We might describe the philosophical issue of human freedom and moral responsibility as an existential metaphysical problem. Problems of this kind are not just a matter of theoretical interest and curiosity: They address issues that we care about and that affect us. They are, more specifically, relevant to the significance and value that we attach to our lives and the way that we lead them. According to the orthodox view, there is a tidy connection between skepticism and pessimism. (...) Skepticism threatens a wide range of interests and concerns that themselves rest on the foundation of our self-conception as responsible moral agents. From this perspective, whereas skepticism licenses a degree of pessimism about our human predicament, the defeat of skepticism serves to vindicate optimism. In recent years this orthodox view of the relationship between skepticism and pessimism has been challenged. It has been argued, for example, that skepticism may be defended in much more optimistic terms. While we have reason to accept skepticism, we have no reason to draw any bleak or depressing consequences from this. Another way of severing the orthodox connection between skepticism and pessimism is to reject skepticism but deny that this will serve to secure or salvage any unqualified form of optimism. This chapter reviews and contrasts these various positions and approaches, beginning with an account of P. F. Strawson’s particularly influential statement of the relationship between the skeptical challenge and pessimism. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to demonstrate that moral responsibility theory produces, legitimates, and even magnifies the considerable social injustice that accrues to disabled people insofar as it implicitly and explicitly promotes a depoliticized ontology of disability that construes disability as a naturally disadvantageous personal characteristic or deleterious property of individuals rather than identifies it as an effect of power, an apparatus. In particular, I argue that the methodological tools of “analytic” philosophy that philosophers of moral (...) class='Hi'>responsibility theory employ to establish the philosophical domain in which they engage have distinctly detrimental effects on disabled people. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore how a conversational theory of moral responsibility can provide illuminating resources for building a theory about the nature and norms of moral forgiveness.

P.F. Strawson’s (1962) “Freedom and Resentment” has provoked a wide range of responses, both positive and negative, and an equally wide range of interpretations. In particular, beginning with Gary Watson, some have seen Strawson as suggesting a point about the “order of explanation” concerning moral responsibility: it is not that it is appropriate to hold agents responsible because they are morally responsible, rather, it is ... well, something else. Such claims are often developed in different ways, but one (...) thing remains constant: they meant to be incompatible with libertarian theories of moral responsibility. The overarching theme of this paper is that extant developments of “the reversal” face a dilemma: in order to make the proposals plausibly anti-libertarian, they must be made to be implausible on other grounds. I canvas different attempts to articulate a “Strawsonian reversal”, and argue that none is fit for the purposes for which it is intended. I conclude by suggesting a way of clarifying the intended thesis: an analogy with the concept of funniness. The result: proponents of the “reversal” need to accept the difficult result that if we blamed small children, they would be blameworthy, or instead explain how their view escapes this result, while still being a view on which our blaming practices “fix the facts” of moral responsibility. (shrink)

I argue against two of the most influential contemporary theories of moral responsibility: those of Harry Frankfurt and John Martin Fischer. Both propose conditions which are supposed to be sufficient for direct moral responsibility for actions. (By the term direct moral responsibility, I mean moral responsibility which is not traced from an earlier action.) Frankfurt proposes a condition of 'identification'; Fischer, writing with Mark Ravizza, proposes conditions for 'guidance control'. I argue, using (...) counterexamples, that neither is sufficient for direct moral responsibility. -/- My counterexample cases are based on recent research in psychology which reveals many surprising causes of our actions. Some of this research comes from the field of situationist social psychology; some from experiments which reveal the influence of automatic processes in our actions. Broadly, I call such causes 'subverting' when the agent would not identify with her action, if she knew all the causes of the action. When an action has subverting causes, the agent is not directly morally responsible for it, even though she may meet the conditions specified by Frankfurt and Fischer. -/- I also criticise the theories of Eddy Nahmias and John Doris, who have both engaged specifically with the threats posed to moral responsibility by situationist research. Against Doris and Nahmias, I argue that their conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient for direct moral responsibility. -/- My final objective is to argue that there are many everyday actions for which we mistakenly hold agents morally responsible. I review evidence that there are many everyday actions which have subverting causes. Many of those are actions for which we currently hold agents morally responsible. But I argue that, in many of those same actions, the agents are not in fact morally responsible – they bear neither direct nor traced moral responsibility. (shrink)

The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude (...) alternatives to the person''s action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot bring it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for the determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is always available to ground moral responsibility. In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and argue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of noncounterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Frankfurt''s original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liability, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP''s conceptual connection between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities. (shrink)

