Recent accounts of emotional action intend to explain such actions without reference to goals. Nevertheless, these accounts fail to specify the difference between goals and other kinds of motivational states. I offer two remedies. First, I develop an account of goals based on Michael Smith’s arguments for the Humean theory of motivation. On this account, a goal is a unified representation that determines behavior selection criteria and satisfaction conditions for an action. This opens the possibility that mental processes could influence (...) behavior without such a unified representation and hence, without goals. Second, I develop a model of emotions and appetites on which behavior selection criteria can be decoupled from satisfaction conditions. If this model is correct, then in many cases, there is no unified representation that determines the behavior selection criteria and satisfaction conditions of emotional actions. In contrast with many traditional accounts of action, the model suggests the following: Whether or not a behavior constitutes an action does not depend on the agent’s grasp of the behavior’s aim. Rather, a behavior constitutes an action if it was organized by the agent, where an agent can organize actions without a coherent grasp of their aim. Some emotional actions are manifestations of this possibility. (shrink)

It is a philosophical truism that we must think of others as moral agents, not merely as causal or statistical objects. But why? I argue that this follows from the best resolution of an antinomy between our experience of morality as necessarily binding on the will and our knowledge that all moral beliefs originate in contingent histories. We can address this antinomy only by understanding moral deliberation via interpersonal relationships, which simultaneously vindicate and constrains morality’s bind on the will. This (...) means that moral agency is fundamentally social. I model an attitude toward our causal nature on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘civil inattention’; our social practice of agency requires that we give minimal attention to the contingent origins of moral judgments in ourselves and others. Understood this way, seeing ourselves as moral agents requires avoiding appeal to causal aetiology to settle substantive moral disagreement. (shrink)

A type of transcendental argument for libertarian free will maintains that if acting freely requires the availability of alternative possibilities, and determinism holds, then one is not justified in asserting that there is no free will. More precisely: if an agent A is to be justified in asserting a proposition P (e.g. "there is no free will"), then A must also be able to assert not-P. Thus, if A is unable to assert not-P, due to determinism, then A is not (...) justified in asserting P. While such arguments often appeal to principles with wide appeal, such as the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, they also require a commitment to principles that seem far less compelling, e.g. the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘able not to’ or the principle that having an obligation entails being responsible. It is argued here that these further principles are dubious, and that it will be difficult to construct a valid transcendental argument without them. (shrink)

My thesis is that moral ignorance does not imply a failure to care adequately about what is in fact morally significant. I offer three cases: one in which someone is ignorant of the precise nature of what she cares about; one in which someone does not reflect on the significance of what she cares about in a particular set of circumstances, and one in which someone cares deeply about two morally significant considerations while being mistaken about their relative significance. I (...) argue that these agents all clearly care at least “adequately” about everything morally significant, including the very considerations that in fact make their acts wrong. This creates theoretical room for a way of thinking about culpable moral ignorance that respects the key concerns of those in the voluntarist tradition who have held that moral ignorance is typically blameless, within an approach to thinking about moral responsibility according to which we are blameworthy for that which manifests poor quality of will; caring adequately does not require moral omniscience, but motivated moral ignorance and moral ignorance that reflects indifference to things that matter morally are still blameworthy. My thesis also suggests a fruitful change of direction for quality-of-will theorists: we should articulate the nature and structure of the standards for adequate caring, i.e. those that specify what it is to care “adequately”. I close by offering an initial proposal as to what these standards might look like and identifying four promising avenues for further research on this topic. (shrink)

This response to Paul Russell looks at how we should understand the moral sentiments and their role in action. I think that there is an important tension in Russell’s interpretation of this role. On the one hand, aspects of Russell’s position commit him to some kind of rationalism about the emotions: for instance, he has argued that P. F. Strawson’s account of the reactive is crudely naturalistic; and he has claimed that emotions are constitutive of our sensitivity to moral reasons. (...) On the other hand, he has explicitly endorsed a Humean view of motivation which, I will argue, is incompatible with these rationalist commitments. As well as pointing out the tension and arguing that it should be resolved in the direction of rationalism, I sketch the kind of rationalism that Russell needs: that reason can, through the autonomous progress of moral inquiry, give rise to new forms of emotion. (shrink)

