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Strawson's view on punishment has been either neglected or recoiled from in contemporary scholarship on ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (FR). Strawson's alleged retributivism has made his view suspect and troublesome. In this article, we first argue, against the mainstream, that the punishment passage is an indispensable part of the main argument in FR (section 1) and elucidate in what sense Strawson can be called ‘a retributivist’ (section 2). We then elaborate our own hypothesis of symbolic retribution to explain the continuum between (...) |
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In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...) |
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This chapter addresses a general question: What is responsible risking? It explores the notion of "responsible risking" as a thick moral concept, and it argues that the notion can be given moral content that could be action-guiding and add an important tool to our moral toolbox. To impose risks responsibly, on this view, is to take on responsibility in a good way. A core part of responsible risking, this chapter argues, is some version of a Forethought Condition. Such a condition (...) |
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I argue for responsibility internalism. That is, moral responsibility (i.e., accountability, or being apt for praise or blame) depends only on factors internal to agents. Employing this view, I also argue that no one is responsible for what AI does but this isn’t morally problematic in a way that counts against developing or using AI. Responsibility is grounded in three potential conditions: the control (or freedom) condition, the epistemic (or awareness) condition, and the causal responsibility condition (or consequences). I argue (...) |
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Respondeat superior is a legal doctrine conferring liability from one party onto another because the latter stands in some relationship of authority over the former. Though originally a doctrine of tort law, for the past century it has been used within the criminal law, especially to the end of securing criminal liability for corporations. Here, I argue that on at least one prominent conception of criminal responsibility, we are not justified in using this doctrine in this way. Firms are not (...) |
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This volume bridges contemporary philosophical conceptions of risk and responsibility and offers an extensive examination of the topic. It shows that risk and responsibility combine in ways that give rise to new philosophical questions and problems. Philosophical interest in the relationship between risk and responsibility continues to rise, due in no small part due to environmental crises, emerging technologies, legal developments, and new medical advances. Despite such interest, scholars are just now working out how to conceive of the links between (...) |
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A self-fulfilling prophecy is, roughly, a prediction that brings about its own truth. Although true predictions are hard to fault, self-fulfilling prophecies are often regarded with suspicion. In this article, we vindicate this suspicion by explaining what self-fulfilling prophecies are and what is problematic about them, paying special attention to how their problems are exacerbated through automated prediction. Our descriptive account of self-fulfilling prophecies articulates the four elements that define them. Based on this account, we begin our critique by showing (...) |
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This paper argues for a new understanding of Strawson’s distinction between personal, impersonal, and self-reactive attitudes. Many Strawsonians take these basic reactive attitude types to be distinguished by two factors. Is it the self or another who is treated with good- or ill-will? And is it the self or another who displays good- or ill-will? On this picture, when someone else wrongs me, my reactive attitude is personal; when someone else wrongs someone else, my reactive attitude is impersonal; and when (...) |
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It seems intuitive to think that if you contribute more to an outcome, you should be more morally responsible for it. Some philosophers think this is correct. They accept the thesis that ceteris paribus one's degree of moral responsibility for an outcome is proportionate to one's degree of causal contribution to that outcome. Yet, what the degree of causal contribution amounts to remains unclear in the literature. Hence, the underlying idea in this thesis remains equally unclear. In this article, I (...) |
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Recent decades have witnessed tremendous progress in artificial intelligence and in the development of autonomous systems that rely on artificial intelligence. Critics, however, have pointed to the difficulty of allocating responsibility for the actions of an autonomous system, especially when the autonomous system causes harm or damage. The highly autonomous behavior of such systems, for which neither the programmer, the manufacturer, nor the operator seems to be responsible, has been suspected to generate responsibility gaps. This has been the cause of (...) |
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Although we are morally responsible for things of various kinds, what we bear direct responsibility for are certain exercises of our agency (and perhaps some omissions of these). Theorists disagree about what kind of agency is in this respect the source of our responsibility. Some hold that it is agency the exercises of which are actions. Others say that it is agency exercised in forming reasons-responsive attitudes on the basis of our take on reasons (or value). With attention to the (...) |
