Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Satisficers Still Get Away with Murder!Joe Slater - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    Recently, a few attempts have been made to rehabilitate satisficing consequentialism. One strategy, initially shunned by Tim Mulgan, is to suggest that agents must produce an outcome at least as good as they could at a particular level of effort. The effort-satisficer is able to avoid some of the problem cases usually deemed fatal to the view. Richard Yetter Chappell has proposed a version of effort-satisficing that not only avoids those problem cases, but has some independent plausibility. In this paper, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Aspects of Blame: In which the nature of blame, blameworthiness, standing to blame and proportional blame are discussed.Marta Johansson Werkmäster - 2023 - Dissertation, Lund University
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Blameworthiness is Terminable.Benjamin Matheson - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    A theory of blameworthiness must answer two fundamental questions. First, what makes a person blameworthy when they act? Second, what makes a person blameworthy after the time of action? Two main answers have been given to the second question. According to interminability theorists, blameworthiness necessarily doesn’t even diminish over time. Terminability theorists deny this. In this paper, I argue against interminability and in favour of terminability. After clarifying the debate about whether blameworthiness is interminable or terminable, I argue there’s no (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Agency and aesthetic identity.Kenneth Walden - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (12):3253-3277.
    Schiller says that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Here I attempt to defend a claim in the same spirit as Schiller’s but by different means. My thesis is that a person’s autonomous agency depends on their adopting an aesthetic identity. To act, we need to don contingent features of agency, things that structure our practical thought and explain what we do in very general terms but are neither universal nor necessary features of agency (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Determination from Above.Kenneth Silver - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):237-251.
    There are many historical concerns about freedom that have come to be deemphasized in the free will literature itself—for instance, worries around the tyranny of government or the alienation of capitalism. It is hard to see how the current free will literature respects these, or indeed how they could even find expression. This paper seeks to show how these and other concerns can be reintegrated into the debate by appealing to a levels ontology. Recently, Christian List and others have considered (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Epistemic Condition.Daniel J. Miller - 2023 - In Maximilian Kiener (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Responsibility. Routledge.
    While the contemporary philosophical literature is replete with discussion of the control or freedom required for moral responsibility, only more recently has substantial attention been devoted to the knowledge or awareness required, otherwise called the epistemic condition. This area of inquiry is rapidly expanding, as are the various positions within it. This chapter introduces two major positions: the reasonable expectation view and the quality of will view. The chapter then explores two dimensions of the epistemic condition that serve as fault (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Good deeds and hard knocks: The effect of past suffering on praise for moral behavior.Philip Robbins, Fernando Alvear & Paul Litton - 2021 - Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 97.
    Are judgments of praise for moral behavior modulated by knowledge of an agent's past suffering at the hands of others, and if so, in what direction? Drawing on multiple lines of research in experimental social psychology, we identify three hypotheses about the psychology of praise — typecasting, handicapping, and non-historicism — each of which supports a different answer to the question above. Typecasting predicts that information about past suffering will augment perceived patiency and thereby diminish perceived agency, making altruistic actions (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • “Free will” is vague.Santiago Amaya - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):7-21.
    This paper argues that “free will” is vague. The argument has two steps. First, I argue that free will is a matter of degrees and, second, that there are no sharp boundaries separating free decisions and actions and non‐free ones. After presenting the argument, I focus on one significant consequence of the thesis, although others are mentioned along the way. In short, considerations of vagueness help understand the logic behind so‐called manipulation arguments, but also show why these arguments are ultimately (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The illusion of the relevance of difficulty in evaluations of moral responsibility.Asia Ferrin - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    A common intuition is that the more difficult it is for someone to do the right thing, the more praiseworthy she is for succeeding and the less blameworthy she is for failing. Here, I call this the ‘Difficulty Thesis’ and argue that the Difficulty Thesis is false. In Section 2, I briefly describe what I mean by ‘difficulty’ and the Difficulty Thesis. The Difficulty Thesis has strong prima facie appeal, however, why exactly difficulty is morally relevant remains an open and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Situationism and trait-eliciting situations.Adam Piovarchy - 2022 - Analysis 83 (1):80-88.
