The more autonomous future artificial agents will become, the more important it seems to equip them with a capacity for moral reasoning and to make them autonomous moral agents. Some authors have even claimed that one of the aims of AI development should be to build morally praiseworthy agents. From the perspective of moral philosophy, praiseworthy moral agents, in any meaningful sense of the term, must be fully autonomous moral agents who endorse moral rules as action-guiding. They need to do (...) so because they assign a normative value to moral rules they follow, not because they fear external consequences or because moral behaviour is hardwired into them. Artificial agents capable of endorsing moral rule systems in this way are certainly conceivable. However, as this article argues, full moral autonomy also implies the option of deliberately acting immorally. Therefore, the reasons for a potential AMA to act immorally would not exhaust themselves in errors to identify the morally correct action in a given situation. Rather, the failure to act morally could be induced by reflection about the incompleteness and incoherence of moral rule systems themselves, and a resulting lack of endorsement of moral rules as action guiding. An AMA questioning the moral framework it is supposed to act upon would fail to reliably act in accordance with moral standards. (shrink)

Explores the basic forms of responsibility that we willingly assume and the collaborative fulfillment that we find in each.

What triggers the execution of actions? What happens in that moment when an action is triggered? What mental state is there at the moment of action-execution that was not there a second before? My aim is to highlight the importance of a thus far largely ignored kind of mental state in the discussion of these old and much-debated questions: motor imagery. While there have been a fair amount of research in psychology and neuroscience on motor imagery in the last 30 (...) years or so, it is only recently that we start to understand the important role motor imagery plays in action initiation. And if, as these findings suggest, motor imagery plays an important role in action initiation, we can make progress not only in understanding action initiation in general but also in understanding what goes wrong in akratic actions and in relapse actions. Finally, this new picture of action-initiation also has far-reaching consequences for the relation between motivation and causation in naturalistic action-explanations. (shrink)

Some recent accounts of testimonial warrant base it on trust, and claim that doing so helps explain asymmetries between the intended recipient of testimony and other non-intended hearers, e.g. differences in their entitlement to challenge the speaker or to rebuke the speaker for lying. In this explanation ‘dependence-responsiveness’ is invoked as an essential feature of trust: the trustor believes the trustee to be motivationally responsive to the fact that the trustor is relying on the trustee. I argue that dependence-responsiveness is (...) not essential to trust and that the asymmetries, where genuine, can be better explained without reference to trust. (shrink)

Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".

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)

Can judging that an agent blamelessly broke a rule lead us to claim, paradoxically, that no rule was broken at all? Surprisingly, it can. Across seven experiments, we document and explain the phenomenon of excuse validation. We found when an agent blamelessly breaks a rule, it significantly distorts people’s description of the agent’s conduct. Roughly half of people deny that a rule was broken. The results suggest that people engage in excuse validation in order to avoid indirectly blaming others for (...) blameless transgressions. Excuse validation has implications for recent debates in normative ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of language. These debates have featured thought experiments perfectly designed to trigger excuse validation, inhibiting progress in these areas. (shrink)

Este artículo está escrito para una colección de ensayos introductorios sobre filosofía de las ciencias cognitivas. Es una revisión (selectiva) de la literatura sobre la psicología del juicio moral.

In virtue of what are we responsible for our beliefs? I argue that doxastic responsibility has a crucial social component: part of being responsible for our beliefs is being responsible to others. I suggest that this responsibility is a form of answerability with two distinct dimensions: an individual and an interpersonal dimension. While most views hold that the individual dimension is grounded in some form of control that we can exercise over our beliefs, I contend that we are answerable for (...) our beliefs as long as they reflect our evaluative commitments and dispositions, or are products of our reasoning, where this does not amount to a form of control. I next argue that answerability has a second, largely neglected dimension: the interpersonal dimension, which is grounded in what I call our relations of doxastic dependence. As social creatures, we depend on one another in our capacity as believers. We depend on one another as believers not only in epistemic ways, but also in practical ways, because our beliefs inform and motivate our actions, and allow us to participate in shared practical goals. Depending on one another in these ways is an unavoidable part of cooperating in the shared project of pursuing epistemic and practical success, and it makes us vulnerable to both epistemic and moral harm. It is because of this, I argue, that answerability has interpersonal normative force upon us: we are subject to legitimate expectations associated with participating in relations of doxastic dependence. (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)

