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Accountability and Desert

The Journal of Ethics 20 (1-3):173-189 (2016)

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  1. Punishment and the Value of Deserved Suffering.Michael McKenna - 2020 - Public Affairs Quarterly 34 (2):97-123.
    An assumption central to some forms of retributivism is that it is noninstrumentally good that a culpable wrongdoer suffers in receiving a deserved punishment. A justification for this can be built from a conversational theory of moral responsibility, and in particular deserved blame. On such a theory, deserved blame is fitting as a response to a wrongdoer insofar as it is conversationally meaningful as a reply to a wrong done. Punishment, it might be argued, has this feature too. The conversational (...)
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  • Responsibility, Free Will, and the Concept of Basic Desert.Leonhard Menges - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (2):615-636.
    Many philosophers characterize a particularly important sense of free will and responsibility by referring to basically deserved blame. But what is basically deserved blame? The aim of this paper is to identify the appraisal entailed by basic desert claims. It presents three desiderata for an account of desert appraisals and it argues that important recent theories fail to meet them. Then, the paper presents and defends a promising alternative. The basic idea is that claims about basically deserved blame entail that (...)
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  • On the Top-Down Argument for the Ability to Do Otherwise.Leonhard Menges - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (6):2459-2472.
    The Top-Down Argument for the ability to do otherwise aims at establishing that humans can do otherwise in the sense that is relevant for debates about free will. It consists of two premises: first, we always need to answer the question of whether some phenomenon (such as the ability to do otherwise) exists by consulting our best scientific theories of the domain at issue. Second, our best scientific theories of human action presuppose that humans can do otherwise. This paper argues (...)
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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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  • What’s wrong with hypocrisy.Kartik Upadhyaya - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Warwick
    Hypocrisy seems to be a distinctive moral wrong. This thesis offers an account of that wrong. The distinctive wrong of hypocrisy is not a rational failing, or a deception of others. It is a problem in how we critique, and blame, others, when we ourselves are guilty of similar faults. Not only does it seem wrong to blame others hypocritically; it is also widely remarked that hypocrites ‘lack standing’ to blame. I defend both judgments. When we engage others in response (...)
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  • Free will, determinism, and the right levels of description.Leonhard Menges - 2021 - Philosophical Explorations 25 (1):1-18.
    ABSTRACT Recently, many authors have argued that claims about determinism and free will are situated on different levels of description and that determinism on one level does not rule out free will on another. This paper focuses on Christian List’s version of this basic idea. It will be argued for the negative thesis that List’s account does not rule out the most plausible version of incompatibilism about free will and determinism and, more constructively, that a level-based approach to free will (...)
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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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  • What do We Want from a Theory of Epistemic Blame?Adam Piovarchy - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (4):791-805.
    ABSTRACT This paper identifies a number of questions that any plausible theory of epistemic blame ought to answer. What is epistemic blame? When is someone an appropriate target of epistemic blame? And what justifies engaging in epistemic blame? I argue that a number of problems arise when we try to answer these questions by using existing conceptions of moral blame. I then consider and reject Brown’s [2020] belief-desire model of epistemic blame. Finally, I argue that an agency-cultivation model of moral (...)
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  • Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second‐Personal Authority.Adam Piovarchy - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (4):603-627.
    This paper identifies why hypocrites lack the standing to blame others for certain wrongs. I first examine previous analyses of 'standing', and note these attempts all centre around the idea of entitlement. I then argue that thinking of standing to blame as a purely moral entitlement faces numerous problems. By examining how the concept of standing is used in other contexts, I argue that we should think of standing to blame in partly metaphysical terms. That is, we should think of (...)
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  • Blame in the Aftermath of Excused Wrongdoing.Adam Piovarchy - 2020 - Public Affairs Quarterly 34 (2):142-168.
    Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they (...)
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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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  • Self-Defense, Deterrence, and the Use Objection: A Comment on Victor Tadros’s Wrongs and Crimes.Derk Pereboom - 2019 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 13 (3):439-454.
    In Wrongs and Crimes, Victor Tadros argues that wrongdoers acquire special duties to those they’ve wronged, and from there he generates wrongdoers’ duties to contribute to general deterrence by being punished. In support, he contends that my manipulation argument against compatibilism fails to show that causal determination is incompatible with the proposed duties wrongdoers owe to those they’ve wronged. I respond that I did not intend my manipulation argument to rule out a sense of moral responsibility that features such duties, (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Rank Offence: The Ecological Theory of Resentment.Samuel Reis-Dennis - 2021 - Mind 130 (520):1233-1251.
