Abstract“Absolutely nothing,” say the radical Bayesians. “Simplifying decisions,” say the moderates. “Providing premises in practical reasoning,” say the epistemologists. “Coordinating with others,” say I. It is hard to see how to construct an adequate theory of rational behavior without using a graded notion of belief, such as credence. But once we have credence, what role is left for belief? After surveying some answers to this question, I will explore the idea that belief is in a different line of work altogether. (...) Its job is not to rationalize and explain an agent’s behavior, but to track what the agent would accept as a reason. Although some philosophers have seen the connection between belief and reasons, they have tended to see reasons as part of a theory of rational action. This locates belief in the rationalizing and explaining business, where it must vie with credence. In contrast, I argue that reasons play no essential role in an account of individual rationality; they are important because we need to coordinate with others. Credence and belief thus answer to separate needs. (shrink)

Agent-regret seems to give rise to a philosophical puzzle. If we grant that we are not morally responsible for consequences outside our control (the ‘Standard View’), then agent-regret—which involves self-reproach and a desire to make amends for consequences outside one’s control—appears rationally indefensible. But despite its apparent indefensibility, agent-regret still seems like a reasonable response to bad moral luck. I argue here that the puzzle can be resolved if we appreciate the role that agent-regret plays in a larger social practice (...) that helps us deal with bad moral luck. That agent-regret is a component in a social practice limits the questions that we can reasonably ask about it. While we can ask whether an experience of agent-regret is rational given the norms of this practice, we cannot ask the question that motivates the puzzle of agent-regret, viz. whether agent-regret is rationally defensible according to the Standard View. (shrink)

The conception of responsibility for beliefs typically assumed in the literature mirrors the practices ofaccountabilityfor actions. In this paper, I argue that this trend leaves a part of what it is to be responsible unduly neglected, namely the practices ofattributability.After offering a diagnosis for this neglect, I bring these practices into focus and develop a virtue-theoretic framework to vindicate them. I then investigate the specificity of the belief case and conclude by resisting two challenges, namely that attributability cannot amount to (...) genuine responsibility and that it can be reduced to a sort of accountability. (shrink)

This paper criticizes two closely connected rationalist views about human agency. The first of these views, rationalism about agential control, claims that the capacities for agential control in normal adult human beings are rational capacities. The second view, rationalism about action, claims that the capacities for agential control in virtue of which the things we do count as our actions are rational capacities. The arguments of the paper focus on aspects of technical skills that control integral details of skillful action, (...) like the details of a baseball player’s pitching technique. I argue that these aspects of technical skills are largely non-rational capacities, but are nonetheless capacities for agential control, and can help make the things we do count as actions. While rational capacities do have a central role in human agency, their importance should not lead us to neglect the significant constitutive role of non-rational capacities in our agency. (shrink)

Emotions have not received sufficient attention in business ethics. This paper identifies the positive role of emotions in human judgment and attitudes. It then argues that emotions as well as feelings on the part of managers and their employees can be positive forces for both business managers and for the organizations they lead. Allowing emotions a stronger role in business affairs could serve in putting a more human face on both managers and their organizations.

In Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, the narrator finds himself involved in a moral relation with the title character whose sense he finds difficult to articulate. I argue that we can make sense of this relation, up to a certain point, in terms of the influential account of obligation that Stephen Darwall advances in The Second-Person Standpoint. But I also argue that there is a dimension of moral sense in the relation that is not captured by Darwall’s account, or indeed (...) by any of the accounts of obligation that have been most prominent in the history of western philosophy from the early modern period up to the present. More specifically, I argue that what is brought out in the relation between Bartleby and the narrator is the separation of the experience of moral necessitation from the rule that would give its content. I attempt to show that this obligation without rule is a genuine moral phenomenon and that we can begin to understand it in terms of the ideas of love, singularity, and potentiality as these are developed in the work of Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend externalist accounts of justified belief from Cohen's new evil demon objection. While I think that Cohen might be right that the person is justified in believing what she does, I argue that this is because we can defend the person from criticism and that defending a person is a very different thing from defending a person's attitudes or actions. To defend a person's attitudes or actions, we need to show that they met standards or did (...) not violate norms. Intuitions about whether we can defend a person from criticism are a poor guide when it comes to determining whether norms were violated or standards were met. It turns out that even radical forms of externalism about justification are compatible with the intuitions that Cohen's example elicits. Properly understood, those intuitions show that the believer should be excused from criticism (and excused for failing to believe with adequate justification). (shrink)

