Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed (...) moral responsibility for their behavior. This thesis challenges the conventional paradigm by proposing an alternative approach where moral agency is conceived as the competence to participate in moral responsibility practices. By shifting focus from intra-individual to contextual and socially situated features, this practice-focused approach appears to make the attribution of moral agency to nonhuman animals and AI entities more plausible than commonly assumed. Moreover, considering the current and potential future prevalence of nonhuman animals and AI entities in everyday settings and social contexts, a potential extension of moral agency to such entities could very well transform our social, moral, and legal practices. Hence, this thesis proposes that the attribution or withholding of moral agency to different entities should be carefully evaluated, considering the potential normative implications. (shrink)

I argue that to remove all backward-looking grounds and justification from the practice, as some theorists recommend, is to remove (not revise) moral responsibility. The most paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility must feature desert and retributive elements. So, moral responsibility must be (at least partially) backward-looking. When we hold people responsible, one reason we do so is that we believe that they deserve punishment or reward simply in virtue of the action for which we hold them responsible. None of this (...) rebuts responsibility skepticism. For instance, forward-looking theories might adopt Myisha Cherry's proposal: anger as love without blameworthiness. (shrink)

A dominant view of guilt and shame is that they have opposing action tendencies: guilt- prone people are more likely to avoid or overcome dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, making amends for past misdoings, whereas shame-prone people are more likely to persist in dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, avoiding responsibility for past misdoings and/or lashing out in defensive aggression. Some have suggested that addiction treatment should make use of these insights, tailoring therapy according to people’s degree of guilt-proneness versus shame-proneness. In this (...) paper, we challenge this dominant view, reviewing empirical findings from others as well as our own to question (1) whether shame and guilt can be so easily disentangled in the experience of people with addiction, and (2) whether shame and guilt have the opposing action tendencies standardly attributed to them. We recommend a shift in theoretical perspective that explains our main finding that both emotions can be either destructive or constructive for recovery, depending on how these emotions are managed. We argue such management depends in turn on a person’s quality of self-blame (retributive or ‘scaffolding’), impacting upon their attitude towards their own agency as someone with fixed and unchanging dispositions (shame and guilt destructive for recovery) or as someone capable of changing themselves (shame and guilt productive for recovery). With an eye to therapeutic intervention, we then explore how this shift in attitude towards the self can be accomplished. Specifically, we discuss empathy-driven affective and narratively-driven cognitive components of a process that allow individuals to move away from the register of retributive self-blame into a register of scaffolding ‘reproach’, thereby enabling them to manage their experiences of both shame and guilt in a more generative way. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a forward-looking account of the difference between the responsibility of children and the responsibility of adults. I do so by means of criticizing agency-cultivation accounts of responsibility. According to these accounts, the justification for holding a person to a norm is the cultivation of their moral agency, and children are, just like adults, considered responsible to the extent that they can have their moral agency cultivated in this manner. Like many forward-looking accounts, these accounts claim (...) that the purpose of holding adults to norms is similar to the purpose of holding children to norms. I argue that the justifications for holding adults to norms are different because of the particular ways in which adults can be in moral disagreement with one another, and the consequences that this has. Moral disagreement is relevant to consequentialist accounts because it impacts on whether and how we can secure beneficial outcomes via holding someone to a norm. One of the upshots of this analysis is that the forward-looking justification for holding adults to norms is qualitatively different from how and why we should hold children to norms. (shrink)

It has been proposed that the ways in which the criminal justice system treats offenders with Autism spectrum condition should duly account for how the condition influences the offenders’ behavior. While the recommendation appears plausible, what adhering to it means in practice remains unclear. A central feature of ASC is seen to be that people with the condition have difficulties with understanding and reacting to the mental states of others in what are commonly considered as adequate ways. This article aims (...) to clarify how the difficulties affect the moral weight to be given to the good and bad motives of offending in sentencing offenders with ASC. I start by explicating the main points of departure of the endeavor. After that I assess the moral significance of the good and bad motives of offenders with ASC in view of four cases and a comparison with how we commonly treat people who are not as able to understand and react to the mental states of others as neurotypical adults. I suggest that considerations pertaining to what has been called the primary orientation of morality provide grounds for deeming the good motives of offenders with ASC as morally significant as those of otherwise similar neurotypical offenders and the bad motives of offenders with ASC as less morally significant than those of otherwise similar neurotypical offenders. After considering three possible objections to the suggestion, I conclude by briefly elucidating its purported import. (shrink)

Exemption from blameworthiness is often bound to implicit or explicit claims of diminished agency, or even non-agency. This poses a dilemma in navigating moral relationships affected by mental illness. While it is crucial for assessments of responsibility to be responsive to the significance of mental illness, must this responsiveness come at a cost to symmetrical moral relations? In this paper we argue, contra recent critiques, that Strawsonian accounts of responsibility are able to navigate this dilemma, and can accommodate significant exculpation (...) on the basis of mental illness while maintaining symmetrical relations. We understand this to be part of the larger recognition that while we have certain fundamental entitlements within our moral relationships, it is also possible to be over-entitled, and to expect too much of others. Our account draws, in particular, on the moral significance of difficulty. Difficulty is inherently scalar, and in drawing on this explanatory framework we explicate a theory of both excuse and exemption by degree. We argue for a significant realm of excuse on the basis of mental illness that is fully compatible with symmetrical relations. However, we also acknowledge the limits of this accommodation on Strawsonian grounds, and argue that these limits are justified and appropriate. (shrink)

This article sets out a forward-looking account of moral responsibility on which the ground-level practice is directly sensitive to aims such as moral formation and reconciliation, and is not subject to a barrier between tiers. On the contrasting two-tier accounts defended by Daniel Dennett and Manuel Vargas, the ground-level practice features backward-looking, desert-invoking justifications that are in turn justified by forward-looking considerations at the higher tier. The concern raised for the two-tier view is that the ground-level practice will be insufficiently (...) responsive to the forward-looking aims that are held to justify it. On the single-tier alternative, forward-looking considerations can more readily motivate substantial revisions, which the practice, due to serious and pervasive deficiencies, requires. (shrink)