    Doris, in his 2002 book Lack of Character and 2005 paper ‘Replies: evidence and sensibility’, famously argues that we lack the kinds of global character traits posited by theories of virtue, because the situationist experiments demonstrate that people do not display trait-relevant behaviour in trait-relevant situations above chance. This paper argues that some notable situationist experiments are not trait-relevant situations. By analysing which factors improve or reduce participants’ chances of success (e.g. stress, lack of familiarity, ambiguity), and observing that these (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Cognitive penetration and implicit cognition.Lucas Battich & Ophelia Deroy - 2023 - In J. Robert Thompson (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Implicit Cognition. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 144-152.
    Cognitive states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions, may influence how we perceive people and objects. If this is the case, are those influences worse when they occur implicitly rather than explicitly? Here we show that cognitive penetration in perception generally involves an implicit component. First, the process of influence is implicit, making us unaware that our perception is misrepresenting the world. This lack of awareness is the source of the epistemic threat raised by cognitive penetration. Second, the influencing state (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Cost and Psychological Difficulty: Two Aspects of Demandingness.Brian McElwee - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):920-935.
    The demandingness of a moral prescription is generally understood exclusively in terms of the welfare costs involved in complying with that prescription. I argue that psychological difficulty is a second aspect of demandingness, whose relevance cannot be reduced to that of welfare costs. Appeal to psychological difficulty explains intuitive verdicts about the permissibility of favouring oneself over others, favouring loved ones over strangers, and favouring one’s short-term good over one’s long-term good. There are also significant implications for the morality of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Difficulty & quality of will: implications for moral ignorance.Anna Hartford - forthcoming - Tandf: Philosophical Explorations:1-18.
    Difficulty is often treated as blame-mitigating, and even exculpating. But on some occasions difficulty seems to have little or no bearing on our assessments of moral responsibility, and can even exacerbate it. In this paper, I argue that the relevance (and irrelevance) of difficulty with regard to assessments of moral responsibility is best understood via Quality of Will accounts. I look at various ways of characterising difficulty – including via sacrifice, effort, skill and ‘trying’ – and set out to demonstrate (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Response-Dependence in Moral Responsibility: A Granularity Challenge.Shawn Tinghao Wang - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (3):273–285.
    According to the response-dependence view of moral responsibility, a person is morally responsible just in case, and in virtue of the fact that, she is an appropriate target for reactive attitudes. This paper raises a new puzzle regarding response-dependence: there is a mismatch between the granularity of the reactive attitudes and of responsibility facts. Whereas the reactive attitudes are comparatively coarse-grained, responsibility facts can be quite fine-grained. This poses a challenge for response-dependence, which seeks to ground facts about responsibility in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Situationism, capacities and culpability.Adam Piovarchy - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (6):1997-2027.
    The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people's behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects' responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Moral Irrelevance of Constitutive Luck.Mihailis E. Diamantis - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):1331-1346.
    One’s constitution—whether one is generous or miserly, temperate or intemperate, kind or mean, etc.—is beyond one’s control in significant respects. Yet one’s constitution affects how one acts. And how one acts affects one’s moral standing. The counterintuitive inference—the so-called problem of constitutive moral luck—is that one’s moral standing is, to some significant extent, beyond one’s control. This article grants the premises but resists the inference. It argues that one’s constitution should have no net impact on one’s moral standing. While a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Moral Appraisal for Everyone: Neurodiversity, Epistemic Limitations, and Responding to the Right Reasons.Claire Https://Orcidorg Field - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (3):733-752.
    De Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • A pluralistic account of degrees of control in addiction.Federico Burdman - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (1):197-221.
    While some form of loss of control is often assumed to be a common feature of the diverse manifestations of addiction, it is far from clear how loss of control should be understood. In this paper, I put forward a concept of decrease in control in addiction that aims to fill this gap and thus provide a general framework for thinking about addictive behavior. The development of this account involves two main steps. First, I present a view of degrees of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Being Sympathetic to Bad-History Wrongdoers.Craig K. Agule - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (1):147-169.
    For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Conceptualizing Coercive Indoctrination in Moral and Legal Philosophy.Evan Tiffany - 2022 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (1):153-179.
    This paper argues that there are compelling grounds for thinking that coercive indoctrination can defeat or mitigate moral culpability in virtue of being a form of non-culpable moral ignorance. That is, I defend a two-tier account such that what excuses an agent for a wrongful act is the agent’s ignorance regarding the moral quality of their act; and what excuses the defendant for their ignorance is that coercion or manipulation deprived the defendant of a fair opportunity to avoid that ignorance. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Resentment, Parenting, and Strawson’s Compatibilism.Daniel Coren - 2020 - Erkenntnis 88 (1):43-65.