In this paper, I shall discuss a problem that arises when you try to combine an attractive account of what constitutes evidence with an independently plausible account of the kind of access we have to our evidence. According to E = K, our evidence consists of what we know. According to the principle of armchair access, we can know from the armchair what our evidence is. Combined, these claims entail that we can have armchair knowledge of the external world. Because (...) it seems that the principle of armchair access is supported by widely shared intuitions about epistemic rationality, it seems we ought to embrace an internalist conception of evidence. I shall argue that this response is mistaken. Because externalism about evidence can accommodate the relevant intuitions about epistemic rationality, the principle of armchair access is unmotivated. We also have independent reasons for preferring externalism about evidence to the principle of armchair access. (shrink)

In The Ends of Harm Victor Tadros develops an alternative to consequentialist, and non-consequentialist retributivist, accounts of the justifiability of punishment: the duty view. Crucial to this view is the claim that wrongdoers incur an enforceable duty to remedy their wrongs. They cannot undo them, but they can do something that is almost as good—namely, by submitting to appropriate punishment, which will deter potential wrongdoers in the future, reduce their victim’s risk of suffering similar wrongs again. Admittedly, this involves harming (...) wrongdoers as a means to an end, but according to Tadros the ‘means principle’ that we should not harm others as a means, properly construed, does not apply to cases where the victim has an enforceable duty to bear the kind of harm that he or she is being made to suffer. In this article, I shall express reservations about Tadros’ defense and interpretation of the means principle. In presenting his position, Tadros also sets out some interesting anti-retributivist considerations casting doubt on the idea that wrongdoers’ suffering is non-instrumentally good. I shall challenge these. Finally, I shall suggest that the duty view may have counterintuitive implications in relation to wrongs where the offender helps to lower the risk that victims will be subjected to similar wrongs in ways other than by being punished. (shrink)

The aims of this paper are fourfold. The first aim is to characterize two distinct forms of circumstantial moral luck and illustrate how they are implicitly recognized in pre-theoretical moral thought. The second aim is to identify a significant difference between the ways in which these two kinds of circumstantial luck are morally relevant. The third aim is to show how the acceptance of circumstantial moral luck relates to the acceptance of resultant moral luck. The fourth aim is to defuse (...) a legitimate concern about accepting the existence of circumstantial moral luck, namely the fact that its existence implies substantial moral risks. (shrink)

The simple knowledge norm of assertion holds that one may assert that p only if one knows that p. Turri :37–45, 2011) and Williamson both argue that more is required for epistemically permissible assertion. In particular, they both think that the asserter must assert on the basis of her knowledge. Turri calls this the express knowledge norm of assertion. I defend SKNA and argue against EKNA. First, I argue that EKNA faces counterexamples. Second, I argue that EKNA assumes an implausible (...) view of permissibility on which an assertion is epistemically permissible only if it is made for a right reason, i.e., a reason that contributes to making it the case that it is epistemically permissible to make that assertion. However, the analogous view in other normative domains is both controversial and implausible. This is because it doesn’t make it possible for one to act or react rightly for the wrong reason. I suggest that proponents of EKNA have conflated requirements for φ-ing rightly with requirements for φ-ing well. Finally, I argue that proponents of SKNA can explain the intuitive defectiveness of asserting on the basis of an epistemically bad reason, even when the asserters know the content of their assertion, by arguing that the asserters are epistemically blameworthy. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently argued that agents need not be conscious of the reasons for which they act or the moral significance of their actions in order to be morally responsible for them. In this paper, I identify a kind of awareness that, I claim, agents must have in order to be responsible for their actions. I argue that conscious information processing differs from unconscious in a manner that makes the following two claims true: (1) an agent’s values (...) ought to be identified with attitudes of which she is conscious, because having a value entails having a set of dispositions produced by conscious attitudes alone, and (2) that only actions settled upon by conscious deliberation are deeply attributable to agents, because only such actions express the agent’s evaluative stance. (shrink)

