Many theoretical claims about the folk concept of moral responsibility coming from the current literature are indeterminate because researchers do not clearly specify the folk concept of moral responsibility in question. The article pursues a cognitive approach to folk concepts that pays special attention to this indeterminacy problem. After addressing the problem, the article provides evidence on folk attributions of moral responsibility in the case a failed attempt to kill that goes against a specific claim coming from the current literature (...) - that the dimension of causation is part of the structure of the folk concept of moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper explores the central question of why soldiers in democratic societies might decide to fight in wars that they may have reason to believe are objectively or questionably unjust. First, I provide a framework for understanding the dilemma caused by an unjust war and a soldier's competing moral obligations; namely, the obligations to self and state. Next, I address a few traditional key thoughts concerning soldiers and jus ad bellum. This is followed by an exploration of the unique and (...) contradicting moral problems that confront modern soldiers and their officers. I argue that although traditional positions such as invincible ignorance provide a rather dangerous ‘head-in-the-sand’ mentality, soldiers serving a democratic government are nonetheless very limited in their legal and moral ability to interpret what is a justifiable war. However, a very few select senior officers are in positions to make such legal and moral decisions concerning jus ad bellum. (shrink)

It is widely believed that (1) if theological determinism were true, in virtue of God’s role in determining created agents to perform evil actions, created agents would be neither free nor morally responsible for their evil actions and God would not be perfectly good; (2) if metaphysical compatibilism were true, the free-will defense against the deductive problem of evil would fail; and (3) on the assumption of metaphysical compatibilism, God could have actualized just any one of those myriad possible worlds (...) that are populated only by compatibilist free creatures. The primary thesis of this essay is that none of these propositions is true. This thesis is defended by appealing to a recently proposed novel, acausal, composite, unified theory of free action – the Theory of Middle Freedom – that evades the central problems plaguing traditional theories of metaphysical compatibilism. (shrink)

While there is no shortage of disagreement about what is required for blameworthiness, it has traditionally been assumed that freely doing what you know to be wrong all things considered, despite being aware that it is within your power to do the right thing instead, suffices. Let us refer to this traditional assumption as the sufficiency thesis. The sufficiency thesis is plausible, but it is not beyond dispute. Reflection on certain situations in which a person can do the right thing (...) but only at great personal sacrifice highlights some particularly pressing difficulties for it. My principal aim in this article is to show that those difficulties are not insuperable. Along the way, I also make some observations about the sorts of considerations that can limit the amount of blame of which a person is worthy without rendering the person entirely blameless.The Challenge OutlinedThe following story will serve as the backdrop for much of the subsequent discussion.The story is an augmented ve .. (shrink)

In this article I argue that it is possible to be blameworthy for doing something that was not objectively morally wrong. If I am right, this would have implications for several debates at the intersection of metaphysics and moral philosophy. I also float a view about which actions can serve as legitimate bases for blame that allows for the possibility of blameworthiness without objective wrongdoing and also suggests an explanation for the appeal of the commonly held view that blameworthiness requires (...) objective wrongdoing. (shrink)

We have a strong intuition that a person’s moral standing should not be affected by luck, but the fact is that we do blame a morally unfortunate person more than her fortunate counterpart. This is the problem of moral luck. I argue that the problem arises because account is not taken of the fact that the extension of the term ‘blame’ is contextually determined. Loosely speaking, the more likely an act is to have an undesirable consequence, the more its agent (...) is to blame. But how likely a consequence is depends on which possibilities of harm we take to be relevant. (shrink)

Legal theorists commonly employ a distinction between justification defenses and excuse defenses, but there are significant theoretical disagreements about the nature of the distinction as well as about what the distinction entails. This dissertation is concerned with finding the best way to describe the distinction between the moral concepts of justification and excuse that underlie the concepts employed by legal theorists. Chapter 1 begins by examining moral defenses in general, with emphasis on their purpose, nature, function, and epistemology. Chapter 2 (...) critically examines many of the traditional theoretical assumptions made about justification and excuse in the literature with the goal of winnowing them down to an uncontroversial core that can provide the foundation for a fuller, more specific account. Chapter 3 examines the ordinary language meaning of the words "justification" and "excuse" in order to identify any analytic constraints on what a correct theoretical account of justification and excuse may legitimately include. Finally, Chapter 4 offers and defends a reductive theory of justification and excuse which I call "the praise/blame theory." This theory identifies justified acts with those prima facie wrongful acts for which the actor is morally praiseworthy and excused acts with those prima facie wrongful acts for which the actor is merely not to blame. This simple account is consistent with the logical form of moral defenses, requires minimal elaboration on the terms' ordinary language content, avoids the conceptual mistakes that plague more traditional theories, and has the potential help resolve nagging theoretical issues in related fields. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of moral responsibility are standardly framed by two platitudes. According to them, blame requires the presence of a moral defect in the agent and the absence of excuses. In this chapter, this kind of approach is challenged. It is argued that (a) people sometimes violate moral norms due to performance mistakes, (b) it often appears reasonable to hold them responsible for it, and (c) their mistakes cannot be traced to their moral qualities or to the presence of excuses. (...) In the end, the implications for discussions of moral responsibility are discussed. (shrink)