Smithian (supposedly) irregular feelings reveal the internal structure of moral judgements by showing that they consist of two distinct elements. These elements belong to different dynamisms of human nature, are triggered by different causes, and produce different reactions in the agent. In the case of resentment, I call them animal resentment and moral resentment, respectively. Animal resentment closely resembles Hume's account of resentment and follows his theory of the passions. Moral resentment is different, for it is not caused directly by (...) pain, but by the recognition of the evil intention of the aggressor. Finally, plain moral resentment – or resentment caused by an unjust action and approved of by the impartial spectator – blends these elements into a unity articulated by Hume’s theory of the passions. (shrink)

I argue for responsibility internalism. That is, moral responsibility (i.e., accountability, or being apt for praise or blame) depends only on factors internal to agents. Employing this view, I also argue that no one is responsible for what AI does but this isn’t morally problematic in a way that counts against developing or using AI. Responsibility is grounded in three potential conditions: the control (or freedom) condition, the epistemic (or awareness) condition, and the causal responsibility condition (or consequences). I argue (...) that causal responsibility is irrelevant for moral responsibility, and that the control condition and the epistemic condition depend only on factors internal to agents. Moreover, since what AI does is at best a consequence of our actions, and the consequences of our actions are irrelevant to our responsibility, no one is responsible for what AI does. That is, the so-called responsibility gap exits. However, this isn’t morally worrisome for developing or using AI. Firstly, I argue, current AI doesn’t generate a new kind of concern about responsibility that the older technologies don’t. Then, I argue that responsibility gap is not worrisome because neither responsibility gap, nor my argument for its existence, entails that no one can be justly punished, held accountable, or incurs duties in reparations when AI causes a harm. (shrink)

What is it to take responsibility for a moral failure? This chapter investigates taking responsibility for wrongdoing. It starts by considering a prominent view in the literature: that to take responsibility for a wrong is to blame oneself for it. Contrary to the self-blame account, it is argued that taking responsibility and self-blame can come apart in various ways. Instead, the normative footprint account is defended. It is suggested that wrongdoing changes the normative landscape in systematic ways: it can create (...) duties to apologize, to acknowledge the wrong done, to make amends, to respond to the wronged party’s upset. To take responsibility for a wrong is to own the normative consequences of one’s wrong. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and robots approach autonomous decision-making, debates about how to assign moral responsibility have gained importance, urgency, and sophistication. Answering Stenseke’s (2022a) call for scaffolds that can help us classify views and commitments, we think the current debate space can be represented hierarchically, as answers to key questions. We use the resulting taxonomy of five stances to differentiate—and defend—what is known as the “blank check” proposal. According to this proposal, a person activating a robot could (...) willingly make themselves answerable for whatever events ensue, even if those events stem from the robot’s autonomous decision(s). This blank check solution was originally proposed in the context of automated warfare (Champagne & Tonkens, 2015), but we extend it to cover all robots. We argue that, because moral answerability in the blank check is accepted voluntarily and before bad outcomes are known, it proves superior to alternative ways of assigning blame. We end by highlighting how, in addition to being just, this self-initiated and prospective moral answerability for robot harm provides deterrence that the four other stances cannot match. (shrink)

Upon hearing the title of C. Stephen Evans’s book, many readers familiar with the moral responsibility and blame literature will be struck by surprise that more consideration hasn’t previously been...

Respondeat superior is a legal doctrine conferring liability from one party onto another because the latter stands in some relationship of authority over the former. Though originally a doctrine of tort law, for the past century it has been used within the criminal law, especially to the end of securing criminal liability for corporations. Here, I argue that on at least one prominent conception of criminal responsibility, we are not justified in using this doctrine in this way. Firms are not (...) answerable for the crimes committed by their employees, because firms cannot answer as to why the crime was committed; they lack the authority to offer the employee’s reasons for action. Though this rules out respondeat superior as a general principle, I show contexts in which vicarious liability is still appropriate in the criminal law, and I respond to a number of other concerns raised by this picture. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects of employing a functional approach in order to improve our concept of actual causation. Claims of actual causation play an important role for a variety of purposes. In particular, they are relevant for identifying suitable targets for intervention, and they are relevant for our practices of ascribing responsibility. I argue that this gives rise to the _challenge of purpose_. The challenge of purpose arises when different goals demand adjustments of the concept that pull in opposing (...) directions. More specifically, I argue that a common distinction between certain kinds of preempted and preempting factors is difficult to motivate from an interventionist viewpoint. This indicates that an appropriately revised concept of actual causation would not distinguish between these two kinds of factors. From the viewpoint of retributivist responsibility, however, the distinction between preempted and preempting factors sometimes is important, which indicates that the distinction should be retained. (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)