Accounts of moral responsibility can be divided into those that claim that attributability of an act, omission, or attitude to an agent is sufficient for responsibility for it, and those which hold that responsibility depends crucially on choice. I argue that accounts of the first, attributionist, kind fail to make room for the relatively stringent epistemic conditions upon moral responsibility, and that therefore an account of the second, volitionist, kind ought to be preferred. I examine the various arguments advanced on (...) behalf of attributionist accounts, and argue that for each of them volitionism has a reply that is in every case at least as, and often more, persuasive. Most significantly, only volitionism can accommodate the intuitively important distinction between the bad and the blameworthy. (shrink)

In this article we survey six recent developments in the philosophical literature on free will and moral responsibility: (1) Harry Frankfurt's argument that moral responsibility does not require the freedom to do otherwise; (2) the heightened focus upon the source of free actions; (3) the debate over whether moral responsibility is an essentially historical concept; (4) recent compatibilist attempts to resurrect the thesis that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise; (5) the role of the control condition in free (...) will and moral responsibility, and finally (6) the debate centering on luck. (shrink)

There is a lively debate over who is to blame for the harms arising from unhealthy behaviours, like overeating and excessive drinking. In this paper, I argue that given how demanding the conditions required for moral responsibility actually are, we cannot be highly confident that anyone is ever morally responsible. I also adduce evidence that holding people responsible for their unhealthy behaviours has costs: it undermines public support for the measures that are likely to have the most impact on these (...) harms. I claim that these two facts—the fact that we cannot be highly confident that anyone is morally responsible and the fact that holding people responsible for their unhealthy behaviours has costs—interact. Together they give us a powerful reason for believing, or acting as if we believed, that ordinary people are not in fact responsible for their unhealthy behaviours. (shrink)

Both libertarian and compatibilist approaches have been unsuccessful in providing an acceptable account of free will. Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, including the connectionist theory of mind and empirical findings regarding modularity and integration of brain functions, provide the basis for a new approach: neural holism. This approach locates free will in fully integrated behavior in which all of a person's beliefs and desires, implicitly represented in the brain, automatically contribute to an act. Deliberation, the experience of volition, and cognitive (...) and behavioral shortcomings are easily understood under this model. Assigning moral praise and blame, often seen as grounded in the notion that a person has the ability to have done otherwise, will be shown to reflect instead important aspects of signaling in social interactions. Thus, important aspects of the traditional notion of free will can be accounted for within the proposed model, which has interesting implications for lifelong cognitive development. (shrink)

Stephen Darwall, in his book The Second -Person Standpoint, has argued for an account of morality grounded in what he calls second - personal reasons. My first aim in this paper is to demonstrate the value of an account like Darwall’s; as I read it, it responds to the need for an account of morality as ‘intrinsic’ to the person. However, I go on to argue, as my second aim in this paper, that Darwall’s account is ultimately unsuccessful. I hope (...) to achieve these aims by contrasting Darwall’s second - personal account with two other accounts, Hobbes’ and the neo-Kantians’. In the first case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account meets a need that the other accounts don’t in virtue of its differences from the other accounts; and in the second case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account ultimately fails in virtue of its residual similarities to at least one of them. (shrink)

This paper defends what the philosopher Merleau Ponty coins 'the imaginary texture of the real'. It is suggested that the imagination is at work in the everyday world which we perceive, the world as it is for us. In defending this view a concept of the imagination is invoked which has both similarities with and differences from, our everyday notion. The everyday notion contrasts the imaginary and the real. The imaginary is tied to the fictional or the illusory. Here it (...) will be suggested, following both Kant and Strawson, that there is a more fundamental working of the imagination, present in both perception and the constructions of fictions. What Kant and Strawson failed to make clear, however, was that the workings of the imagination within the perceived world, gives that world, an affective logic. The domain of affect is that of emotions, feelings and desire, and to claim such an affective logic in the world we experience, is to point out that it has salience and significance for us. Such salience suggests and demands the desiring and sometimes fearful responses we make to it; the shape of the perceived world echoed in the shapes our bodies take within it. (shrink)