The Buddha taught that there is no self. He also accepted a version of the doctrine of karmic rebirth, according to which good and bad actions accrue merit and demerit respectively and where this determines the nature of the agent’s next life and explains some of the beneficial or harmful occurrences in that life. But how is karmic rebirth possible if there are no selves? If there are no selves, it would seem there are no agents that could be held (...) morally responsible for ‘their’ actions. If actions are those happenings in the world performed by agents, it would seem there are no actions. And if there are no agents and no actions, then morality and the notion of karmic retribution would seem to lose application. Historical opponents argued that the Buddha's teaching of no self was tantamount to moral nihilism. The Buddha, and later Buddhist philosophers, firmly reject this charge. The relevant philosophical issues span a vast intellectual terrain and inspired centuries of philosophical reflection and debate. This article will contextualise and survey some of the historical and contemporary debates relevant to moral psychology and Buddhist ethics. They include whether the Buddha's teaching of no-self is consistent with the possibility of moral responsibility; the role of retributivism in Buddhist thought; the possibility of a Buddhist account of free will; the scope and viability of recent attempts to naturalise karma to character virtues and vices, and whether and how right action is to be understood within a Buddhist framework. (shrink)

According to Michael Zimmerman, no interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal captures a significant truth. He raises several worries about the Strawsonian view that moral responsibility consists in susceptibility to the reactive attitudes and claims that this view at best supports only an etiolated interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. He outlines three problems. First, the existence of self-reactive attitudes may be incompatible with the interpersonal nature (...) of moral responsibility. Secondly, Zimmerman questions the significance of the interpersonal nature of moral responsibility, according to the Strawsonian view. Thirdly, he argues that that view may be taken to suggest the wrong kind of priority relation between ‘P is morally responsible’ and ‘it is appropriate to adopt some reactive attitude toward P’. I discuss each of these problems in turn and conclude that Strawsonians can respond to all three problems raised by Zimmerman. The Strawsonian view supports a significant interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. (shrink)

I argue that we are sometimes morally responsible for having and using (or not using) our concepts, despite the fact that we generally do not choose to have them or have full or direct voluntary control over how we use them. I do so by extending an argument of Angela Smith's; the same features that she says make us morally responsible for some of our attitudes also make us morally responsible for some of our concepts. Specifically, like attitudes, concepts can (...) be (a) conceptually and rationally connected to our evaluative judgments, (b) in principle subject to rational revision (reasons‐responsive), and (c) the basis for actual and potential moral assessments of people that we have good reasons to endorse. Thus, we are open to moral appraisal on the basis of having and using (or not using) our concepts when they reflect our evaluative judgments, though even then it is not always appropriate to praise or blame us on that basis. (shrink)

Michael Zimmerman has recently argued against the twofold Strawsonian claim that there can be no moral responsibility without a moral community and that, as a result, moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. I offered a number of objections to Zimmerman’s view, to which Zimmerman responded. In this article, I respond to Zimmerman’s responses to my criticisms.

In recent years, philosopher Jeff McMahan has solidified an influential view that moral desert is irrelevant to the ethics of self-defense. This work aims to criticize this view by demonstrating that there are cases in which moral desert has a niche position in determining whether it may be permissible to kill a person in self- (or other-)defense. This is done by criticizing McMahan’s Responsibility Account of liability as being overly punitive against minimally responsible threateners (MRTs), and by (...) demonstrating, through reference to Saba Bazargan’s Hybrid Account of liability to defensive harm, that further justification than mere liability is necessary in the justification of killing these kinds of threateners. It is also argued that other kinds of justifications like lesser-evil justifications are not necessarily strong enough to justify killing MRTs, even on top of established liability. This paper puts forward the view that, where a strong enough moral difference between threatener and innocent victim cannot be established, a justification on the basis of the implications of prior moral acts might, on some occasions, give us reasons to kill or not kill MRTs in self-defense. (shrink)

Most philosophers who study moral responsibility have done so in isolation of the concept of truth. Here, I show that thinking about the nature of truth has profound consequences for discussions of moral responsibility. In particular, by focusing on the very trivial nature of truth—that truth depends on the world and not the other way around—we can see that widely accepted counterexamples to one of the most influential incompatibilist arguments can be shown not only to be (...) false, but also impossible. (shrink)

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

Moral response-dependent metaethical theories characterize moral properties in terms of the reactions of certain classes of individuals. Nick Zangwill has argued that such theories are flawed: they are unable to accommodate the motive of duty. That is, they are unable to provide a suitable reason for anyone to perform morally right actions simply because they are morally right. I argue that Zangwill ignores significant differences between various approvals, and various individuals, and that moral response-dependent theories can accommodate (...) the motive of duty. (shrink)