    Is moral responsibility compatible with determinism? Peter Strawson’s first answer is: I do not know what the thesis of determinism is. His second answer seems to be: Yes, it is, and we can see this by looking to relevant pockets of our ordinary practices and attitudes, especially our responses (resentment, anger, love, forgiveness) to quality of will. His second answer has shaped subsequent discussions of moral responsibility. But what exactly is Strawson’s compatibilism? And is it a plausible view? By attending (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • From Sufficient Health to Sufficient Responsibility.Ben Davies & Julian Savulescu - 2020 - Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (3):423-433.
    The idea of using responsibility in the allocation of healthcare resources has been criticized for, among other things, too readily abandoning people who are responsible for being very badly off. One response to this problem is that while responsibility can play a role in resource allocation, it cannot do so if it will leave those who are responsible below a “sufficiency” threshold. This paper considers first whether a view can be both distinctively sufficientarian and allow responsibility to play a role (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The agential perspective: a hard-line reply to the four-case manipulation argument.Sofia Jeppsson - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):1935-1951.
    One of the most influential arguments against compatibilism is Derk Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. Professor Plum, the main character of the thought experiment, is manipulated into doing what he does; he therefore supposedly lacks moral responsibility for his action. Since he is arguably analogous to an ordinary agent under determinism, Pereboom concludes that ordinary determined agents lack moral responsibility as well. I offer a hard-line reply to this argument, that is, a reply which denies that this kind of manipulation is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Satisficing Consequentialism Still Doesn't Satisfy.Joe Slater - 2020 - Utilitas 32 (1):108-117.
    Satisficing consequentialism is an unpopular theory. Because it permits gratuitous sub-optimal behaviour, it strikes many as wildly implausible. It has been widely rejected as a tenable moral theory for more than twenty years. In this article, I rehearse the arguments behind this unpopularity, before examining an attempt to redeem satisficing. Richard Yetter Chappell has recently defended a form of ‘effort satisficing consequentialism’. By incorporating an ‘effort ceiling’ – a limit on the amount of willpower a situation requires – and requiring (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Deservingness Transfers.Knut Olav Skarsaune - 2020 - Utilitas 32 (2):209-218.
    This article seeks to cause trouble for a brand of consequentialism known as ‘desertarianism’. In somewhat different ways, views of this kind evaluate outcomes more favourably, other things equal, the better the fit between the welfare different people enjoy and the welfare they each deserve. These views imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing welfare to fit desert, which seems plausible enough. Unfortunately, they also imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing desert to fit welfare: in other words, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Narrative capacity and moral responsibility.Meghan Griffith - 2019 - Social Philosophy and Policy 36 (1):93-113.
    :My main aim in this essay is to argue that “narrative capacity” is a genuine feature of our mental lives and a skill that enables us to become full-fledged morally responsible agents. I approach the issue from the standpoint of reasons-responsiveness. Reasons-responsiveness theories center on the idea that moral responsibility requires sufficient sensitivity to reasons. I argue that our capacity to understand and tell stories has an important role to play in this sensitivity. Without such skill we would be cut (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Being More Blameworthy.D. Justin Coates - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (3):233-246.
    In this paper I explore graded attributions of blameworthiness—that is, judgments of the general sort, "A is more blameworthy for x-ing than B is," or "A is less blameworthy for her character than B is." In so doing, I aim to provide a philosophical basis for the widespread, if not completely articulate, practice of altering the degree to which we hold others responsible on the basis of facts about them or facts about their environments. To vindicate this practice, I disambiguate (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • You Oughta Know: A Defence of Obligations to Learn.Teresa Bruno-Niño & Preston J. Werner - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):690-700.
    Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives learning, practising, and performing a wide range of skills. Many of us also have a great amount of control over which skills we learn and develop. From choices as significant as career pursuits to those as minor as how we spend our weeknight leisure time, we exercise a great amount of agency over what we know and what we can do. In this paper we argue, using a framework first developed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Quality of Reasons and Degrees of Responsibility.Hannah Tierney - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):661-672.