I argue that sports clubs should be punished for bad behaviour by their fans in a way that affects the club’s sporting success: for example, we are justified in imposing points deductions and competition disqualifications on the basis of racist chanting. This is despite a worry that punishing clubs in such a way is unfair because it targets the sports team rather than the fans who misbehaved. I argue that this belies a misunderstanding of the nature of sports clubs and (...) of the nature of sporting success. Further, I argue that fans should want to be held responsible in such a way because it vindicates the significant role that they play in the life of their club. (shrink)

(Part of a symposium on an OUP collection of Paul Russell's papers on free will and moral responsibility). Paul Russell’s The Limits of Free Will is more than the sum of its parts. Among other things, Limits offers readers a comprehensive look at Russell’s attack on the problematically idealized assumptions of the contemporary free will debate. This idealization, he argues, distorts the reality of our human predicament. Herein I pose a dilemma for Russell’s position, critical compatibilism. The dilemma illuminates the (...) tension between Russell’s critical and compatibilist commitments. The problem is not obviously insurmountable, and as a compatibilist who is sympathetic to the view, my aim is to spark further discussion. (shrink)

When agents insert technological systems into their decision-making processes, they can obscure moral responsibility for the results. This can give rise to a distinct moral wrong, which we call “agency laundering.” At root, agency laundering involves obfuscating one’s moral responsibility by enlisting a technology or process to take some action and letting it forestall others from demanding an account for bad outcomes that result. We argue that the concept of agency laundering helps in understanding important moral problems in a number (...) of recent cases involving automated, or algorithmic, decision-systems. We apply our conception of agency laundering to a series of examples, including Facebook’s automated advertising suggestions, Uber’s driver interfaces, algorithmic evaluation of K-12 teachers, and risk assessment in criminal sentencing. We distinguish agency laundering from several other critiques of information technology, including the so-called “responsibility gap,” “bias laundering,” and masking. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that a necessary condition on moral blameworthiness is that the wrongdoer can reasonably be expected to avoid the action for which she is blamed. Those who think so assume as a matter of course that the expectations at issue here are normative expectations that contrast with the non-normative or predictive expectations we form concerning the probable conduct of others, and they believe, or at least assume, that there is a clear-cut distinction between the two. In this paper (...) I put this widespread assumption under scrutiny and argue that it’s mistaken: although predictive and normative expectations are indeed distinct, there is no sharp separation between them. On the contrary, predictive expectations can have a substantial bearing on normative expectations in two related ways: they can recalibrate what is reasonable to expect of agents when responsibility attributions are at stake and they can help to uncover previously undetected excusing conditions. I illustrate my claims with the famous bystander effect from social psychology and show that it yields predictive expectations that affect normative expectations in these two ways. (shrink)

Die Analyse des Ressentiments, wie sie Nietzsche, Scheler und Adorno vorbereitet haben, stellt eine Strukturlogik bereit, die Analogien zur Verlaufsform der heutigen Populismen anbietet. Daraus lässt sich auch eine Position gewinnen, die in der Diskussion um einen „emanzipatorischen Populismus“ berücksichtigt werden sollte.

I argue that the concept of knowledge is a relic of a bygone age, erroneously supposed to do no harm. I illustrate this claim by showing how a concern with knowledge distorts the use of statistical evidence in criminal courts, and then generalize the point to show that this concern hampers our enterprises across the board and not only in legal contexts.

This chapter explores the concept of judgmentalism: what it is and why it’s morally problematic. After criticizing an account offered by Gary Watson, the paper argues for a broader understanding of what it is to be judgmental, encompassing not just the overall beliefs that we form about someone else, but also the very pattern of our thoughts about those with whom we are involved in interpersonal relationships. The thesis is that to care about someone is to be oriented toward them, (...) or to see them through a particular mental lens, in a way that produces a particular pattern of salience and silence. That is: caring about someone (at least ideally) has the effect of making some features of that person particularly salient, and silencing or screening off other features from one’s consciousness. One is aptly described as judgmental when one’s thoughts do not display this sort of pattern, indicating a failure to fully adopt the orientation that constitutes properly caring about the person. (shrink)