Susan Wolf proposes that there is a virtue of character we all dimly recognize but cannot put a name to, a virtue that involves living with an expectation and a willingness to take responsibility for more than what one is rationally on the hook for. For Wolf, recognizing this virtue helps explain why we should feel moved to offer up our time and resources to help resolve the problems we become entangled with by accident. In this thesis, I argue that (...) her account of the nameless virtue does not go far enough and thus does not do justice to her “irrationalist” impulse but that we can look to Heideggerian authenticity in order to make the requisite changes while preserving her core sentiment. So, I present an interpretation of authenticity that focuses on reticence, anticipation, and resoluteness in order to develop a better model for assessing her moral luck cases. (shrink)

Does one’s causal responsibility increase the degree of one’s moral responsibility? The proponents of resultant moral luck hold that it does. Until quite recently, the causation literature has almost exclusively been interested in the binary question of whether one factor is a cause of an outcome. Naturally, the debate over resultant moral luck also revolved around this binary question. However, we have seen an increased interest in the question of degrees of causation in recent years. And some philosophers have already (...) explored various implications of a graded notion of causation on resultant moral luck. In this paper, I will do the same. But the implications that I will draw attention to are bad news for resultant moral luck. I will show that resultant moral luck entails some implausible results that leave resultant moral luck more indefensible than it was previously thought be. I will also show that what is typically taken to be the positive argument in favor of resultant moral luck fails. I will conclude that we should reject resultant moral luck. (NOTE: Email me for a copy.). (shrink)

When a computer system causes harm, who is responsible? This question has renewed significance given the proliferation of autonomous systems enabled by modern artificial intelligence techniques. At the root of this problem is a philosophical difficulty known in the literature as the responsibility gap. That is to say, because of the causal distance between the designers of autonomous systems and the eventual outcomes of those systems, the dilution of agency within the large and complex teams that design autonomous systems, and (...) the impossibility of fully predicting how autonomous systems will behave once deployed, determining who is morally responsible for harms caused by autonomous systems is unclear at a conceptual level. I review past work on this topic, criticizing prior works for suggesting workarounds rather than philosophical answers to the conceptual problem presented by the responsibility gap. The view I develop, drawing on my earlier work on vicarious moral responsibility, explains why computing professionals are ethically required to take responsibility for the systems they design, despite not being blameworthy for the harms these systems may cause. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that victims of domestic violence characteristically suffer from two distinct kinds of moral harm: moral damage and moral injury. Moral damage occurs when the ability to develop or sustain good moral character has been compromised by an agent’s circumstances. Moral injury refers to a kind of psychological anguish that follows from when an agent causes or becomes causally implicated in actions that we ordinarily would understand to be morally grievous offenses because of their circumstances. A (...) person can experience moral damage or moral injury separately, but the experiences of moral damage and moral injury can also overlap. Because abusers often expect victims to adopt morally deficient dispositions and often implicate victims in wrongdoing, I argue that victims of domestic violence characteristically suffer from both moral damage and moral injury. By appreciating the different yet overlapping moral experiences of the victim, we become better positioned to identify strategies for responding to and repairing the different harms they suffer. (shrink)

Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control affect her blameworthiness. Several scholars deny the existence of moral luck by distinguishing judging blameworthy from blame-related practices. Luck does not affect an agent’s blameworthiness because morality is conceptually fair, but it can affect the appropriate degree of blame for that agent. While separatism resolves the paradox of moral luck, we aim to show it that it needs amendment, because it is unfair to treat two equally blameworthy people unequally. We argue (...) that separatists should conceive fairness as a pro tanto reason for blame. By locating fairness as a ground for blame within a wider axiology of blame, separatism could resolve the challenge of blaming fairly. In such an axiology, reasonable and fair blame diverge. (shrink)

