Moral Responsibility

Disavowals such as "That's not who I am" are one way to distance ourselves from unsavory actions in order to try to mitigate our responsibility for them. Although such disclaimers can be what Harry Frankfurt calls "shabbily insincere devices for obtaining unmerited indulgence," they can also be a way to renew our commitments to new values as part of the processes of aspiration and moral improvement. What, then, separates backsliding aspirants from those in denial who seek unmerited indulgence? Drawing on (...) Christine Korsgaard, on the one hand, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, on the other, I propose a two-dimensional account of practical identity that makes sense of a certain kind of self-ignorance and helps us distinguish the aspirant from the superficially similar cases of denial and resignation. A key factor is how one responds to what I call residual practical identities. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to briefly spell out why corporate moral agency is a fallacy and to show how this conclusion should shift the field of business ethics more in the direction of political philosophy and the rule of law. An argument based on a false assumption can be valid, but it cannot be sound. If corporate moral agency is a fallacy, and thus also moral prescriptions for corporations, how do we salvage the field of business ethics? To (...) the extent that business ethics is about corporate behaviour (rather than individual managerial behaviour), the field can shift its foundational paradigm from ethics (which requires the attributes of moral agency) to legal accountability (which can be imposed instrumentally on corporate legal agents). By letting our elected representatives legislate the norms of acceptable corporate behaviour we can hold corporate legal entities legally accountable. What these norms should be then becomes the central focus of business ethics seen through the lens of political philosophy. (shrink)

This edited collection brings together world-leading authors writing about a wide range of issues related to responsibility and healthcare, and from a variety of perspectives. Alongside a comprehensive introduction by the editors outlining the scope of the relevant debates, the volume contains 14 chapters, split into four sections. This volume pushes forward a number of important debates on responsibility and its role in contemporary healthcare. -/- The first and second groups of chapters focus, respectively, on (a) the potential justification and (...) (b) nature of 'responsibility-sensitive' policies in healthcare provision; in other words, policies that would hold some patients responsible for their ill health via differences in treatment. These sections include empirically-informed work on public opinion, chapters linking responsibility in healthcare with ongoing debates around criminal responsibility, and new conceptual and theoretical work on the details of responsibility-sensitive policies. -/- The third set of chapters turns in a more detailed way to the issues of whether, and how, we can be responsible for our health, presenting novel challenges and questions for those who would advocate responsibility-sensitive policies in healthcare. -/- Finally, questions of responsibility in medicine do not end with those receiving treatment. The fourth group of chapters broadens the volume's focus to think about responsibility of individuals other than patients, including medical professionals and policymakers, including specific consideration of the role of responsibility during pandemics. (shrink)

I argue that to remove all backward-looking grounds and justification from the practice, as some theorists recommend, is to remove (not revise) moral responsibility. The most paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility must feature desert and retributive elements. So, moral responsibility must be (at least partially) backward-looking. When we hold people responsible, one reason we do so is that we believe that they deserve punishment or reward simply in virtue of the action for which we hold them responsible. None of this (...) rebuts responsibility skepticism. For instance, forward-looking theories might adopt Myisha Cherry’s proposal: anger as love without blameworthiness. (shrink)

This paper clarifies and answers the following question: is technology morally neutral? It is argued that the debate between proponents and opponents of the Neutrality Thesis depends on different underlying assumptions about the nature of technological artifacts. My central argument centres around the claim that a mere physicalistic vocabulary does not suffice in characterizing technological artifacts as artifacts, and that the concepts of function and intention are necessary to describe technological artifacts at the right level of description. Once this has (...) been established, I demystify talk about the possible value-ladenness of technological artifacts by showing how these values can be empirically identified. I draw from examples in biology and the social sciences to show that there is a non-mysterious sense in which functions and values can be empirically identified. I conclude from this that technology can be value-laden and that its value-ladenness can both derive from the intended functions as well as the harmful non-intended functions of technological artifacts. (shrink)

Our ability to locate moral responsibility is often thought to be a necessary condition for conducting morally permissible medical practice, engaging in a just war, and other high-stakes endeavors. Yet, with increasing reliance upon artificially intelligent systems, we may be facing a wideningresponsibility gap, which, some argue, cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility. How then, if at all, can we make use of crucial emerging technologies? According to Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach, the advent of so-called ‘artificial moral (...) agents’ (AMAs) is inevitable. Still, this notion may seem to push back the problem, leaving those who have an interest in developing autonomous technology with a dilemma. We may need to scale-back our efforts at deploying AMAs (or at least maintain human oversight); otherwise, we must rapidly and drastically update our moral and legal norms in a way that ensures responsibility for potentially avoidable harms. This paper invokes contemporary accounts of responsibility in order to show how artificially intelligent systems might be held responsible. Although many theorists are concerned enough to develop artificial conceptions ofagencyor to exploit our present inability to regulate valuable innovations, the proposal here highlights the importance of—and outlines a plausible foundation for—a workable notion ofartificial moral responsibility. (shrink)