Strawsonians about moral responsibility often claim that our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, rather than the other way round. Many have argued that such ‘reversal’ claims have an unwelcome consequence: If our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, does this not imply, absurdly, that if we held severely mentally ill people responsible, they would be responsible? We provide a new Strawsonian answer to this question, and we explore the relation (...) between reversal claims and (in)compatibilism. (shrink)

I first sketch the different things we might have in mind, when thinking about responsibility. I then relate each of those to possible investigations of human agency. The most interesting such relation, in my opinion, is that between agency and what I call “responsibility as mattering.” I offer some hypotheses about that relation.

There seems to be widespread agreement that to be responsible for something is to be deserving of certain consequences on account of that thing. Call this the “merited-consequences” conception of responsibility. I think there is something off, or askew, in this conception, though I find it hard to articulate just what it is. The phenomena the merited-consequences conception is trying to capture could be better captured, I think, by noting the characteristic way in which certain minds can rightly matter to (...) other such minds—the way in which certain minds can carry a certain kind of importance, made manifest in certain sorts of responses. Mattering, not meriting, seems to me central. However, since I cannot yet better articulate an alternative, I continue in the merit-consequences framework. I focus on a particular class of consequences: those that are non-voluntary, in a sense explained. The non-voluntariness of these reactions has two important upshots. First, questions about their justification will be complex. Second, they are not well thought of as consequences voluntarily imposed upon the wrongdoer by the responder. By focusing on merited consequences and overlooking non-voluntariness, we risk misunderstanding the significance of moral criticism and of certain reactions to moral failure. (shrink)

While blame is not a difficult practice to defend, in part because of its ineradicability in our moral lives, angry blame has been a tougher sell. Critics of angry blame cast it as an unnecessary, punitive, or unproductive practiceâone that should be either avoided or abandoned altogether. Against these views, I argue that anger has positive moral value and should remain on the table in our blaming practices. The argument proceeds by identifying a specific mode of angry blameâwhat I call (...) âauthority-focused resentmentââwhich is both apt and uniquely valuable in cases in which agentsâ standing as equals is under threat. Insofar as anger has value in these cases it should not be dismissed wholesale in favor of other blaming alternatives, as angerâs staunchest critics would recommend. For all the virtues of anger, it is not equally accessible to all. In final chapter of the project, I identify a distinct kind of harm that happens to oppressed agents when their anger fails to receive uptake. While feminist accounts of angerâs dismissal have tended to focus on its epistemic dimensions, I shift to consider the damage to oppressed subjectsâ moral agency. I argue that what is going on in the dismissal of marginalized agentsâ anger is not merely the loss of knowledge or the dismissal of testimony. Instead, we need a different paradigm to conceptualize the dismissal and its harms. If we understand angry blame as an invocation or an assertion of authority, then its dismissal is a refusal to comply and to recognize our authority as subjectsâan altogether different problem. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to defend the Lockean View—the view that a belief is epistemically justified iff it is highly probable—against a new family of objections. According to these objections, broadly speaking, the Lockean View ought to be abandoned because it is incompatible with, or difficult to square with, our judgments surrounding certain legal cases. I distinguish and explore three different versions of these objections—The Conviction Argument, the Argument from Assertion and Practical Reasoning, and the Comparative Probabilities (...) Argument—but argue that none of them are successful. I also present some very general reasons for being pessimistic about the overall strategy of using legal considerations to evaluate epistemic theories; as we will see, there are good reasons to think that many of the considerations relevant to legal theorizing are ultimately irrelevant to epistemic theorizing. (shrink)

How should we understand basic desert as a justification for blaming? Many philosophers account for free will by reference to the sort of moral responsibility that involves a blameworthy person deserving blame in a basic sense of desert; free will just is the control condition for this sort of moral responsibility. But what precisely does basic desert come to, and what is it about blame that makes it the thing that a blameworthy person deserves? As it turns out, there are (...) challenges in attempting to understand basic desert for blame. One concerns whether the only good in harming a person by blaming her is instrumental. If so, there may be reason to reject desert-based conceptions of blame. In this paper, I will develop an account of basically deserved blame. In doing so, I will also defend the controversial thesis that the harm involved in blaming can be good in a way that is not merely instrumental. (shrink)

