Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility argues that the normative basis of moral responsibility is anchored in the effects of responsibility practices. Further, the capacities required for moral responsibility are socially scaffolded. This article considers criticisms of this account that have been recently raised by John Doris, Victoria McGeer, and Michael Robinson. Robinson argues against Building Better Beings’s rejection of libertarianism about free will, and the account of desert at stake in the theory. considers methodological questions that arise (...) from the account of desert, providing some additional resources for thinking about these issues within the framework of the account. McGeer objects to the particular mode of justification used to motivate the prescriptive aspect of the account. This article presents replies to each of these lines of response. (shrink)

The idea of moral responsibility is central to a wide range of our moral, social, and legal practices, and it underpins our basic notion of culpability. Yet the idea of moral responsibility is increasingly viewed with skepticism by researchers and scholars in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the law. Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility responds to these challenges, offering a new account of the justification of our practices and judgments of moral responsibility. Three distinctive ideas shape the account. (...) The first is the agency cultivation model, which holds that a system of responsibility practices can derive its justification from the way it supports our agency. The second idea, circumstantialism, is a new way of thinking about agential capacities. This is the view that the capacities required for moral responsibility are functions of agents in circumstances, rather than basic features of agents considered in themselves. The third idea is revisionism, or the idea that a satisfactory theory of moral responsibility will conflict with some aspects of ordinary commitments about freedom and moral responsibility. (shrink)

There are two standard theoretical responses to putative errors in ordinary thinking about some given target property: eliminativism or revisionism. Roughly, eliminativism is the denial that the target property exists, and revisionism is the view that the property exists, but that people tend to have false beliefs about it. Recently, Shaun Nichols has proposed a third option: discretionism. Discretionism is the idea that some terms have multiple reference conventions, so that it may be true to say with eliminativists that the (...) property does not exist, and true to say with revisionists that the property does exist. This article explores the viability of discretionism, and argues that it faces serious difficulties. Even if the difficulties faced by discretionism can be overcome, it is unclear that discretionism secures anything beyond what is already available to standard revisionist views. The article concludes with some reflections about Nichols’ account of the bare retributive norm. (shrink)

Both legal and moral theorists have offered broadly “communicative” theories of criminal and moral responsibility. According to such accounts, we can understand the nature of responsibility by appealing to the idea that responsibility practices are in some fundamental sense expressive, discursive, or communicative. In this essay, I consider a variety of issues in connections with this family of views, including its relationship to free will, the theory of exemptions, and potential alternatives to the communicative model. Focusing on Michael McKenna’s Conversation (...) and Responsibility, I argue that communicative accounts, and the conversational model in particular, direct our attention to important and under-appreciated elements of our responsibility practices. However, rather than focusing on a model of conversation-as-address, as McKenna does, we do better to regard gossip as the paradigmatic conversational form that captures the main features of moral responsibility. (shrink)

It is sometimes instructive to reflect on a problem as it appeared before our current philosophical presumptions became ingrained. In this context, Maurice Mandelbaum’s “Determinism and Moral Responsibility” is of particular interest. Published in 1960, it appeared only a few years before the wave of work that gave us much of our contemporary understanding of moral responsibility, free will, and determinism. Mandelbaum’s account repays reconsideration. Mandelbaum argues that (1) there is an underappreciated threat to “determinist” or compatibilist accounts of responsibility, (...) and (2) this threat can be met with a suitable compatibilist account of the etiology of action. (shrink)

Revisionism in the theory of moral responsibility is, roughly, the idea that some aspect of our responsibility practices, attitudes, or concept is in need of revision. In this paper, I argue that (1) in spite of being an increasingly prevalent thread in discussions of moral responsibility, revisionism is poorly understood, (2) the limited critical discussion there has been of it does not reflect the complexities and nuances of revisionist theories, and (3) at least one species of revisionismmoderate revisionism- has some (...) advantages over conventional compatibilist and incompatibilist theories. If I am right, one result is that the outcome of prominent debates about the compatibility (or not) of determinism and our commonsense thinking about moral responsibility may be less crucial than they seem. (shrink)