It is widely thought that, to be morally responsible for some action or omission, an agent must have had, at the very least, the general ability to do otherwise. As we argue, however, there are counterexamples to the claim that moral responsibility requires the general ability to do otherwise. We present several cases in which agents lack the general ability to do otherwise and yet are intuitively morally responsible for what they do, and we argue that such cases (...) raise problems for various kinds of accounts of moral responsibility. We suggest two alternative approaches to thinking about the connection between moral responsibility and abilities to do otherwise, one of which denies that there is any ability-to-do-otherwise requirement on moral responsibility and the other of which requires only an opportunity to do otherwise. We also argue that a general-ability-to-do-otherwise requirement not only faces counterexamples but also lacks positive motivation. (shrink)

This book explores a universal question of human social order: Under what circumstances and to what extent is the individual to be held morally responsible for collective events? This question reaches far beyond the intentions and actions of a particular business enterprise, state or a similar large-scale collective. The philosopher Wolfgang Sohst (Berlin, Germany) investigates the subject with unprecedented thoroughness, covering the whole range of contemporary discussion on this subject. He provides a detailed analysis of the functions of individual members (...) in such a collective, the structural prerequisites for them to be held responsible for acts which they have not directly committed themselves and the transmission of responsibility even to successor generations of the perpetrators collective. -/- Table of contents: -/- Introduction 1 Actors and Moral Action 1.1 On the concepts of actors and action 1.2 The simultaneous emergence of actor and action 1.3 The difference between a unit of event and a unit of action 1.4 The difference between legal and moral responsible action -/- 2 The Continuum Between Individual and Corporate Actor 2.1 The relationship between a single human actor and a corporate actor 2.1.1 The primary responsibility of the individual actor and the ontological status of the collective 2.1.2 Additional arguments for putting collective responsibility onto the individual actor 2.2 The levels within structural consolidation 2.3 A different schematic view: Community, Society, State 2.4 Direct vs. organized sociality 2.5 Conflicts of application in assigning collective responsibility -/- 3 Individual and Collective Actions 3.1 A better form of social reductionism 3.2 Corporate bodies as a bundle of agency relationships 3.3 The horizon of view for collective social phenomena -/- 4 The Corporate Entity as a Moral Subject 4.1 Are corporate actors also morally responsible? 4.2 Corporate bodies as norm subjects -/- 5 Possible criteria for the moral qualification of collective action 5.1 Membership in a group 5.2 Success of an action 5.3 Shared intentionality or purpose, common interests and common consciousness 5.4 Social relationships between actors as a condition of collective action 5.5 Subjective and factual feelings of collective responsibility 5.6 The community of shared values 5.7 Social identity 5.8 Origin and ethnic belonging 5.9 No equality in injustice -/- 6 Norm-based and Purpose-oriented Organization 6.1 No collective responsibility without inner organization 6.2 Collective shame as an indication of collective responsibility 6.3 Individual responsibility for collective norms 6.4 The collective organization as an independent unit of purpose for the collective 6.4.1 The actualistic perspective 6.4.2 Structural persistence 6.4.3 Possible counter-examples of structural persistence 6.5 The other side of collective responsibility 6.6 Interim Result -/- 7 Moral Responsibility of the Individual from an International Perspective -/- 8 Social Norms and Our Responsibility for their Fulfillment 8.1 Norm dimensions 8.2 The overarching importance of norm ranking in assigning collective moral responsibility 8.3 Private and public norms 8.4 Subjective ‘ought’ and personal responsibility 8.5 The obligation to morally acceptable and coherent behavior -/- 9 The Difference between Culpability and Responsibility 10 The Temporal Horizon of Collective Moral Responsibility Index Bibliography. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a version of compatibilism against luck-related objections. After introducing the types of luck that some take to be problematic for moral responsibility, I consider and respond to two recent attempts to show that compatibilism faces the same problem of luck that libertarianism faces—present luck. I then consider a different type of luck—constitutive luck—and provide a new solution to this problem. One upshot of the present discussion is a reason to prefer a history-sensitive compatibilist (...) account over a purely nonhistorical structuralist account. (shrink)

This paper is a critical comment on an article of David Widerker which also appeared in the Journal of Philosophy. In this article, Wideker held, against positions previously defended by him, that in was possible to design effective counterexamples, in the line initiated by Harry Frankfurt in 1969, to the so-called “Principle of Alternative Possibilities”. The core of my criticism of Widerker is to deny that agents, in his putative counterexamples, are morally responsible for their decisions, owing to the fact (...) they are not able to respond appropriately to moral reasons. (shrink)

