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  1. Moral responsibility.Andrew Eshleman - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as worthy of blame for not having used one's mobile phone to call for (...)
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  • Debt and Desert.Andreas Brekke Carlsson - 2024 - The Journal of Ethics 28 (4).
    According to what may be called the Debt Model, blameworthiness is defined in terms of deserved suffering. The Debt Model has a significant implication: one is less blameworthy if one has experienced some of the suffering one deserves, and no longer blameworthy once one has experienced the full amount of suffering one deserves. Blameworthiness, according to the Debt Model, is not forever. In recent papers, Clarke (2022) and Howard (2022) independently criticize the Debt Model and argue for the opposite conclusion: (...)
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  • Guilt: The Debt and the Stain.Samuel Reis-Dennis - manuscript
    Abstract: Contemporary analytic philosophers of the “reactive attitudes” tend to share a simple conception of guilt as “self-directed blame”—roughly, an “unpleasant affect” felt in combination with, or in response to, the thought that one has violated a moral requirement, evinced substandard “quality of will,” or is blameworthy. I believe that this simple conception is inadequate. As an alternative, I offer my own theory of guilt’s logic and its connection to morality. In doing so, I attempt to articulate guilt’s defining thought (...)
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  • Responsibility and the emotions.Andreas Brekke Carlsson - 2024 - In Maximilian Kiener (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Responsibility. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
    According to the Strawsonian tradition, a person is responsible for an action just in case it is appropriate to hold them responsible for that action. One important way of holding people responsible for wrongdoing is by experiencing and expressing blaming emotions. This raises the questions of what blaming emotions are and in what sense they can be appropriate. In this chapter I will provide an overview of different answers to both these questions. A common thread in the chapter will be (...)
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  • Deserving to Suffer.Douglas W. Portmore - 2024 - The Journal of Ethics 28 (4):795-813.
    I argue that the blameworthy deserve to suffer in that they deserve to feel guilt, which is the unpleasant experience of appreciating one’s apparent culpability for having done wrong. I argue that the blameworthy deserve to feel guilt because they owe it to those whom they’ve culpably wronged to (a) hold themselves accountable, (b) manifest the proper regard for those whom they’ve wronged, and (c) appreciate their culpability for, and the moral significance of, their wrongdoing. And I argue that the (...)
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  • Blaming.Leonhard Menges - 2023 - In Maximilian Kiener (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Responsibility. Routledge.
    In the last two decades, blame has become a core topic in ethics, philosophical moral psychology and, more recently, epistemology. This chapter aims at clarifying the complex state of the debate and at making a suggestion for how we should proceed from here. The core idea is that accounts of blame are often motivated by very different background goals. One standard goal is to provide a unifying account of our everyday blame practices. The chapter argues that there is reason to (...)
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  • Reasons to Punish Autonomous Robots.Zac Cogley - 2023 - The Gradient 14.
    I here consider the reasonableness of punishing future autonomous military robots. I argue that it is an engineering desideratum that these devices be responsive to moral considerations as well as human criticism and blame. Additionally, I argue that someday it will be possible to build such machines. I use these claims to respond to the no subject of punishment objection to deploying autonomous military robots, the worry being that an “accountability gap” could result if the robot committed a war crime. (...)
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  • Praise.Daniel Telech - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (10):1-19.
    One way of being responsible for an action is being praiseworthy for it. But what is the “praise” of which the praiseworthy agent is worthy? This paper provides a survey of answers to this question, i.e. a survey of possible accounts of praise’s nature. It then presents an overview of candidate norms governing our responses of praise. By attending to praise’s nature and appropriateness conditions, we stand to acquire a richer conception of what it is to be, and to regard (...)
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  • The Kind of Blame Skeptics Should Be Skeptical About.Leonhard Menges - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (6):401-415.
    Skepticism about blameworthiness says that there is good reason to doubt that, in our world, humans are ever blameworthy for their deeds. A significant problem for the discussion of this view is that it is unclear how to understand the kind of blame that should be at issue. This paper makes a new proposal. The basic idea is that the kind of blame skeptics should be skeptical about is constituted by responses that can violate the targets’ claims and by the (...)
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  • Blame, deserved guilt, and harms to standing.Gunnar Björnsson - 2022 - In Andreas Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press. pp. 198–216.
    Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range (...)
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  • Guilty Confessions.Hannah Tierney - 2013 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 182-204.
    Recent work on blameworthiness has prominently featured discussions of guilt. The philosophers who develop guilt-based views of blameworthiness do an excellent job of attending to the evaluative and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s characteristic action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. This paper focuses on the nature of guilty confession and argues that it illuminates an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the (...)
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  • Deserved Guilt and Blameworthiness over Time.Andreas Brekke Carlsson - 2022 - In Andreas Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press.
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  • (1 other version)Two Problems of Self-Blame for Accounts of Moral Standing.Kyle G. Fritz & Daniel J. Miller - forthcoming - Ergo.
    Traditionally, those writing on blame have been concerned with blaming others, including when one has the standing to blame others. Yet some alleged problems for such accounts of standing arise when we focus on self-blame. First, if hypocrites lack the standing to blame others, it might seem that they also lack the standing to blame themselves. But this would lead to a bootstrapping problem, wherein hypocrites can only regain standing by doing that which they lack the standing to do. Second, (...)
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  • The paradox of self-blame.Patrick Todd & Brian Rabern - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2):111–125.
