In her recent book Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio develops a distinctive version of an actual-sequence account of free will, according to which, when agents choose and act freely, their freedom is exclusively grounded in, and supervenes on, the actual causal history of such choices or actions. Against this proposal, I argue for an alternative- possibilities account, according to which agents’ freedom is partly grounded in their ability to choose or act otherwise. Actual-sequence accounts of freedom are motivated by (...) a reflection on so-called Frankfurt cases. Instead, other cases, such as two pairs of examples originally designed by van Inwagen, threaten actual-sequence accounts, including Sartorio’s. On the basis of her view of causation, Sartorio contends, however, that the two members of each pair have different causal histories, so that her view is not undermined by those cases after all. I discuss these test cases further and defend my alternative-possibilities account of freedom. (shrink)

Jonathan Bennett, Nomy Arpaly, and others see in Huckleberry Finn's apparent praiseworthiness for not turning Jim in (even though this goes against his own moral judgments in the matter) a model for an improved, non-intellectualist approach to moral appraisal. I try to show – both on Aristotelian and on independent grounds – that these positions are fundamentally flawed. In the process, I try to show how Huck may be blameless for lacking what would have been a praiseworthy belief (that I (...) should help Jim), hence, blameless for not acting on this belief; but being ‘blamelessly unpraiseworthy’ is not the same thing as being praiseworthy. (shrink)

I argue that a capacity‐based account of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness is superior to an account based on quality of will. I focus on four types of cases about which the two accounts disagree and show that the capacity‐based view offers a better treatment. As part of my argument, I motivate the distinction between an assessment of a person's moral character, as reflected by her action, and an assessment of her blameworthiness or praiseworthiness for that action.

Abstract. In Minimal Morality (2018), I develop a multilevel social contract theory that accommodates deep moral pluralism. In this article, I reply to comments by Gaus, Van Schoelandt and Cooper concerning the three core projects of the book that aim to (i) revive orthodox rational choice contractarianism as a viable approach to the social contract, (ii) integrate this approach into a comprehensive social contract theory and (iii) show the applicability of the theory to the real world. My replies clarify some (...) of the main features of the theory, defend its core projects and expand discussion of some of its details in order to show that the theory can address the challenges raised. (shrink)

This paper challenges the moral justificatory significance of the notion of basic desert. The notion of basic desert is commonly used in the literature to distinguish a specific sense of moral responsibility that depends on free will. In this sense, a person is morally responsible for an action if this action belongs to her in such a way that she would deserve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve to be praised if (...) she understood that it was morally exemplary. The central question of the paper concerns the role of the notion of basic desert in moral justifications of social practices including responsibility practices. I argue that the significance sometimes attributed to the notion of basic desert is largely a byproduct of its isolation from a larger context of other moral reasons and moral justifications. First, I introduce the concepts of special and general moral justifications and defend the central assumption behind these concepts. Next, I present a three-case argument that challenges the justificatory moral significance of the notion of basic desert by considering various logical roles that it might play in the general moral justification of various social practices. Finally, I apply this argument to Derk Pereboom’s theory of hard incompatibilism in order to show that moral justification of the revisionary part of his project does not depend on the belief in free will necessary for moral responsibility in the sense of basic desert. (shrink)

When a group does harm, sometimes there’s no obvious individual who bears moral responsibility, and yet we still intuit that someone is to blame. This apparent ‘deficit’ of moral responsibility has led some scholars to posit that groups themselves can be responsible, and that this responsibility is distributed in some uniform fashion among group members. This solution to the deficit, however, risks providing a scapegoat for individuals who have acted wrongly and shifting blame onto those who have not. Instead, this (...) article argues that, in most deficit cases, moral responsibility is borne not by the group but by specific individual members. When an individual acts within a group, she gains an increased potential for doing harm – and, accordingly, heightened duties of care toward others. These duties can, depending on the individual’s position, require amending the group’s rules, procedures, and norms. In most deficit cases, it is individuals who have failed to fulfill these duties who are responsible. (shrink)

