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 (...) reason to think such technological advances are likely, then we should take steps to address the potential for engineering responsibility. (shrink)

The notion of “responsibility gap” with artificial intelligence (AI) was originally introduced in the philosophical debate to indicate the concern that “learning automata” may make more difficult or impossible to attribute moral culpability to persons for untoward events. Building on literature in moral and legal philosophy, and ethics of technology, the paper proposes a broader and more comprehensive analysis of the responsibility gap. The responsibility gap, it is argued, is not one problem but a set of at least four interconnected (...) problems – gaps in culpability, moral and public accountability, active responsibility—caused by different sources, some technical, other organisational, legal, ethical, and societal. Responsibility gaps may also happen with non-learning systems. The paper clarifies which aspect of AI may cause which gap in which form of responsibility, and why each of these gaps matter. It proposes a critical review of partial and non-satisfactory attempts to address the responsibility gap: those which present it as a new and intractable problem (“fatalism”), those which dismiss it as a false problem (“deflationism”), and those which reduce it to only one of its dimensions or sources and/or present it as a problem that can be solved by simply introducing new technical and/or legal tools (“solutionism”). The paper also outlines a more comprehensive approach to address the responsibility gaps with AI in their entirety, based on the idea of designing socio-technical systems for “meaningful human control", that is systems aligned with the relevant human reasons and capacities. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in implicit bias. Driving this concern is the thesis, apparently established by tests such as the IAT, that people who hold egalitarian explicit attitudes and beliefs, are often influenced by implicit mental processes that operate independently from, and are largely insensitive to, their explicit attitudes. We argue that implicit bias testing in social and empirical psychology does not, and without a fundamental shift in focus could not, establish this startling thesis. We suggest (...) that implicit bias research has been conducted in light of inadequate theories of racism and sexism. As a result, such testing has not sufficiently controlled for subjects’ prejudiced explicit beliefs and emotions, and has not ruled out the possibility that explicit prejudice best explains test subjects’ discriminatory associations and behavior. (shrink)

Since it has become possible to “read the book of life”, different approaches to the universe, revealed by genetic scientific advances, have come into being. On the one hand, the Human Genome Project has opened the medical field to new treatments – or at least to the hope of new therapies – through, for instance, gene therapy. On the other hand, developments in genetics have allowed reductionism or genetic essentialism to make its way into the public and institutional perception of (...) genetic advances. This paper will argue that the essentialist approach to genetics is inspired by the constant craving of humans to find, once and for all, those features and determinants that constitute identity: the human nature. I will argue against this trend by testing a particular field in which the concept of human nature could be the source of discrimination and inequalities, that being genetic human nature based law. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Thomas Szanto develops an account of hatred, according to which the target of this attitude, paradigmatically, is a representative of a group or a class. On this account, hatred overgeneralises its target, has a blurred affective focus, is co-constituted by an outgroup/ingroup distinction, and is accompanied by a commitment for the subject to stick to the hostile attitude. While this description captures an important form of hatred, this paper claims that it does not do justice to (...) the paradigmatic cases of this attitude. The paper puts forward a “singularist” view of hatred, the core idea of which is that, in its simpler form, hatred is to aversively target the other qua this individual person, where the adverb “aversively” expresses the subject’s desire for the target to be annihilated. The conclusion develops some general considerations on the distinction between paradigmatic and marginal instances of an attitude by highlighting its importance for the study of affective phenomena. (shrink)

Social norms forbidding rape jokes, blackface, and flag-burning exemplify a peculiar form of etiquette, which I call political etiquette. Just as compliance with ordinary etiquette expresses respect for the other individuals involved in a social encounter, compliance with political etiquette expresses respect for social groups. In this paper, I propose that we understand political etiquette as a system of conventions whereby we indicate our commitment to treating vulnerable social groups in accordance with their rightful status. Because we have a standing (...) obligation to assure all members of our community that their rightful social status will be respected, we have a powerful moral reason to conform with all existing political etiquette norms whose target social groups lack such assurance, even when compliance with these norms is not antecedently morally valuable. Alongside our moral reasons to comply with some existing political etiquette norms, we also have moral reasons to fortify good political etiquette norms and to reform or erode bad ones. (shrink)

The discussion of propositional gratitude stands in need of a secure theoretical underpinning. Its place in the gratitude literature, alongside the more familiar targeted gratitude that we direct towards benefactors, now seems assured, but its adoption has been uncritical in many cases. In this paper, I argue that existing accounts of gratitude fail to give us good reason to incorporate propositional gratitude into our theories. I discuss Sean McAleer’s paper ‘Propositional Gratitude’ in some detail, and argue that the connection he (...) draws between propositional gratitude and humility is not as close as he supposes, and cannot do all the work required of it. Then I trace the connections between propositional gratitude, targeted gratitude, and gladness, and develop and defend a definition of gratitude that integrates the propositional and the targeted components. (shrink)

The discussion in this paper begins with some observations regarding a number of structural similarities between art and morality as it involves human agency. On the basis of these observations we may ask whether or not incompatibilist worries about free will are relevant to both art and morality. One approach is to claim that libertarian free will is essential to our evaluations of merit and desert in both spheres. An alternative approach, is to claim that free will is required only (...) in the sphere of morality—and that to this extent the art/morality analogy breaks down. I argue that both these incompatibilist approaches encounter significant problems and difficulties—and that incompatibilist have paid insufficient attention to these issues. However, although the analogy between art and morality may be welcomed by compatibilists, it does not pave the way for an easy or facile optimism on this subject. On the contrary, while the art/morality analogy may lend support to compatibilism it also serves to show that some worries of incompatibilism relating to the role of luck in human life cannot be easily set aside, which denies compatibilism any basis for complacent optimism on this subject. (shrink)

In the third and final part of his A Theory of Determinism (TD) Ted Honderich addresses the fundamental question concerning “the consequences of determinism.” The critical question he aims to answer is what follows if determinism is true? This question is, of course, intimately bound up with the problem of free will and, in particular, with the question of whether or not the truth of determinism is compatible or incompatible with the sort of freedom required for moral responsibility. It is (...) Honderich’s aim to provide a solution to “the problem of the consequences of determinism” and a key element of this is his articulation and defence of an alternative response to the implications of determinism that collapses the familiar Compatibilist/Incompatibilist dichotomy. Honderich offers us a third way – the response of “Affirmation” (HFY 125-6). Although his account of Affirmation has application and relevance to issues and features beyond freedom and responsibility, my primary concern in this essay will be to examine Honderich’s theory of “Affirmation” as it concerns the free will problem. (shrink)

Dehumanisation is an elusive concept. While the term itself indicates that its meaning relates to a process that negatively affects the human aspect of the object involved, it proves more difficult to pinpoint what the ‘human aspect’ in this formula entails precisely or how dehumanisation can negatively affect it. This article aims to contribute to ongoing academic debates about dehumanisation by presenting a new way to understand this notion, which places the failure to recognise the moral relevance of human subjectivity (...) at its conceptual core. The main argument is that dehumanisation involves a failure to recognise what matters most about human beings in a normative sense, namely the fact that their human subjectivity counts as a moral reason against mistreating them. This line of thought has the potential to bring together various strands in the available literature. The account integrates the insight that dehumanisation entails a denial of humanity, resonates with the idea that dehumanisation involves a particular form of moral exclusion and affirms that dehumanisation constitutes an affront to fundamental human interests, needs and rights. (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)

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)

To deserve credit for doing what is morally right, we must act from the right kinds of motives. Acting from the right kinds of motives involves responding both to the morally relevant reasons, by acting on these considerations, and to the morally relevant individuals, by being guided by appropriate attitudes of regard for them. Recent theories of the right kinds of motives have tended to prioritize responding to moral reasons. I develop a theory that instead prioritizes responding to individuals (through (...) appropriate attitudes of regard for them) and argue that it better accounts for the basic features of the right kinds of motives – what we most fundamentally care about in judging whether persons deserve moral credit. (shrink)

Proponents of the epistemic companions in guilt argument argue that we should reject the moral error theory because it entails that there are no epistemic reasons. In this paper, I investigate whether a plausible version of the moral error theory can be constructed that does not entail an error theory about epistemic reasons. I argue that there are no irreducibly normative second-personal reasons even if there are irreducibly normative reasons. And epistemic reasons are not second-personal reasons. In this case, a (...) plausible version of the moral error theory can be constructed that does not entail an error theory about epistemic reasons if facts and claims about morality entail facts and claims about irreducibly normative second-personal reasons. And, as I explain, there is a good case that facts and claims about morality do entail facts and claims about irreducibly normative second-personal reasons. (shrink)

The paper examines the conditions under which we are responsible for actions performed under duress, focusing on a real case in which a soldier was compelled at gunpoint to participate in the massacre of civilian prisoners. The case stands for a class of cases in which the compelled act is neither clearly justified nor clearly excused on grounds of temporary incapacity, but in which it is nonetheless plausible that the agent is not morally blameworthy. The theoretical challenge is to identify (...) the excuse in such cases and to explain its basis. The paper argues that when mortal duress excuses in cases of this sort, it does so because the compelled act, though impermissible and freely chosen, nonetheless fails to manifest ‘an insufficiently good will’. The argument depends on a potentially controversial thesis in the ethics of concern, namely, that a thoroughly decent moral agent—someone who cares enough about morality and the values that underlie it—will not always be moved to do what he knows he ought to do. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett maintains that regardless of determinism humans are both free to act and have a meaningful existence. Yet Dennett’s compatibilism entails that a felicity-advancing interaction with the world is all that we could wish for, which seems false. I also argue that Dennett’s attempt to define the terms central to this metaphysical debate fails. The weaknesses of Dennett’s case suggest that he is motivated more by his desire to complete the naturalistic project than he is by the pursuit of (...) philosophical coherence. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson famously argued that reactive attitudes and ordinary moral practices justify moral assessments of blame, praise, and punishment. Here we consider whether Strawson's approach can illuminate the concept of desert. After reviewing standard attempts to analyze this concept and finding them lacking, we suggest that to deserve something is to justifiably receive a moral assessment in light of certain criteria – in particular, eligibility criteria (a subject's properties that make the subject principally eligible for moral assessments) and assignment criteria (...) (particulars about the subject, act, and circumstances that justify assessments such as blame in a particular case). Strawson's analysis of the ordinary attitudes and practices of moral assessment hints at these criteria but does not unequivocally ground a notion of desert. Following Strawson's general naturalistic approach, we show that recent psychological research on folk concepts and practices regarding freedom, moral responsibility, and blame illuminates how people actually arrive at moral assessments, thus revealing the very eligibility criteria and assignment criteria we suggest ground a concept of desert. By pushing the Strawsonian line even further than Strawson did, by empirically investigating actual moral practice and folk understandings, we can illuminate desert and lend credence to Strawson's general anti-metaphysical position. (shrink)

I start by presenting an intuitively appealing account of forgiveness, ‘the insult account’, which nicely explains the cycle from wrongdoing to forgiveness. We need to respond to wrongdoing by blaming our offenders because they insult us with their actions, 529–55, 2001; Hampton 1988a, b). How can wrongdoing be overcome? Either by the retraction of the insult or by taking necessary steps to correct for the wrong done. Once the insult has been retracted, usually by apology or remorse, forgiveness can come (...) about. Martin The Journal of Philosophy, 107, 534–53, has recently criticized this promising account of forgiveness. My aim here is to defend an improved version of the ‘insult account’. I propose an account of earned forgiveness through apology, which shares features with the ‘insult account’ criticized by Martin, but also improves upon problems found in the ‘insult account’. This new account will successfully solve the puzzle of forgiveness. Drawing on Bovens’ account of apologies, I argue that apologies uniquely earn the wrongdoer’s forgiveness. I finally address a concern about the relation between apologies and forgiveness, recently raised by Hallich Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 16, 999–1017,. I argue that my expressive view of what the function of apologies is will answer his skepticism about apologies. (shrink)

I present three versions of the argument from divine hiddenness that are grounded in moral considerations regarding how a just deity would act and auxiliary commitments that theists often have. First, I argue that the problem of hiddenness is made worse if one also holds that many will suffer in the afterlife due to not achieving a proper orientation towards God and the demands of morality in this life. Second, I argue that if any version of the moral argument for (...) theism is successful, then God has a very good reason to not remain hidden. Third, I argue that a just God would not allow people to do evil in her name. (shrink)

A microaggression is a small insulting act made disproportionately harmful by its part in an oppressive pattern of similar insults. How should you respond when made the victim of a microaggression? In this paper I survey several morally salient factors, including effects upon victims, perpetrators, and third parties. I argue, contrary to popular views, that ‘growing a thicker skin’ is not good advice nor is expressing reasonable anger always the best way to contribute to confronting oppression. Instead, appropriately responding to (...) microaggression involves difficult application of practical wisdom that does not easily fall under a simple prescription. (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)

This paper proposes a contextualist solution to the puzzle about free will. It argues that the context-sensitivity of statements about freedom of the will follows from the correct analysis of these statements. Because the analysis is independently plausible, the contextualism is warranted not merely in virtue of its capacity to solve the puzzle.

According to the standard account of forgiveness, you forgive your wrongdoer by overcoming your resentment towards them. But how exactly must you do so? And when is such overcoming fitting? The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel version of the standard account to answer these questions. Its core idea is that the reactive attitudes are a fitting response not just to someone’s blameworthiness, but to their blameworthiness being significant for you, or worthy of your caring, in virtue (...) of your relationship to it. Someone’s blameworthiness is significant for you to the extent you’re bound up with what grounds it––e.g. with the wrongdoer’s being a participant in human relationships, with their attitudes, or with the victim’s being a source of demands. So you may fittingly not care about someone’s blameworthiness if it’s sufficiently insignificant for you in this manner––e.g. if their wrong happened far off in place and time. And forgiveness revolves around this. You forgive your wrongdoer if and only if, partly out of goodwill towards them, you cease to care about their blameworthiness––a bit as if their wrong had happened far off. If I’m right, this agent-relativity-based account can resolve the apparent ‘paradoxy of forgiveness’, satisfies a number of desiderata, and is plausible on an intuitive level. (shrink)

Much contemporary first-order moral theory revolves around the debate between consequentialists and deontologists. Depressingly, this debate often seems to come down to irresolvable first-order intuition mongering about runaway trolleys, drowning children in shallow ponds, lying to murderers at doors, and the like. Prima facie, common sense morality contains both consequentialist and deontological elements, so it may be no surprise that direct appeal to first-order intuitions tend towards stalemate. One might infer from this that we should simply embrace some sort of (...) pluralism in the style of W.D. Ross, but there are problems with this approach too.I of course have in mind the sort of view defended by W.D. Ross. See W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). For one thing, pluralism provides precious little guidance in hard cases. For another, there is something inherently conservative about giving Rossian pluralism any sort of default status as the corr. (shrink)

As a neurodevelopmental condition that affects cognitive functioning, autism has been used as a test case for theories of moral responsibility. Most of the relevant literature focuses on autism’s impact on theory of mind and empathy. Here I examine aspects of autism related to executive function. I apply an account of how we might fail to be reasons responsive to argue that autism can increase the frequency of excuses for transgressive behavior, but will rarely make anyone completely exempt from moral (...) responsibility in general. On this account, although excuses may apply more often to autists than to others, the excuses that apply to autists are just the same excuses that can apply to anyone. (shrink)

Uma forte objeção a uma estratégia compatibilista da responsabilidade moral — isto é, à tese de que responsabilidade é compatível com uma explicação causal determinista do mundo — diz que, ao defender a possibilidade de agentes responsáveis determinados causalmente por fatos prévios às suas ações, uma estratégia compatibilista não dispõe dos recursos conceituais necessários para refutar a tese intuitiva de que agentes manipulados tacitamente não são responsáveis por suas ações. Neste artigo, fornecemos uma resposta a esta objeção, sugerindo como uma (...) estratégia semicompatibilista, que apela para a relevância da história causal da formação de estados mentais componentes de deliberações, pode acomodar várias de nossas intuições acerca de casos de manipulação em que estamos dispostos a negar que os agentes em questão sejam responsáveis. Por outro lado, tentaremos também mostrar que, segundo tal estratégia semicompatibilista, certos processos de manipulação tácita revelam casos em que podemos genuinamente atribuir responsabilidade a agentes, a despeito de haver um componente “manipulador” na explicação das suas ações. Por fim, consideraremos a aplicabilidade da estratégia semicompatibilista a um caso específico, discutido na literatura bioética, sobre manipulação genética de traços componentes do perfil de um agente.A strong objection to a compatibilist strategy on moral responsibility — i.e., to the thesis according to whichresponsibility is compatible with a causal deterministic explanation of the world — says that, insofar as acompatibilist strategy claims that agents could be made responsible in spite of the fact that they are causallydetermined by previous facts to their actions, it lacks conceptual resources to reject the intuitive view that covertlymanipulated agents are not responsible for their actions. We provide here a response to this objection by suggestingthat a semicompatibilist strategy, which resorts to the relevance of the causal history in the formation of the mentalstates which deliberations are composed of, can accommodate many of our intuitions about cases of manipulationand about which we are tempted to deny that the agents in question are responsible. On the other hand, we shall try toshow that, as a consequence of the semicompatibilist strategy, there might be some manipulation processesin respect of which we could genuinely ascribe responsibility to agents, regardless of there being a manipulatingcomponent in the explanation of their actions. Lastly, we shall consider the applicability in practice of thesemicompatibilist strategy, and discuss a case mentioned in the literature on bioethics about genetic manipulation ofhuman traits which are constitutive of an agent’s profile. (shrink)

In this paper I articulate a view of doxastic control that helps defend the legitimacy of our practice of blaming people for their beliefs. I distinguish between three types of doxastic control: intention-based, reason-based, and influence-based. First I argue that, although we lack direct intention-based control over our beliefs, such control is not necessary for legitimate doxastic blame. Second, I suggest that we distinguish two types of reason-responsiveness: sensitivity to reasons and appreciation of reasons. I argue that while both capacities (...) are necessary for satisfying the control condition, neither is sufficient. Finally, I defend an influence-based view of doxastic control according to which we have the capacity to execute intentions to engage in reflection that causally influences our beliefs in positive epistemic ways. This capacity is both necessary and sufficient for satisfying the control condition for legitimate doxastic blame. I end by defending the view from two objections: that reflection is not necessary for meeting the control condition, and that it is not sufficient. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the rise of ‘Just Culture’ as an ideal in the patient safety movement, with numerous hospitals and professional organisations adopting a Just Culture response to incidents ranging from non-culpable human error to intentional misconduct. This paper argues that there is a deep problem with the Just Culture model, resulting from its impoverished understanding of the value of punitive, fundamentally backward-looking, practices of holding people accountable. I show that the kind of ‘accountability’ and ‘punishment’ contemporary Just Culture (...) advocates endorse disrespects both patients and providers. I claim, first, that punishment is good because it respects participants in the healthcare system by restoring an equilibrium of social and moral status that wrongdoing disturbs, and, second, that it only does so when it communicates a backward-looking message of resentful blame. (shrink)

I argue that fitting resentment tracks unacceptable ‘ecological’ imbalances in relative social strength between victims and perpetrators that arise from violations of legitimate moral expectations. It does not respond purely, or even primarily, to offenders’ attitudes, and its proper targets need not be fully developed moral agents. It characteristically involves a wish for the restoration of social equilibrium rather than a demand for moral recognition or good will. To illuminate these contentions, I focus on cases that I believe demonstrate a (...) corollary thesis, namely, that strength, broadly construed, is a necessary condition of resentment-worthiness. I argue that weakness can make resentment unfitting in two ways. First, weakness may prevent a wrongdoer from shifting the balance of social power. Second, a weak wrongdoer may do social damage but be so lowly that resentment, which would represent him as excessively strong, would be inapt. Finally, I consider how accepting the ecological view might affect our theorizing about moral responsibility and the ethics of blame. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the question (...) of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)

This article considers and criticizes criminal law‘s assumption of the moral autonomy of individuals, showing how that view rests on questionable and obscure Kantian commitments about the self, and proposes a naturalistic alternative developed through a synthetic reading of Adorno‘s and Bhaskar‘s account of the subject in relation to nature and society. As an embodied, emergent, changing subject whose practically rational powers are emergent, polymorphous, and contingent, the subject‘s moral autonomy is dependent on the conditions for experiences of solidarity in (...) four-planar nature. This view makes criminal theory‘s Autonomy Assumption look deeply questionable; autonomy must be a complex, nuanced open question, not an abstract, a priori default assumption. (shrink)

This article argues—against the present compatibilist orthodoxy in the philosophy of criminal law—for the contemporary relevance of a kind of critique of criminal law known as the ‘determinist challenge’, through a reconstruction of Theodor Adorno’s thought on freedom and determinism. The article begins by considering traditional forms of the determinist challenge, which expressed a widespread intuition that it is irrational or inappropriate for the criminal law to hold people responsible for actions that are causally determined by social and psychological forces (...) in such a way that they cannot be said to have acted freely. Yet as traditionally presented it was possible for its opponents to interpret this challenge as an incompatibilist position within the traditional free will/determinism debate, and to present compatibilist arguments against it—in particular, that the determinist challenge is unmotivated and has implausible implications. It is argued that these compatibilist objections hold only on a certain interpretation of the determinist challenge, but that this interpretation is not the only one available. Adorno’s distinctive position on freedom and determinism is presented as an alternative version of the challenge, which cannot be assimilated to the terms of the traditional compatibilist/incompatibilist disputes. This novel, ‘metacritical’ version of the determinist challenge is essentially a social–historical, not metaphysical, thesis about the moral significance of the freedom-undermining effects of modern social forms. As such, it is argued, it is invulnerable to the usual compatibilist objections, and presents a serious challenge to our criminal legal institutions. (shrink)

Reactive theories of responsibility see moral accountability as grounded on the capacity for feeling reactive-attitudes. I respond to a recent argument gaining ground in this tradition that excludes psychopaths from accountability. The argument relies on what Paul Russell has called the 'subjectivity requirement'. On this view, the capacity to feel and direct reactive-attitudes at oneself is a necessary condition for responsibility. I argue that even if moral attitudes like guilt are impossible for psychopaths to deploy, that psychopaths, especially the "successful" (...) and "secondary" subtypes of psychopathy, can satisfy the subjectivity requirement with regard to shame. I appeal to evidence that embarrassment and shame are grounded on the same affective process and data that psychopathic judgments about embarrassment are neurotypical. If I am right, then psychopaths ought to be open to shame-based forms of accountability including shame punishments. I conclude by considering why psychopaths rarely self-report shame. I argue that lacking a capacity to see oneself as flawed is a different sort of failure than lacking the capacity to feel. (shrink)

IntroductionStrawsonian theories of moral responsibility, which aim to ground the phenomenon of moral responsibility in our practices of holding one another accountable for our actions, lead us to think more carefully about the content of those practices. Strawson and his followers have done much to explore the significance of the deontic reactive attitudes (resentment, indignation and guilt), which we tend to aim at wrongdoers.P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 48 (1962). See also, R. Jay (...) Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2006). In this essay, I am interested in the ways in which we express those attitudes. While it is plausible that experiencing a negative reactive attitude would be permissible in every case of blameworthy wrongdoing, few would agree that verbal .. (shrink)

Is gossip ever appropriate as a response to other people’s misdeeds or character flaws? Gossip is arguably the most common means through which communities hold people responsible for their vices and transgressions. Yet, gossiping itself is traditionally considered wrong. This essay develops an account of social punishment in order to ask whether gossip can serve as a legitimate means of enforcing moral norms. In the end, however, I argue that gossip is most likely to be permissible where it resembles punishment (...) as little as possible. (shrink)

In Punishment and the Moral Emotions, Jeffrie Murphy rejects his earlier, strong endorsements of retributivism. Questioning both our motivations for embracing retributivism and our views about the basis of desert, he now describes himself as a “reluctant retributivist.” In this essay, I argue that Murphy should reject retributivism altogether. Even if we grant that criminals have negative desert, why should we suppose that it is desert of suffering? I argue that it is possible to defend desert-based theories of punishment that (...) reject this view of the object of desert. I consider, but reject, expressivist versions of such a theory. (shrink)

The concept of free will has been heavily debated in philosophy and the social sciences. Its alleged importance lies in its association with phenomena fundamental to our understandings of self, such as autonomy, freedom, self-control, agency, and moral responsibility. Consequently, when neuroscience research is interpreted as challenging or even invalidating this concept, a number of heated social and ethical debates surface. We undertook a content analysis of media coverage of Libet’s et al.’s :623–642, 1983) landmark study, which is frequently interpreted (...) as posing a serious challenge to the existence of free will. Media descriptions of Libet et al.’s experiment provided limited details about the original study. Overall, many media articles reported that Libet et al.’s experiments undermined the existence of free will, despite acknowledging that several methodological limitations had been identified in the literature. A propensity to attribute greater credibility than warranted to neurobiological explanations could be at stake. (shrink)

Is the idea of the voluntary important? Those who think so tend to regard it as an idea that can be metaphysically deepened through a theory about voluntary action, while those who think it a superficial idea that cannot coherently be deepened tend to neglect it as unimportant. Parting company with both camps, I argue that the idea of the voluntary is at once important and superficial—it is an essentially superficial notion that performs important functions, but can only perform them (...) if we refrain from deepening it. After elaborating the contrast between superficial and deepened ideas of the voluntary, I identify the important functions that the superficial idea performs in relation to demands for fairness and freedom. I then suggest that theories trying to deepen the idea exemplify a problematic moralization of psychology—they warp psychological ideas to ensure that moral demands can be met. I offer a three-tier model of the problematic dynamics this creates, and show why the pressure to deepen the idea should be resisted. On this basis, I take stock of what an idea of the voluntary worth having should look like, and what residual tensions with moral ideas this leaves us with. (shrink)

This paper puts forward an account of blame combining two ideas that are usually set up against each other: that blame performs an important function, and that blame is justified by the moral reasons making people blameworthy rather than by its functionality. The paper argues that blame could not have developed in a purely instrumental form, and that its functionality itself demands that its functionality be effaced in favour of non-instrumental reasons for blame—its functionality is self-effacing. This notion is sharpened (...) and it is shown how it offers an alternative to instrumentalist or consequentialist accounts of blame which preserves their animating insight while avoiding their weaknesses by recasting that insight in an explanatory role. This not only allows one to do better justice to the authority and autonomy of non-instrumental reasons for blame, but also reveals that autonomy to be a precondition of blame’s functionality. Unlike rival accounts, it also avoids the “alienation effect” that renders blame unstable under reflection by undercutting the authority of the moral reasons which enable it to perform its function in the first place. It instead yields a vindicatory explanation that strengthens our confidence in those moral reasons. (shrink)

We propose that the prevalent moral aversion to AWS is supported by a pair of compelling objections. First, we argue that even a sophisticated robot is not the kind of thing that is capable of replicating human moral judgment. This conclusion follows if human moral judgment is not codifiable, i.e., it cannot be captured by a list of rules. Moral judgment requires either the ability to engage in wide reflective equilibrium, the ability to perceive certain facts as moral considerations, moral (...) imagination, or the ability to have moral experiences with a particular phenomenological character. Robots cannot in principle possess these abilities, so robots cannot in principle replicate human moral judgment. If robots cannot in principle replicate human moral judgment then it is morally problematic to deploy AWS with that aim in mind. Second, we then argue that even if it is possible for a sufficiently sophisticated robot to make ‘moral decisions’ that are extensionally indistinguishable from (or better than) human moral decisions, these ‘decisions’ could not be made for the right reasons. This means that the ‘moral decisions’ made by AWS are bound to be morally deficient in at least one respect even if they are extensionally indistinguishable from human ones. Our objections to AWS support the prevalent aversion to the employment of AWS in war. They also enjoy several significant advantages over the most common objections to AWS in the literature. (shrink)

This paper examines Lockie’s theory of libertarian self-determinism in light of the question of prediction: “Can we know (or justifiably believe) how an agent will act, or is likely to act, freely?” I argue that, when Lockie's theory is taken to its full logical extent, free actions cannot be predicted to any degree of accuracy because, even if they have probabilities, these cannot be known. However, I suggest that this implication of his theory is actually advantageous, because it is able (...) to explain and justify an important feature of the practices we use to determine whether someone has acted culpably: our hostility to the use of predictive evidence. (shrink)

On the standard view, pessimism is a philosophically intractable topic. Against the standard view, I hold that pessimism is a stance, or compound of attitudes, commitments and intentions. This stance is marked by certain beliefs—first and foremost, that the bad prevails over the good—which are subject to an important qualifying condition: they are always about outcomes and states of affairs in which one is personally invested. This serves to distinguish pessimism from other views with which it is routinely conflated— including (...) skepticism and nihilism—and to allow for the extent to which pessimism necessarily involves more than the intellectual endorsement of a doctrine. (shrink)

While libertarians affirm personal responsibility as a central moral and political value, libertarian theorists write relatively little about the theory and practice of this value. Focusing on the work of F. A. Hayek and David Schmidtz, this article identifies the core of a libertarian approach to personal responsibility and demonstrates the ways in which this approach entails a radical revision of the ethics and American politics of personal responsibility. Then, I highlight several central implications of this analysis in the American (...) political and economic status quo. First, this analysis makes a mockery of so-called libertarian/conservative ‘fusionism’, such that libertarian personal responsibility cannot partner with meritocratic conservative thought to provide a plural grounding for rejecting progressive or redistributive economic policy. Next, preferred libertarian policies threaten the status, esteem and social bases of self-respect of citizens who are worse-off through little or no fault of their own. Finally, these policies undermine the ethics of personal responsibility that Americans from across the ideological spectrum value and many conservatives and libertarians celebrate. In the American status quo, those who value personal responsibility must reserve a central place for policies that mitigate opportunity and distributive inequalities. (shrink)