In The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility (2015), Bruce Waller sets out to explain why the belief in individual moral responsibility is so strong. He begins by pointing out that there is a strange disconnect between the strength of philosophical arguments in support of moral responsibility and the strength of philosophical belief in moral responsibility. While the many arguments in favor of moral responsibility are inventive, subtle, and fascinating, Waller points (...) out that even the most ardent supporters of moral responsibility acknowledge that the arguments in its favor are far from conclusive; and some of the least confident concerning the arguments for moral responsibility—such as Van Inwagen—are most confident of the truth of moral responsibility. Thus, argues Waller, whatever the verdict on the strength of philosophical arguments for moral responsibility, it is clear that belief in moral responsibility—whether among philosophers or the folk—is based on something other than philosophical reasons. -/- He goes on to argue that there are several sources for the strong belief in moral responsibility, but the following four are particularly influential: First, moral responsibility is based in a powerful “strike back” emotion that we share with other animals. Second, there is a deep-rooted “belief in a just world”—a belief that, according to Waller, most philosophers reject when they consciously consider it, but which has a deep nonconscious influence on what we regard as just treatment and which provides subtle (but mistaken) support for belief in moral responsibility. Third, there is a pervasive moral responsibility system—extending over criminal justice as well as “common sense”—that makes the truth of moral responsibility seem obvious, and makes challenges to moral responsibility seem incoherent. Finally, there is the enormous confidence we have in the power of reason, which mistakenly leads us to believe that our conscious, rational, and critically reflective selves are constantly guiding our behavior in accordance with our deep values. -/- In these comments, I would like to discuss the many points of agreement I have with Waller, providing along the way additional fuel for his skeptical fire (i.e., his moral responsibility skepticism and his skeptical analysis of the source of our strong belief in moral responsibility). I will also discuss, however, my one main point of disagreement—i.e., his desire to preserve the conception of free will. Waller believes free will can “flourish” in the absence of moral responsibility (see Ch.8), while I maintain they that the variety of free will that is of central philosophical and practical importance is the sort required for moral responsibility in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense of moral responsibility is set apart by the notion of basic desert and is purely backward-looking and non-consequentialist (see Pereboom 2001, 2014; Caruso and Morris, forthcoming). Understood this way, the sort of free will at issue in the historical debate is a kind of power or ability an agent must possess in order to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatments in response to decisions or actions that the agent performed or failed to perform. (shrink)

Proponents of manipulation arguments against compatibilism hold that manipulation scope (how many agents are manipulated) and manipulation type (whether the manipulator intends that an agent perform a particular action) do not impact judgments about free will and moral responsibility. Many opponents of manipulation arguments agree that manipulation scope has no impact but hold that manipulation type does. Recent work by Latham and Tierney (2021, 2022) found that people’s judgments were sensitive to manipulation scope: people judged that an agent (...) was less free and responsible when a manipulation was existential (impacting at least one but not all agents) than when the manipulation was universal (impacting every agent). This study examines people’s judgements about existential and universal manipulation cases that involve both intentional and non-intentional outcomes. We found that manipulation scope also affects people’s free will and responsibility judgments in manipulation cases involving both intentional and non-intentional outcomes. Interestingly, we also found that manipulation type influences the effect that manipulation scope has on people’s free will judgments but not their moral responsibility judgments, which indicates that people’s free will and responsibility judgments can come apart. This puts pressure on the prevalent assumption that judgments about free will and moral responsibility are conceptually bound together. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: 1. This paper argues that Epicurus had a notion of moral responsibility based on the agent’s causal responsibility, as opposed to the agent’s ability to act or choose otherwise; that Epicurus considered it a necessary condition for praising or blaming an agent for an action, that it was the agent and not something else that brought the action about. Thus, the central question of moral responsibility was whether the agent was the, or a, cause (...) of the action, or whether the agent was forced to act by something else. Actions could be attributed to agents because it is in their actions that the agents, qua moral beings, manifest themselves. 2. As a result, the question of moral development becomes all important. The paper collects and discusses the evidence for Epicurus views on moral development, i.e. (i) on how humans become moral beings and (ii) on how humans can become morally better. It becomes clear that Epicurus envisaged a complex web of hereditary and environmental factors to shape the moral aspect of a human being. 3. In line with Epicurus’ theory of moral responsibility and moral development, Epicurus ethics does not have the function of developing or justifying a moral system that allows for the effective allocation of praise and blame. Rather, for him the function of ethics – and in fact of the whole of philosophy – is to give everyone a chance to morally improve. (shrink)