When addressing the burdens borne by victims of police wrongdoing, we often overlook moral harms in focusing on the physical and psychological harms that they suffer. These moral harms undermine the moral status of the victim, her ability to consistently pursue the values she endorses, and her character. Victimhood is a morally significant social role. Victimhood imposes normative standards that measure the moral or political status of victim. Conforming to these standards affects our assessment of the conduct of the victim (...) and her moral standing. Considering the victims’ role provides important insights into contemporary practices of policing in the United States. The physical and verbal acts of the police often force race-based degradation upon racially subordinated groups. There is often no morally good way out of racially discriminatory encounters when the choice is to degrade oneself or suffer violence or even death. Worse, how we respond to the threat of police violence morally undermines our relationships with those we would keep safe from police violence. (shrink)

This paper warns of two threats to moral responsibility that arise when accounting for omissions, given some plausible assumptions about how abilities are related to responsibility. The first problem threatens the legitimacy of our being responsible by expanding the preexisting tension that luck famously raises for moral responsibility. The second threat to moral responsibility challenges the legitimacy of our practices of holding responsible. Holding others responsible for their omissions requires us to bridge an epistemic gap that does not arise when (...) holding others responsible for their actions—one that we might often fail to cross. (shrink)

For a long time the dominant view on the nature of blame was that to blame someone is to have an emotion toward her, such as anger, resentment or indignation in the case of blaming someone else and guilt in the case of self-blame. Even though this view is still widely held, it has recently come under heavy attack. The aim of this paper is to elaborate the idea that to blame is to have an emotion and to defend the (...) resulting emotion account of blame. (shrink)

Many philosophers characterize a particularly important sense of free will and responsibility by referring to basically deserved blame. But what is basically deserved blame? The aim of this paper is to identify the appraisal entailed by basic desert claims. It presents three desiderata for an account of desert appraisals and it argues that important recent theories fail to meet them. Then, the paper presents and defends a promising alternative. The basic idea is that claims about basically deserved blame entail that (...) the targets have forfeited their claims that others not blame them and that there is positive reason to blame them. The paper shows how this view frames the discussion about skepticism about free will and responsibility. (shrink)

Even though the idea that privacy is some kind of control is often presented as the standard view on privacy, there are powerful objections against it. The aim of this paper is to defend the control account of privacy against some particularly pressing challenges by proposing a new way to understand the relevant kind of control. The main thesis is that privacy should be analyzed in terms of source control, a notion that is adopted from discussions about moral responsibility.

This article explores the conceptual connections between free action and action for which the agent is morally responsible. Questions addressed include the following. Can agents who are never morally responsible for anything sometimes act freely? Can agents who never act freely be morally responsible for some of their actions? Various compatibilist and incompatibilist responses to these questions are discussed, as is the control over their behavior that ordinary agents attribute to themselves.

Wimpy retributivism finds reasons to refrain from giving the blameworthy and culpable what they deserve, even if it comes to very little. These reasons have to do with the moral hazards of being mistaken about when harsh treatment is justified. A moral influence theory can help supplement retributivist reasons with further consequentialist considerations and thereby keep these skeptical worries in check.

In “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment” Angela Smith defends her nonvoluntarist theory of moral responsibility against the charge that any such view is shallow because it cannot capture the depth of judgments of responsibility. Only voluntarist positions can do this since only voluntarist positions allow for control. I argue that Smith is able to deflect the voluntarists’ criticism, but only with further resources. As a voluntarist, I also concede that Smith’s thesis has force, and I close with a compromise position, (...) one that allows for direct moral responsibility for the nonvoluntary, but also incorporates a reasonable control condition. (shrink)

An assumption central to some forms of retributivism is that it is noninstrumentally good that a culpable wrongdoer suffers in receiving a deserved punishment. A justification for this can be built from a conversational theory of moral responsibility, and in particular deserved blame. On such a theory, deserved blame is fitting as a response to a wrongdoer insofar as it is conversationally meaningful as a reply to a wrong done. Punishment, it might be argued, has this feature too. The conversational (...) aim in both deserved blame and punishment is for the guilty to grasp the meaning conveyed by those who blame or punish and then respond meaningfully by, for example, apologizing or expressing remorse. Ideally, a culpable agent would experience a form and degree of guilt suitable for a wrong done. So, a conversational theory of punishment can then be justified in terms of providing conditions conducive for a culpable wrongdoer to respond to punishment by manifesting an appropriately pained response of guilt. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the central arguments of my book Conversation and Responsibility in response to two critics, Dana Nelkin and Holly Smith.

