An encyclopedia article on the epistemic or knowledge condition for moral responsibility, written for the SEP.

In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward performing (...) the forgotten action does not. We argue that this result has important implications for a long-running debate about the nature of responsible agency. (shrink)

How might attention intersect with normative issues and the psychology surrounding them? I provide an empirically grounded framework integrating three attentional phenomena: salience, vigilance (or broadly attunement) and attentional character. Using this frame, I review recent philosophical work on attention and norms. -/- Section 1 establishes a common ground conception of attention no more controversial than the established experimental paradigms for attention. This conception explicates the concept of a bias, which explains core features of action and attention, one that intersects (...) biological, psychological and philosophical concerns. I emphasize historical biases associated with learning and experience. Section 2 presents an analysis of automaticity and control, concepts needed to fully characterize action. Historical biases are revealed as automatic. Specifically, the automatization of attention is central to acquiring skills and excellence in light of normative standards for a practice. Section 3 argues that salience involves the deployment of attention, while Section 4 characterizes vigilance not merely as a disposition but as an active orientation to attend. Vigilance is one type of attunement, and the set of attunements constitutes the agent’s varied orientations to deploy attention, part of their attentional character. As discussed in Section 5, shaping this character is a goal of a normatively sensitive upbringing where appropriate attention is automatized through proper practice. Section 6 examines a common epistemic bias in academia and subsequent attempts to debias. I conclude with an example of acquired epistemic skill to give hope that attentional excellence is achievable. (shrink)

This is a draft of my chapter on Negligence for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook in Moral Psychology. It discusses philosophical, psychological, and legal approaches to the attribution of culpability in cases of negligent wrongdoing.

Many people have long-term commitments that require coordination and cooperation with others. To achieve this, we construct plans to settle when, how, and for how long to pursue certain goals rather than others. This raises an interesting cognitive problem, namely that individuals can, at any given moment, manage significantly less information than they will need to accomplish their goals. Call this the Problem of Scarce Information. The solution requires a special self-regulatory system that strategically manages the varying informational demands of (...) one's activity. This paper argues that vigilance has structural and functional characteristics that make it apt to play this role. This paper illuminates both crucial aspects of temporally extended agency, but also the unique practical norms that structure how we act over time. (shrink)

One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome’s obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory (...) of responsibility. (shrink)

Quality of will accounts of moral responsibility hold that ill will is necessary for blameworthiness. But all such accounts are false to ordinary moral practice, which licenses blame for agents who act wrongly from epistemically unreasonable ignorance even if the act is not ill willed. This should be especially concerning to Strawsonians about moral responsibility, who think the genuine conditions of blameworthiness are derived from the standards internal to our practice. In response, I provide a theory of moral blameworthiness on (...) which ill will is not necessary for blameworthiness. On the view I defend, “Rational Capacitarianism,” agents are blameworthy whenever they act wrongly from an unreasonable attitude which is attributable to them, where an attitude is attributable to an agent just in case she has the capacity to assess reasons for and against the attitude and modulate the attitude in light of these assessments. Acting from unreasonable ignorance is just a special case of acting from an unreasonable attitude. My theory contrasts both with both quality of will accounts of blameworthiness and the Capacitarian view, which specifies that agents who act wrongly from ignorance are culpable if they could and should have known better. On Capacitarianism, a variety of awareness-relevant capacities are pertinent, including memory; on my view it is only failures of rational capacities that render the agent culpable, because only failures of rational capacities are attributable to the agent. (shrink)

The standard case of weakness of will involves a strong temptation leading us to reconsider or act against our judgments. Here, however, I consider cases of what I call ‘habitual weakness', where we resolve to do one thing yet do another not to satisfy any grand desire, but out of habit. After giving several examples, I suggest that habitual weakness has been under-discussed in the literature and explore why. These cases are worth highlighting for their ubiquity, and I show three (...) further advantages of appreciating habitual weakness as a kind of weakness: It challenges purportedly necessary conditions on akrasia, it side-steps outstanding skeptical concerns, and it provides a new model for considering the weak-willed behavior of group agents. I conclude by arguing that cases of habitual weakness are genuine cases of akrasia and weakness of will. Rather than lacking strength of will, habitual weakness involves lacking diligence, vigilance, or fortitude. (shrink)

Proponents of corporate moral responsibility take certain corporations to be capable of being responsible in ways that do not reduce to the responsibility of their members. If correct, one follow-up question concerns what leads corporations to fail to meet their obligations. We often fail morally when we know what we should do and yet fail to do it, perhaps out of incontinence, akrasia, or weakness of will. However, this kind of failure is much less discussed in the corporate case. And, (...) where it is discussed, the view is that corporations are less prone to weakness. Here, I argue that proponents of corporate responsibility should say that corporations can and often do instantiate weakness of the will, and that this is important to recognize. Weakness of the will requires certain capacities that these proponents typically take corporations to have. And once this is appreciated, we can assess how corporate weakness might proceed differently than how it does for individuals. We can also begin a conversation about how best to meet the distinctive challenges for recognizing and correcting corporate weakness, using a number of resources from management scholarship. (shrink)

