both that there are two types of blameworthiness -- accountability blameworthiness and attributability blameworthiness -- and that avoidability is necessary only for the former. My task, then, is to explain why avoidability is necessary for accountability blameworthiness but not for attributability blameworthiness. I argue that what explains this is both the fact that these two types of blameworthiness make different sorts of reactive attitudes fitting and that only one of these two types (...) of attitudes requires having been able to refrain from φ-ing in order for them to be fitting. (shrink)

[This download includes the table of contents and chapter 1.] -/- When we praise, blame, punish, or reward people for their actions, we are holding them responsible for what they have done. Common sense tells us that what makes human beings responsible has to do with their minds and, in particular, the relationship between their minds and their actions. Yet the empirical connection is not necessarily obvious. The “guilty mind” is a core concept of criminal law, but if a defendant (...) on trial for murder were found to have serious brain damage, which brain parts or processes would have to be damaged for him to be considered not responsible, or less responsible, for the crime? What mental illnesses would justify legal pleas of insanity? The authors argue that evidence from neuroscience and cognitive science can illuminate and inform the nature of responsibility and agency. They go on to offer a novel and comprehensive neuroscientific theory of human responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to make two general points. First, I claim that the discussions in Repetti (2017) assume different, sometimes conflicting, notions of free will, so the guiding question of the book is not as clear as it could be. Second, according to Buddhist tradition, the path to enlightenment requires rejecting the delusional belief in the existence of a persisting self. I claim that if there is no persisting self, there are no intentional actions; and, if there are (...) no intentional actions, there is no hope for Buddhist enlightenment. Thus, rejecting the allegedly delusional belief in a persisting self has disastrous consequences, both for the existence of intentional action and for Buddhist soteriology. (shrink)

The immediate aim of this paper is to articulate the essential features of an alternative compatibilist position, one that is responsive to sources of resistance to the compatibilist program based on considerations of fate and luck. The approach taken relies on distinguishing carefully between issues of skepticism and pessimism as they arise in this context. A compatibilism that is properly responsive to concerns about fate and luck is committed to what I describe as free will pessimism, which is to be (...) distinguished from free will skepticism. Free will skepticism is the view that our vulnerability to conditions of fate and luck serve to discredit our view of ourselves as free and responsible agents. Free will pessimism rejects free will scepticism, since the basis of its pessimism rests with the assumption that we are free and responsible agents who are, nevertheless, subject to fate and luck in this aspect of our lives. According to free will pessimism, all the major parties and positions in the free will debate, including that of skepticism, are modes of evasion and distortion regarding our human predicament in respect of agency and moral life. (shrink)

According to some, free will requires alternative possibilities. But not any old alternative possibility will do. Sometimes, being able to bring about an alternative does not bestow any control on an agent. In order to bestow control, and so be directly relevant qua alternative to grounding the agent's moral responsibility, alternatives need to be robust. Here, I investigate the nature of robust alternatives. I argue that Derk Pereboom's latest robustness criterion is too strong, and I suggest a different criterion based (...) on the idea that what agents need to be able to do is keep open the possibility of securing their blamelessness, rather than needing to directly ensure their own blamelessness at the time of decision. (shrink)

We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control (...) explain culpability for unwitting omissions. (shrink)

In this paper, I articulate an argument for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism. My argument comes in the form of an extend story, modeled loosely on Peter van Inwagen's "rollback argument" scenario. I thus call it "the replication argument." As I aim to bring out, though the argument is inspired by so-called "manipulation" and "original design" arguments, the argument is not a version of either such argument -- and plausibly has advantages over both. The result, I believe, is a (...) more convincing incompatibilist argument than those we have considered previously. (shrink)

An interesting aspect of Ernest Sosa’s (2017) recent thinking is that enhanced performances (e.g., the performance of an athlete under the influence of a performance-enhancing drug) fall short of aptness, and this is because such enhanced performances do not issue from genuine competences on the part of the agent. In this paper, I explore in some detail the implications of such thinking in Sosa’s wider virtue epistemology, with a focus on cases of cognitive enhancement. A certain puzzle is then highlighted, (...) and the solution proposed draws from both the recent moral responsibility literature on guidance control (e.g., Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Fischer 2012) as well as from work on cognitive integration in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008; Pritchard 2010; Palermos 2014; Carter 2017). (shrink)