This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P.F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding responsible and being fit to be held responsible that makes this claim credible? I propose a non-standard answer to this question, arguing for a view of responsible agency that is neither anti-realist (i.e. purely 'conventionalist') nor straightforwardly realist. It is instead ‘constructivist’. On (...) the ‘Scaffolding View’ I defend, reactive attitudes play an essential role in developing, supporting, and thereby maintaining the capacities that make for responsible agency. While this view has relatively novel implications for a metaphysical understanding of capacities, its chief virtue, in contrast with more standard views, is providing a plausibly defensible account of how so-called responsible agents genuinely deserve to be treated as such. (shrink)

Arguably, the original conception of epistemic justification comes from Descartes and Locke, who thought of justification deontologically. Moreover, their deontological conception was especially strict: there are no excuses for unjustified beliefs. Call this the “classical deontologist” conception of justification. As the original conception, we ought to accept it unless proven untenable. Nowadays, however, most have abandoned classical deontologism as precisely that—untenable. It stands accused of requiring doxastic voluntarism and normative transparency. My goal is to rescue classical deontologism from these accusations. (...) I show how, given a specific form of internalism coupled with a plausible theory of epistemic blame, we can be blameworthy for all of our (non-exempt) unjustified beliefs without transparency or voluntarism. The result is that the classical deontological conception of justification should regain its privileged status. (shrink)

It has often been noted that many of our intuitive assessments of particular actions suggest that there is an asymmetry between blameworthy and praiseworthy actions with regard to the question of whether moral responsibility requires that the agent could have acted otherwise. It is a quite different question, though, whether such an asymmetry between good and bad cases can be supported by more systematic considerations. In this paper, I will develop a new argument for a restricted version of the asymmetry, (...) by showing that in cases of praiseworthy actions responsibility cannot generally presuppose that the agent could have acted otherwise. This argument will be based on a distinction between two different kinds of roles that moral norms can play in determining whether an action is right and in guiding our deliberation. That agents can sometimes be responsible for their praiseworthy actions even though they cannot act otherwise is best seen as a reflection of the fact that moral norms can prohibit treating certain courses of action as genuine options at all. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss various hard cases that an account of moral ignorance should be able to deal with: ancient slave holders, Susan Wolf’s JoJo, psychopaths such as Robert Harris, and finally, moral outliers. All these agents are ignorant, but it is not at all clear that they are blameless on account of their ignorance. I argue that the discussion of this issue in recent literature has missed the complexities of these cases by focusing on the question of epistemic (...) fault. It is not clear that all blameworthy morally ignorant agents have committed an epistemic fault. There are other important issues that pull us in various directions: moral capacity, bad will, and formative circumstances. I argue that bad will is what is crucial, and moral ignorance itself can be a form of bad will. I argue that we should distinguish between two sorts of bad will, and correspondingly, two sorts of blameworthiness. Ordinary blameworthiness, requires moral knowledge, and is based on akratic action. The other kind of blameworthiness, objective blameworthiness, applies when the agent is morally ignorant, and when this indicates bad will. Objective blameworthiness can be undermined by unfortunate formative circumstances. (shrink)

According to an influential view, asserting a proposition involves undertaking some “commitment” to the truth of that proposition. But accounts of what it is for someone to be committed to the truth of a proposition are often vague or imprecise, and are rarely put to work to define assertion. This paper aims to fill this gap. It offers a precise characterisation of assertoric commitment, and shows how it can be applied to define assertion. On the proposed view, acquiring commitment is (...) not sufficient for asserting. To assert, commitment must be acquired by explicitly presenting a proposition as true. (shrink)

Many theorists claim that the reactive emotions, even in their private form, are communicative entities. But as widely endorsed as this claim is, it has not been redeemed: the literature lacks a clear and compelling account of the sense in which reactive attitudes qua private mental states are essentially communicative. In this paper, I fill this gap. I propose that it is apt to characterize privately held reactive attitudes as communicative in nature because they, like many paradigmatic forms of communication, (...) have representational content and the function of evoking uptake of this content in a recipient. (shrink)