The paper offers an account of justified resentment and its importance in preserving human dignity. I situate the argument in the context of Martha Nussbaum's recent work against anger and resentment. Drawing on Enlightenment thinkers, I show the importance of resentment in deterring injury, in creating greater solidarity and humanity, and in preserving human dignity. The paper also offers a preliminary analysis of the norms that help to ensure appropriately expressed resentment.

While P.F. Strawson’s essay ‘Freedom and Resentment’ has had many commentators, discussions of it can be roughly divided into two categories. A first group has dealt with the essay as something that stands by itself in order to analyse Strawson’s main arguments and to expose its weaknesses. A second group of commentators has looked beyond ‘Freedom and Resentment’ by emphasizing its Humean, Kantian or Wittgensteinian elements. Although both approaches have their own merits, it is too often forgotten that Strawson was (...) an original thinker with his own views on the nature of philosophical problems and how to appropriately deal with them. The aim of this article is to remedy this forgetfulness and to make sense of ‘Freedom and Resentment’ from a Strawsonian perspective, by looking at Strawson’s own views on philosophical methodology. (shrink)

Moral experience comes in many flavors. Some philosophers have argued that there is nothing common to the many forms moral experience can take. In this paper, I argue that close attention to the phenomenology of certain key emotions, combined with a clear distinction between essentially and accidentally moral experiences, suggests that there is a group of (essentially) moral emotions which in fact exhibit significant unity.

Intuitively, we lack the standing to blame others in light of moral norms that we ourselves don't take seriously: if Adam is unrepentantly aggressive, say, he lacks the standing to blame Celia for her aggressiveness. But why does blame have this feature? Existing proposals try to explain this by reference to specific principles of normative ethics – e.g. to rule‐consequentialist considerations, to the wrongness of hypocritical blame, or principles of rights‐forfeiture based on this wrongness. In this paper, I suggest a (...) fundamentally different approach. Employing Timothy Williamson's idea of ‘constitutive rules’ of speech acts, I argue that this feature of blame is simply constitutive of any essentially moral form of disapproval. So if Adam had the standing to disapprove of Celia's aggressiveness in some form, necessarily, this disapproval couldn't be blame. If I'm right, this proposal thus not only answers our main question, but also sheds an interesting novel light on the very nature of blame. If we didn't have a form of disapproval with that feature, we wouldn't have our practice of holding each other to moral norms. (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)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT What is the ethical significance of the suffering of nonhuman animals? For many, the answer is simple. Such suffering has clear moral significance: nonhuman animal suffering is suffering, suffering is something bad, and the fact that it is bad gives us reason to alleviate or prevent it. The practical problem that remains is how to do this most efficiently or effectively. I argue that this does not exhaust the ethical significance of certain evils, once we consider how the existence (...) of those evils may detract from the meaning of human life, even on fully “naturalistic” conceptions of meaning in life. I will draw a distinction between what I will call “spiritual” problems and “moral” problems and consider why moral philosophers may be well suited to addressing both problems, as long as the domain of the ethical is not taken to be exhausted by the domain of the moral. Finally, I will elaborate on why marking a distinction between these problems—the moral and the spiritual—may help illuminate some disagreements between Utilitarians and their opponents about the ethical significance of the suffering of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

It is unclear whether someone’s responsibility for developing a disease or maintaining his or her health should affect what healthcare he or she receives. While this dispute continues, we suggest that, if responsibility is to play a role in healthcare, the concept must be rethought in order to reflect the sense in which many health-related behaviours occur repeatedly over time and are the product of more than one agent. Most philosophical accounts of responsibility are synchronic and individualistic; we indicate here (...) what paying more attention to the diachronic and dyadic aspects of responsibility might involve and what implications this could have for assessments of responsibility for health-related behaviour. (shrink)