A central debate in the philosophy of love is whether people can love one another for good reasons. Reasons for love seem to help us sympathetically understand and evaluate love or even count as loving at all. But it can seem that if reasons for love existed, they could require forms of love that are presumably illicit. It might seem that only some form of wishful thinking would lead us to believe reasons for love could never do this. However, if (...) we focus on why reasons for love as such motivate us to love, we find evidence that reasons for love as such do not require or even justify it: all they do is favor it. This result is fine, however, since love never stands in need of justification. We would think otherwise only if we somehow conflate reasons and justifications, or value and permissibility. We must give up such background assumptions if we are to appreciate reasons for love. (shrink)

New philosophical essays on love by a diverse group of international scholars. Topics include contributions to the ongoing debate on whether love is arational or if there are reasons for love, and if so what kind; the kinds of love there may be ; whether love can explain the difference between nationalism and patriotism; whether love is an necessary component of truly seeing others and the world; whether love, like free will, is “fragile,” and may not survive in a deterministic (...) world; and whether or not love is actually a good thing or may instead be a force opposed to morality. Key philosophers discussed include Immanuel Kant, Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Harry Frankfurt, J. David Velleman, Niko Kolodny, Thomas Hurka, Bennett Helm, Alfred Mele and Derk Pereboom. Essays also touch on the treatment of love in literature and popular culture, from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair to Spike Jonze’s movie her. (shrink)

Vicarious responsibility is sometimes analysed by considering the different kinds of agents involved—who is vicariously responsible for the actions of whom? In this paper, I discuss vicarious responsibility from a different angle: in what sense is the vicarious agent responsible? I do this by considering the ways in which one may take responsibility for events caused by another agent or process. I discuss three senses of taking responsibility—accepting fault, assuming obligations, and fulfilling obligations—and the forms of vicarious responsibility that correspond (...) to these. I end by explaining how to judge which sense applies in a given case, based on the degree of (what I call) moral entanglement between the agent and what they should take responsibility for. (shrink)

The nexus of the moral luck debate is the control principle, which says that people are responsible only for things within their control. In this paper, I will first argue that the control principle should be restrained to blameworthiness, because responsibility is too wide a concept to square with control. Many deniers of moral luck appeal to the intuitiveness of the control principle. Defenders of moral luck do not share this intuition and demand a stronger defence of the control principle. (...) I will establish a defence of the control principle based on the value of simplicity for selecting a theory of blameworthiness. A simpler theory of blameworthiness is more likely to be true, and not being falsely judged blameworthy is desirable. I will conclude that simplicity advices the acceptance of the control principle over other theories of blameworthiness that embrace factors beyond control. (shrink)

Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they (...) improve themselves, make reparations for the harm caused, and retract the meaning expressed in the original wrong. Failure to do these things expresses a lack of regard for the victims, and can make those wrongdoers appropriate targets of blame. (shrink)

Some philosophers are skeptical that individuals are morally blameworthy for their own greenhouse gas emissions. Although an individual’s emissions may contribute to climate change that is on the whole very harmful, perhaps that contribution is too trivial to render it morally impermissible. Against this view, there have been attempts to show that an individual’s lifetime emissions cause non-trivial harm, but in this paper I will consider what follows if it is true that an individual is not blameworthy for her emissions. (...) Specifically, I ask how a non-blameworthy emitter would best regard his or her own emissions. I will argue that the appropriate attitude to adopt here is one of agent-regret. This allows us to capture the moral disvalue of one’s emissions without entailing blame for them. *Links to the paper and video overview below.*. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is concerned with the improvement of our concepts. The motivating thought behind many such projects is that some of our concepts are defective. But, if to use a defective concept is to do something wrong, and if to do something wrong one must be in control of what one is doing, there might be no defective concepts, since we typically are not in control of our concept use. To address this problem, this paper turns from appraising the concepts (...) we use to appraising the people who use them. First, I outline several ways in which the use of a concept can violate moral standards. Second, I discuss three accounts of moral responsibility, which I call voluntarism, rationalism, and psychologism, arguing that each allows us to find at least some cases where we are responsible for using defective concepts. Third, I answer an objection that because most of our concepts are acquired through processes for which we are not responsible, our use of defective concepts is a matter of bad luck, and not something for which we are responsible after all. Finally, I conclude by discussing some of the ways we may hold people accountable for using defective concepts. (shrink)