Recent years have seen recurring episodes of tension between proponents of freedom of speech and advocates of the disenfranchised. Recent survey research attests to the ideological division in attitudes toward free speech, whereby conservatives report greater support for free speech than progressives do. Intrigued by the question of whether “canceling” is indeed a uniquely progressive tendency, we conducted a vignette-based experiment examining judgments of offensiveness among progressives and conservatives. Contrary to the dominant portrayal of progressives and conservatives, our study documented (...) ideological symmetry in their evaluations of offensive speech. When faced with utterances whose content matters to them, both conservatives and progressives viewed outgroup speakers as more offensive than ingroup speakers. A second contribution of this chapter is to provide a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanism implicated in evaluating outgroup speech as more offensive than ingroup speech. Our results suggest that perception of offensiveness is mediated by ascriptions of intent: we tend to attribute negative intent to the speaker whenever we deem their utterances to be offensive, even against the explicitly stated speaker’s background attitudes. (shrink)

Compatibilists about determinism and moral responsibility disagree with one another about the bearing of agents’ histories on whether or not they are morally responsible for some of their actions. Some stories about manipulated agents prompt such disagreements. In this article, I call attention to some of the main features of my own “history-sensitive” compatibilist proposal about moral responsibility, and I argue that arguments advanced by Michael McKenna and Manuel Vargas leave that proposal unscathed.

A pair of compatibilists, John Fischer (2012: ch. 6; n.d.) and Manuel Vargas (2012) have responded to a problem about luck that Alfred Mele (2005, 2006) posed for incompatibilist believers in free will and moral responsibility. They offer assistance to libertarians - at least on this front. In this paper, we assess their responses and explain why what they offer is inadequate for libertarian purposes.

The Luck Problem has existed in one form or another since David Hume, at least. It is perhaps as old as Stoic objections to the Epicurean swerve. Although the general issue admits of different formulations with subtly different emphases, the characterization of it that will serve as my target focuses on “cross-worlds” luck, a kind of luck that arises when the decision-making of agents is indeterministic.

A satisfactory construal of the subject matter of free will debates must allow for disagreements along two axes. First, it must allow for the possibility of higher order disagreements, or disagreements about what concepts, phenomena, or practices an account of free will is supposed to capture or explain. Second, it must allow for the fact of variation in the extent to which theories are bound by antecedent pre-philosophical thought, talk, and practices. A promising way of accommodating these two thoughts is (...) to treat free will in broadly functionalist terms. On the account proposed here, free will is a power that makes sense of everyday responsibility practices. This construal is not widely shared, but it allows for the possibility that we might have false beliefs about the nature of free will, while still making sense of central philosophical debates about free will. (shrink)

Nomy Arpaly rejects the model of rationality used by most ethicists and action theorists. Both observation and psychology indicate that people act rationally without deliberation, and act irrationally with deliberation. By questioning the notion that our own minds are comprehensible to us--and therefore questioning much of the current work of action theorists and ethicists--Arpaly attempts to develop a more realistic conception of moral agency.

As the world keeps advancing, the need for automated interconnected devices has started to gain significance; to cater to the condition, a new concept Internet of Things has been introduced that revolves around smart devicesʼ conception. These smart devices using IoT can communicate with each other through a network to attain particular objectives, i.e., automation and intelligent decision making. IoT has enabled the users to divide their household burden with machines as these complex machines look after the environment variables and (...) control their behavior accordingly. As evident, these machines use sensors to collect vital information, which is then the complexity analyzed at a computational node that then smartly controls these devicesʼ operational behaviors. Deep learning-based guessing attack protection algorithms have been enhancing IoT security; however, it still has a critical challenge for the complex industries’ IoT networks. One of the crucial aspects of such systems is the need to have a significant training time for processing a large dataset from the networkʼs previous flow of data. Traditional deep learning approaches include decision trees, logistic regression, and support vector machines. However, it is essential to note that this convenience comes with a price that involves security vulnerabilities as IoT networks are prone to be interfered with by hackers who can access the sensor/communication data and later utilize it for malicious purposes. This paper presents the experimental study of cryptographic algorithms to classify the types of encryption algorithms into the asymmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithm. It presents a deep analysis of AES, DES, 3DES, RSA, and Blowfish based on timing complexity, size, encryption, and decryption performances. It has been assessed in terms of the guessing attack in real-time deep learning complex IoT applications. The assessment has been done using the simulation approach and it has been tested the speed of encryption and decryption of the selected encryption algorithms. For each encryption and decryption, the tests executed the same encryption using the same plaintext for five separate times, and the average time is compared. The key size used for each encryption algorithm is the maximum bytes the cipher can allow. To the comparison, the average time required to compute the algorithm by the three devices is used. For the experimental test, a set of plaintexts is used in the simulation—password-sized text and paragraph-sized text—that achieves target fair results compared to the existing algorithms in real-time deep learning networks for IoT applications. (shrink)