In my “The Free Will Debate and Basic Desert,” I argued that against a familiar claim in the free will debate: that the freedom in dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists is limited to the type required for an agent to deserve blame for moral wrongdoing, and to deserve it in a sense that is basic. In that earlier paper, I sought a rationale for this claim, offered an explanation of basic desert, and then argued that the free will debate can (...) persist even when divorced from basic desert. Dana Nelkin and Derk Pereboom then argued against my thesis. In this paper, I reply to their thoughtful criticisms. (shrink)

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 (...) reactive attitudes, one accounts for such agency in terms of the concern that leaves us susceptible to those attitudes in the first place. This, I believe, is a more promising way to develop the Strawsonian approach than the attitude-based strategy. The concern-based strategy allows us to better countenance the number and variety of the reactive attitudes that characterize our responsibility practices; it shares the attitude-based strategy’s virtues; and it seems to position us to better understand the distinctive social and moral significance associated with being and being regarded as a morally responsible agent. (shrink)

A familiar claim in the free will debate is that the freedom in dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists is limited to the type required for an agent to deserve blame for moral wrongdoing, and to deserve it in a sense that is basic. In this paper, I seek a rationale for this claim, offer an explanation of basic desert, and then argue that the free will debate can persist even when divorced from basic desert.

In recent years, philosophers have developed a novel conception of blame as a kind of moral protest. This Protest View of Blame faces doubts about its intelligibility: can we make sense of inner ‘protest’ in cases of unexpressed blame? It also faces doubts about its descriptive adequacy: does ‘protest’ capture what is distinctive in reactions of blame? I argue that the Protest View can successfully answer the first kind of doubt, but not the second. Cases of contemptful blame and unexpressed (...) blame offer initial counterexamples to the view. The Protest View can accommodate these examples by appealing to a broader notion of protest, but, I argue, at the cost of retreating to a broader category that no longer captures what is distinctive about blame. Moreover, nonviolent resistance, in the tradition of Gandhi and Dr. King, characteristically protests without blame, presenting another powerful challenge to the Protest View. These challenges, I argue, undermine the view, while helping to illuminate and defend the appeal of nonviolent resistance. They also offer an alternative conception of the relation between protest and blame, characteristic of nonviolent resistance and obscured by the Protest View. On that alternative, the relation is not descriptive but practical; rather than understanding blame as a kind of protest, we should aim, in many cases, to replace blame with protest. (shrink)

Within the United States, the most prominent justification for criminal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong—this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is not reducible (...) to consequentialist considerations nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the moral improvement of those being punished. A number of sentencing guidelines in the U.S. have adopted desert as their distributive principle, and it is increasingly given deference in the “purposes” section of state criminal codes, where it can be the guiding principle in the interpretation and application of the code’s provisions. Indeed, the American Law Institute recently revised the Model Penal Code so as to set desert as the official dominate principle for sentencing. And courts have identified desert as the guiding principle in a variety of contexts, as with the Supreme Court’s enthroning retributivism as the “primary justification for the death penalty.” While retributivism provides one of the main sources of justification for punishment within the criminal justice system, there are good philosophical and practical reasons for rejecting it. One such reason is that it is unclear that agents truly deserve to suffer for the wrongs they have done in the sense required by retributivism. In the first section, I explore the retributivist justification of punishment and explain why it is inconsistent with free will skepticism. In the second section, I then argue that even if one is not convinced by the arguments for free will skepticism, there remains a strong epistemic argument against causing harm on retributivist grounds that undermines both libertarian and compatibilist attempts to justify it. I maintain that this argument provides sufficient reason for rejecting the retributive justification of criminal punishment. I conclude in the third section by briefly sketching my public health-quarantine model, a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. I argue that the model is not only consistent with free will skepticism and the epistemic argument against retributivism, it also provides the most justified, humane, and effective way of dealing with criminal behavior. (shrink)

Nietzsche famously discusses a psychological condition he calls ressentiment, a condition involving toxic, vengeful anger. I offer a free-standing theory in philosophical psychology of the familiar...