In the paper, I try to cast some doubt on traditional attempts to define, or explicate, moral responsibility in terms of deserved praise and blame. Desert-based accounts of moral responsibility, though no doubt more faithful to our ordinary notion of moral responsibility, tend to run into trouble in the face of challenges posed by a deterministic picture of the world on the one hand and the impact of moral luck on human action on (...) the other. Besides, grounding responsibility in desert seems to support ascriptions of pathological blame to agents trapped in moral dilemmas as well as of excess blame in cases of joint action. Desert is also notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to determine (at least with sufficient precision). And, finally, though not least important, recent empirical research on people’s responsibility judgments reveals our common-sense notion of responsibility to be hopelessly confused and easily manipulated. So it may be time to rethink our inherited theory and practice of moral responsibility. Our theoretical and practical needs may be better served by a less intractable, more forward-looking notion of responsibility. The aim of the paper is to contrast the predominant, desert-based accounts of moral responsibility with their rather unpopular rival, the consequence- based accounts, and then show that the latter deserve more consideration than usually granted by their opponents. In the course of doing so, I assess, and ultimately reject, a number of objections that have been raised against consequentialist accounts of moral responsibility: that it (i) doesn’t do justice to our common-sense theory and practice of responsibility; (ii) ties responsibility too closely to influenceability, thereby exposing itself to the charge of counter-intuitivity; (iii) assigns undeserved responsibility (praise, blame) to agents; (iv) confuses ‘being responsible’ with ‘holding responsible’‚ and (v) provides the wrong-kind-of-reason for praise and blame. My negative and positive case may not add up to a knockdown argument in favor of revising our ordinary notion of responsibility. As long as the considerations adduced succeed in presenting the consequentialist alternative as a serious contender to a pre-arranged marriage between moral responsibility and desert, however, I’m happy to rest my case. (shrink)

Working out a Kantian theory of moral responsibility for animals2 requires the untying of two philosophical and interpretive knots: i.) How to interpret Kant’s claim in the important “episodic” section of the Doctrine of Virtue that we do not have duties “to” animals, since such duties are only “with regard to” animals and “directly to” ourselves; and ii.) How to explain why animals don’t have rights, while human beings who (currently or permanently) don’t have sufficient reason for (...) class='Hi'>moral responsibility do have rights. At the heart of the problem lies the philosophical challenge of whether a Kantian account of moral responsibility for animals can take the animals themselves into account in the right way, that is, without utilizing arguments that (wrongly) presuppose that non-human animals are moral agents or can be morally responsible for their actions. The task of untying these two knots is the aim of this chapter. I start by defending Kant’s general claim that our duties regarding animals are not “to” them, but rather “with regard to” them. Relations between human and other animals are not relations between two kinds of moral beings, since animals are not capable of the kind of consciousness, in particular the reflective self-consciousness moral being requires. Instead the more complex human-animal relations are affectionate, social relations to which humans can and sometimes should relate morally. This is why these moral duties are “direct” only to ourselves; we are the only ones in the relations that can be morally responsible for them. Correspondingly, respect (in Kant’s precise sense of the word) is a distinctly reflective, moral emotion internal to the specific normative orientation we have only to beings that can be truly free (reflectively self-conscious), and so, to human beings; morality and respect single out how we regard ourselves and other human beings capable of freedom. As we will see, Kant has a consistent and not counter-intuitive account of why we have the moral attitudes we do about animals and of how it is that these attitudes have the appearance of being about the animals themselves. In addition, Kant can explain why it doesn’t follow from this that these moral attitudes arise from attributing moral rights to the animals themselves. Central to this interpretation is Kant’s Religion, as it contains an account of human nature that adequately explains why we have the positive attitudes we do towards animals; similarly, the Religion contains an account of human evil that explains why we consider other occasions of attitudes towards animals as genuine examples of moral failure. Hence, the Religion is central to understanding why Kant’s approach to animals is neither internally inconsistent nor counter-intuitive. (shrink)

This paper presents a new challenge to the thesis that moral responsibility for an omission requires the ability to do the omitted action, whereas moral responsibility for an action does not require the ability to do otherwise than that action. Call this the asymmetry thesis. The challenge arises from the possibility of cases in which an omission is identical to an action. In certain of such cases, the asymmetry thesis leads to a contradiction. The challenge is (...) then extended to recent variations of the asymmetry thesis defended by John Martin Fischer and Carolina Sartorio. Finally, a possible objection to the challenge is addressed. (shrink)