David Lewis’ contemplations regarding divine foreknowledge and free will, along with some of his other more substantial work on modal realism and his counterpart theory can serve as a springboard to a novel solution to the foreknowledge and metaphysical freedom puzzle, namely a proposal that genuine metaphysical freedom is compatible with determinism, which is quite different from the usual compatibilist focus on the compatibility between determinism and moral responsibility. This paper argues that while Lewis opens the doors to such a (...) possibility, in order to fully elucidate a genuinely metaphysical compatibilist account, Lewis’ own counterpart theory must be abandoned in favour of an account of trans-world identity that is theoretically framed by a modified version of Robert Nozick’s closest continuer theory. (shrink)

The Brain and the Meaning of Life Paul Thagard Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010 274 pages, ISBN: 9780691142722 (hbk): $29.95 This paper criticizes central arguments in Paul Thagard's The Brain and the Meaning of Life, concluding, contrary to Thagard, that there is very little that we can learn from brain research about the meaning of life. The paper offers a critical review of Thagard's argument against nihilism and his argument that it is love, work, and play, rather than other activities, (...) that make life meaningful. Moreover, the paper argues that the rich neurological information Thagard presents throughout the book does not contribute at all to his arguments and, more generally, that neurological research is irrelevant also to almost all other aspects of meaning of life research. (shrink)

Moral and legal philosophy are too entangled: moral philosophy is prone to model interpersonal moral relationships on a juridical image, and legal philosophy often proceeds as if the criminal law is an institutional reflection of juridically imagined interpersonal moral relationships. This article challenges this alignment and in so doing argues that the function of the criminal law lies not fundamentally in moral blame, but in regulation of harmful conduct. The upshot is that, in contrast to interpersonal relationships, the criminal law (...) cannot lose its standing to blame through institutional analogues of hypocrisy, complicity, and meddling. Rather, certain forms of structural and severe historical and contemporary injustice point to the question of the overall legitimacy of state authority. (shrink)

The Limits of Blame, by KellyErin I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 221.

Within contemporary penal philosophy, the view that punishment can only be justified if the offender is a moral agent who is responsible and hence blameworthy for their offence is one of the few areas on which a consensus prevails. In recent literature, this precept is associated with the retributive tradition, in the modern form of ‘just deserts’. Turning its back on the rehabilitative ideal, this tradition forges a strong association between the justification of punishment, the attribution of responsible agency in (...) relation to the offence, and the appropriateness of blame. By contrast, effective clinical treatment of disorders of agency employs a conceptual framework in which ideas of responsibility and blameworthiness are clearly separated from what we call ‘affective blame’: the range of hostile, negative attitudes and emotions that are typical human responses to criminal or immoral conduct. We argue that taking this clinical model of ‘responsibility without blame’ into the legal realm offers new possibilities. Theoretically, it allows for the reconciliation of the idea of ‘just deserts’ with a rehabilitative ideal in penal philosophy. Punishment can be reconceived as consequences—typically negative but occasionally not, so long as they are serious and appropriate to the crime and the context—imposed in response to, by reason of, and in proportion to responsibility and blameworthiness, but without the hard treatment and stigma typical of affective blame. Practically, it suggests how sentencing and punishment can better avoid affective blame and instead further rehabilitative and related ends, while yet serving the demands of justice. (shrink)

In Emotions, Values, and Agency, Christine Tappolet develops a sophisticated, perceptual theory of emotions and their role in wide range of issues in value theory and epistemology. In this paper, we raise three worries about Tappolet's proposal.

A number of contemporary philosophers have pointed out that justice is not primarily an intellectual virtue, grounded in abstract, detached beliefs, but rather an emotional virtue, grounded in certain beliefs and desires that are compelling and deeply embedded in human nature. As a complex emotional virtue, justice seems to encompass, amongst other things, certain desert-based emotions that are developmentally and morally important for an understanding of justice. This article explores the philosophical reasons for the rising interest in desert-based emotions and (...) offers a conceptual overview of some common emotions of this sort having to do with the fortunes of others and of oneself, respectively. The article does not give a definitive answer to the question of whether those emotions really are virtuous, but aims at enriching our understanding of what kind of virtue they might possibly represent. (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.