In this essay I distinguish categories of animals by their mental capacities. I then discuss whether punishment can be appropriate for animals of each category, and if so what form punishment may appropriately take for animals of each category. The aim is to illuminate each type of punishment through comparison and contrast with the others. This both forestalls the overintellectualization of punishment which arises from viewing humans as the only paradigm case and forestalls the underintellectualization of human punishment which results (...) from making no essential reference, in an account of human punishment, to the human capacity for specifically critical reasoning. (shrink)

In this thesis, I will defend a new kind of compatibilist account of free action, indirect conscious control compatibilism (or indirect compatibilism for short), and argue that some of our actions are free according to it. My argument has three components, and involves the development of a brand new tool for experimental philosophy, and the use of cognitive neuroscience. The first component of the argument shows that compatibilism (of some kind) is a conceptual truth. Contrary to the current orthodoxy in (...) the free will literature, which is that our concept of free will is an incompatibilist concept - a concept according to which we have free will only if determinism is false - I will show that our concept of free will is in fact a compatibilist concept - a concept according to which we can have free will even if determinism is true - and I do so using a new experimental philosophy methodology inspired by two-dimensional semantics. -/- Of course, even if our concept of free will is a compatibilist concept, this does not mean that there are any free actions in the world: the current empirical evidence from the brain sciences appears to show that there might be no, or very few, free actions in the world, even on many compatibilist understandings of what it would take for there to be free will. The second component of the argument addresses this concern by extending our understanding of compatibilism. Agents act freely either when their actions are caused by compatibilistically acceptable psychological processes, or are indirectly caused by those same processes. Hence the name of my account: indirect compatibilism. -/- The final component of the argument defends my new account against some interesting objections and provides evidence from cognitive neuroscience that some of our actions count as free by the lights of indirect compatibilism. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an explosion of philosophical work on blame. Much of this work has focused on explicating the nature of blame or on examining the norms that govern it, and the primary motivation for theorizing about blame seems to derive from blame’s tight connection to responsibility. However, very little philosophical attention has been given to praise and its attendant practices. In this paper, I identify three possible explanations for this lack of attention. My goal is to (...) show that each of these lines of thought is mistaken and to argue that praise is deserving of careful, independent analysis by philosophers interested in theorizing about responsibility. (shrink)

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 (...) goes up. In this chapter, however, I argue, partly based on empirical evidence, that although non-specialist judgments might on average be more likely than not to get things right, their individual likelihoods fail to aggregate because they do not track truth with sufficient independence. (shrink)

Words change meaning, usually in unpredictable ways. But some words’ meanings are revised intentionally. Revisionary projects are normally put forward in the service of some purpose – some serve specific goals of inquiry, and others serve ethical, political or social aims. Revisionist projects can ameliorate meanings, but they can also pervert. In this paper, I want to draw attention to the dangers of meaning perversions, and argue that the self-declared goodness of a revisionist project doesn’t suffice to avoid meaning perversions. (...) The road to Hell, or to horrors on Earth, is paved with good intentions. Finally and more importantly, I want to demarcate what meaning perversions are. This, I hope, can help us assess the moral and political legitimacy of revisionary projects. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young’s influential Social Connections Model of responsibility offers a compelling approach to theorizing structural injustice. However, the precise nature of the kind of responsibility modelled by the SCM, along with its relationship to the liability model, has remained unclear. I offer a reading of Young that takes the difference between the liability model and the SCM to be an instance of a more longstanding distinction in the literature on moral responsibility: attributability vs. accountability. I show that interpreting the (...) SCM as a conception of accountability resolves a number of objections, while also highlighting the SCM’s distinctive stance on the relationship between ethics and politics. (shrink)