In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...) consensual sex suggest that consent is insufficient to ground responsibility; a more fundamental orientation toward the value of sexual agency provides a better foundation for sexual ethics. Using feminist critical theory, phenomenology, and black feminist thought, this dissertation develops a socially situated and relational notion of sexual agency and diagnoses how such agency is neglected in prevailing discussions of consent in moral philosophy and legal theory. I argue that the ethical question of responsibility to another in a sexual encounter—apart from juridical considerations—should be reframed around the value of each person’s socially situated practices of agency. Preceding and extending beyond the obligation to gain valid consent for an action, responsibility demands adapting one’s intentions and behaviors in response to the wider range of another’s communicative expressions of agency. However, communicative expressions can be ambiguous or overdetermined by social context and cultural norms; they often offer only provisional traces of agency. To address this inherent uncertainty in intimacy, I propose drawing on insights from Emmanuel Levinas about the dynamic, open-ended nature of relationality, responsibility, and communication. Responsibility toward another does not depend on securing certainty about their “yes” or “no,” but requires responding continuously under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, adapting behaviors and intentions to make room for another’s agency despite its opacity. (shrink)

Many scholars have claimed that the psychology of the indirect passions in the Treatise is meant to capture how we come to regard persons as morally responsible agents. My question is exactly how the indirect passions relate to responsibility. In elucidating Hume’s account of responsibility, scholars have often focused not on the passionate responses themselves, but on their structural features. In this paper, I argue that locating responsibility in the structural features is insufficient to make sense of Hume’s account of (...) responsibility. I argue this on the grounds that without reference to the passions, Hume does not have the resources to distinguish between responsible and non-responsible entities. Instead, I attribute to Hume a distinctive, sympathy-based response-dependent conception of responsibility. (shrink)

Buda no construyó una religión; Estudió filosofía y ciencias. Fue el precursor del realismo científico, el psicoanálisis, la filosofía analítica, el existencialismo, el feminismo, la epistemología, la teoría y crítica del conocimiento, la psicología social, la psicología positiva, el conservacionismo ecológico y conceptos relacionados con la materia y la energía que sólo muy recientemente la física cuántica pudo demostrar. . Conocer adecuadamente qué es el budismo es fundamental para la formación y la cultura de cualquier persona que no quiera ser (...) simplemente un extraterrestre más en una manada que camina a ciegas en medio de una revolución tecnológica. Es posible comprender el budismo desde sus cimientos a través del lenguaje y el conocimiento modernos, y establecer sus relaciones con el pensamiento contemporáneo y sus referentes. Esto permite profundizar y ampliar nuestra percepción sobre la compatibilidad de estos antiguos principios con nuestras modernas formas de vida y conocimiento. El estudio necesario para ello es bastante laborioso. El budismo es un tema que subyace a una gigantesca montaña literaria y cultural. Cuanto más cerca estemos de su concepto original, más profunda y voluminosa será la excavación que tendremos que hacer. (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 (2022, 2023) 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)

I defend an iterated knowledge condition on responsibility for outcomes: one is responsible for a consequence of one's action only if one was in a position to know that, for all one was in a position to know, one's action would have that consequence.

I want to suggest that it would be bad if compatibilism were true, and that this gives us good reason to think that it isn't. This is, you might think, an outlandish argument, and the considerable burden of this paper is to convince you otherwise. There are two key elements at stake in this argument. The first is that it would be ‐ in a distinctive sense to be explained ‐ bad if compatibilism were true. The thought here is that (...) compatibilism ultimately presents us with a picture on which, in principle, powerful manipulators can effectively guarantee that finite moral agents should become blameworthy. To my mind, this isn't just false ‐ though I think that it is ‐ it is also such that it would be bad (unfortunate, undesirable…) if it were true. The second is that the fact that it would be ‐ in this sense ‐ bad if true gives us reason to think that it isn't. It may be bad that there is no afterlife. But that, in itself, hardly gives us reason to think that there is an afterlife. That is true, but ‐ as others before me have suggested ‐ when the object of the relevant badness is morality itself, the inference seems secure. A more general aim of the paper is to investigate the nature of this very form of argument in itself, and I compare my argument (inter alia) to a recent argument from Sayre–McCord against the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to present the distinct ways in which Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand the relationship between necessitation, constraint, and reluctant action in an effort to illustrate the subtle ways in which their conceptions of obligation differ from each another. Whereas Wolff conceives of natural or moral obligation as incompatible with constraint, Baumgarten holds that constraint and reluctant action are, in some instances, compatible with natural obligation. Kant departs from Baumgarten by conceiving of obligation as necessarily (...) involving constraint: as Kant’s reply to Schiller’s famous objection reveals, obligation must take on the character of constraint to reluctant action on account of the fact that human beings possess inclinations that always threaten to impel them in directions that oppose morality. (shrink)