Theorists have spent considerable time discussing the concept of responsibility. Their discussions, however, have generally focused on the question of who counts as responsible, and for what. But as Gary Watson has noted, “Responsibility is a triadic relationship: an individual (or group) is responsible to others for something” (Watson Agency and answerability: selected essays, 2004 , p. 7). Thus, theorizing about responsibility ought to involve theorizing not just about the actor and her conduct, but also about those the actor is (...) responsible to—and specifically about how these people hold the actor responsible for her conduct. In this paper, I give a topology of the terrain of holding others responsible. Over the course of the paper I disambiguate two very broad senses of holding responsible—regarding another as a responsible agent and holding another responsible for a particular piece of conduct. Next, I argue that the latter sense of holding responsible is a genus with two species—what I will call “holding responsible as deep moral appraisal” and “holding responsible as accountability.” Appreciating these distinctions, I argue, sheds considerable light on a number of questions concerning the scope and nature of our practices of holding others responsible. Finally, illuminating these distinct senses of holding responsible and highlighting their features reveals an awkwardness in the most carefully explicated and influential account of holding responsible, namely R. Jay Wallace’s account in Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. (shrink)

This paper responds to recent work on moral blame, which has drawn attention to the ambivalent nature of our blaming practices and to the need to ‘civilize’ these practices. It argues that the project of civilizing blame must engage with a further problematic feature of these practices, namely, that they can be implicated in structures of social oppression, and distorted by epistemic and discursive injustice. The paper also aims to show that engaging with this problem raises questions about the Strawsonian (...) equation of moral responsibility with liability to praise or blame. (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)

Psychopathy presents a difficult challenge to moral and criminal responsibility theorists. Persons with the disorder have an impaired capacity for empathy and other moral emotions, and fail to feel the force of moral considerations. They have some rational impairments, but they reason adequately to manipulate, con, and exploit their victims, and otherwise to engage successfully in antisocial behavior. Is it appropriate to hold them morally responsible for their wrongdoing? Should the law hold psychopaths criminally responsible? This essay discusses philosophical debates (...) involved in addressing these questions. (shrink)

Philosophers analyzing standing to blame have argued that in view of a blamer’s own fault she can lack standing to blame another for an act even if the act is blameworthy and that standingless, hypocritical blame is pro tanto morally wrongful. The bearing of these conclusions on standing to praise is yet to receive the attention it deserves. I defend two claims. The first is the conditional claim that if and are true, so are and. The latter are: a praiser (...) can lack the standing to praise herself for an act even if that act is praiseworthy and standingless, hypocritical praise is pro tanto morally wrongful. So I am suggesting that facts about standing to blame reflect more general facts about standing to hold responsible. The second is the claim that and are true. (shrink)

Are strangers sincere in their moral praise and criticism? Here we apply signaling theory to argue ceteris paribus moral criticism is more likely sincere than praise; the former tends to be a higher-fidelity signal (in Western societies). To offer an example: emotions are often self-validating as a signal because they're hard to fake. This epistemic insight matters: moral praise and criticism influence moral reputations, and affect whether others will cooperate with us. Though much of this applies to generic praise and (...) criticism too, moral philosophers should value sincere moral praise and moral criticism for several reasons: it (i) offers insight into how others actually view us as moral agents; (ii) offers feedback to help us improve our moral characters; and (iii) encourages some behaviors, and discourages others. And so as moral agents, we should care whether moral praise and moral criticism is sincere. (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)

In this paper, I offer a novel view of the coherence (or structural) requirements on belief and intention, according to which they are not norms, but rather principles describing how your belief and intention operate. I first argue, on the basis of the unintelligibility of some relevant attitudes-reports, that there are conditions under which you simply do not count as believing or intending unless your beliefs and intentions satisfy the requirements: the conditions under which all of your relevant attitudes are (...) occurrent or activated. I then argue that you are subject to a coherence requirement only if your relevant attitudes are all activated, for you are not necessarily subject to the charge of irrationality in violating a coherence requirement when your attitudes are not all activated. If so, however, you satisfy the coherence requirements whenever you are subject to them, which makes it plausible that the “requirements” should be seen as descriptive principles about belief and intention. [*published with open access]. (shrink)