This article has three interrelated aims. The first is to analyze the concept of grief; the second is to argue for the putative rationality of grief (against Donald Gustafson’s contention to the contrary); and the third is to offer a moral justification of grief along broadly Aristotelian lines as an intrinsically valuable trait of character—a virtue. With regard to this third and ultimate aim, I argue not only that grief plays an unappreciated positive role in our moral experiences but flesh (...) out a case for what exactly that positive moral role is. More precisely, I argue that grief is best justified as an Aristotelian desert-based emotional trait, incorporating two distinct desert-motivated desires, one specifically directed at the memory of the dead person as deserving of homage, the other more cosmically focusing on the general undeservingness of good people passing away. The argument goes against the grain of most previous instrumental justifications of grief and palpably violates David Konstan’s contention that grief involves “no reference to desert.”. (shrink)

Lovers do not relate to their beloveds as seats of valuable qualities that would be replaceable for anyone with relevantly similar or more valuable qualities. Instead, lovers take their beloveds to be irreplaceable. This has been noted frequently in the current debate on love and different theories of love have offered different explanations for the phenomenon. In this paper, I develop a more complex picture of what is involved in lovers taking their beloveds to be irreplaceable. I argue that in (...) order to account for the beloved’s irreplaceability, a theory of love must meet two conditions: it must explain the subjective aspect as well as the moral aspect of the beloved’s irreplaceability. I show that current theories of love fail to meet these conditions, either one or both of them, and I offer an alternative account that does - an account according to which love is understood as a special kind of desire for the beloved as a person. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to give a more nuanced picture of the beloved’s irreplaceability, acknowledging in particular that there is a moral aspect to the phenomenon that has not been attended to thus far; second, to introduce and motivate a new desire-based account of love. (shrink)

Debates concerning whether Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder mitigates responsibility often involve recourse to its genetic and neurodevelopmental etiology. For such arguments, individuals with ADHD have diminished self-control, and hence do not fully satisfy the control condition for responsibility, when there is a genetic or neurodevelopmental etiology for this diminished capacity. In this article, I argue that the role of genetic and neurobiological explanations has been overstated in evaluations of responsibility. While ADHD has genetic and neurobiological causes, rather than embrace the essentialistic (...) notion that it directly diminishes self-control and, therefore, responsibility, we ought to think of ADHD as constraining only some self-control practices. In particular, situational self-control strategies remain feasible for people with ADHD. However, not all individuals have access to these strategies. I suggest a way to evaluate responsibility in terms of situational rather than agential pleas, which tracks whether the individual had access to self-control behaviors. While I restrict my discussion to ADHD, the access-based approach is also relevant for assessments of responsibility for other cases where self-control failures are at stake. (shrink)

In large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. The mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. But how do we actually do this? The current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a desire (...) to maintain good will to those in the community we are imbedded in. Participating in such practices alone will not get the job done, though, for expressions of our reactive attitudes are often what economists call cheap talk. But when we praise and blame in cases of moral diversity, expressions of our reactive attitudes act as costly signals capable of solving our social dilemma. (shrink)

The paper argues that in our usage of moral language we relate three concepts: guilt, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This assumes that we can distinguish between external actions and internal executions, because guilt as well as forgiveness and reconciliation are realities that first affect our inner humanity. When a relationship has been damaged by culpable actions (sometimes even by both sides), forgiveness is the precondition of reconciliation. As long as people accuse each other, there can be no talk of true reconciliation. (...) Although these are attitudes, that is, inner engagements, reconciliation also becomes outwardly recognizable as peace. However, these relationships can only be explained well in the connections of individual persons to each other. When political communities confront each other, our moral sense becomes fuzzy, because it is not so easy to say how such collectives (e.g., peoples) are to be determined in their inside and outside. Who can and may forgive, if other persons have become victims of culpable actions, but cannot forgive themselves? Here, then, the difficulty of individuality and collectivity is added. The essay pleads for maintaining the conceptual conjunction between individual and collective forgiveness. However, this should not be done at the price of a complete socio-ontological dissolution of collectives. Therefore, one must also be cautious about rash universalistic appropriation of the Other or the other group, because this is usually accompanied by a failure to recognize and endure the selfhood of the Other. Before it comes to a “false” reconciliation in this way, it is better to at least recognize each other – also in diversity. This should also be reflected in the rules of conflict, which must above all be oriented toward ensuring that conflicts are not carried out in such a way that the manner in which the conflict is carried out makes reconciliation impossible. But in both collective and individual reconciliation, the person does not have the outcome of the process entirely in his or her own hands. Reconciliation is not a technique, but a relational event that is carried out in an “open space.”. (shrink)