We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control (...) explain culpability for unwitting omissions. (shrink)

Neil Levy (2007) argues that empirical data shows that psychopaths lack the moral knowledge required for moral responsibility. His account is intriguing, and it offers a promising way to think about the significance of psychopaths for work on moral responsibility. In what follows we focus on three lines of concern connected to Levy's account: his interpretation of the data, the scope of exculpation, and the significance of biological explanations for anti-social behavior.

Moral psychology is the study of how human minds make and are made by human morality. This state of the art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha. The volume’s 50 chapters, authored by leading figures in the field, cover foundational topics, such as character, virtue, emotion, moral responsibility, the neuroscience of morality, weakness of will, (...) and the nature of moral judgments and reasons. The volume also canvases emerging work in applied moral psychology, including adaptive preferences, animals, mental illness, poverty, marriage, race, bias, and victim blaming. (shrink)

It is notable that all of the leading theories of blame have to employ ungainly fixes to deflect one or more apparent counterexamples. What these theories share is a content‐based theory of blame's nature. Such approaches overlook or ignore blame's core unifying feature, namely, its function, which is to signal the blamer's commitment to a set of norms. In this paper, we present the problems with the extant theories and then explain what signaling is, how it functions in blame, why (...) appealing to it resolves the problems in other theories, what the signaling function implies for a wider range of gray‐area cases, and what the larger significance is of blame's core function for interpersonal interactions in a variety of (non‐moral) normative domains. (shrink)

Part I: Building blocks. 1. Folk convictions -- 2. Doubts about libertarianism -- 3. Nihilism and revisionism -- 4. Building a better theory -- Part II. A theory of moral responsibility. 5. The primacy of reasons -- 6. Justifying the practice -- 7. Responsible agency -- 8. Blame and desert -- 9. History and manipulation --10. Some conclusions.

Many prominent theories of moral responsibility rely on the notion of “tracing,” the idea that responsibility for an outcome can be located in (i.e., “traced back to”) some prior moment of control, perhaps significantly antecedent to the proximate sources of a considered action. In this article, I show how there is a problem for theories that rely on tracing. The problem is connected to the knowledge condition on moral responsibility. Many prima facie good candidate cases for tracing analyses appear to (...) violate the knowledge condition on moral responsibility. So, either we need to dispense with tracing approaches or we must refine our understanding of the knowledge condition or we are responsible less frequently than we suppose. (shrink)

Many prominent accounts of free will and moral responsibility make use of the idea that agents can be responsive to reasons. Call such theories Reasons accounts. In what follows, I consider the tenability of Reasons accounts in light of situationist social psychology and, to a lesser extent, the automaticity literature. In the first half of this chapter, I argue that Reasons accounts are genuinely threatened by contemporary psychology. In the second half of the paper I consider whether such threats can (...) be met, and at what cost. Ultimately, I argue that Reasons accounts can abandon some familiar assumptions, and that doing so permits us to build a more empirically plausible picture of our agency. (shrink)

Philosophy in the United States continues to be among the least diverse disciplines in the humanities, dominated statistically by white males, with the next largest group being white female philosophers.1 This lack of diversity affects how we define philosophy and who counts as a philosopher. As the editors of The Philosophies of America Reader, Kim Díaz and Mathew A. Foust, put it, "Just as history has fashioned and popularized distorted accounts of the 'discovery' of America, it has done the same (...) in its presentation of American Philosophy" (p. xv). This exemplary collection of essays from across the Americas allows the readers and instructors to reimagine what we construe as philosophy and who we imagine an... Read More. (shrink)