Different societies came to consider certain behaviors as morally wrong, and, in time, due to a more or less general practice, those behaviors have also become legally prohibited. While, nowadays, the existence of legal responsibility of states and individuals for certain reprehensible acts committed during an armed conflict, international or non-international, is hard to be disputed, an inquiry into the manner in which the behavior of the belligerents has come to be considered reveals long discussions in the field of (...) morals and theory of morality, and, especially, regarding the different manner of establishing the elements to whom obedience is rather owed (the divinity, the sovereign, the law) and the relations between these. Hence, the present paper aims at analyzing the connections between moral responsibility and legal responsibility for wrongful behaviur during war in a diachronic approach, along with the major shifts in paradigm (codification and individual liability). Understanding morality as practice, convention, custom, we are arguing that the nowadays requirement of liability for war crimes appeared due to an assumed intention and practice of the decision-making entities (the sovereign, the state) and, ultimately, to a decision-making process of the most influential states. (shrink)

In Fredericks (2018b), I argued that we can be morally responsible for our concepts if they are mental representations. Here, I make a complementary argument for the claim that even if concepts are abstract objects, we can be morally responsible for coming to grasp and for thinking (or not thinking) in terms of them. As before, I take for granted Angela Smith's (2005) rational relations account of moral responsibility, though I think the same conclusion follows from various other (...) accounts. My strategy is to focus on the relations that can obtain between concepts (understood as abstract objects) and morally responsible agents. I conclude by discussing some of the reasons why my arguments matter, which have to do with consequential choices between conceptual options, purposefully seeking out concepts that are new to us, and moral education. (shrink)

The autors focuse on the problem of moral responsibility in H. Jonas' ethics of social consequences. While by Jonas the attention is paid mainly to global moral responsibility, in the consequentialist ethics the individual, and social levels of moral responsibility of moral subject are intertwinned.

In this paper, we do three things. First, we put forth a novel hypothesis about judgments of moral responsibility according to which such judgments are a species of explanatory judgments. Second, we argue that this hypothesis explains both some general features of everyday thinking about responsibility and the appeal of skeptical arguments against moral responsibility. Finally, we argue that, if correct, the hypothesis provides a defense against these skeptical arguments.

Addressing concerns about the treatment of psychopaths, Grant Gillett and Flora Huang (2013) argue that we ought to accept a relational or holistic view of psychopathy and APSD rather than the default biomedical-deficit model since the latter “obscures moral truths about the psychopath”. This change in approach to the psychopath will both mitigate at least some of their moral responsibility for the harms they cause, and force communities to incur special obligations, so they claim, because the harms (...) endured by psychopaths will be understood as part of the cause for the harms they are guilty of committing. However, as I will argue, even if we accept that a relational or holistic approach is better suited to understand psychopathy (which is itself contentious), it does not follow that their responsibility is mitigated in a way that causes communities to have special obligations to them as Gillett and Huang suggest. A diagnosis of APSD or psychopathy does not, prima facie, exculpate an agent or suggest a different way of treating them. My discussion will focus on the widely accepted excusing conditions one must meet for responsibility to me mitigated and conclude, contra Gillett and Huang, that psychopaths are no different from you or I with regards to having a causal history that leads to action. Outside forces play a role in all of our behavior. If the psychopath is owed anything because of the way they have come to understand the world then we all are owed that same debt. (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. (shrink)

It has often been argued that Hannah Arendt ‘let off’ Eichmann through her concept of the banality of evil. In this paper I argue, through revisiting and modifying the concept of the banality of evil, that we can reject such criticism. That is, by judging that a perpetrator, like Eichmann, commits evil banally in no way undermines the grounds for holding them to be responsible for their actions, but it does help us to understand why such perpetrators act as they (...) do and to teach us how we might prevent such evil from occurring again. (shrink)

This Element examines the concept of moral responsibility as it is used in contemporary philosophical debates and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with it, including moral praise/blame, retributive punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. After identifying and discussing several different varieties of responsibility-including causal responsibility, take-charge responsibility, role responsibility, liability responsibility, and the kinds of responsibility associated with attributability, answerability, and accountability-it distinguishes between basic (...) and non-basic desert conceptions of moral responsibility and considers a number of skeptical arguments against each. It then outlines an alternative forward-looking account of moral responsibility grounded in non-desert-invoking desiderata such as protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. It concludes by addressing concerns about the practical implications of skepticism about desert-based moral responsibility and explains how optimistic skeptics can preserve most of what we care about when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, morality, and meaning in life. (shrink)

Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious, ‘introspectively inaccessible’ attitudes. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence of partial awareness for individuals’ moral responsibility. First, I argue that responsibility comes in degrees. Second, I argue that individuals’ partial awareness of their (...) implicit biases makes them (partially) morally responsible for them. I argue by analogy to a close relative of implicit bias: moods. (shrink)

The Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) states that polluters should bear the burdens as- sociated with their pollution. This principle has been highly contested because of the pu- tative impossibility of considering individuals morally responsible for an important amount of their emissions. For the PPP faces the so-called excusable ignorance objec- tion, which states that polluters were for a long time non-negligently ignorant about the negative consequences of greenhouse gas emissions and, thus, cannot be considered morally responsible for their negative consequences. (...) This paper focuses on the concept of moral responsibility as it appears in the excusable ignorance objection. I claim that this objection stems from a narrow notion of moral responsibility and that a more fundamen- tal notion of moral responsibility would pave the way to overcome it. I show that it should be out of the question whether historical polluters should bear some burdens asso- ciated with climate change because of their historical emissions. The relevant question is which kind of burdens they can legitimately be asked to bear. I argue that this notion of moral responsibility allows us to assign burdens of symbolic reparation, which are at the core of ‘Loss and Damage’ policies. (shrink)

Every account of moral responsibility has conditions that distinguish between the consequences, actions, or traits that warrant praise or blame and those that do not. One intuitive condition is that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness cannot be affected by luck, that is, by factors beyond the agent’s control. Several philosophers build their accounts of moral responsibility on this luck-free condition, and we may call their views Luck-Free Moral Responsibility (LFMR). I offer moral and metaphysical arguments (...) against LFMR. First, I maintain that considerations of fairness that often motivate LFMR do not require its adoption. Second, I contend that LFMR has counterintuitive implications for the nature and scope of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and that LFMR is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum. Third, I state some common reasons for thinking that LFMR’s commitment to true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom is problematic, and I argue that if there are no such true counterfactuals and if LFMR is true, a person is praiseworthy and blameworthy at most for a tiny fraction of her actions. Fourth, I argue that proponents of LFMR cannot escape this skeptical cost by appealing to a different kind of counterfactual of freedom. Fifth, I develop an anti-skeptical motivation to affirm the idea that luck can affect moral responsibility. (shrink)

Does a diagnosis of brain dysfunction matter for ascriptions of moral responsibility? This chapter argues that, while knowledge of brain pathology can inform judgments of moral responsibility, its evidential value is currently limited for a number of practical and theoretical reasons. These include the problem of establishing causation from correlational data, drawing inferences about individuals from group data, and the reliance of the interpretation of brain findings on well-established psychological findings. Brain disorders sometimes matter for (...) class='Hi'>moral responsibility, however, because they change an individual’s moral psychology in a way that is beyond their control. While control over psychological changes is not an excusing factor, brain disorders can mitigate moral responsibility because they confront individuals with new psychological deficits or urges for which their previous moral education and existing external and internal moral resources have not prepared them. (shrink)

This paper introduces a new theory of moral responsibility that does not rely on any concept of human control. Since an understanding of determinism shapes the possible set of views one can take regarding control, and there is no account of control that could be held simultaneously by both compatibilists and libertarians, the “relational theory of responsibility” is meant to create a common ground between compatibilism and libertarianism which are held to be mutually exclusive. Since the relational (...) account of responsibility is to be a common ground, it must be neutral regarding the truth of determinism and indeterminism. Thus, it must also be indifferent concerning different concepts of control formed by compatibilists and libertarians. I argue that my view can be accepted by both compatibilists and incompatibilists. It makes the claim that, in order for a person to be responsible, she has to act in a certain type of situation that needs to be such that there is at least one relevantly similar situation in which the agent refrains from performing the action that was executed in the original case. A person cannot be held responsible for doing what she does if no person refrains from performing that action in a relevantly similar situation. I claim that the relational theory of responsibility itself is sufficient for grounding responsibility. Since the relational account expresses responsibility without relying on any concept of control, a choice between determinism and indeterminism does not have to be made in order to establish a proper concept of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Many important theorists – e.g., Gary Watson and Stephen Darwall – characterize blame as a communicative entity and argue that this entails that morally responsible agency requires not just rational but moral competence. In this paper, I defend this argument from communication against three objections found in the literature. The first two reject the argument’s characterization of the reactive attitudes. The third urges that the argument is committed to a false claim.