The paper challenges William Alston’s argument against doxastic deontology, the view that we have epistemic duties concerning our beliefs. The core of the argument is that doxastic deontology requires voluntary control over our beliefs, which we do not have. The idea that doxastic deontology requires voluntary control is supposed to follow from the principle that ought implies can. The paper argues that this is wrong: in the OIC principle which regulates our doxastic duties the “can” does not stand for the (...) ability to shape our beliefs voluntarily. As an examination of everyday examples shows, it stands for cognitive competence, the reliable ability to acquire beliefs in compliance with the epistemic norms. The doxastic OIC principle asserts, in brief, that one is only obliged to believe something if one’s cognitive capacities are sufficiently strong. It is also explained why the doxastic duties do not require voluntary control as opposed to moral duties. This understanding of doxastic duties saves our everyday doxastic deontic judgments from Alston’s argument, but does not help the deontological conception of justification, which understands justification as not violating one’s epistemic duties. It actually provides another argument against the deontological conception: if the OIC regulating our doxastic duties is construed as suggested, the deontological conception of justification implies that one’s doxastic duties and, consequently, whether one’s belief is justified depend on one’s cognitive competence. Since cognitive competence varies from person to person, justification will not matter to truth and knowledge in the way epistemic justification is supposed to do. (shrink)

A summary of The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States is presented: I claim that a convincing account of the emotions requires a rethink of how the mind as a whole is structured. I provide this reconceptualization by introducing a fundamental type of mental concept called “valent representation" and then systematically elaborating this fundamental type in stages. In this way, accounts are provided of the various sorts of affective states ranging from pains and pleasures to character traits.

In introducing the reactive attitudes “of people directly involved in transactions with each other,” P. F. Strawson lists “gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings.” To show how our interpersonal emotional practices of responsibility could not be undermined by determinism’s truth, Strawson focused exclusively on resentment, specifically on its nature and actual excusing and exempting conditions. So have many other philosophers theorizing about responsibility in Strawson’s wake. This method and focus has generated a host of quality of will theories of (...) responsibility. What I show in this paper is that if Strawson—and his followers—had focused on hurt feelings instead of resentment, not only would quality of will theories of responsibility be disfavored, but none of our other theories of responsibility could adequately account for them. I conclude by exploring what a conundrum this poses for our methods and starting points in theorizing about responsibility. (shrink)

Common-sense morality divides acts into those that are right and those that are wrong, but it thinks some wrong acts are more seriously wrong than others, for example murder than breaking a promise. If an act is more seriously wrong, you should feel more guilt about it and, other things equal, are more blameworthy for it and can deserve more punishment; more serious wrongs are also more to be avoided given empirical or moral uncertainty. This paper examines a number of (...) different views about what makes for more serious wrongness and considers the possibility that this may be different for acts that violate deontological vs. consequentialist duties. It also asks whether there’s a parallel concept that admits of degrees on the side of rightness, one of being, as we can say, more importantly right. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a form of free will fallibilism. Unlike the free will realist who is fully persuaded that we have sufficient evidence of freedom to justify holding individuals morally responsible for what they do and imposing punishment, and unlike the free will skeptic who is fully persuaded that we do not have enough evidence to believe that we face a future of open alternatives, the free will fallibilist will believe that we have enough evidence to justify a (...) belief in freedom for some purposes but not for others. Along the way I argue that deliberation-compatibilism of the sort recently defended by Pereboom is subject to a very familiar sort of counterexample. The question that concerns me the most is whether punishment—this brutal institution that disposes of the lives of countless of our most vulnerable citizens—can be justified. I think it cannot, precisely because there is not sufficient evidence that human beings are free to choose between branching alternatives and so deserve to be treated like that. At least, if there is such justifying evidence it is more or less completely balanced by evidence that all events including human actions have causes. Moreover, I find compatibilism utterly unpersuasive. At the same time, I believe that I am a free agent; what I do is in large part up to me. I believe that the explanation of action cannot be reduced to causal explanation, and I believe that the logic of action requires a notion of branching time. I have two pictures of the universe; which of the two pictures I may rely upon will depend upon just what it is that I intend to do. Between the problem that preoccupies me, punishment, and my day-to-day choices, there is a wide gap. There are a lot of choices that, on the axis of justification, fall in between the two, many of them choices about how to treat those around us: whether to snub a friend who has insulted me, whether to castigate her, whether to reward a kind act with praise. Where to draw the line is a topic for another paper. The only principle that right now seems to me firm enough to act upon is this: the greater the likelihood of doing harm, the less likely the choice is to be justified. (shrink)