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Does one’s causal responsibility increase the degree of one’s moral responsibility? The proponents of resultant moral luck hold that it does. Until quite recently, the causation literature has almost exclusively been interested in the binary question of whether one factor is a cause of an outcome. Naturally, the debate over resultant moral luck also revolved around this binary question. However, we have seen an increased interest in the question of degrees of causation in recent years. And some philosophers have already (...) |
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This work develops a philosophically credible and psychologically realisable account of control that is necessary for moral responsibility. We live, think, and act in an environment of subjective uncertainty and limited information. As a result, our decisions and actions are influenced by factors beyond our control. Our ability to act freely is restricted by uncertainty, ignorance, and luck. Through three articles, I develop a naturalistic theory of control for action as a process of error minimisation that extends over time. Thus (...) |
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P.F. Strawson’s account of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” has been widely influential. In both that paper and in the contemporary literature, much attention has been paid to Strawson’s account of blame in terms of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation. The Strawsonian view of praise in terms of gratitude has received comparatively little attention. Some, however, have noticed something puzzling about gratitude and accountability. We typically understand accountability in terms of moral demands and expectations. Yet gratitude does not (...) |
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This paper has a two-fold goal. First, I defend the view that the prejudicial behaviour that results from implicit biases is best understood as a type of habitual action—as a harmful, yet deeply entrenched, passively acquired, socially relevant type of habit. Second, I explore how characterizing such implicitly biased behaviour as a habit aids our understanding of the responsibility we bear for it. As habits are ultimately susceptible of being controlled, agents ought to be held responsible for their implicit biased (...) |
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The notion of credit plays a central role in virtue epistemology and in the literature on moral worth. While virtue epistemologists and ethicists have devoted a significant amount of work to providing an account of creditable success, a unified theory of credit applicable to both epistemology and ethics, as well as a discussion of the general form it should take, are largely missing from the literature. Our goal is to lay out a theory of credit that seems to underlie much (...) |
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European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 646-663, September 2021. |
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This paper defends the view that we have special relationship duties that do not derive from our moral duties. Our special relationship duties, I argue, are grounded in what I call close relationships. Sharing a close relationship with another person, I suggest, requires that both people conceive of themselves as being motivated to promote the other’s interests. So, staying true to oneself demands being committed to promoting the interests of those with whom we share a close relationship. Finally, I show (...) |
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The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first (...) |
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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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This chapter describes the attributionist approach to moral responsibility. Works by Pamela Hieronymi, T.M. Scanlon, Angela Smith, and Matthew Talbert are taken to representative of this approach. On the interpretation given here, attributionism is committed to the following: assessments of moral responsibility are, and ought to be, centrally concerned with the morally significant features of an agent’s orientation toward others that are attributable to her, and an agent is eligible for moral praise or blame solely on the basis of these (...) |
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In this paper we show that being blameworthy for not blaming and being blameworthy for victim blaming are structurally similar. Each involve the two traditional contours of moral responsibility: a knowledge condition and a control condition. But interestingly, in these cases knowledge and control are importantly interrelated. Being in a relationship with another person affords us varying degrees of knowledge about them. This knowledge in turn affords agents in relationships varying degrees of influence over one another. Cases where an agent (...) |
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Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.". |
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When subjects violate epistemic standards or norms, we sometimes judge them blameworthy rather than blameless. For instance, we might judge a subject blameworthy for dogmatically continuing to believe a claim even after receiving evidence which undermines it. Indeed, the idea that one may be blameworthy for belief is appealed to throughout the contemporary epistemic literature. In some cases, a subject seems blameworthy for believing as she does even though it seems prima facie implausible that she is morally blameworthy or professionally (...) |
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It is common for theorists, drawing on P. F. Strawson, to account for morally responsible agency in terms of the nature of the emotions and feelings that characterize our responsibility practices, in terms of the nature of the so-called “reactive attitudes.” Here, I argue against this attitude-based Strawsonian strategy, and I argue in favor of an alternative, which I call the “concern-based Strawsonian strategy.” On this alternative, rather than account for morally responsible agency in terms of the nature of the (...) |