It seems that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes—e.g., our beliefs, desires, and intentions. Yet, we rarely, if ever, have volitional control over such attitudes, volitional control being the sort of control that we exert over our intentional actions. This presents a trilemma: (Horn 1) deny that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes, (Horn 2) deny that φ’s being under our control is necessary for our being directly accountable for φ-ing, or (Horn 3) deny (...) that the relevant sort of control is volitional control. This paper argues that we should take Horn 3. (shrink)

In this paper, I solve a puzzle generated by three conflicting claims about the relationship between faith, belief, and control: according to the Identity Thesis, faith is a type of belief, and according to Fideistic Voluntarism, we sometimes have control over whether or not we have faith, but according to Doxastic Involuntarism, we never have control over what we believe. To solve the puzzle, I argue that the Identity Thesis is true, but that either Fideistic Voluntarism or Doxastic Voluntarism is (...) false, depending on how we understand "control." I distinguish two notions of control: direct intention-based control and indirect reflective control. I argue that though we have direct intention-based control over neither belief nor faith, we have indirect reflective control over each of them. Moreover, indirect reflective control helps explain how we can be held accountable for each. (shrink)

My ambition in this paper is to provide an account of an unacknowledged example of blameless guilt that, I argue, merits further examination. The example is what I call carer guilt: guilt felt by nurses and family members caring for patients with palliative-care needs. Nurses and carers involved in palliative care often feel guilty about what they perceive as their failure to provide sufficient care for a patient. However in some cases the guilty carer does not think that he has (...) the capacity to provide sufficient care; he has, in his view, done all he can. These carers cannot legitimately be blamed for failing to meet their own expectations. Yet despite acknowledging their blamelessness, they nonetheless feel guilty. My aims are threefold: first, to explicate the puzzling nature of the carer guilt phenomenon; second, to motivate the need to solve that puzzle; third, to give my own account of blameless guilt that can explain why carers feel guilty despite their blamelessness. In doing so I argue that the guilt experienced by carers is a legitimate case of guilt, and that with the right caveats it can be considered an appropriate response to the progressive deterioration of someone for whom we care. (shrink)

Complicity marks out a way that one person can be liable to sanctions for the wrongful conduct of another. After describing the concept and role of complicity in the law, I argue that much of the motivation for presenting complicity as a separate basis of criminal liability is misplaced; paradigmatic cases of complicity can be assimilated into standard causation-based accounts of criminal liability. But unlike others who make this sort of claim I argue that there is still room for genuine (...) complicity in the law and in morality. In defending this claim, I sketch an approach to complicity which grounds our liability for what others do not in our causal relation to their actions but in our “agency-relations” with others. In such cases, one agent can be liable for the wrongs of second agent to the extent that first authorizes the second to act at her behest. This approach fills the gap where standard causation-based accounts of complicity fail – especially in where several agents cooperatively contribute to an overdetermined harm. (shrink)

Suppose someone (P1) does something that is wrongful only in virtue of the risk that it will enable another person (P2) to commit a wrongdoing. Suppose further that P1’s conduct does indeed turn out to enable P2’s wrongdoing. The resulting wrong is agentially mediated: P1 is an enabling agent and P2 is an intervening agent. Whereas the literature on intervening agency focuses on whether P2’s status as an intervening agent makes P1’s conduct less bad, I turn this issue on its (...) head by investigating whether P1’s status as an enabling agent makes P2’s conduct more bad. I argue that it does: P2 wrongs not just the victims of ϕ but P1 as well, by acting in a way that wrongfully makes P1 accountable for ϕ. This has serious implications for compensatory and defensive liability in cases of agentially mediated wrongs. (shrink)

From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by automatic coping processes. I examine the evidence for three psychological phenomena recently held to support anti-intellectualism and (...) argue that it supports neither traditional candidate, but an intermediate attention-control account, according to which the top-down, intention-directed control of attention is a necessary component of skillful action. Only this account recognizes both the role of automatic control in skilled action and the need for higher-order cognition to thread automatic processes together into a unified, skillful performance. This applies to bodily skillful action in general, from the world-class performance of experts to mundane, habitual action. The attention-control account stresses that, for intentions to play their role as top-down modulators of attention, agents must sustain the intention’s activation; hence, the need for reflecting throughout performance. (shrink)

In this book, Rik Peels provides a comprehensive original account of intellectual duties, doxastic blameworthiness, and responsible belief. The discussions, relating to work in epistemology as well as moral responsibility, are clear and often provide useful entries into the literature. Though I disagree with some of the main conclusions, the arguments are carefully laid out and typically merit a good amount of thought even where one remains unconvinced. After providing an overview of the contents, I specifically suggest that Peels theory (...) fails to account for one important kind of doxastic obligations and doxastic blame. (shrink)