I take a close look at Bernard Williams’s paper "Moral Luck," which put this notion on the philosophical agenda. Williams’s focal example is the painter Paul Gauguin. According to Williams, Gauguin’s morally dubious decision to desert his family so as to pursue an artistic career can be redeemed only by his partially fortuitous success as a painter. This is shown by the consideration that a successful Gauguin would not be able to regret his decision, whereas failure would have prompted regret. (...) I suggest that the best way to understand this claim is to see Gauguin’s decision to become an artist as a constitutive decision, which launches what for him proved to be a defining project. One cannot coherently regret the realization of such a project or the decision that gave rise to it because that would amount to wishing to be someone else: conditions of personal identity set the limits on the counterfactuals about ourselves that we can intelligibly entertain. However, not being able to regret the constitutive elements of one’s life is not the same as approving of these elements. So I disagree with Williams’s ultimate conclusion that the inability to regret a decision signals some justification for it, no matter how attenuated. (shrink)

abstract In this paper I take seriously von Hirsch's view that sanctions imposed on offenders need to be compatible with their dignity, and argue that some versions of restorative justice — notably that defended by Braithwaite — can put offenders in the humiliating position of having to make apologies that they do not believe in in order to avoid further bad consequences. Drawing on recent work by Duff I argue that this problem can be avoided by conceiving of restorative justice (...) as an apologetic ritual. This view gives some ground to von Hirsch but presents a view of criminal justice that is distinctively restorative. I conclude by drawing out the differences between my account and that of Duff. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that tort law is, or ought to be understood as, a system of personal responsibility and corrective justice. Moreover, it is often assumed that these notions are identical, or at least compatible. In fact, however, personal responsibility and corrective justice are very different concepts and they produce very different pictures of the law. The article demonstrates this by comparing the way in which personal responsibility and corrective justice deal with three important problems: the presence of non-subjective (...) standards in the law, the place of liability insurance, and the relationship between law and politics. (shrink)

The last twenty-five years or so of thought about tort law have been remarkably productive and dynamic, as the dominance of the law and economics model has been challenged by theories that reintroduce the language of corrective justice. Over this same time period, theorizing about corrective justice has sprung up in response to a wide range of social, political and moral issues. I have in mind work on restorative theories in criminal justice; on postwar justice; on truth commissions, political reconciliation (...) and transitional justice in contexts of regime change; on official apologies as responses to international crises, institutionalized abuse and historical injustices; and on interpersonal apology, the making of amends, and forgiveness as responses to everyday moral transgressions. In these writings, theorists explore what people owe to one another in the aftermath of various kinds of wrongdoing, and thereby subtly challenge our ideas about what should be included under the heading of corrective justice. One new strand of thought, which appears in many of these debates, suggests that corrective justice requires a form of reconciliation or relational repair. My goal in this chapter is to introduce this idea and explore what it might offer to the philosophy of tort law. (shrink)

The book examines the philosophical foundations of private law, arguing that the foremost preoccupations of the law of obligations are grounded in and pervade the personal lives of individuals.

I explore what BernardWilliams means by regarding one’s action ‘purely externally, as one might regard anyone else’s action’, and how it links to regret and agent-regret. I suggest some ways that we might understand the external view: as a failure to recognize what one has done, in terms of Williams’s distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic luck, and as akin to Thomas Nagel’s distinction between an internal and external view. I argue that none of these captures what Williams was getting at (...) because they do not allow one to take a view on one’s action. I offer two alternative accounts. One turns around what we identify with, the other concerns what we care about. Both accounts capture how I might regret, rather than agent-regret, my own action. I demonstrate that these accounts can explain the relationship between an insurance payout and the external view, and they can explain the agent-relativity of agent-regret. (shrink)

Should those who get dirty hands be punished? There is strong disagreement among even those who support the existence of such scenarios. The problem arises because the paradoxical nature of dirty hands - doing wrong to do right - renders the standard normative justifications for punishment unfit for purpose. The Consequentialist, Retributivist and Communicative approaches cannot accommodate the idea that an action can be right, all things considered, but nevertheless also a categorical wrong. This paper argues that punishment is indeed (...) appropriate for those who dirty their hands and that there are three normative justifications that can be used to support this claim. These are the justifications from ‘Catharsis’, ‘Recognition of Evil Suffered’ and ‘Causal Responsibility’. Together they provide the sui generis justifications for punishing dirty hands. (shrink)

Bernard Williams claims that we should feel “agent-regret” for bad events we cause but for which we are not blameworthy. Such agent-regret involves no presupposition of fault, yet it also involves a need to personally make amends. This combination suggests that agent-regret, even if virtuous, is inherently irrational. In this paper, I defend agent-regret from attempts to explain it away as a confusion of other attitudes. I argue that the rationality of agent-regret is found in how it makes sense as (...) a response to conflicts that might arise between people through nothing more than bad luck. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that negating and counterbalancing should be recognised as two fundamental categories of corrective action. First, I show that recognising the distinction helps to avoid confusion when asking normative questions about the justification of imposing corrective duties. Second, I argue that we have moral reasons to care about the difference between negating and counterbalancing detrimental states, and this has implications for permissible action. I then outline some ways in which the discussion helps us explain and justify (...) specific legal remedies in private law, and I conclude by noting some exceptions to the normative priority of negating over counterbalancing. (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)

In this paper I discuss the proposal that the law of torts exists to do justice, more specifically corrective justice, between the parties to a tort case. My aims include clarifying the proposal and defending it against some objections (as well as saving it from some defences that it could do without). Gradually the paper turns to a discussion of the rationale for doing corrective justice. I defend what I call the ‘continuity thesis’ according to which at least part of (...) the rationale for doing corrective justice is to mitigate one’s wrongs, including one’s torts. I try to show how much of the law of torts this thesis helps to explain, but also what it leaves unexplained. In the process I show (what I will discuss in a later companion paper) that ‘corrective justice’ cannot be a complete answer to the question of what tort law is for. (shrink)

An updated and extended second edition supporting the findings of its well-known predecessor which claimed that courts employ common-sense notions of causation in determining legal responsibility.

The View from Here is a study of our must fundamental attitudes toward the past. The book explores the dynamics of affirmation and regret, tracing the connections of each to our ongoing attachments. The focus is on situations in which our attachments commit us to affirming events or decisions that we know to have been unfortunate or regrettable.

What are our duties or rights? How should we act? What are we responsible for? Joseph Raz examines the philosophical issues underlying these everyday questions. He explores the nature of normativity--the reasoning behind certain beliefs and emotions about how we should behave--and offers a novel account of responsibility.

The doyen of living English philosophers, by these reflections, took hold of and changed the outlook of a good many other philosophers, if not quite enough. He did so, essentially, by assuming that talk of freedom and responsibility is talk not of facts or truths, in a certain sense, but of our attitudes. His more explicit concern was to look again at the question of whether determinism and freedom are consistent with one another -- by shifting attention to certain personal (...) rather than moral attitudes, first of all gratitude and resentment. In the end, he arrived at a kind of Compatibilist or, as he says, Optimist conclusion. That is no doubt a recommendation but not the largest recommendation of this splendidly rich piece of philosophy. (shrink)

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients (...) than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)