Negligence is a problematic basis for being morally blamed and punished for having caused some harm, because in such cases there is no choice to cause or allow—or risk causing or allowing—such harm to occur. The standard theories as to why inadvertent risk creation can be blameworthy despite the lack of culpable choice are that in such cases there is blame for: (1) an unexercised capacity to have adverted to the risk; (2) a defect in character explaining why one did (...) not advert to the risk; (3) culpably acquiring or failing to rid oneself of these defects of character at some earlier time; (4) flawed use of those practical reasoning capacities that make one the person one is; or (5) chosen violation of per se rules about known precautions. Although each of these five theories can justify blame in some cases of negligence, none can justify blame in all cases intuitively thought to be cases of negligence, nor can any of these five theories show why inadvertent creation of an unreasonable risk, pure and simple, can be blameworthy. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to identify different sorts of freedom putatively linked to moral responsibility; I then explore the relationship between such notions of freedom and the Consequence Argument, on the one hand, and the Frankfurt-examples, on the other. I focus (in part) on a dilemma: if a compatibilist adopts a broadly speaking "conditional" understanding of freedom in reply to the Consequence Argument, such a theorist becomes vulnerable in a salient way to the Frankfurt-examples.

Physical determinism is a metaphysical thesis about the natural world whose consequences for freedom and moral responsibility have been widely discussed. In this paper, I articulate a different form of determinism, motivational determinism, which claims that all intentional action is causally determined by the prior motivational state of the agent. Motivational determinism was defended in a simple form by Hume, but has been neglected in recent philosophical literature. I show that there are important reasons that support the plausibility of MD. (...) I then compare MD with libertarian and physical deterministic theories of agency and note that MD has various attractive features. I show that MD is much more threatening to moral responsibility than physical determinism. I conclude that MD is an interesting theory of human agency that deserves wide attention. (shrink)