In the paper, I defend the claim that agent who caused unintentional loss should take responsibility for it. Such kind of responsibility is neither a result of being guilty, being moral responsible for the loss, nor is just the expression of one’s sensitivity to other people’s hurt, but it has proper objective reasons. Human being experiences unity of his agency both in intentional actions and in actions which result in unintended harm. Moral agent is not only autonomous author of the (...) action but also, through his corporeality, is somebody vulnerable to influence of accidental, unintended factors. In order to preserve personal integrity agent is obliged to admit the relation between his action and caused harm. Reasons to take responsibility for unintended results of action do not only relate to structure of human agency, but also relate to the structure of action itself and its relation to acting person. These issues are presented in two first paragraphs of the article. Characteristic features of obligation to take responsibility for unintended loss is presented in the last part of the article. Such responsibility is not a matter of voluntary agency, does not lie in the core of one’s agency but concerns what belong to “penumbra of agency.” Agent through act of his will makes himself responsible. Act of taking responsibility encompasses such behaviours like explanation, apology, help. (shrink)

In this article, I aim at problematizing the implied idea of causality in cognitive evaluations of horizontal justice events. I will draw on theories about retrospective sensemaking and its cognitive foundation in counterfactual belief formation. Issues related to horizontal or intraunit unfairness emerge in situations in which the actions of one employee influence the outcome of another due to relational interdependence. The authors of theories about horizontal unfairness have continued the traditional distinction between the three facets of justice, procedural, distributive, (...) and interactional. However, might employee A blame employee B because she (B) obtained qualitative (e.g., non-monetary appraisal) or quantitative (e.g., monetary compensation) recognition even though the latter did not, directly at least, bring about the event. The problem here is one of causality which asks the question, Can A be blamed by B for bringing about the event of outcome difference? While blame in evaluations of vertical justice certainly presumes causal agency, it might be questioned whether the same goes for horizontal unfairness. Counterfactual belief formation enables a step into the cognitive and retrospective nature of evaluations of horizontal justice events centered on the counterfactual belief “had the unfavorable event X not occurred, another and more favorable event X1 would have occurred.” This is related to the distance between the actual X and the potential event state X), in the sense that the closer the two appear, the more convincing becomes A’s belief to himself. The underlying causality of rewarding processes, however, states that some third party introduces the recognition, for example, a manager, and, therefore, B did not bring about the reward event, the third party did. It seems, then, that to understand this, we should take into consideration: 1) the formation of counterfactual beliefs and 2) the causality of blame. The article concludes that, due to the underlying causality of rewarding processes, one might solely consider one facet of horizontal justice, interactional horizontal justice. However, tapping into the phenomenological dimension of morality might allow one also to address the moral nature of distributive and procedural facets of horizontal justice as the experience of the psychosocial fabric of social reality related with feeling either “as if” one is being treated unfairly or “as if” one is treating others unfairly. (shrink)

Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Kinds of moral luck are differentiated by the source of lack of control such as the results of her actions, the circumstances in which she finds herself, and the way in which she is constituted. Many philosophers accept the existence of some of these kinds of moral luck but not others, because, in their view, the existence of only some of them would (...) make morality unfair. I, however, argue that this intermediary approach is unstable, because either morality is fair in ways that rule out resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck (and this leads to moral responsibility skepticism), or morality is unfair in ways that permit the existence of those kinds of moral luck. Thus, such intermediary approaches lack the motivation that their proponents have long taken them to have. In the appendix, I point to ways in which morality is unfair concerning the scope of moral responsibility, moral obligation, moral taint, being a good or bad person, and flourishing. (shrink)

‘Heritage’ is a concept that often carries significant normative weight in moral and political argument. In this article, I present and critique a prevalent conception according to which heritage must have a positive valence. I argue that this view of heritage leads to two moral problems: Disowning Injustice and Embracing Injustice. In response, I argue for an alternative conception of heritage that promises superior moral and political consequences. In particular, this alternative jettisons the traditional focus on heritage as a primarily (...) positive relationship to the past, and thus offers resources for coming to terms with histories of injustice. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest that there is a way to make sense of blameworthiness for morally problematic actions even when there is no bad will behind such actions. I am particularly interested in cases where an agent acts in a biased way, and the explanation is socialization and false belief rather than bad will on the part of the agent. In such cases, I submit, we are pulled in two directions: on the one hand non-culpable ignorance is usually an (...) excuse, but in the case of acting in a biased way we feel some pull to find the agent blameworthy. I argue that agents are sometimes blameworthy, (where I really mean that they are blameworthy, and not just that it is permissible to reproach them), even if they do not have any bad will. I argue that although the paradigmatic account of blameworthiness is based on quality of will, we can and should be willing to allow that there are non-paradigmatic cases. I argue that the zone of responsibility can be extended to include acts that we are not fully in control of, and acts whose moral status we are non-culpably ignorant about at the time of acting. This extension of responsibility happens through a voluntary taking of responsibility. I argue that there are certain conditions under which we should take responsibility, and that when we do so, we genuinely are responsible. (shrink)

Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently been unearthing the unconscious processes that give rise to moral intuitions and emotions. According to skeptics like Joshua Greene, what has been found casts doubt on many of our moral beliefs. However, a new approach in moral psychology develops a learning-theoretic framework that has been successfully applied in a number of other domains. This framework suggests that model-based learning shapes intuitions and emotions. Model-based learning explains how moral thought and feeling are attuned to local material (...) and social conditions. Philosophers can draw on these explanations, in some cases, in order to vindicate episodes of moral change. Explanations can support justifications by showing that they are not mere rationalizations. In addition, philosophical justifications are a fertile source for empirical hypotheses about the rational learning mechanisms that shape moral intuitions and emotions. (shrink)

This essay attempts to provide and defend what may be the first actual argument in support of P. F. Strawson's merely stated vision of a response-dependent theory of moral responsibility. It does so by way of an extended analogy with the funny. In part 1, it makes the easier and less controversial case for response-dependence about the funny. In part 2, it shows the tight analogy between anger and amusement in developing the harder and more controversial case for response-dependence about (...) a kind of blameworthiness. It then defends the view from three serious skeptical challenges. (shrink)

This paper concerns the problem of moral luck—the fact that our moral judgements appear to depend, perhaps unjustifiably, on matters of luck. The history and scope of the problem are discussed. It is suggested that our result-sensitive sentiments have their origin in views about moral pollution we might now wish to reject in favour of a volitionalist ethics.

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 suffering of war refugees is often regarded as a wrong-less harm. Although war refugees have been made worse off in severe ways, they have not been wronged, because no one intentionally caused their suffering. In military parlance, war refugees are collateral damage. As such, nothing is owed to them as a matter of justice, because their suffering is not the result of intentional wrongdoing; rather, it is the regrettable and unintended result of necessary and proportionate wartime actions. So, while (...) the warring national or extra-national groups might help war refugees, such aid is regarded as humanitarian, not as justice.I challenge the view that war refugees are harmed but not wronged when those harms directly result from necessary and proportionate wartime actions. War refugees are innocent bystanders, and so are an exception to the principle that permits defense by any necessary and proportionate means. Just as an individual may not kill or seriously harm an innocent bystander to save herself, so too national or extra-national groups may not create refugees to win a war. If such groups do create war refugees during the legitimate pursuit of military goals, they have wronged those refugees, and so owe them recompense. (shrink)

One key desideratum of a theory of blame is that it be able to explain why we typically have differing blaming responses in cases involving significant degrees of luck. T.M. Scanlon has proposed a relational account of blame, and he has argued that his account succeeds in this regard and that this success makes his view preferable to reactive attitude accounts of blame. In this paper, I aim to show that Scanlon's view is open to a different kind of luck-based (...) objection. I then offer a way of understanding moral luck cases which allows for a plausible explanation of our differential blaming responses by appealing to the salience of certain relevant features of the action in question. (shrink)

Philosophical defenses of parents’ rights typically appeal to the interests of parents, the interests of children, or some combination of these. Here I propose that at least in the case of biological, non-adoptive parents, these rights have a different normative basis: namely, these rights should be accorded to biological parents because of the compensatory duties such parents owe their children by virtue of having brought them into existence. Inspried by Seana Shiffrin, I argue that procreation inevitably encumbers the wills of (...) children in otherwise morally objectionable ways. Such subjection generates duties to compensate children, even if the child’s life is on balance a benefit to her. The right to procreate is thus conditioned on prospective parent’s willingness to compensate for the harms of procreation. And because parents bear such compensatory duties, they must be accorded permissions (i.e., rights) to fulfill these duties. These rights include familiar exclusionary rights to promote children’s welfare, etc. Moreover, because subjecting children to harms or the risks thereof violates their autonomy, parental duties (and rights) include the provision of education and other goods that enable their subsequent autonomy as adults. Grounding parental rights in compensatory procreative duties avoids problems associated with appeals to the interests of children (e.g., that these interests do not seem to generate exclusive parental rights) or to the interests of parents (e.g., that these interests do not appear strong enough to permit the creation of a new, vulnerable human individual). (shrink)

This paper poses an original puzzle about the relationship between causation and moral responsibility called The Moral Difference Puzzle. Using the puzzle, the paper argues for three related ideas: (1) the existence of a new sort of moral luck; (2) an intractable conflict between the causal concepts used in moral assessment; and (3) inability of leading theories of causation to capture the sorts of causal differences that matter for moral evaluation of agents’ causal contributions to outcomes.

The use of child soldiers in armed conflict is an increasing global concern. Although philosophers have examined whether child soldiers can be considered combatants in war, much less attention has been paid to their moral responsibility. While it is tempting to think of them as having diminished or limited responsibility, child soldiers often report feeling guilt for the wrongs they commit. Here I argue that their feelings of guilt are both intelligible and morally appropriate. The feelings of guilt that child (...) soldiers experience are not self-censure; rather their guilt arises from their attempts to come to terms with what they see as their own morally ambiguous motives. Their guilt is appropriate because it reaffirms their commitment to morality and facilitates their self-forgiveness. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the task of further examining the ticking bomb argument in favor of the use of torture. In doing so, I will focus on some recent scholarship regarding ticking bomb methodology introduced by Fritz Allhoff. I will then propose a set of ticking bomb variations which, I believe, call into question some of Allhoff's conclusions. My goal is to show that ticking bomb methodology is misguided in its attempt to justify torture insofar as its proponents (...) seem to ignore certain nonconsequentialist factors that are latent in the various types of uncertainty in real-world ticking bomb cases. Once this fact is recognized, I claim, the normative claims about torture that follow can be denied by appealing to it. I then argue that, even if we grant a certain level of uncertainty within the ticking bomb argument, torture is not justified. Rather, the implementation of torture, even if it yields positive results, is nothing more than a case of moral luck. In other words, the supposed "success" of torture in the ticking bomb cases lies entirely outside the agent's control. Thus, if the outcome of the use of torture is in no way controlled by the agent, then the agent's actions cannot be justified by appealing to that outcome. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about whether outcome luck can affect an agent's “moral responsibility.” Focusing on responsibility's “negative side,” some maintain, and others deny, that an action's results bear constitutively on how “blameworthy” the actor is, and on how much blame or punishment they “deserve.” Crucially, both sides to the debate assume that an actor's blameworthiness and negative desert are equally affected—or unaffected—by an action's results. This article challenges that previously overlooked assumption, arguing that blameworthiness and desert are distinct moral notions that (...) serve distinct normative functions: blameworthiness serves aliabilityfunction (removing a bar to otherwise impermissible treatments), whereas desert serves afavoringfunction (contributing new value to states of affairs, or providing new reasons for responsive treatments). Having distinguished (negative) desert from blameworthiness, the article proposes a novel resolution to the outcome‐luck debate: that results do not affect an agent's liability to blame, but do affect the amount and severity of blame to which the agent is justly liable, including by affecting the severity of blame that the agent deserves. (shrink)

The control principle implies that people should not feel guilt for outcomes beyond their control. Yet, the so-called ‘agent and observer puzzles’ in philosophy demonstrate that people waver in their commitment to the control principle when reflecting on accidental outcomes. In the context of car accidents involving conventional or autonomous vehicles, Study 1 established that judgments of responsibility are most strongly associated with expressions of guilt–over and above other negative emotions, such as sadness, remorse or anger. Studies 2 and 3 (...) then confirmed that, while people generally endorse the control principle, and deny that occupants in an AV should feel guilt when involved in an accident, they nevertheless ascribe guilt to those same occupants. Study 3 also uncovered novel implications of the observer puzzle in the legal context: Passengers in an AV were seen as more legally liable than either passengers in a conventional vehicle, or even their drivers–especially when participants were prompted to reflect on the passengers’ affective experience of guilt. Our findings document an important conflict–in the context of AV accidents–between people’s prescriptive reasoning about responsibility and guilt on one hand, and their counter-normative experience of guilt on the other, with apparent implications for liability decisions. (shrink)

I argue for a novel understanding of the nature of agent-regret. On the standard picture, agent-regret involves regretting the result of one’s action and thus regretting one’s action. I argue that the standard picture is a flawed analysis of agent-regret. I offer several cases of agent-regret where the agent feels agent-regret but does not regret the result itself. I appeal to other cases where an agent’s attitude towards something depends upon whether or not they are involved in that thing. I (...) argue that the same applies to actions: sometimes an agent’s attitude towards a result differs from their attitude to their involvement in bringing about that result. Agent-regret is regret about my own action, but it need not involve regret about something in the world. I end by considering how this picture of agent-regret allows us to respond to a particular criticism of agent-regret. (shrink)

This thesis concerns our moral and epistemic responsibilities regarding our concepts. I argue that certain concepts can be morally, epistemically, or socially problematic. This is particularly concerning with regard to our concepts of social kinds, which may have both descriptive and evaluative aspects. Being ignorant of certain concepts, or possessing mistaken conceptions, can be problematic for similar reasons, and contributes to various forms of epistemic injustice. I defend an expanded view of a type of epistemic injustice known as ‘hermeneutical injustice’, (...) where widespread conceptual ignorance puts members of marginalized groups at risk of their distinctive and important experiences lacking intelligible interpretations. Together, I call the use of problematic concepts or the ignorance of appropriate concepts ‘conceptual incapacities’. I discuss the conditions under which we may be responsible for our conceptual incapacities on several major theories of responsibility, developing my own account of responsibility in the process, according to which we are responsible for something just in case it was caused by one of our reasons-responsive constitutive psychological traits. However, I argue that regardless of whether we are responsible for something, we may still be required to take responsibility for it. Whether or not we are responsible for our conceptual incapacities, we are required to reflect critically upon them in a variety of scenarios that throw our use of those concepts into question. I consider the method of conceptual engineering — the philosophical critique and revision of concepts — as one way we might take responsibility for our concepts, or at least, defer that duty to experts. But, this top-down model of conceptual revision is insufficient. Using a pragmatist model of the social epistemology of morality, I argue that conceptual inquiry is a social endeavour in which we are all required to participate, to some degree. (shrink)

Recent work by Ingmar Persson and Jason Hanna has posed an interesting new challenge for deontologists: How can they account for so-called cases of letting oneself do harm? In this article, I argue that cases of letting oneself do harm are structurally similar to real-world cases such as climate change, and that deontologists need an account of the moral status of these cases to provide moral guidance in real-world cases. I then explore different ways in which deontologists can solve this (...) challenge and argue that the most promising way to conceive of cases of letting oneself do harm is as nonstandard cases of allowing harm, supplemented with an additional argument for the moral relevance of one's own agency. The upshot is that cases of letting oneself do harm are both more theoretically challenging and practically important than has been acknowledged. (shrink)

Aristotle tries to solve the riddle of future-directedness and luck-awareness by offering an account of what he calls ‘good hope’ or hoping-well. I concede that hope does not hold Aristotle’s attention for long. However, his allusions to hope (in the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and the Rhetoric) allow us to articulate a quite detailed, illuminating, and rich phenomenology of hope that will prove to be decisive when inquiring into how hopefulness belongs to the core of practical life, thereby making (...) an important contribution to contemporary discussions of hope. (shrink)

Is it appropriate to blame people unequally if the only difference between them was a matter of luck? Suppose Alice would drive recklessly if she could, Belen drove recklessly but didn’t harm anyone, and Cleo drove recklessly and killed a child. Luck-advocates emphasize that in real life we do blame such agents very unequally. Luck-skeptics counter that people aren’t responsible for factors beyond their control, or beyond their quality of will. I’ll defend a somewhat reconciliatory view. I’ll concede to the (...) skeptics that these agents are equally culpable. Nonetheless, I’ll suggest with the luck-advocates that it’s fitting to blame them unequally. That’s because their culpability is unequally significant for us: Cleo’s culpability concerns us more than Belen’s, and Belen’s more than Alice’s—just like the fault of a close aggressor concerns us more than that of an aggressor far off in place and time. And it’s fitting for us to respond with more blame to faults that concern us more. Indeed, blaming people simply in proportion to their culpability manifests a form of fetishism, or problematic mere-matter-of-principle concern. So while many skeptical tenets may hold, in substance the luck-advocates are right. (shrink)

I argue that certain kinds of luck can partially determine an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. To make this view clearer, consider some examples. Two identical agents drive recklessly around a curb, and one but not the other kills a pedestrian. Two identical corrupt judges would freely take a bribe if one were offered. Only one judge is offered a bribe, and so only one judge takes a bribe. Put in terms of these examples, I argue that the killer driver and (...) bribe taker are more blameworthy than their counterparts. I offer three arguments for that view, and, in doing so, I exemplify a general way to advance the moral luck debate. First, I argue against an account of moral responsibility that implies that the judges are equally blameworthy. Second, I argue that the killer driver is more blameworthy than the merely reckless driver. Third, I locate an alternative sense in which the agents in each case pair are morally on par. (shrink)

I consider cases in which a person’s action causes a foreseeable harm, but does so through an unforeseeable causal path. According to a common view, the person is blameless for the harm in such cases. I argue that any defense of this common view incurs serious costs. I then show how a popular view about resultant luck can make the rejection of the common view palatable.

The notion of responsible innovation suggests that innovators carry additional responsibilities beyond those commonly suggested. In this paper, we will discuss the meaning of these novel responsibilities focusing on two philosophical problems of attributing such responsibilities to innovators. The first is the allocation of responsibilities to innovators. Innovation is a process that involves a multiplicity of agents and unpredictable, far-reaching causal chains from innovation to social impacts, which creates great uncertainty. A second problem is constituted by possible trade-offs between different (...) kinds of responsibility. It is evident that attributing backward-looking responsibility for product failures diminishes the willingness to learn about such defects and to take forward-looking responsibility. We will argue that these problems can be overcome by elaborating what it is exactly that innovators are responsible for. In this manner, we will distinguish more clearly between holding responsible and taking responsibility. This opens a space for ‘supererogatory’ responsibilities. Second, we will argue that both innovation processes and outcomes can be objects of innovators’ responsibility. Third, we will analyze different kinds of responsibility and show that the functions of their attribution are not necessarily contradictory. Based on this conceptual refinement, we will argue that accountability, responsibility-as-virtue and the willingness to take responsibility are crucial for responsible innovation. (shrink)

We tend to hold people responsible for their choices, but not for what they can’t control: their nature, genes or biological makeup. This thought-provoking collection redefines the boundaries of moral responsibility. It shows how epigenetics reveals connections between our genetic make-up and our environment. The essays challenge established notions of human nature and the nature/nurture divide and suggest a shift in focus from individual to collective responsibility. Uncovering the links between our genetic makeup, environment and experiences, this is an important (...) contribution to ongoing debates on ethics, genetics and responsibility. (shrink)

In resultant moral luck, blame and punishment seem intuitively to depend on downstream effects of a person’s action that are beyond his or her control. Some skeptics argue that we should override our intuitions about moral luck and reform our practices. Other skeptics attempt to explain away apparent cases of moral luck as epistemic artifacts. I argue, to the contrary, that moral luck is real—that people are genuinely responsible for some things beyond their control. A partially consequentialist theory of responsibility (...) justifies moral luck. But this justification is no mere rationalization of the status quo. Recent experimental and evolutionary work on punishment and learning suggests that the very same reasons that justify moral luck have also shaped the evolution of our luck-sensitive moral practices. (shrink)