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Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Specifically, can folk judgments in line with a particular answer to that question provide support for that answer. Based on reasoning familiar from Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, such support could be had if individual judges track the truth of the matter independently and with some modest reliability: such reliability quickly aggregates as the number of judges (...) |
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When sporting agents fail through wrongful or faulty behaviour, they should feel guilty; when they fail because of a deficiency in their abilities, they should feel shame. But sometimes we fail without being deficient and without being at fault. I illustrate this with two examples of players, Moacir Barbosa and Roberto Baggio, who failed in World Cup finals and cost their teams the greatest prize in sport. Although both players failed, I suggest that neither was at fault and neither was (...) |
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Influentially, Pamela Hieronymi has argued that any account of forgiveness must be both articulate and uncompromising. It must articulate the change in judgement that results in the forgiver’s loss of resentment without excusing or justifying the misdeed, and without comprising a commitment to the transgressor=s responsibility, the wrongness of the action, and the transgressed person=s self-worth. Non-articulate accounts of forgiveness, which rely on indirect strategies for reducing resentment (for example, reflecting on the transgressor’s bad childhood) are said to fail to (...) |
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ABSTRACTThe contemporary debate over responsibility for belief is divided over the issue of whether such responsibility requires doxastic control, and whether this control must be voluntary in nature. It has recently become popular to hold that responsibility for belief does not require voluntary doxastic control, or perhaps even any form of doxastic ‘control’ at all. However, Miriam McCormick has recently argued that doxastic responsibility does in fact require quasi-voluntary doxastic control: “guidance control,” a complex, compatibilist form of control. In this (...) |
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ABSTRACT:Many ‘deep self’ theories of moral responsibility characterize the deep self as necessarily requiring that an agent be able to reflect on her own cognitive states in various ways. In this paper, I argue that these metacognitive abilities are not actually a necessary feature of the deep self. In order to show this, I appeal to empirical evidence from research on autism spectrum disorders that suggests that individuals with ASD have striking impairments in metacognitive abilities. I then argue that metacognitive (...) |
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Is it a good objection to a moral theory that it demands a great deal of individual agents? I argue that if we interpret the question to be about the potential welfare costs associated with our moral obligations, the answer must be “no.” However, the demands a moral theory makes can also be measured in terms of what it requires us to take responsibility for. I argue that this is distinct from what we may be required to do or give (...) |
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When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as worthy of blame for not having used one's mobile phone to call for (...) |
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AI systems, like self-driving cars, healthcare robots, or Autonomous Weapon Systems, already play an increasingly important role in our lives and will do so to an even greater extent in the near future. This raises a fundamental philosophical question: who is morally responsible when such systems cause unjustified harm? In the paper, we argue for the admittedly surprising claim that some of these systems can themselves be morally responsible for their conduct in an important and everyday sense of the term—the (...) |
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A number of authors have argued that, in order for S to be appropriately held morally responsible for some action or attitude (say, via moral blame), that action or attitude must somehow reflect or express a negative aspect of S’s (“true”, “deep”, or “real”) self. Recently, theorists of “epistemic blame” and “epistemic accountability” have also incorporated certain “self-disclosure” conditions into their accounts of these phenomena. In this paper, I will argue that accounts of epistemic responsibility which require disclosure of an (...) |
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One influential tradition holds that blame is a moral attitude: blame is appropriate only when the target of blame has violated a moral norm without excuse or justification. Against this, some have recently argued that agents can be blameworthy for their violation of epistemic norms even when no moral norms are thereby violated. This paper defends the appropriateness of aesthetic blame: agents can be blameworthy for their violation of aesthetic norms as such, where aesthetic norms are the norms of social (...) |
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Acts of futile resistance—harms against an aggressor which could not reasonably hope to avert the threat the aggressor poses—give rise to a puzzle: on the one hand, many such acts are intuitively permissible, yet on the other, these acts fail to meet the justificatory standards of defensive action. The most widely accepted solution to this puzzle is that victims in such cases permissibly defend against a secondary threat to their honour, dignity, or moral standing. I argue that this solution fails, (...) |