    It is widely accepted that there is what has been called a non-hypocrisy norm on the appropriateness of moral blame; roughly, one has standing to blame only if one is not guilty of the very offence one seeks to criticize. Our acceptance of this norm is embodied in the common retort to criticism, “Who are you to blame me?”. But there is a paradox lurking behind this commonplace norm. If it is always inappropriate for x to blame y for a (...)
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  • Shame and the Scope of Moral Accountability.Shawn Tinghao Wang - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3):544-564.
    It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the (...)
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  • It’s (Almost) All About Desert: On the Source of Disagreements in Responsibility Studies.Fernando Rudy-Hiller - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (3):386-404.
    In this article I discuss David Shoemaker’s recently published piece “Responsibility: The State of the Question. Fault Lines in the Foundations.” While agreeing with Shoemaker on many points, I argue for a more unified diagnosis of the seemingly intractable debates that plague (what I call) “responsibility studies.” I claim that, of the five fault lines Shoemaker identifies, the most basic one is about the role that the notion of deserved harm should play in the theory of moral responsibility. I argue (...)
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  • Responsibility: the State of the Question Fault Lines in the Foundations.David Shoemaker - 2020 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 58 (2):205-237.
    Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".
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  • Moral Responsibility.Matthew Talbert - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral responsibility.
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  • Shame and Attributability.Andreas Brekke Carlsson - 2019 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6. Oxford University Press.
    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 (...)
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  • Desert, Control, and Moral Responsibility.Douglas W. Portmore - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (4):407-426.
    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 (...)
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  • Control, Attitudes, and Accountability.Douglas W. Portmore - 2013 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    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 (...)
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  • Opting for the Best: Oughts and Options.Douglas W. Portmore - 2019 - New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    The book concerns what I take to be the least controversial normative principle concerning action: you ought to perform your best option—best, that is, in terms of whatever ultimately matters. The book sets aside the question of what ultimately matters so as to focus on more basic issues, such as: What are our options? Do I have the option of typing out the cure for cancer if that’s what I would in fact do if I had the right intentions at (...)
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  • Blameworthiness as Deserved Guilt.Andreas Brekke Carlsson - 2017 - The Journal of Ethics 21 (1):89-115.
    It is often assumed that we are only blameworthy for that over which we have control. In recent years, however, several philosophers have argued that we can be blameworthy for occurrences that appear to be outside our control, such as attitudes, beliefs and omissions. This has prompted the question of why control should be a condition on blameworthiness. This paper aims at defending the control condition by developing a new conception of blameworthiness: To be blameworthy, I argue, is most fundamentally (...)
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  • Guilt, grief, and the good.Dana Kay Nelkin - 2019 - Social Philosophy and Policy 36 (1):173-191.
    :In this essay, I consider a particular version of the thesis that the blameworthy deserve to suffer, namely, that they deserve to feel guilty to the proper degree. Two further theses have been thought to explicate and support the thesis, one that appeals to the non-instrumental goodness of the blameworthy receiving what they deserve, and the other that appeals to the idea that being blameworthy provides reason to promote the blameworthy receiving what they deserve. I call the first "Good-Guilt" and (...)
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  • Agent‐Regret and Accidental Agency.Rachana Kamtekar & Shaun Nichols - 2019 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 43 (1):181-202.
    Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • Free Will Skeptics Can Have Their Basic Desert and Eat It Too.Leigh Vicens - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1:1-12.
    In this essay, I argue that if we assume with free will skeptics that people lack moral responsibility, or at least a central form of it, we may still maintain that people are ‘basically’ deserving of certain treatment in response to their behavior. I characterize basic-desert justifications for treatment negatively, as justifications that do not depend on consequentialist, contractualist, or relational considerations. Appealing to attributionist accounts of responsibility as well as the symbolic value of protest, I identify protest as a (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility as Guiltworthiness.A. P. Duggan - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (2):291-309.
    It is often alleged that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves a negative interpersonal response for that transgression, blaming responses such as resentment and indignation being paradigms. Aside from a few exceptions, guilt is cited in recent discussions of moral responsibility, if at all, as merely an effect of being blamed, or as a reliable indicator of moral responsibility, but not itself an explanation of moral responsibility. In this paper, (...)
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  • IX—Equal Opportunity: A Unifying Framework for Moral, Aesthetic, and Epistemic Responsibility.Dana Kay Nelkin - 2020 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 120 (2):203-235.
    On the one hand, there seem to be compelling parallels to moral responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness in domains other than the moral. For example, we often praise people for their aesthetic and epistemic achievements and blame them for their failures. On the other hand, it has been argued that there is something special about the moral domain, so that at least one robust kind of responsibility can only be found there. In this paper, I argue that we can adopt a (...)
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  • Guilt, Desert, Fittingness, and the Good.Coleen Macnamara - 2019 - The Journal of Ethics 24 (4):449-468.
    Desert-realists maintain that those who do wrong without an excuse deserve blame. Desert-skeptics deny this, holding that though we may be responsible for our actions in some sense, we lack the kind of responsibility needed to deserve blame. In two recent papers, Randolph Clarke (Philosophical Explorations 16:153–164, 2013 and Journal of Ethics 20:121–137, 2016) advances an innovative defense of desert-realism. He argues for deserved-guilt, the thesis that the guilty deserve to feel guilt. In his 2013 paper, Clarke suggests two strategies (...)
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