This paper takes under consideration a piece by Roger Crisp in which he questions what the problem of moral luck can teach us about COVID-19 lockdown rule-breakers. Taking the position that although such rule-breakers might seem to be new examples of moral luck, Crisp ends up denying the existence of moral luck and argues that moral luck is an outdated notion in so far as it relies on other questionable aspects of morality, that is, retributivist punishment and blame. Although the (...) author agrees with Crisp that pandemic rule-breaker cases are putative examples of resultant moral luck, he proposes that Crisp has misconstrued what moral luck is and the paper examines in detail what he sees as the numerous problems with Crisp’s claims. The author concludes that Crisp’s analysis of pandemic rule-breaking does not shed any new light on the moral luck debate, and the difficult questions of luck, moral responsibility, and desert are not so easily resolved. -/- . (shrink)

Luck skepticism is the view that no one is ever morally responsible for anything because of the nature and ubiquity of luck. One acclaimed argument in favor of this view is Neil Levy’s luck pincer. The luck pincer holds that all morally significant acts or events involve either present luck, constitutive luck, or both and that present and constitutive luck each negate moral responsibility. Therefore, no one is ever morally responsible for any action or event. I argue that this argument (...) is unsound as both of its premises are false. First, not all morally significant events involve present or constitutive luck. Some morally significant events are non-lucky. Second, present and constitutive luck do not always negate moral responsibility. Luck – independent of ontological concerns – is not as threatening to free will as is often thought. (shrink)

Our ability to locate moral responsibility is often thought to be a necessary condition for conducting morally permissible medical practice, engaging in a just war, and other high-stakes endeavors. Yet, with increasing reliance upon artificially intelligent systems, we may be facing a wideningresponsibility gap, which, some argue, cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility. How then, if at all, can we make use of crucial emerging technologies? According to Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach, the advent of so-called ‘artificial moral (...) agents’ (AMAs) is inevitable. Still, this notion may seem to push back the problem, leaving those who have an interest in developing autonomous technology with a dilemma. We may need to scale-back our efforts at deploying AMAs (or at least maintain human oversight); otherwise, we must rapidly and drastically update our moral and legal norms in a way that ensures responsibility for potentially avoidable harms. This paper invokes contemporary accounts of responsibility in order to show how artificially intelligent systems might be held responsible. Although many theorists are concerned enough to develop artificial conceptions ofagencyor to exploit our present inability to regulate valuable innovations, the proposal here highlights the importance of—and outlines a plausible foundation for—a workable notion ofartificial moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper I have two main aims. My first aim is to introduce the notion of bounded emotionality. This notion is the analogue of that of bounded rationality in behavioural economics. Bounded rationality says, roughly, that human beings are cognitively limited with respect to their processing and memory capacities. Bounded emotionality says that we are limited in our emotional capabilities, notably in the intensity, duration, and possible combinations of our emotional states. Bounded rationality is a foundational notion in behavioural (...) economics and has played an important role in various fields of philosophy as well. In particular, in epistemology bounded rationality has been thought to have implications with respect to our doxastic norms. My second aim in this paper is to suggest that bounded emotionality also has an important role to play in philosophy. As a case in point, I discuss the implications that bounded emotionality has for our doxastic norms. In particular, I argue that one is not obligated to believe something or to stop holding a belief if one could not believe/fail to believe it without having an emotional response that exceeds one's bounded emotional capacities. (shrink)

People are often responsible for what they do, but they also often possess an excuse. One of the most common excuses is ignorance. Not all ignorance constitutes an excuse, however, for some ignorance is culpable and culpable ignorance is no excuse. But what about group agents? In our everyday practices, we blame group agents constantly. But if groups can be blameworthy, they plausibly can also be excused. Surely one such excuse is ignorance. But, as with individual agents, some group ignorance (...) is also surely culpable. How should we understand the culpable ignorance of group agents? In this paper, I argue for two conditional claims that together constitute what I call the Group Justification Thesis, which is a group-agent adaptation of the Justification Thesis put forth by Biebel [(2018). ‘Epistemic Justification and the Ignorance Excuse.’ Philosophical Studies 175 (12): 3005–3028]: (i) A group agent is excused because of ignorance only if that ignorance is justified, and (ii) a group agent is culpable despite being ignorant only if that ignorance is not justified. One interesting upshot of this view is that a group agent can be culpably ignorant even though none of the members are culpable for their ignorance. (shrink)