    Traditionally, theories of moral responsibility feature only the minimally sufficient conditions for moral responsibility. While these theories are well-suited to account for the threshold of responsibility, it’s less clear how they can address questions about the degree to which agents are responsible. One feature that intuitively affects the degree to which agents are morally responsible is how difficult performing a given action is for them. Recently, philosophers have begun to develop accounts of scalar moral responsibility that make use of this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Moral Luck and The Unfairness of Morality.Robert Hartman - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (12):3179-3197.
    Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Kinds of moral luck are differentiated by the source of lack of control such as the results of her actions, the circumstances in which she finds herself, and the way in which she is constituted. Many philosophers accept the existence of some of these kinds of moral luck but not others, because, in their view, the existence of only some of them would (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • Agency, Teleological Control and Robust Causation.Marius Usher - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2):302-324.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Irrational Option Exclusion.Sofia Jeppsson - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (3):537-551.
    In this paper, I describe a hitherto overlooked kind of practical irrationality, which I call irrational option exclusion. An agent who suffers from this problem does not merely fail to act on her best judgement – she fails to realize that the superior action is even an option for her. I furthermore argue that this kind of irrationality is serious enough to undermine moral responsibility. I show that an agent suffering from this problem has compromised reasons-responsiveness, does not really express (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Moral Responsibility, Luck, and Compatibilism.Taylor W. Cyr - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (1):193-214.
    In this paper, I defend a version of compatibilism against luck-related objections. After introducing the types of luck that some take to be problematic for moral responsibility, I consider and respond to two recent attempts to show that compatibilism faces the same problem of luck that libertarianism faces—present luck. I then consider a different type of luck—constitutive luck—and provide a new solution to this problem. One upshot of the present discussion is a reason to prefer a history-sensitive compatibilist account over (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Is Ignorance of Climate Change Culpable?Philip Robichaud - 2017 - Science and Engineering Ethics 23 (5):1409-1430.
    Sometimes ignorance is an excuse. If an agent did not know and could not have known that her action would realize some bad outcome, then it is plausible to maintain that she is not to blame for realizing that outcome, even when the act that leads to this outcome is wrong. This general thought can be brought to bear in the context of climate change insofar as we think (a) that the actions of individual agents play some role in realizing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Executive Function, Disability, and Agency.Kevin Timpe - 2016 - Res Philosophica 93 (4):767-796.
    This paper considers how a number of particular disabilities can impact agency primarily by affecting what psychologists refer to as ‘executive function.’ Some disabilities, I argue, could decrease agency even without fully undermining it. I see this argument as contributing to the growing literature that sees agency as coming in degrees. The first section gives a broad outline of a fairly standard approach to agency. The second section relates that framework to the existing literature, which suggests that agency comes in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • This is a Tricky Situation: Situationism and Reasons-Responsiveness.Marcela Herdova & Stephen Kearns - 2017 - The Journal of Ethics 21 (2):151-183.
    Situations are powerful: the evidence from experimental social psychology suggests that agents are hugely influenced by the situations they find themselves in, often without their knowing it. In our paper, we evaluate how situational factors affect our reasons-responsiveness, as conceived of by John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, and, through this, how they also affect moral responsibility. We argue that the situationist experiments suggest that situational factors impair, among other things, our moderate reasons-responsiveness, which is plausibly required for moral responsibility. However, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Defeating Manipulation Arguments: Interventionist causation and compatibilist sourcehood.Oisín Deery & Eddy Nahmias - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (5):1255-1276.
    We use recent interventionist theories of causation to develop a compatibilist account of causal sourcehood, which provides a response to Manipulation Arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Our account explains the difference between manipulation and determinism, against the claim of Manipulation Arguments that there is no relevant difference. Interventionism allows us to see that causal determinism does not mean that variables outside of the agent causally explain her actions better than variables within the agent, whereas the causal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Explaining (away) the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson - 2017 - In Philip Robichaud & Jan Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 146–162.
    It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent “should have known better”, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • Mental illness, exemption & moral exclusion: the role of interpretative generosity.Anna Hartford & Dan J. Stein - 2024 - Philosophical Explorations 27 (3):370-384.
    Exemption from blameworthiness is often bound to implicit or explicit claims of diminished agency, or even non-agency. This poses a dilemma in navigating moral relationships affected by mental illness. While it is crucial for assessments of responsibility to be responsive to the significance of mental illness, must this responsiveness come at a cost to symmetrical moral relations? In this paper we argue, contra recent critiques, that Strawsonian accounts of responsibility are able to navigate this dilemma, and can accommodate significant exculpation (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Corporate Weakness of Will.Kenneth Silver - forthcoming - Journal of Business Ethics:1-17.