Even where an act appears to be responsible, and satisfies all the conditions for responsibility laid down by society, the response to it may be unjust where that appearance is false, and where those conditions are insufficient. This paper argues that those who want to place considerations of responsibility at the centre of distributive and criminal justice ought to take this concern seriously. The common strategy of relying on what Susan Hurley describes as a 'black box of responsibility' has the (...) advantage of not taking responsibility considerations to be irrelevant merely because some specific account of responsibility is mistaken. It can, furthermore, cope perfectly well with an absence of responsibility, even of the global sort implied by hard determinism and other strongly sceptical accounts. Problems for the black box view come in where responsibility is present, but in a form that is curtailed in one significant regard or another. The trick, then, is to open the box of responsibility just enough that its contents can be the basis for judgements of justice. I identify three 'moderately sceptical' forms of compatibilism that cannot ground judgements of justice, and are therefore expunged by the strongest 'grey box' view. (shrink)

We cannot conclude from the assumptions that justice is a virtue and desert is an ingredient in justice that desert claims themselves express a virtue. It could be that desert is morally neutral, or even immoral, and that there are other aspects of justice which make it all-in-all virtuous. We need, in other words, an independent moral justification of desert and desert-based emotions. In this paper I take on the challenge of articulating and defending a utilitarian justification of desert in (...) distributive justice. I argue, first, that while there may be ways of accommodating desert-concerns in liberal theory, this cannot, in the view of liberals themselves, be done without considerable cost to the ideals that are closest to their hearts. By contrast, I suggest that a deceptively simple utilitarian defence of desert can be made to work. Finally, I attempt to surmount various possible objections that might be raised against my utilitarian justification and conclude that none of them confutes it. (shrink)

Christopher Franklin argues that, despite appearances, everyone thinks that the ability to do otherwise is required for free will and moral responsibility. Moreover, he says that the way to decide which ability to do otherwise is required will involve settling the nature of moral responsibility. In this paper I highlight one point on which those usually called leeway theorists - i.e. those who accept the need for alternatives - agree, in contradistinction to those who deny that the ability to do (...) otherwise is needed for free will. And I explain why it falsifies both of Franklin’s claims. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to test empirically an idea that many philosophers find intuitive, namely that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. Many philosophers find it intuitive that moral agents are responsible only if they know the particular facts surrounding their action. Our results show that whether moral agents are aware of the facts surrounding their action does have an effect on people’s attributions of blame, regardless of the consequences or side effects of the agent’s actions. In general, it was (...) more likely that a situationally aware agent will be blamed for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. We also tested attributions of forgiveness in addition to attributions of blame. In general, it was less likely that a situationally aware agent will be forgiven for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. When the agent is situationally unaware, it is more likely that the agent will be forgiven than blamed. We argue that these results provide some empirical support for the hypothesis that there is something intuitive about the idea that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. (shrink)

I argue for an account of the vulnerability of trust, as a product of our need for secure social attachments to individuals and to a group. This account seeks to explain why it is true that, when we trust or distrust someone, we are susceptible to being betrayed by them, rather than merely disappointed or frustrated in our goals. What we are concerned about in matters of trust is, at the basic level, whether we matter, in a non-instrumental way, to (...) that individual, or to the group of which they are a member. We have this concern as a result of a drive to form secure social attachments. This makes us vulnerable in the characteristic way of being susceptible to betrayal, because how the other acts in such matters can demonstrate our lack of worth to them, or to the group, thereby threatening the security of our attachment, and eliciting the reactive attitudes characteristic of betrayal. (shrink)

There are two broadly competing pictures of moral responsibility. On the view I favor, to be responsible for some action is to be related to it in such a way that licenses attributing certain properties to the agent, properties like blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Responsibility is attributability. A different view understands being responsible in terms of our practices of holding each other responsible. Responsibility is accountability, which “involves a social setting in which we demand (require) certain conduct from one another and (...) respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson, Philos Top 24:227–248, 1996). My concern here is the relation between moral responsibility and desert. Plausibly, if someone is morally responsible for something wrong then they deserve blame, and it is on the basis of them being morally responsible and its being wrong that they deserve blame. In this paper, I try to make progress toward understanding why it would follow that being morally responsible for something supports a desert claim. I propose to do this by exploring how the “two faces” of responsibility should proceed. An important upshot is that we gain a new currency by which to evaluate extant theories of responsibility that might favor one or the other conception: do they carry plausible desert commitments? To illustrate this benefit, I argue that accountability theory carries implausible implications for deserved praise. (shrink)

Imagine you are casually browsing an online bookstore, looking for an interesting novel. Suppose the store predicts you will want to buy a particular novel: the one most chosen by people of your same age, gender, location, and occupational status. The store recommends the book, it appeals to you, and so you choose it. Central to this scenario is an automated prediction of what you desire. This article raises moral concerns about such predictions. More generally, this article examines the ethics (...) of artificial social cognition—the ethical dimensions of attribution of mental states to humans by artificial systems. The focus is presumptuous aim attributions, which are defined here as aim attributions based crucially on the premise that the person in question will have aims like superficially similar people. Several everyday examples demonstrate that this sort of presumptuousness is already a familiar moral concern. The scope of this moral concern is extended by new technologies. In particular, recommender systems based on collaborative filtering are now commonly used to automatically recommend products and information to humans. Examination of these systems demonstrates that they naturally attribute aims presumptuously. This article presents two reservations about the widespread adoption of such systems. First, the severity of our antecedent moral concern about presumptuousness increases when aim attribution processes are automated and accelerated. Second, a foreseeable consequence of reliance on these systems is an unwarranted inducement of interpersonal conformity. (shrink)

In the contemporary moral responsibility debate, most theorists seem to be giving accounts of responsibility in the ‘desert-entailing sense’. Despite this agreement, little has been said about the notion of desert that is supposedly entailed. In this paper I propose an understanding of desert sufficient to help explain why the blameworthy and praiseworthy deserve blame and praise, respectively. I do so by drawing upon what might seem an unusual resource. I appeal to so-called Fitting-Attitude accounts of value to help inform (...) a conception of desert or merit, one that can be usefully applied to discussions of moral responsibility. I argue that the view, which I call, Desert as Fittingness (DAF), merits additional attention. I do so by making two claims: First, that it does better than extant Fitting Attitude accounts of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness; second, that it has an initial plausibility with respect to informing a general account of desert. While these reasons are insufficient to show the view is true, they do make the case for taking the view seriously. (shrink)

Does having a mental disorder, in general, affect whether someone is morally responsible for an action? Many people seem to think so, holding that mental disorders nearly always mitigate responsibility. Against this Naïve view, we argue for a Nuanced account. The problem is not just that different theories of responsibility yield different verdicts about particular cases. Even when all reasonable theories agree about what's relevant to responsibility, the ways mental illness can affect behavior are so varied that a more nuanced (...) approach is needed. (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)

Businesses increasingly rely on algorithms that are data-trained sets of decision rules (i.e., the output of the processes often called “machine learning”) and implement decisions with little or no human intermediation. In this article, we provide a philosophical foundation for the claim that algorithmic decision-making gives rise to a “right to explanation.” It is often said that, in the digital era, informed consent is dead. This negative view originates from a rigid understanding that presumes informed consent is a static and (...) complete transaction. Such a view is insufficient, especially when data are used in a secondary, noncontextual, and unpredictable manner—which is the inescapable nature of advanced artificial intelligence systems. We submit that an alternative view of informed consent—as an assurance of trust for incomplete transactions—allows for an understanding of why the rationale of informed consent already entails a right to ex post explanation. (shrink)

It typically taken for granted that agents can be morally responsible for such things as, for example, the death of the victim and the capture of the murderer in the sense that one may be blameworthy or praiseworthy for such things. The primary task of a theory of moral responsibility, it is thought, is to specify the appropriate relationship one must stand to such things in order to be morally responsible for them. I argue that this common approach is problematic (...) because it attempts to explain the way in which an agent can be morally responsible for something that is external to her, the agent. Since, I argue, everything that matters for moral responsibility is internal to the agent, the accounts that emerge from this approach are committed to a particular form of moral luck. Instead, we should reject this form of moral luck, and with it, the possibility of moral responsibility for objects external to the agent. We are, I argue, morally responsible only for our inner willings. Thus, a form of internalism about moral responsibility is defended. (shrink)