I examine the question of whether people are sometimes morally blameworthy for what I call ‘slips’: wrongful actions or omissions that a good-willed agent inadvertently performs due to a non-negligent failure to be aware of relevant considerations. I focus in particular on the capacitarian answer to this question, according to which possession of the requisite capacities to be aware of relevant considerations and respond appropriately explains blameworthiness for slips. I argue, however, that capacitarianism fails to show that agents have responsibility (...) level control over their slips and, consequently, fails to show that it is reasonable to expect agents to avoid this kind of wrongdoing. I conclude that people are typically not blameworthy for their slips, but only regarding the backward-looking, desert-entailing type of blame that has been at issue in this debate. I suggest that ordinary intuitions about blameworthiness for slips can be accommodated by appealing to other types of responsibility and blame. (shrink)

:Reasons-responsiveness theories of moral responsibility are currently among the most popular. Here, I present the fallibility paradox, a novel challenge to these views. The paradox involves an agent who is performing a somewhat demanding psychological task across an extended sequence of trials and who is deeply committed to doing her very best at this task. Her action-issuing psychological processes are outstandingly reliable, so she meets the criterion of being reasons-responsive on every single trial. But she is human after all, so (...) it is inevitable that she will make rare errors. The reasons-responsiveness view, it is claimed, is forced to reach a highly counterintuitive conclusion: she is morally responsible for these rare errors, even though making rare errors is something she is powerless to prevent. I review various replies that a reasons-responsiveness theorist might offer, arguing that none of these replies adequately addresses the challenge. (shrink)

Given the pervasiveness of habit in human life, the distinctive problems posed by habitual acts for accounts of moral responsibility deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. But whereas it is hard to find a systematic treatment habitual acts within current accounts of moral responsibility, proponents of such accounts have turned their attention to a topic which, I suggest, is a closely related one: unwitting omissions. Habitual acts and unwitting omissions raise similar issues for a theory of responsibility because (...) they likewise invite us to rethink the assumption that moral responsibility requires awareness of the relevant features of one’s conduct. And given the increasing interest in the problem of responsibility for unwitting omissions, it is reasonable to expect that the theoretical moves made in response to this problem might be used to make sense of judgments of responsibility regarding habitual acts. I substantiate these points by inquiring into whether some well-known accounts of unwitting omissions can be used to explain how we can be responsible for things we do out of habit. (shrink)

Doris argues that an agent is responsible for her behavior only if that behavior expresses (a relevant subset of) the agent’s values. This view has problems explaining responsibility for mistakes or episodes of forgetfulness. These problems highlight a conceptual problem with Doris’s theory of responsible agency and give us reasons to prefer an alternative (non-valuational) theory of responsible agency.

Capacitarianism says that an agent can be non-derivatively blameworthy for wrongdoing if at the time of their conduct the agent lacked awareness of the wrong-making features of their conduct but had the capacity to be aware of those features. In this paper, I raise three objections to capacitarianism in relation to its verdict of the culpability of so-called “slips” and use these objections to support a rival (“accessibility internalist”) view which requires awareness of wrong-making features for non-derivative blameworthiness. The objections (...) are that (1) the rival internalist view is just as capable of explaining the culpability of paradigm cases of slips; (2) there are some cases of slips without dispositional awareness of wrong-making features that capacitarians wrongly deem culpable; and (3) capacitarianism cannot adequately ground the reasonable expectation to avoid slips (as Fernando Rudy-Hiller has argued). I then argue that an internalist can simultaneously ground a reasonable expectation to avoid slips and account for slips’ culpability by pointing to the satisfaction of a novel epistemic condition: it is (dispositionally) obvious to the slipping agent that they need to pay enough attention to what they are doing, and how to pay enough attention, to reliably achieve the goal that they have set out to achieve. (shrink)

This paper argues that diversity and uptake are required for objectivity. In philosophy, women are underrepresented with respect to teaching, publishing, and citations. This undermines the objectivity of our research output. To improve women’s representation and objectivity in philosophy, we should take steps to increase women’s numbers and institute uptake-conducive conditions. In concrete terms, this means fostering an appreciation for diversity, diversifying evaluators, integrating women’s contributions into mainstream discourse, and reducing implicit bias.

This paper poses a new challenge to control-based theories of moral responsibility. Control-based theories – as defended, for instance, by Aristotle and John Martin Fischer – hold that an agent is responsible for an action only if she acted voluntarily and knew what she was doing. However, this paper argues that there is a large class of cases of unreflective behavior of which the following is true: the persons involved did not have the kind of control required by control-based theories, (...) yet we intuitively take the persons involved to be morally responsible. (shrink)