Forward-looking aims tend to play a much less significant role than retribution in justifying criminal punishment, especially in common law systems. In this paper I attempt to reinvigorate the idea that there are important forward-looking justifications for criminal law and punishment by looking to social theories of responsibility. I argue that the criminal law may be justified at the institutional level because it is a part of larger responsibility practices that have the effect of bolstering our reasons-responsiveness by making us (...) sensitive to the potential reactive attitudes of a larger societal audience. I further claim that forward-looking effects may justify criminal law institutions even if retribution is the primary aim of assigning punishments to specific offenders. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological redirection of the philosophical debate on artificial moral agency in view of increasingly pressing practical needs due to technological development. This “normative approach” suggests abandoning theoretical discussions about what conditions may hold for moral agency and to what extent these may be met by artificial entities such as AI systems and robots. Instead, the debate should focus on how and to what extent such entities should be included in human practices normally assuming moral agency and (...) responsibility of participants. The proposal is backed up by an analysis of the AMA debate, which is found to be overly caught in the opposition between so-called standard and functionalist conceptions of moral agency, conceptually confused and practically inert. Additionally, we outline some main themes of research in need of attention in light of the suggested normative approach to AMA. (shrink)

An emerging strand of research claims that blame is justified on the basis of its instrumental role in serving to ‘cultivate’ or ‘scaffold’ moral agency in those to whom it is directed. On these instrumentalist accounts, our actual collective responsiveness to moral considerations is largely explained by the scaffolding or cultivating force of blame as directed at us. We believe that there is some reason to be sceptical of the instrumental role assigned to blame on these accounts. This is because (...) there is evidence from the psychology literature on prosocial behaviour and moral development that blame may be directly ineffective; it may be ineffective in inculcating moral norms in the children and young adults to whom it is directed. We concede that blame may have this proximate instrumental role in scaffolding moral behaviour in adults, however we believe that such accounts overlook what we think is likely the more central instrumental role of blame. This is the role blame plays in the moral ecology: the models, narratives, scripts, and cultural frameworks that we internalize. The most central instrumental role of blame, we claim, is to indirectly foster moral considerations responsive agency in third parties through modelling behaviour observed in the moral ecology. (shrink)

Ecological accounts of responsible agency claim that moral feedback is essential to the reasons-responsiveness of agents. In this paper, we discuss McGeer’s scaffolded reasons-responsiveness account in the light of two concerns. The first is that some agents may be less attuned to feedback from their social environment but are nevertheless morally responsible agents – for example, autistic people. The second is that moral audiences can actually work to undermine reasons-responsiveness if they espouse the wrong values. We argue that McGeer’s account (...) can be modified to handle both problems. Once we understand the specific roles that moral feedback plays for recognizing and acting on moral reasons, we can see that autistics frequently do rely on such feedback, although it often needs to be more explicit. Furthermore, although McGeer is correct to highlight the importance of moral feedback, audience sensitivity is not all that matters to reasons-responsiveness; it needs to be tempered by a consistent application of moral rules. Agents also need to make sure that they choose their moral audiences carefully, paying special attention to receiving feedback from audiences which may be adversely affected by their actions. (shrink)