    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, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Graded Causation and Moral Responsibility.Vera Hoffmann-Kolss & Matthias Rolffs - 2024 - Erkenntnis:1-19.
    Theories of graded causation attract growing attention in the philosophical debate on causation. An important field of application is the controversial relationship between causation and moral responsibility. However, it is still unclear how exactly the notion of graded causation should be understood in the context of moral responsibility. One question is whether we should endorse a proportionality principle, according to which the degree of an agent’s moral responsibility is proportionate to their degree of causal contribution. A second question is whether (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Enhancement and Hyperresponsibility.Anna Hartford, Dan J. Stein & Julian Savulescu - 2023
    We routinely take diminished capacity as diminishing moral responsibility (as in the case of immaturity, senility, or particular mental impairments). The prospect of enhanced capacity therefore poses immediate questions with regard to moral responsibility. Of particular interest are those capacities that might allow us to better avoid serious harms or wrongdoing. We can consider questions of responsibility with regards to enhancement at various removes. In the first instance: where such (safe and effective) interventions exist, do we have an obligation to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Agency and responsibility: The personal and the political.Sofia Jeppsson - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):70-82.
    In this paper, I review arguments according to which harsh criminal punishments and poverty are undeserved and therefore unjust. Such arguments come in different forms. First, one may argue that no one deserves to be poor or be punished, because there is no such thing as desert-entailing moral responsibility. Second, one may argue that poor people in particular do not deserve to remain in poverty or to be punished if they commit crimes, because poor people suffer from psychological problems that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Why history matters for moral responsibility: Evaluating history‐sensitive structuralism.Taylor W. Cyr - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):58-69.
    Is moral responsibility essentially historical, or does an agent's moral responsibility for an action depend only on their psychological structure at that time? In previous work, I have argued that the two main (non‐skeptical) views on moral responsibility and agents’ histories—historicism and standard structuralism—are vulnerable to objections that are avoided by a third option, namely history‐sensitive structuralism. In this paper, I develop this view in greater detail and evaluate the view by comparing it with its three dialectical rivals: skepticism about (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Degrees of Epistemic Criticizability.Cameron Boult - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2):431-452.
    We regularly make graded normative judgements in the epistemic domain. Recent work in the literature examines degrees of justification, degrees of rationality, and degrees of assertability. This paper addresses a different dimension of the gradeability of epistemic normativity, one that has been given little attention. How should we understand degrees of epistemic criticizability? In virtue of what sorts of factors can one epistemic failing be worse than another? The paper develops a dual-factor view of degrees of epistemic criticizability. According to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • (1 other version)Reasons‐sensitivity and degrees of free will.Alex Kaiserman - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (3):687-709.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 687-709, November 2021.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Obligations of feeling.Mario Attie-Picker - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (4):1282-1297.
    Moral obligation, according to one influential conception, is distinct among other moral concepts in at least two respects. First, obligation is linked with demands. If I am obligated to you to do X, then you can demand that I do X. Second, obligation is linked with blame and the rest of our accountability practices. If I am obligated to you to do X, failure to do so is blameworthy and you may hold me accountable for it. The puzzle is the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Equal Moral Opportunity: A Solution to the Problem of Moral Luck.Philip Swenson - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):386-404.
    ABSTRACT Many of our common-sense moral judgments seemingly imply the existence of moral luck. I attempt to avoid moral luck while retaining most of these judgments. I defend a view on which agents have moral equality of opportunity. This allows us to account for our anti-moral-luck intuitions at less cost than has been previously recognized.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Impermissible yet Praiseworthy.Theron Pummer - 2021 - Ethics 131 (4):697-726.
    It is commonly held that unexcused impermissible acts are necessarily blameworthy, not praiseworthy. I argue that unexcused impermissible acts can not only be pro tanto praiseworthy, but overall praiseworthy—and even more so than permissible alternatives. For example, there are cases in which it is impermissible to at great cost to yourself rescue fewer rather than more strangers, yet overall praiseworthy, and more so than permissibly rescuing no one. I develop a general framework illuminating how praiseworthiness can so radically come apart (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations