Abstract

The issues of moral responsibility and moral appraisability are different issues even though many philosophers fail to distinguish between them. This paper distinguishes between moral responsibility and moral appraisability in the following way: (i) an agent may sometimes be held morally responsible without being morally appraisable for a particular action and (ii) an agent may receive resentment when the agent performs a praiseworthy action; and, an agent may receive gratitude when the agent performs a blameworthy action. In addition, the distinction made in this paper solves an unspoken puzzle existing in various moral scenarios which is named as the Puzzle Concerning the Divergence between Responsibility and Appraisability (PCDRA). By solving this puzzle, moral conflicts that exist in various moral scenarios have been eradicated.