Formal views of autonomy rule out substantive rational capacities (reasons-responsiveness) as a condition of autonomous agency. I argue that such views face a number of underappreciated problems: they have trouble making sense of how autonomous agents could be robustly responsible for their choices, face the burden of explaining why there should be a stark distinction between the importance of factual and evaluative information within autonomous agency, and leave it mysterious why autonomy is the sort of thing that has value and (...) ought to be promoted. Moreover, I argue that the alternative view that includes substantive rational capacities need not have the unacceptable political implications it is sometimes thought to have. (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)

Recent decades have witnessed tremendous progress in artificial intelligence and in the development of autonomous systems that rely on artificial intelligence. Critics, however, have pointed to the difficulty of allocating responsibility for the actions of an autonomous system, especially when the autonomous system causes harm or damage. The highly autonomous behavior of such systems, for which neither the programmer, the manufacturer, nor the operator seems to be responsible, has been suspected to generate responsibility gaps. This has been the cause of (...) much concern. In this article, I propose a more optimistic view on artificial intelligence, raising two challenges for responsibility gap pessimists. First, proponents of responsibility gaps must say more about when responsibility gaps occur. Once we accept a difficult-to-reject plausibility constraint on the emergence of such gaps, it becomes apparent that the situations in which responsibility gaps occur are unclear. Second, assuming that responsibility gaps occur, more must be said about why we should be concerned about such gaps in the first place. I proceed by defusing what I take to be the two most important concerns about responsibility gaps, one relating to the consequences of responsibility gaps and the other relating to violations of jus in bello. (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)

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)

Artificial intelligence increasingly executes tasks that previously only humans could do, such as drive a car, fight in war, or perform a medical operation. However, as the very best AI systems tend to be the least controllable and the least transparent, some scholars argued that humans can no longer be morally responsible for some of the AI-caused outcomes, which would then result in a responsibility gap. In this paper, I assume, for the sake of argument, that at least some of (...) the most sophisticated AI systems do indeed create responsibility gaps, and I ask whether we can bridge these gaps at will, viz. whether certain people could take responsibility for AI-caused harm simply by performing a certain speech act, just as people can give permission for something simply by performing the act of consent. So understood, taking responsibility would be a genuine normative power. I first discuss and reject the view of Champagne and Tonkens, who advocate a view of taking liability. According to this view, a military commander can and must, ahead of time, accept liability to blame and punishment for any harm caused by autonomous weapon systems under her command. I then defend my own proposal of taking answerability, viz. the view that people can makes themselves morally answerable for the harm caused by AI systems, not only ahead of time but also when harm has already been caused. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between synchronic responsibility (SR) and diachronic responsibility (DR). SR concerns an agent’s responsibility for an act at the time of the action, while DR concerns an agent’s responsibility for an act at some later time. While most theorists implicitly assume that DR is a straightforward matter of personal identity, I argue instead that it is grounded in psychological connectedness. I discuss the implications this distinction has for the concepts of apology, forgiveness, and punishment as well as the (...) way in which this distinction can be used to defend quality of will accounts of responsibility against objections involving psychological manipulation. I argue that the intuition that a manipulated agent is not responsible can be explained by appeal to the conditions of DR and, as such, does not unproblematically shed light on the conditions of SR. (shrink)

Moral responsibility seems to presuppose personal identity. However, there are problems with this view, raised by Derek Parfit’s arguments for the view that personal identity isn’t what matters for our practical concerns. While Parfit discusses moral responsibility only in passing, the problems that arise for the connection between moral responsibility and personal identity have recently been sharpened by David Shoemaker. This paper defends the claim that moral responsibility presupposes personal identity against these problems. It argues, first, that only reductionist views (...) about personal identity have problems with the connection between responsibility and identity, which suggests that personal identity is a non-reductionist concept. Second, it argues that while non-reductionism is problematic, there is a novel view—non-representationalism about personal identity, according to which we account for personal identity in terms of a distinctive non-representational function—that is equally well-positioned to rescue the connection as non-reductionism, without suffering from non-reductionism’s problems. (shrink)