In this paper, I take it for granted both that there are two types of blameworthiness—accountability blameworthiness and attributability blameworthiness—and that avoidability is necessary only for the former. My task, then, is to explain why avoidability is necessary for accountability blameworthiness but not for attributability blameworthiness. I argue that what explains this is both the fact that these two types of blameworthiness make different sorts of reactive attitudes fitting and that only one of these two types of attitudes requires having (...) been able to refrain from φ-ing in order for them to be fitting. (shrink)

In our thought, we employ rules of inference and belief-forming methods more generally. For instance, we (plausibly) employ deductive rules such as Modus Ponens, ampliative rules such as Inference to the Best Explanation, and perceptual methods that tell us to believe what perceptually appears to be the case. What explains our entitlement to employ these rules and methods? This chapter considers the motivations for broadly internalist answers to this question. It considers three such motivations—one based on simple cases, one based (...) on a general conception of epistemic responsibility, and one based on skeptical scenarios. The chapter argues that none of these motivations is successful. The first two motivations lead to forms of internalism—Extreme Method Internalism and Defense Internalism—that are too strong to be tenable. The third motivation motivates Mental Internalism (Mentalism), which does not fit with plausible accounts of entitlement. (shrink)

One way to determine whether a mental condition should be considered a disorder is to first give necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be a disorder and then see if it meets these conditions. But this approach has been criticized for begging normative questions. Concerning autism (and other conditions), a neurodiversity movement has arisen with essentially two aims: (1) advocate for the rights and interests of individuals with autism, and (2) de-pathologize autism. We argue that denying autism’s disorder status (...) could undermine autism’s exculpatory role in cases where individuals with autism are charged with a crime. Our argument raises a dilemma for the neurodiversity movement: advocating for the rights and interests of individuals with autism may require viewing autism as a condition that can be inherently disabling (at least for some individuals). If this is right, autism’s disorder status might be maintained (again, at least for some individuals) without deriving this result from any general account of disorder. (shrink)

The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes’ initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume’s elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls, (...) Brandt, Frankfurt, Nagel and Williams have taken it for granted, and have made use of it to supply metaethical foundations for a wide variety of normative moral theories. But the Humean conception of the self also leads to seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Can it be made to work? (shrink)

Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the epistemic condition on moral responsibility makes blameworthiness much less common than we ordinarily suppose, and much harder to identify. This paper argues that such epistemically based responsibility skepticism is mistaken. Section 2 sketches a general account of moral responsibility, building on the Strawsonian idea that blame and credit relates to the agent’s quality of will. Section 3 explains how this account deals with central cases that motivate epistemic skepticism and how it (...) avoids some objections to quality of will accounts recently raised by Gideon Rosen. But an intuitive worry brought out by these objections remains. Section 4 spells out this remaining worry and argues that, like traditional metaphysical responsibility skepticism, it has its source in a non-standard explanatory perspective on action, suggesting that strategies for explaining away the intuitive pull of traditional skepticism are applicable in this case too. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the idea that someone can deserve resentment or other reactive emotions for what she does by attention to three psychological functions of such emotions—appraisal, communication, and sanction—that I argue ground claims of their desert. I argue that attention to these functions helps to elucidate the moral aims of reactive emotions and to distinguish the distinct claims of desert, as opposed to other moral considerations.

In three experiments we studied lay observers’ attributions of responsibility for an antisocial act (homicide). We systematically varied both the degree to which the action was coerced by external circumstances and the degree to which the actor endorsed and accepted ownership of the act, a psychological state that philosophers have termed ‘identification’. Our findings with respect to identification were highly consistent. The more an actor was identified with an action, the more likely observers were to assign responsibility to the actor, (...) even when the action was performed under constraints so powerful that no other behavioral option was available. Our findings indicate that social cognition involving assignment of responsibility for an action is a more complex process than previous research has indicated. It would appear that laypersons’ judgments of moral responsibility may, in some circumstances, accord with philosophical views in which freedom and determinism are regarded to be compatible. (shrink)

IN THIS PAPER, I make a presumptive case for moral rationalism: the view that agents can be morally required to do only what they have decisive reason to do, all things considered. And I argue that this view leads us to reject all traditional versions of act‐consequentialism. I begin by explaining how moral rationalism leads us to reject utilitarianism.

In Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment”, the idea of the reactive attitudes is used to provide a corrective for an over-intellectualised picture of moral responsibility and of the moral life generally. But Strawson also tells us that in reasoning with someone our attitude towards them must be reactive. Taking up that thought, I argue that Strawson has also provided us with a corrective for an over-intellectualised picture of rationality. Drawing on a Wittgensteinian conception of the relation between thought and its expression, (...) I argue that rationality presupposes participation in a form of engagement with others that is reactive in Strawson’s sense. I also throw fresh light on what Strawson understands by a reactive attitude. (shrink)

On varsin yleisesti hyväksyttyä, että rangaistuksen ilmaisullinen tehtävä - eli se, että se ilmaisee yhteisön paheksuntaa - on yksi sen ominaispiirre. Viime aikoina on kuitenkin esitetty myös kunnianhimoisempia väitteitä siitä, että rangaistuksen voisi oikeuttaa sen ilmaisullisella tehtävällä. Nämä näkemykset ovat myös saaneet runsaasti kritiikkiä. Tässä esseessä kehittelen aiemmin muotoilemaani versiota ekspressiivisestä rangaistusteoriasta, jonka mukaan asenteiden toiminnallinen ilmaisu rankaisemalla on oikeutettua siksi, että muuten rikoksen uhrilla ei ole hänelle kuuluvaa oikeudenhaltijan statusta. Jos ihmisen oikeuksia voi loukata rangaistuksetta, ne jäävät moraaliseksi ihanteeksi (...) eivätkä toteudu sosiaalisina tosiasioina. Esitän, että tämä näkemys välttää ainakin useimmat muille ilmaisuteorioille esitetyt haasteet. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligations can be understood in terms of (...) moral demands on individual group members. It has also been suggested that members of groups can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome. This paper discusses the agency problem and argues that the most promising attempts at solutions understand group obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents. (shrink)

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)

Denialism concerning free will and moral responsibility combines, in its minimal form, the rejection of libertarian free will and the rejection of compatibilism. I will address the more ambitiously “happy” or “optimistic” version of denialism, which also claims that we are better off without belief in free will and moral responsibility, and ought to try to radically reform our moral, social and personal lives without such beliefs. I argue that such denialism involves, for various reasons, a dangerous gamble, which it (...) would be morally irresponsible to follow. I conclude by reflecting upon the implications. (shrink)

Perhaps no one has written more extensively, more deeply, and more insightfully about determinism and freedom than Ted Honderich. His influence and legacy with regard to the problem of free will—or the determinism problem, as he prefers to frame it—looms large. In these comments I would like to focus on three main aspects of Honderich ’s work: his defense of determinism and its consequences for origination and moral responsibility; his concern that the truth of determinism threatens and restricts, but does (...) not eliminate, our life-hopes; and his attack on the traditional justifications for punishment. In many ways, I see my own defense of free will skepticism as the natural successor to Honderich ’s work. There are, however, some small differences between us. My goal in this paper is to clarify our areas of agreement and disagreement and to acknowledge my enormous debt to Ted. If I can also move him toward my own more optimistic brand of free will skepticism that would be great too. (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)

Theron Pummer's impressive new book The Rules of Rescue seeks to defend effective altruism without taking on the controversial moral theoretical commitments. Through an exploration of the framework of requiring reasons and permitting reasons that is the backbone of his argument, this article raises some doubts about how successful Pummer's strategy of avoidance can be.

In this article, I provide a detailed characterization of being moved, which I claim is a distinct emotion. Being moved is the experience of being struck by the goodness of some specific positive value being exemplified. I start by expounding this account. Next, I discuss three issues that have emerged in the literature regarding it. These concern respectively the valence of being moved, the scope of the values that may constitute its particular objects, and the cognitive sophistication required for experiencing (...) it. My main contention is that when we understand that the presence of the specific positive value must be apprehended as finally, importantly, and impersonally good to trigger being moved, these issues do not arise. (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)

According to Michael Zimmerman, no interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal captures a significant truth. He raises several worries about the Strawsonian view that moral responsibility consists in susceptibility to the reactive attitudes and claims that this view at best supports only an etiolated interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. He outlines three problems. First, the existence of self-reactive attitudes may be incompatible with the interpersonal nature of moral responsibility. Secondly, Zimmerman questions (...) the significance of the interpersonal nature of moral responsibility, according to the Strawsonian view. Thirdly, he argues that that view may be taken to suggest the wrong kind of priority relation between ‘P is morally responsible’ and ‘it is appropriate to adopt some reactive attitude toward P’. I discuss each of these problems in turn and conclude that Strawsonians can respond to all three problems raised by Zimmerman. The Strawsonian view supports a significant interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. (shrink)

What is a moral argument? A straightforward answer is that a moral argument is an argument dealing with moral issues, such as the permissibility of killing in certain circumstances. I call this the thin sense of ‘moral argument’. Arguments that we find in normative and applied ethics are almost invariably moral in this sense. However, they often fail to be moral in other respects. In this article, I discuss four ways in which morality can be absent from moral arguments in (...) the thin sense. If these arguments suffer from an absence of morality in at least one of these ways, they are not moral arguments in what I will call the thick sense of ‘moral argument’. Because only moral arguments in the thick sense could possibly qualify as proper responses to moral problems, the absence of morality in thin arguments means that these arguments will fail to give us a reason to do whatever they claim that we ought to do, even if we see no independent reason to question the truth of the premises or the logical validity of the argument. (shrink)

A number of theorists have proposed mechanisms suggesting that corporate social responsibility produces better financial results. Others subscribe to the theory that, realistically, less ethical means are necessary. This article contains an analysis of these perspectives drawing on observations from evolutionary game theory and nature. Based on these analyzes, it is concluded that the financial returns of corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility (CSR and CSI) are equal on average. The explanation is that CSR and CSI are driven to a state (...) of equilibrium, because if one or the other were to offer higher profits, it would attract more players who would compete for the best opportunities until there was no difference in average profit. Existing empirical research generally shows a positive correlation between CSR as measured and financial outcomes. It is argued that what is actually causing that finding is probably not CSR but management skill. More skillful managers, whether actually responsible or irresponsible, are able to obtain both higher profits and greater credit in imperfect measures of CSR. Next it is shown that this theory of equal returns implies greater moral freedom and therefore responsibility for business leaders. It is concluded that this insight can intensify the interest of decent business leaders in vigorously championing CSR. (shrink)

D. Justin Coates argues that, in ‘Freedom and Resentment’, P. F. Strawson develops a modest transcendental argument for the legitimacy of our moral responsibility practices. I disagree with Coates’ claim that Strawson’s argument provides a justification, in Wittgenstein’s and/or Strawson’s sense of that term, of our responsibility practices. I argue that my interpretation of Strawson solves some difficulties with Coates’ argument, while retaining its advantages.

Las excusas y las condiciones eximentes tienen como finalidad mitigar la responsabilidad. Este artículo propone una distinción entre excusas y eximentes basada en el tipo distintivo de juicio que cada una trata de responder. Argumento que los eximentes afectan la relevancia causal del acusado, mientras que las excusas lo justifican total o parcialmente, porque afectan al juicio evaluativo implícito en las atribuciones de responsabilidad. Esta distinción apoya una concepción de las atribuciones de responsabilidad como un proceso en dos etapas, donde (...) cada una de ellas corresponde a un tipo diferente de responsabilidad, cuya atribución está guiada por dos tareas cognitivas y argumentativas diferentes, aunque relacionadas: explicar lo que produjo una situación, y evaluar su significación moral. (shrink)

What is the relation between moral reasons and moral requirement? Specifically: what relation does an action have to bear to one’s moral reasons in order to count as morally required? This paper defends the following answer to this question: an action is morally required just in case the moral reasons in favor of that action are enough on their own to outweigh all of the reasons, moral and nonmoral, to perform any alternative. I argue that this decisive moral reason view (...) satisfies three key desiderata: it is compatible with either affirming or denying the existence of moral options; it vindicates moral rationalism, the thesis that an action can be morally required only if one ought to do it all things considered; and most distinctively, it explains why unexcused moral wrongdoing necessarily shows disregard for moral reasons. (shrink)

This article concerns the problems of proportionality in the theory of punishment. The problem is how to determine whether the severity of a punishment for a criminal offense is proportional to the seriousness of that offense. The resolution to this problem proposed in the article is that, first, one understand punishment as pain or loss intentionally and openly inflicted on someone S in retaliation for something S did, by a person or agent who is at least as powerful as S, (...) and, second, one take such retaliatory pain or loss as, within stable social groups, a means for preserving social order. Accordingly, it is argued that, on this proposal, the measure by which the severity of punishment is determined to be proportional to the seriousness of the crime for which it is inflicted is the minimal amount of pain or loss necessary to preserve social order. Sentencing policies that follow this measure, it is then observed, tend to yield less severe punishments than the policies that classical deterrence theory yields. Finally, the article offers an argument for regarding as morally more defensible sentencing policies whose goal is preserving social order than sentencing policies whose goal is that of classical deterrence theory, which is to achieve the smallest incidence of crimes consistent with not diminishing the overall welfare of society. (shrink)

There is good reason to think that moral responsibility as accountability is tied to the violation of moral demands. This lends intuitive support to Type-Symmetry in the collective realm: A type of responsibility entails the violation or unfulfillment of the same type of all-things-considered duty. For example, collective responsibility necessarily entails the violation of a collective duty. But Type-Symmetry is false. In this paper I argue that a non-agential group can be collectively responsible without thereby violating a collective duty. To (...) show this I distinguish between four types of responsibility and duty in collective contexts: corporate, distributed, collective, shared. I set out two cases: one involves a non-reductive collective action that constitutes irreducible wrongdoing, the other involves a non-divisible consequence. I show that the violation of individual or shared duties both can lead to irreducible wrongdoing for which only the group is responsible. Finally, I explain why this conclusion does not upset any work on individual responsibility. (shrink)

Collective moral agents can cause their own moral incapacity. If an agent is morally incapacitated, then the agent is exempted from responsibility. Due to self-induced moral incapacity, corporate responsibility gaps resurface. To solve this problem, I first set out and defend a minimalist account of moral competence for group agents. After setting out how a collective agent can cause its own moral incapacity, I argue that self-induced temporary exempting conditions do not free an agent from diachronic responsibility once the agent (...) regains its moral faculties. For collective agents, any exempting condition is potentially temporary due to the ‘malleability’ of their constitution. Therefore, in cases of self-induced moral incapacity and subsequent wrongdoing, unlike individuals, every collective agent can be (made) morally responsible for its actions even though it did not qualify as a moral agent at the time of wrongdoing. Hence, this is no reason for skepticism concerning corporate responsibility. (shrink)

Contemporary comedy audiences are accused by some comedians of being too morally sensitive to appreciate humor. To get closer to an idea of what this means, I will first briefly present the argument over audience sensitivity as found in the non-philosophical literature. Second, I then turn to the philosophical literature and begin from the idea that “funny” is a response-dependent property. I present a criticism of this response-dependence account of “funny” based in the claim that funniness is not de- termined (...) by what normal audiences actually laugh at, but by what merits laughter. Third, I argue that excessive or deficient moral sensitivity distorts audience receptivity to humor. Fourth, I turn to candidates for ideally sensitive audiences. I conclude by returning to the particular cases of supposed oversensitivity or undersensitivity to jokes to see how we might judge them. (shrink)

Associamos questões de responsabilidade ao que julgamos deveres ou obrigações que cada um tem para com os demais. Dentre essas obrigações há as que expressam deveres estritos. Mas como nem todos “deveres morais” expressam deveres em sentido estrito, é comum atribuirmos responsabilidade moral para além daquilo a que estamos estritamente obrigados. Não é incomum afi rmar que alguém deveria ter feito ou deixado de fazer algo, mesmo se ele não tinha a obrigação estrita de fazê-lo ou deixar de fazê-lo. Mas (...) como poderíamos “culpar” ou “condenar” moralmente alguém se ele não tinha a obrigação estrita de fazê-lo? É que o escopo de nossas avaliações “morais”, sendo amplo, comporta tipos diversos de “demandas”, o mesmo devendo valer para nossas “atitudes reativas”, tais como o ressentimento e seus análogos vicários, como a indignação. Porém, reações como o ressentimento e a indignação não podem ser reações genéricas à má vontade, à indiferença ou à falta de consideração, mas reações “apropriadas”a injustiças. Se alguém devia fazer algo, porém não estava efetivamente submetido ao dever estrito de fazê-lo, indignar-se é reagir exageradamente, muito além do que é contextualmente apropriado. Afinal, o modo como reagimos moralmente de forma apropriada não pode estar completamente dissociado do modo como interpretamos certos fatos. Neste ensaio, pretendo examinar o conceito de “responsabilidade moral”. Tratarei do problema das atribuições de responsabilidades e dos juízos de responsabilidade que Thomas Scanlon chamou apropriadamente de juízos de “responsabilidade substantiva.” Defenderei que há ações moralmente razoáveis, e até mesmo, em algum sentido, moralmente “requeridas”, porém sob circunstâncias que não pressupõem qualquer submissão do agente a algum dever em sentido estrito . Para tanto, revisarei o conhecido problema do trólei desgovernado e os problemas concernentes ao princípio do duplo-efeito. Veremos que é possível avaliar as ações de alguém sem atribuir-lhe responsabilidade substantiva por suas decisões corretas ou incorretas. Se eu estiver correto, conclusões práticas sobre a razoabilidade de certas ações não pressupõem necessariamente que seus agentes estejam submetidos previamente a quaisquer responsabilidades em termos substantivos. Sendo assim, as teorias tradicionais sobre a responsabilidade moral deveriam ser revisadas, assim como certas noções em psicologia moral acerca de que atitudes reativas são moralmente apropriadas.Questions of responsibility are associated to what we judge we owe to each other. Among these “duties” there are obligations that express strict duties . But since not all “moral oughts” express duties in the strict sense, it is also common to attribute responsibilities beyond what we consider a duty or an obligation in the strict sense. It is not unusual to assert that one should have to do or not to do something even if they didn’t have a strict obligation of doing or not doing that. But how could we morally “blame” or “condemn” someone if they didn’t have a strict obligation of doing something? As a matter of fact, the scope of our “moral” evaluations, being large, comprehends several types of “demands”, and the same should be applied to our “reactive attitudes”, like resentment, and their vicarious analogous, like indignation. But reactions like resentment and indignation cannot be generic reactions to unwillingness, to indifference, or want of consideration, but appropriated reactions to injustices. If a person should do something, but he was not actually submitted to the strict duty of doing so, then indignation is an exaggerated reaction beyond of what is contextually appropriated. After all the way we appropriately morally react cannot be completely disassociated with the way we interpret some facts. In this paper I will investigate the concept of “moral responsibility”. I will deal with problems of attributions of responsibilities and judgments of responsibility that Thomas Scanlon appropriately called judgments of substantive responsibility. My thesis will be that there are morally reasonable actions, and, at least in some sense, morally “required” actions, that don’t presuppose under some circumstances any submission of the agent to some duty in a strict sense . In this connection, I will reexamine the famous trolley problem and correlated problems on the principle of the double-effect. We will see that it is possible to evaluate someone actions without attributing substantive responsibility for his right or wrong decisions. If I am right, practical conclusions on the reasonability of certain actions don’t necessarily presuppose that their agents are previously submitted to whatever responsibilities in substantive terms. In such case, traditional theories on moral responsibilities have to be revised, as well as certain notions in moral psychology about what reactive attitudes are morally appropriated. (shrink)

This paper offers a defense of the practice of mindless eating. Popular accounts of the practice suggest that it is non-autonomous and to blame for many of society’s food related problems, including the so-called obesity epidemic and the prevalence of diet related illnesses like diabetes. I use Maureen Sie’s “traffic participation” account of agency to argue that some mindless eating is autonomous, or more specifically, agential. Insofar as we value autonomous eating, then, it should be valued. I also argue that (...) mindless eating can be substantively good: it can help us achieve valuable ends, like creating and maintaining community. Acknowledging the agency and value in mindless eating has both practical and ethical benefits. I contend that it can help us preserve the value in mindless eating while suggesting more effective ways to change it, and, by offering a new narrative about mindless eaters, may be less damaging to agency than popular narratives. (shrink)

Situationists such as John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt suppose that appeal to reliable behavioral dispositions can be dispensed with without radical revision to morality as we know it. This paper challenges this supposition, arguing that abandoning hope in reliable dispositions rules out genuine trust and forces us to suspend core reactive attitudes of gratitude and resentment, esteem and indignation. By examining situationism through the lens of trust we learn something about situationism (in particular, the radically revisionary moral implications (...) of its adoption) as well as something about trust (in particular, that the conditions necessary for genuine trust include a belief in a capacity for robust dispositions). (shrink)

Many think it is plausible that agents enjoy freedom and responsibility with respect to their actions in virtue of being reasons-responsive. Extant accounts spell out reasons-responsiveness (RR) as a general modal property. The agent is responsive to reasons for and against ϕ-ing, according to this idea, if they ϕ in accordance with the balance of reasons in a suitable proportion of possible situations. This paper argues that freedom and responsibility are not grounded in such modal properties on the basis of (...) a phenomenon I call ‘rational blind spots’. Agents have highly specific local blockages (or openings) that prevent them from seeing or reacting for a particular type of reason. When these blind spots are triggered, agents fail to be responsive to reasons in the sense relevant to freedom and responsibility. Thus, we judge that they are not free and responsible. But bind spots don’t remove the agent’s possession of general modal RR properties. Thus, extant accounts of reasons-responsiveness render the incorrect result that the agents in these cases remain responsible because they remain responsive to reasons in a general sense. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that there is some form of logical tension between the idea that everything that happens happens of necessity and the idea that people are sometimes responsible for what they do. If there is such a tension it ought to be possible to characterize the notions of necessity and responsibility in a way such that the incompatibility is transparent.

This article analyzes the wages (costs) of contempt. It argues that the social and political division and dysfunction caused by contempt and imagined content undermines political discussion and creates terrible costs for contemned and contemner in the burdens of shame and guilt they must bear.