In this paper, I consider a novel challenge to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. According to their view, agents possess the control necessary for moral responsibility if their actions proceed from a mechanism that is moderately reasons-responsive. I argue that their account of moderate reasons-responsiveness fails to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for moral responsibility since it cannot give an adequate account of the responsibility of individuals with (...) autism spectrum disorder. Empirical evidence suggests that autistic individuals demonstrate impairments in counterfactual thinking, and these impairments, I argue, are such that they cast doubt on Fischer and Ravizza’s construal of moderate reasons-responsiveness. I then argue that modifying the view in order to accommodate individuals with ASD forces them to defend a strong reasons-responsive account despite the fact that they explicitly deny that such an account can adequately characterize what it is to be morally responsible for one’s actions. (shrink)

Is moral responsibility essentially historical, or does an agent’s moral responsibility for an action depend only on their psychological structure at that time? In previous work, I have argued that the two main (non-skeptical) views on moral responsibility and agents’ histories—historicism and standard structuralism—are vulnerable to objections that are avoided by a third option, namely history-sensitive structuralism. In this paper, I develop this view in greater detail and evaluate the view by comparing it with (...) its three dialectical rivals: skepticism about moral responsibility, historicism, and standard structuralism. Each comparison includes discussion of new work on moral responsibility and agents’ histories, and along the way I offer new arguments for preferring history-sensitive structuralism, paying special attention to the view’s explanatory power. (shrink)

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

Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes biased to give compatibilist answers by emotional reactions. To test for this (...) hypothesis, we investigated intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility in patients suffering from behavioural frontotemporal dementia. Patients suffering from bvFTD have impoverished emotional reaction. Thus, the ‘performance error model’ should predict that bvFTD patients will give less compatibilist answers. However, we found that bvFTD patients give answers quite similar to subjects in control group and were mostly compatibilist. Thus, we conclude that the ‘performance error model’ should be abandoned in favour of other available model that best fit our data. (shrink)

Judging a person as morally responsible involves believing that certain responses (such as punishment, reward, or expressions of blame or praise) can be justifiably directed at the person. This paper develops an account of the evolution of moral responsibility judgment that adopts Michael Tomasello’s two-step theory of the evolution of morality and borrows also from Christopher Boehm’s work. The main hypothesis defended is that moral responsibility judgment originally evolved as an adaptation that enabled groups of cooperative (...) individuals to hold free riders responsible more safely by acting in a coordinated way. (shrink)

Perhaps no one has written more extensively, more deeply, and more insightfully about determinism and freedom than Ted Honderich. His influence and legacy with regard to the problem of free will—or the determinism problem, as he prefers to frame it—looms large. In these comments I would like to focus on three main aspects of Honderich ’s work: his defense of determinism and its consequences for origination and moral responsibility; his concern that the truth of determinism threatens and restricts, (...) but does not eliminate, our life-hopes; and his attack on the traditional justifications for punishment. In many ways, I see my own defense of free will skepticism as the natural successor to Honderich ’s work. There are, however, some small differences between us. My goal in this paper is to clarify our areas of agreement and disagreement and to acknowledge my enormous debt to Ted. If I can also move him toward my own more optimistic brand of free will skepticism that would be great too. (shrink)

D. Justin Coates argues that, in ‘Freedom and Resentment’, P. F. Strawson develops a modest transcendental argument for the legitimacy of our moral responsibility practices. I disagree with Coates’ claim that Strawson’s argument provides a justification, in Wittgenstein’s and/or Strawson’s sense of that term, of our responsibility practices. I argue that my interpretation of Strawson solves some difficulties with Coates’ argument, while retaining its advantages.

Online service providers —such as AOL, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter—significantly shape the informational environment and influence users’ experiences and interactions within it. There is a general agreement on the centrality of OSPs in information societies, but little consensus about what principles should shape their moral responsibilities and practices. In this article, we analyse the main contributions to the debate on the moral responsibilities of OSPs. By endorsing the method of the levels of abstract, we first analyse the (...) moral responsibilities of OSPs in the web. These concern the management of online information, which includes information filtering, Internet censorship, the circulation of harmful content, and the implementation and fostering of human rights. We then consider the moral responsibilities ascribed to OSPs on the web and focus on the existing legal regulation of access to users’ data. The overall analysis provides an overview of the current state of the debate and highlights two main results. First, topics related to OSPs’ public role—especially their gatekeeping function, their corporate social responsibilities, and their role in implementing and fostering human rights—have acquired increasing relevance in the specialised literature. Second, there is a lack of an ethical framework that can define OSPs’ responsibilities, and provide the fundamental sharable principles necessary to guide OSPs’ conduct within the multicultural and international context in which they operate. This article contributes to the ethical framework necessary to deal with and by endorsing a LoA enabling the definition of the responsibilities of OSPs with respect to the well-being of the infosphere and of the entities inhabiting it. (shrink)