In performing an act of assertion we are sometimes responsible for more than the content of the literal meaning of the words we have used, sometimes less. A recently popular research program seeks to explain certain of the commitments we make in speech in terms of responsiveness to the conversational subject matter. We raise some issues for this view with the aim of providing a more general account of linguistic commitment: one that is grounded in a more general action‐theoretic notion (...) of responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that since artworks cannot take moral responsibility, it is impossible to establish any sort of ethical criticism towards them for their own sake. Ethical criticism of art is inevitably directed at the artist(s), who can take moral responsibility for creating or performing the art in certain ways. Therefore, we should distinguish between two types of criticism towards art: (1) the ethical criticism should be contextualized within the author-work framework, meaning that the extent to which the (...) author can take moral responsibility will significantly affect the ethical criticism of art, while artworks can serve as acts or evidence of acts (of the author) in ethical criticism; (2) ‘ethical’ criticism of art for the work’s own sake should be excluded from the ethical issue and instead reconstructed in the causal issue. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer has recently critiqued the skeptical view that no one is ever morally responsible for their actions in the basic desert sense and has defended a view he calls semiretributivism. This paper responds to Fischer’s concerns about the skeptical perspective, especially those regarding victims’ rights, and further explains why we should reject his semiretributivism. After briefly summarizing the Pereboom/Caruso view and Fischer’s objections to it, the paper argues that Fischer’s defense of basic desert moral responsibility is too weak (...) to justify the kind of retributive blame and punishment he wishes to preserve. It then turns to the issue of victims’ rights and argues that Fischer is mistaken that victims want retribution above all else, and that the public health-quarantine model is better able to deal with the concerns of victims. It concludes by offering two additional objections to Fischer’s semiretributivism. (shrink)

This paper examines Susan Wolf's accout of "the Reason View" of moral responsibility as articulated and defended in 'Freedom Within Reason' (OUP 1990). The discussion turns on two questions about the Reason View: -/- (1) Does the Reason View aim to satisfy what Bernard Williams describes as “morality” and its (“peculiar”) conception of responsibility and blame? -/- (2) If it does, how successful is the Reason View judged in these terms? -/- It is argued that if the Reason View aims (...) to satisfy “morality” in respect of its understanding of deserved blame -- as it seems to -- then it fails for reasons similar to those that apply to R. J. Wallace’s 'rational self-control' model. On the other hand, if Wolf’s Reason View does not aim to satisfy “morality” in this respect then it might well rest satisfied with the more limited conditions of Wallace’s Rational Self-Control model, which in contrast with the Reason View, does not appeal to the (problematic) apparatus of asymmetry and PAP. -/- . (shrink)

This paper proposes a logical framework for studying the structure of moral responsibility for outcomes. The analysis incorporates two vital features: an agency condition and a negative condition of an alternative possibility. The logical language allows us to identify and disambiguate seven plausible criteria for moral responsibility. To accommodate interdependent decision contexts, the semantics are given in terms of so-called responsibility games. The logical framework enables us to classify the logical relations between these seven criteria for moral responsibility. Although all (...) seven criteria are logically distinct, I also identify circumstances where the seven criteria locally reduce to only three. (shrink)

Moral responsibility skepticism has traditionally been dismissed as a nonstarter, but because of the important work of Derk Pereboom, Gregg Caruso, and others, it has become increasingly influential. I lay out this doctrine, and I subject it to critical scrutiny. I argue that the metaphysical arguments about free will do not yield the result that we do not deserve (in a “basic” sense) the attitudes and actions definitive of moral responsibility. Further, I argue that skepticism leaves out crucial components of (...) our considered views about moral responsibility, making it seriously problematic. (shrink)

Simple text and full color photographs describe how to be responsible, not a bully.