In this paper, we investigate how contemporary metaphysics of powers can further an understanding of agent-causal theories of free will. The recent upsurge of such ontologies of powers and the understanding of causation it affords promises to demystify the notion of an agent-causal power. However, as we argue pace, the very ubiquity of powers also poses a challenge to understanding in what sense exercises of an agent’s power to act could still be free—neither determined by external circumstances, nor random, but (...) self-determined. To overcome this challenge, we must understand what distinguishes the power to act from ordinary powers. We suggest this difference lies in its rational nature, and argue that existing agent-causal accounts fail to capture the sense in which the power to act is rational. A proper understanding, we argue, requires us to combine the recent idea that the power to act is a ‘two-way power’ Powers and capacities in philosophy: the new aristotelianism, Routledge, New York, 2013) with the idea that it is intrinsically rational. We sketch the outlines of an original account that promises to do this. On this picture, what distinguishes the power to act is its special generality—the power to act, unlike ordinary powers, does not come with any one typical manifestation. We argue that this special generality can be understood to be a feature of the capacity to reason. Thus, we argue, an account of agent-causation that can further our understanding of free will requires us to recognize a specifically rational or mental variety of power. (shrink)

The claim that (OIC) “ought” implies “can” (i.e., you have an obligation only at times at which you can obey it) entails that (1) obligations that become infeasible are lost (i.e., you stop having an obligation when you become unable to obey it). Moreover, the claim that (2) obligations that become overridden are not always lost (i.e., sometimes you keep having an obligation when you acquire a stronger incompatible obligation) entails that (ONIM) “ought” does not imply “must” (i.e., some obligations (...) are not all-things-considered). It is standard to infer ONIM—via (2)—from the premise that becoming overridden can result in “moral residue” (e.g., in the appropriateness of feeling regret). But then, I note, one could similarly infer not-OIC—via not-(1)—from the premise that becoming infeasible can result in moral residue. So there is an argument against OIC which parallels the standard argument for ONIM. I respond by rejecting both arguments: it is a mistake to always infer from the presence of moral residue that an obligation is not lost. Then I propose new arguments both for ONIM and for OIC. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on the attribution of moral responsibility for the actions of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). To do so, we suggest that the responsibility gap can be closed if human agents can take meaningful moral responsibility for the actions of AWS. This is a moral responsibility attributed to individuals in a justified and fair way and which is accepted by individuals as an assessment of their own moral character. We argue that, given the unpredictability of AWS, meaningful (...) moral responsibly can only be discharged by human agents who are willing to take a moral gambit: they decide to design/develop/deploy AWS despite the uncertainty about the effects an AWS may produce, hoping that unintended and unwanted or unforeseen outcomes may never occurs, but also accepting to be held responsible if such outcomes will occur. We argue that, while a moral gambit is permissible for the use of non-lethal AWS, this is not the case for the actions of lethal autonomous weapon systems. (shrink)

Most contemporary accounts of moral responsibility take desert to play a central role in the nature of moral responsibility. It is also assumed that desert is a backward-looking concept that is not directly derivable from any forward-looking or consequentialist considerations, such as whether blaming an agent would deter the agent from performing similar bad actions in the future. When determining which account of moral responsibility is correct, proponents of desert-based accounts often take intuitions about cases to provide evidence either in (...) favor of or against a proposed theory. In this paper, I discuss two experiments that test whether folk intuitions accord with what desert-based accounts would predict. Results suggest that moral responsibility intuitions are sensitive to forward-looking considerations, thus posing a problem for desert-based accounts of moral responsibility. If appealing to intuitions about cases is a valid method of discovering the nature of moral responsibility and desert, it seems either desert is not entirely backward-looking or moral responsibility is not exclusively desert-based. These experimental results also suggest that consequentialist accounts of moral responsibility, which have largely been abandoned due to their counterintuitive nature, are perhaps not so counterintuitive after all. (shrink)