    I argue that fitting resentment tracks unacceptable ‘ecological’ imbalances in relative social strength between victims and perpetrators that arise from violations of legitimate moral expectations. It does not respond purely, or even primarily, to offenders’ attitudes, and its proper targets need not be fully developed moral agents. It characteristically involves a wish for the restoration of social equilibrium rather than a demand for moral recognition or good will. To illuminate these contentions, I focus on cases that I believe demonstrate a (...)
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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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  • Deserving Blame, and Sometimes Punishment.Katrina L. Sifferd - 2023 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 18 (1):133-150.
    Michael S. Moore is a whole-hearted retributivist. The triumph of Mechanical Choices is that Moore provides a thoroughly physicalist, reductionist-friendly, compatibilist account of the features that make persons deserving of blame and punishment. Many who embrace scientific accounts of psychology worry that from this perspective the grounds for desert disappear; but Moore argues that folk psychological accounts of responsibility—such as those found in the criminal law—are either vindicated or not implicated by science. Moore claims that criminal punishment can be justified (...)
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  • Guilt Without Fault: Accidental Agency in the Era of Autonomous Vehicles.Fernando Aguiar, Ivar R. Hannikainen & Pilar Aguilar - 2022 - Science and Engineering Ethics 28 (2):1-22.
    The control principle implies that people should not feel guilt for outcomes beyond their control. Yet, the so-called ‘agent and observer puzzles’ in philosophy demonstrate that people waver in their commitment to the control principle when reflecting on accidental outcomes. In the context of car accidents involving conventional or autonomous vehicles, Study 1 established that judgments of responsibility are most strongly associated with expressions of guilt–over and above other negative emotions, such as sadness, remorse or anger. Studies 2 and 3 (...)
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  • Demanding more of Strawsonian accountability theory.Daniel Telech - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (4):926-941.
    A neglected and non-trivial problem exists for a central cluster of Strawsonian accountability theories of moral responsibility, namely those that, following Gary Watson, understand the reactive attitudes to be implicit forms of moral address, particularly moral demand. The problem consists in the joint acceptance of two claims: (a) Accountability is a matter of agents holding one another to moral demands, and (b) accountability is a view of blame and praise. I label joint acceptance of these claims the Strawsonian’s demand dogma. (...)
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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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  • Duties, Desert, and the Justification of Punishment.Dana Kay Nelkin - 2019 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 13 (3):425-438.
    In this essay, I assess what I call the “Duty View,” subtly articulated and defended by Victor Tadros in Wrongs and Crimes. According to the Duty View, wrongdoers incur enforceable duties, including the duty to be punished in some circumstances, in virtue of their wrongdoing; therefore, punishment can be justified simply on the ground that wrongdoers’ duties are being legitimately enforced. I argue that, while wrongdoers do incur important duties, these are not necessarily fulfilled by providing protection against future offenses, (...)
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  • The Comparative Nonarbitrariness Norm of Blame.Daniel Telech & Hannah Tierney - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 16 (1).
    Much has been written about the fittingness, epistemic, and standing norms that govern blame. In this paper, we argue that there exists a norm of blame that has yet to receive philosophical discussion and without which an account of the ethics of blame will be incomplete: a norm proscribing comparatively arbitrary blame. By reflecting on the objectionableness of comparatively arbitrary blame, we stand to elucidate a substantive, and thus far overlooked, norm governing our attributions of responsibility. Accordingly, our aim in (...)
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  • Accountability, reasons-responsiveness, and narcos’ moral responsibility.Fernando Rudy-Hiller - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (2):1-25.
    A prominent position about moral responsibility claims that a necessary condition on accountability blame is that, at the time of action, the agent must be sufficiently reasons-responsive so as to be capable of acting differently by following the pertinent moral reasons and thus avoid wrongdoing. Call this the Accountability with Avoidability view (or AWA). In this paper I aim to show that AWA is false by doing three things. First, I argue that it badly contradicts moral commonsense concerning the moral (...)
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  • The Good and the Wrong of Hypocritical Blaming.Kartik Upadhyaya - 2024 - Utilitas 36 (1):83-101.
    Provided we blame others accurately, is blaming them morally right even if we are guilty of similar wrongdoing ourselves? On the one hand, hypocrisy seems to render blame morally wrong, and unjustified; but on the other, even hypocritical blaming seems better than silence. I develop an account of the wrongness of hypocritical blaming which resolves this apparent dilemma. When holding others accountable for their moral failings, we ought to be willing to reason, together with them, about our own, similar failings. (...)
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  • Responses to Wrongs and Crimes.Victor Tadros - 2019 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 13 (3):455-478.
    This is a response to the four essays on Wrongs and Crimes.
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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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