This volume brings together work in free will, ethics, metaethics, feminist theory, disability studies, experimental philosophy, and psychology. The theme for both the workshop and these papers was “Non-Ideal Agency and Responsibility,” and in these essays, our authors take a number of different and creative angles on this theme. Roughly half of the essays fall under the rubric of non-ideal agency. They discuss ways in which our agency is impacted by inherent psychological limitations, by the social contexts in which we (...) act, or by different ways in which our abilities can break down. The other half fall under the rubric of non-ideal responsibility. They discuss both the modes by which we assess imperfect exercises of our agency and the ways in which common forms of assessment are themselves imperfect. (shrink)

Revisionism in the theory of moral responsibility is the idea that some aspect of responsibility practices, attitudes, or concept is in need of revision. While the increased frequency of revisionist language in the literature on free will and moral responsibility is striking, what discussion there has been of revisionism about responsibility and free will tends to be critical. In this paper, I argue that at least one species of revisionism, moderate revisionism, is considerably more sophisticated and defensible than critics have (...) realized. I go on to argue for the advantages of moderate revisionist theories over standard compatibilist and incompatibilist theories. (shrink)

This article summarizes the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to the distinctiveness of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism, and (3) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism about (...) moral responsibility. (shrink)

In mid-twentieth-century Mexican philosophy, there was a peculiar nationalist existentialist project focused on the cultural conditions of agency. This article revisits some of those ideas, including the idea that there is an important but underappreciated experience of one's relationship to norms and social meanings. This experience—something called accidentality—casts new light on various forms of social subordination and socially scaffolded agency, including cultural alienation, biculturality, and double consciousness.

Constitutive instrumentalism is the view that responsibility practices arise from and are justified by our being prosocial creatures who need responsibility practices to secure specific kinds of social goods. In particular, responsibility practices shape agency in ways that disposes adherence to norms that enable goods of shared cooperative life. The mechanics of everyday responsibility practices operate, in part, via costly signaling about the suitability of agents for coordination and cooperation under conditions of shared cooperative life. So, there are a range (...) of identifiable conditions where the ordinary operation of responsibility practices—and thus, the usual normative force of the practices—is disrupted. Even so, these conditions are not so widespread as to favor a more thoroughgoing abandonment of responsibility practices. (shrink)

In recent years, reflection on the relationship between individual moral responsibility and determinism has undergone a remarkable renaissance. Incompatibilists, those who believe moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism, have offered powerful new arguments in support of their views. Compatibilists, those who think moral responsibility is compatible with determinism, have responded with ingenious counterexamples and alternative accounts of responsibility. Despite the admirable elevation of complexity and subtlety within both camps, the trajectory of the literature is somewhat discouraging. Every dialectical stalemate between (...) incompatibilists and compatibilists seems to be superseded by a similar though often more subtle stalemate.1 The stalemates have two sources. On the one hand, incompatibilists again and again find powerful intuitive support from our folk concept. On the other hand, compatibilists seem right to insist that even if determinism were true, this would not mitigate our need for a concept of responsibility. (shrink)

This article summarizes and extends the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to libertarianism based on the moral costs of its current epistemic status, (3) an objection to the distinctiveness (...) of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism and (4) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism about moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this article I propose a resolution to the history issue for responsible agency, given a moderate revisionist approach to responsibility. Roughly, moderate revisionism is the view that a plausible and normatively adequate theory of responsibility will require principled departures from commonsense thinking. The history issue is whether morally responsible agency – that is, whether an agent is an apt target of our responsibility-characteristic practices and attitudes – is an essentially historical notion. Some have maintained that responsible agents must have (...) particular sorts of histories, others have argued that no such history is required. Resolution of this contentious issue is connected to a wide range of concerns, including the significance and culpability of different forms of manipulation, the plausibility of important incompatibilist criticisms of compatibilism, and of course, a satisfactory account of moral responsibility. As it turns out, history matters sometimes, but less frequently than we might think. (shrink)