One argument that has been suggested for conventionalism about personal identity is that it captures that certain disagreements about personal identity seem irresolvable, without being committed to the view that these disagreements are merely verbal. In this paper, I will take the considerations about disagreement used to motivate conventionalism seriously. However, I will use them to motivate a very different, novel, and as yet unexplored view about personal identity. This is the view that personal identity is a non-representational concept, the (...) nature of which isn’t to be accounted for in terms of what entity it represents, but its non-representational role. I highlight that we find structurally very similar concerns about disagreement in another philosophical debate, namely in meta-ethics. But, in meta-ethics, such sorts of considerations are, traditionally, thought to support one distinctive view: meta-ethical expressivism, a non-representational view about normative thought and discourse. This suggests that we should take a similar view seriously for personal identity. I also develop what such an unfamiliar view might look like, using expressivism as a template. On this view, judgements about personal identity are plans that regulate who to hold accountable. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne argument that has been suggested for conventionalism about personal identity is that it captures that certain disagreements about personal identity seem irresolvable, without being committed to the view that these disagreements are merely verbal. In this paper, I will take the considerations about disagreement used to motivate conventionalism seriously. However, I will use them to motivate a very different, novel, and as yet unexplored view about personal identity. This is the view that personal identity is a non-representational concept, the (...) nature of which isn’t to be accounted for in terms of what entity it represents, but its non-representational role. I highlight that we find structurally very similar concerns about disagreement in another philosophical debate, namely in meta-ethics. But, in meta-ethics, such sorts of considerations are, traditionally, thought to support one distinctive view: meta-ethical expressivism, a non-representational view about normative thought and discourse. This suggests that we should take a similar view seriously for personal identity. I also develop what such an unfamiliar view might look like, using expressivism as a template. On this view, judgements about personal identity are plans that regulate who to hold accountable. (shrink)

If an individual is morally responsible, then there is a responsibility-foundation that makes him morally responsible, but there is no responsibility-foundation that makes him responsible. This rested on the notion that if there were a responsibility-foundation, it would be either an ungrounded choice or an ungrounded character state and that neither can serve as the foundation. The paper then considered three types of objections. First, moral responsibility does not require a responsibility-foundation. Second, a character state can serve as the foundation. (...) Third, we know people are responsible even if we don't know what the foundation is. These objections fail. (shrink)

That emotions are especially valuable for our well-being has become a widely agreed upon claim. In this article, we argue that many of the ways in which the emotions are commonly considered to be prudentially valuable – hedonically, experientially, and adaptively – are not specific to the emotions: they are in fact shared by other affective reactions such as drives and sensory affects. This may suggest that emotions are not prudentially valuable in any distinctive manner. We challenge this suggestion by (...) arguing that, unlike other affective reactions, emotions provide unique contexts in which to refine our general sensibility to a wide variety of evaluative properties – and that in this sense they are prudentially valuable in a distinctive way. (shrink)

This paper takes as its starting point the thesis that one is responsible for one’s actions insofar as one has the ability to act for good reasons. Such a view faces a challenge: it is plausible that only beings with the ability to reflect are responsible agents, and yet it seems that not only is it possible to act for reasons without reflecting, it seems to happen quite frequently. Thus, advocates of the rational-ability view of responsibility must either reject as (...) a necessary condition that responsible agents must have the ability to reflect, or locate a plausible role for reflective ability. In this paper, I propose and assess a variety of ways to meet this challenge. (shrink)

The demands of rationality are linked both to our subjective normative perspective (given that rationality is a person-level concept) and to objective reasons or favoring relations (given that rationality is non-contingently authoritative for us). In this paper, I propose a new way of reconciling the tension between these two aspects: roughly, what rationality requires of us is having the attitudes that correspond to our take on reasons in the light of our evidence, but only if it is competent. I show (...) how this view can account for structural rationality on the assumption that intentions and beliefs as such involve competent perceptions of downstream reasons, and explore various implications of the account. (shrink)