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Many optimistic responses have been proposed to bridge the threat of responsibility gaps which artificial systems create. This paper identifies a question which arises if this optimistic project proves successful. On a response-dependent understanding of responsibility, our responsibility practices themselves at least partially determine who counts as a responsible agent. On this basis, if AI or robot technology advance such that AI or robot agents become fitting participants within responsibility exchanges, then responsibility itself might be engineered. If we have good (...) |
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As artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, it will be increasingly involved in novel, morally significant situations. Thus, understanding what it means for a machine to be morally responsible is important for machine ethics. Any method for ascribing moral responsibility to AI must be intelligible and intuitive to the humans who interact with it. We argue that the appropriate approach is to determine how AIs might fare on a standard account of human moral responsibility: a Strawsonian account. We make no claim that (...) |
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In this paper, I examine whether agents who commit testimonial injustice are morally responsible for their wrongdoing, given that they are ignorant of their wrongdoing. Fricker (2007) argues that agents whose social setting lacks the concepts or reasons necessary for them to correct for testimonial injustice are excused. I argue that agents whose social settings have these concepts or reasons available are also typically excused, because they lack the capacity to recognise those concepts or reasons. Attempts to trace this lack (...) |
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Injustice can undermine the standing states have to blame criminal offenders, and this raises a difficulty for a range of punishment theories that depend on a state's moral authority. When a state lacks the moral authority that flows from political legitimacy, its right to punish criminal lawbreakers cannot depend on a systematic claim about the legitimacy of the law. Instead, an unjust state is permitted to punish only criminal acts whose wrongness is established directly by morality, and only when criminal (...) |
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This paper aims to further examine the relationship between self-awareness and agency by focusing on the role that emotional awareness plays in prominent conceptions of responsibility. One promising way of approaching this task is by focusing on individuals who display impairments in emotional awareness and then examining the effects that these impairments have on their apparent responsibility for the actions that they perform. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder as well as other clinical groups who evince high degrees of the personality (...) |
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Upon hearing the title of C. Stephen Evans’s book, many readers familiar with the moral responsibility and blame literature will be struck by surprise that more consideration hasn’t previously been... |
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The advent of intelligent artificial systems has sparked a dispute about the question of who is responsible when such a system causes a harmful outcome. This paper champions the idea that this dispute should be approached as a conceptual engineering problem. Towards this claim, the paper first argues that the dispute about the responsibility gap problem is in part a conceptual dispute about the content of responsibility and related concepts. The paper then argues that the way forward is to evaluate (...) |
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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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Many philosophers endorse the idea that there can be no moral responsibility without a moral community and thus hold that such responsibility is essentially interpersonal. In this paper, various interpretations of this idea are distinguished, and it is argued that no interpretation of it captures a significant truth. The popular view that moral responsibility consists in answerability is discussed and dismissed. The even more popular view that such responsibility consists in susceptibility to the reactive attitudes is also discussed, and it (...) |
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This paper explores one facet of Paul Russell’s unique “critical compatibilist” position on moral responsibility, which concerns his rejection of R. Jay Wallace’s “narrow construal” of moral responsibility as a concept tied exclusively to the Strawsonian reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and guilt. After explaining Russell’s critique of Wallace’s view, the paper considers a Wallace-inspired challenge based on the idea that questions of moral responsibility raise distinct issues of “fairness” that apply only to a narrow subset of the Strawsonian reactive (...) |
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Vicarious responsibility exists. It is (also) a species of moral responsibility. Nevertheless, it is seldomly discussed or considered as such in the main debates within moral philosophy. This article presents a case for the relevance of vicarious moral responsibility to several of these discussions. It seeks to provide new insights for the debate between historicism and structuralism and presents a further case for distinguishing between various facets of moral responsibility. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that an agent need not enter into (...) |
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Bernard Williams described the case of a lorry driver who runs over a child through no fault of his own. In this article, I pursue two aims. First, I want to motivate a puzzle about Williams’s case, which I call the Lorry Driver Paradox and which consists of three individually plausible but jointly inconsistent claims. Second, I want to offer a solution to this paradox based on a novel approach to so-called strict moral answerability. I conclude by responding to the (...) |
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