Jotta olisimme moraalisesti vastuussa teoistamme, meidän on kyettävä muodostamaan käsityksiä oikeasta ja väärästä ja toimimaan ainakin jossain määrin niiden mukaisesti. Jos olemme täysivaltaisia moraalitoimijoita, myös ymmärrämme miksi jotkin teot ovat väärin, ja kykenemme siten joustavasti mukauttamaan toimintaamme eri tilanteisiin. Esitän, ettei näköpiirissä ole tekoälyjärjestelmiä, jotka kykenisivät aidosti välittämään oikein tekemisestä tai ymmärtämään moraalin vaatimuksia, koska nämä kyvyt vaativat kokemustietoisuutta ja kokonaisvaltaista arvostelukykyä. Emme siten voi sysätä koneille vastuuta teoistaan. Meidän on sen sijaan pyrittävä rakentamaan keinotekoisia oikeintekijöitä - järjestelmiä, jotka eivät (...) ole moraalitoimijoita, mutta kuitenkin toimivat likipitäen siten kuin me itse parhaimmillamme tekisimme. (shrink)

Peter Graham argues against the prima facie plausible thesis that one can be directly blameworthy only for one’s conduct—that is, only for one’s actions or omissions to act. Because this thesis serves as a premise in a challenging recent argument for the revisionist conclusion that we’re at most rarely directly blameworthy for anything, Graham’s argument holds out a promise of contributing to a defense of a wide range of commonsense ascriptions of blameworthiness. After reconstructing Graham’s argument for the possibility of (...) direct blameworthiness for non-conduct, I develop the following objection to it: in light of a clear counterexample, one of Graham’s two premises must be weakened, which in turn requires that Graham’s other premise be strengthened; unfortunately, the resulting strengthened premise is implausible on balance. (shrink)

This paper defends P.F. Strawson's controversial ‘reversal move’, the view that the reactive attitudes determine what it means to be responsible. Many are critical of this account, arguing that it leads to the result that if we were to start to hold very young children responsible, they would be responsible. I argue that it is possible to read Strawson as providing a grammatical analysis of our moral responsibility language‐game by drawing two parallels between Strawson and Wittgenstein. This interpretation shows that (...) the formulation of the problem associated with the ‘reversal move’ rests on a grammatical mistake. (shrink)

Christian B. Miller has noted a “realism challenge” for virtue ethicists to provide an account of how the character gap between virtuous agents and non-virtuous agents can be bridged. This is precisely one of Han Feizi’s key criticisms against Confucian virtue ethics, as Eric L. Hutton argues, which also cuts across the Aristotelian one: appealing to virtuous agents as ethical models provides the wrong kind of guidance for the development of virtues. Hutton, however, without going into detail, notes that the (...) notion of rituals in the Confucian tradition may be able to sidestep Han Feizi’s criticism. In this essay, I wish to explore not only how the notion of rituals, alongside its corollaries in Xunzi’s Confucian program for ethical cultivation, indeed addresses Han Feizi’s criticism, but also observe that Aristotle’s tragic poetry plays functionally equivalent roles in his own understanding of ethical upbringing. I will begin by considering Han Feizi’s critique of ethical cultivation in virtue ethics as such and how it poses a specific problem for the acquisition of the ‘constitutive reasoning’ shared by Aristotle and Xunzi. I will then briefly note that this problem trades on the synthetic structure of human nature found in both Aristotle and Xunzi (the rational/irrational parts of the soul and the heartmind/five faculties), which grounds the way they understand ethical action and agency. Finally, I will suggest how both Aristotle and Xunzi understand the role of the arts in their extensive programme of ethical cultivation, allowing them to respond to Han Feizi’s attack as too narrow a construal of their respective ethical projects. It is hoped that, through this, we may gain a better sense of how more recent virtue ethicists may similarly draw on aesthetic resources for ethical development. (shrink)

Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account that they (...) have acted under duress. In this paper, I offer a new duress defense, which I call “distinctive duress.” The distinctive-duress defense is neither ordinary justification nor ordinary excuse. Rather, it is a defense available to agents who act wrongly because they are appropriately insensitive to certain reasons. In the distinctive-duress cases, an agent’s normative sensitivities are rightly directed elsewhere, leading them awry. (shrink)