This article identifies a novel challenge to standard understandings of responsibility practices, animated by experimental studies of biases and heuristics. It goes on to argue that this challenge illustrates a general methodological challenge for theorizing about responsibility. That is, it is difficult for a theory to give us both guidance in real world contexts and an account of the metaphysical and normative foundations of responsibility without treating wide swaths of ordinary practice as defective. The general upshot is that theories must (...) either hew more closely to actual practice than they appear to, or they must provide some normative foundation for responsibility that does not go through actual practice. (shrink)

Explicitly fictional armchair reconstructions of the past are sometimes taken to be informative about philosophical issues. What appeal a counterfactual genealogy has depends on its speculative accuracy, that is, its accuracy in identifying relevant causal, functional, or explanatory particulars. However, even when speculatively accurate, counterfactual genealogies rarely secure more than proofs of possibility. For more ambitious deployments of genealogy – for example, efforts to show what properties the target concept in fact predicates – genealogies are hamstrung by the possibility of (...) predicative drift, or changes over time in what the concept predicates. Still, even when counterfactual genealogies fail to tell us about our current practices or concepts, they may identify appealing successors. Pettit's (2018 Pettit, Philip. 2018. The Birth of Ethics: Reconstructing the Role and Nature of Morality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar]) innovative defense of moral realism and his employment of a counterfactual genealogy provides an illuminating instance of the promise and challenges facing accounts employing counterfactual genealogies. (shrink)

I discuss experimental work by Nichols, and Nichols and Knobe, with respect to the philosophical problems of free will and moral responsibility. I mention some methodological concerns about the work, but focus principally on the philosophical implications of the work. The experimental results seem to show that in particular, concrete cases we are more willing to attribute responsibility than in cases described abstractly or in general terms. I argue that their results suggest a deep problem for traditional accounts of compatibilism, (...) and that they may cast some light on the literature surrounding Frankfurt cases. I also suggest a way in which mature philosophical convictions about free will may reflect a contingent process of refining and defending either of two competing strands of intuitions, and suggest that this may partly explain the persistence of philosophical debates about free will. (shrink)

This paper outlines one way of thinking about the problem of free will, some general reasons for dissatisfactions with traditional approaches to solving it, and some considerations in favor of pursuing a broadly revisionist solution to it. If you are looking for a student-friendly introduction to revisionist theorizing about free will, this is probably the thing to look at.

In this paper I criticize libertarianism and skepticism about free will. The criticism of libertarianism takes some steps towards filling in an argument that is often mentioned but seldom developed in any detail, the argument that libertarianism is a scientifically implausible view. I say "take some steps" because I think the considerations I muster (at most) favor a less ambitious relative of that argument. The less ambitious claim I hope to motivate is that there is little reason to believe that (...) extant libertarian accounts satisfy a standard of naturalistic plausibility, even if they do satisfy a standard of naturalistic compatibility. The argument against skepticism about free will tries to show (1) perhaps the most prominent form of skeptical argument against the existence of free will does not work, and (2) there is a good general argument against skepticism about free will. (shrink)

The present chapter is concerned with revisionism about free will. It begins by offering a new characterization of revisionist accounts and the way such accounts fit (or do not) in the familiar framework of compatibilism and incompatibilism. It then traces some of the recent history of the development of revisionist accounts, and concludes by remarking on some challenges for them.

Consider the following claim: “If an agent comes to be bad through a process that entirely bypasses her ability to appreciate and to respond to reasons, including moral reasons, she is not a responsible agent at all” (Levy 2007). Psychopathy is a wonderful example here, since there’s reason to think it has a strong genetic component. But why should we accept this claim that we have to absolve those who are born irrevocably bad?

Focusing on the recent work of Michael Bratman as emblematic of several important developments in the philosophy of action, I raise four questions that engage with a set of interlocking concerns about systemic functionalism in the philosophy of action. These questions are: (i) Are individual and institutional intentions the same kind of thing? (ii) Can the risk of proliferation of systemic functional explanations be managed? (iii) Is there an appealing basis for the apparent methodological individualism in our theories of action (...) and agency? and (iv) Why not, instead, pursue a methodologically anti-individualist and ecological approach to action and agency? The latter alternative, I suggest, offers a promising way to retain many of the core insights of the Bratmanian project while avoiding the difficulties inherent to some of the methodological presumptions of some strands of contemporary philosophy of action. (shrink)