Citations of:
Ways to Be Blameworthy: Rightness, Wrongness, and Responsibility
Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press (2019)
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One way of being responsible for an action is being praiseworthy for it. But what is the “praise” of which the praiseworthy agent is worthy? This paper provides a survey of answers to this question, i.e. a survey of possible accounts of praise’s nature. It then presents an overview of candidate norms governing our responses of praise. By attending to praise’s nature and appropriateness conditions, we stand to acquire a richer conception of what it is to be, and to regard (...) |
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Negligence reminds us that we often do and cause things unawares, occasionally with grave results. Given the lack of foresight and intention, some authors argue that people should not be judged culpable for negligence. This paper offers a contrasting view. It argues that gaining control is itself a fundamental responsibility, with both collective and individual elements. The paper underlines both sides, focussing on how they relate as we ascribe responsibility or culpability. Following the introduction, Section 2 argues that conscious awareness (...) |
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Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory that assigns value impartially to the well-being of each person. Informed Altruism, introduced in this article, is an intentionalist theory that relegates both consequentialism and impartiality to subordinate roles. It identifies morally right or commendable actions as those motivated by a sufficiently informed intention to benefit and not harm others. An implication of the theory is that multiple agents may perform incompatible actions and yet each be acting rightly in a moral sense. |
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This article sets out a forward-looking account of moral responsibility on which the ground-level practice is directly sensitive to aims such as moral formation and reconciliation, and is not subject to a barrier between tiers. On the contrasting two-tier accounts defended by Daniel Dennett and Manuel Vargas, the ground-level practice features backward-looking, desert-invoking justifications that are in turn justified by forward-looking considerations at the higher tier. The concern raised for the two-tier view is that the ground-level practice will be insufficiently (...) |
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In this review, I summarize Elinor Mason’s Ways to be Blameworthy and raise some worries concerning three aspects of her book: her account of the knowledge condition on moral responsibility, her notion of blame and its justification as well as Mason’s conception of extended blameworthiness. |
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In this paper I provide a forward-looking account of the difference between the responsibility of children and the responsibility of adults. I do so by means of criticizing agency-cultivation accounts of responsibility. According to these accounts, the justification for holding a person to a norm is the cultivation of their moral agency, and children are, just like adults, considered responsible to the extent that they can have their moral agency cultivated in this manner. Like many forward-looking accounts, these accounts claim (...) |
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What it means for an action to have moral worth, and what is required for this to be the case, is the subject of continued controversy. Some argue that an agent performs a morally worthy action if and only if they do it because the action is morally right. Others argue that a morally worthy action is that which an agent performs because of features that make the action right. These theorists, though they oppose one another, share something important in (...) |
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While Strawsonians have focused on the way in which our “reactive attitudes”—the emotions through which we hold one another responsible for manifestations of morally significant quality of regard—express moral demands, serious doubt has been cast on the idea that non-blaming reactive attitudes direct moral demands to their targets. Building on Gary Watson’s proposal that the reactive attitudes are ‘forms of moral address’, this paper advances a communicative view of praise according to which the form of moral address distinctive of the (...) |
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When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as worthy of blame for not having used one's mobile phone to call for (...) |
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This paper argues that, although moral agency and moral patiency are distinct concepts, we have pro tanto normative reasons to ascribe some moral agency to all moral patients. Assuming a practice-focused approach, moral agents are beings that participate in moral responsibility practices. When someone is a participant, we are warranted to take a participant stance toward them. Beings who lack moral agency are instead accounted for by an objective stance. As such, they are assumed to be exempted from moral responsibility (...) |
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Hypocrisy seems to be a distinctive moral wrong. This thesis offers an account of that wrong. The distinctive wrong of hypocrisy is not a rational failing, or a deception of others. It is a problem in how we critique, and blame, others, when we ourselves are guilty of similar faults. Not only does it seem wrong to blame others hypocritically; it is also widely remarked that hypocrites ‘lack standing’ to blame. I defend both judgments. When we engage others in response (...) |
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According to the practice-focused approach to moral agency, a participant stance towards an entity is warranted by the extent to which this entity qualifies as an apt target of ascriptions of moral responsibility, such as blame. Entities who are not eligible for such reactions are exempted from moral responsibility practices, and thus denied moral agency. I claim that many typically exempted cases may qualify as moral agents by being eligible for a distinct participant stance. When we participate in moral responsibility (...) |
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Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame oneself in the (...) |