For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...) we should blame, rather than as cases giving us ready insight into the nature of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Both advocates of corporate regulation and its opponents tend to depict regulation as restrictive—a policy option that limits freedom in the name of welfare or other social goods. Against this framing, I suggest we can understand regulation in enabling terms. If well designed and properly enforced, regulation enables companies to operate in ways that are acceptable to society as a whole. This paper argues for this enabling character by considering some wider questions about responsibility and the sharing of responsibility. Agents (...) who are less able or willing to act well are obviously more likely to face criticism, mistrust, and adverse responses. It will be more difficult to hold those agents responsible, especially so when there are many who fail in their responsibilities or where there are wide-reaching disagreements about those responsibilities. Regulatory standards, like other norms and ways of defining responsibilities, address these problems: by restricting, they also enable social cooperation. Like other forms of holding responsible, ways of enforcing those standards against recalcitrant agents, or encouraging conformity to them, may also seem restrictive. Again, however, these practices play an important role in enabling responsible agency. This is partly because they can bolster readiness to act well in agents who experience or witness such responses. It is also because they free other agents to exercise initiative and commitment in defining their individual responsibilities in line with higher standards. (shrink)

A common compatibilist view says that we are free and morally responsible in virtue of the ability to respond aptly to reasons. Many hold a version of this view despite disagreement about whether free will requires the ability to do otherwise. The canonical version of this view is reductive. It reduces the pertinent ability to a set of modal properties that are more obviously compatible with determinism, like dispositions. I argue that this and any reductive view of abilities faces a (...) significant challenge: it cannot adequately explain the freedom-grounding element of this ability. The problem has the form of a dilemma. This leaves reasons-responsive compatibilists with two options: abandon theories of free will grounded in abilities or abandon reductive theories of abilities. (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)

One of the most influential accounts of blame—the affective account—takes its cue from P.F. Strawson’s discussion of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone, on this account, is to target her with resentment, indignation, or (in the case of self-blame) guilt. Given the connection between these emotions and the demand for regard that is arguably central to morality, the affective account is quite plausible. Recently, however, George Sher has argued that the affective account of blame, as understood both by Strawson himself (...) and by contemporary Strawsonians, is inadequate because it cannot make sense of blameworthiness. In this paper I defend the affective account of blame against several of Sher’s arguments for this conclusion. In the process, I clarify the Strawsonian account of moral responsibility, and I discuss how the affective account of blame ought to be understood and articulated. (shrink)

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)

This paper argues that there are compelling grounds for thinking that coercive indoctrination can defeat or mitigate moral culpability in virtue of being a form of non-culpable moral ignorance. That is, I defend a two-tier account such that what excuses an agent for a wrongful act is the agent’s ignorance regarding the moral quality of their act; and what excuses the defendant for their ignorance is that coercion or manipulation deprived the defendant of a fair opportunity to avoid that ignorance. (...) I further argue that criminal defense theory would better track moral culpability were it to broaden existing defenses whose desert-base is moral ignorance—such as insanity or mistaken-belief self-defense—to include non-culpable ignorance due to diminished situational control. In this way, criminal law can plausibly recognize a defense of coercive indoctrination without postulating any new categories of defense. (shrink)

Traditionally, theories of moral responsibility feature only the minimally sufficient conditions for moral responsibility. While these theories are well-suited to account for the threshold of responsibility, it’s less clear how they can address questions about the degree to which agents are responsible. One feature that intuitively affects the degree to which agents are morally responsible is how difficult performing a given action is for them. Recently, philosophers have begun to develop accounts of scalar moral responsibility that make use of this (...) notion of difficulty (Coates and Swenson 2013; Nelkin 2016). In this paper, I argue that these accounts, although innovative, are incomplete. The degree to which agents are morally responsible is determined not only by the difficulties that agents face but also by the quality of the reasons for which they act. (shrink)

As object-directed emotions, reactive attitudes can be appropriate in the sense of fitting, where an emotion is fitting in virtue of accurately representing its target. I use this idea to argue for a theory of moral accountability: an agent S is accountable for an action A if and only if A expresses S’s quality of will and S has the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons. For the sake of argument, I assume that a reactive attitude is fitting (...) if and only if its constituent thoughts are true, and I argue for the above theory by determining thoughts partly constituting resentment and gratitude. Although others have argued that the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons is necessary for accountability, the argument here is significantly better in two respects. First, it does not rely on intermediary ethical principles, supplementary arguments, or assumptions about the nature of reactive attitudes specifically. Instead, it simply assumes that reactive attitudes, like all emotions, have cognitive content. Second, the argument here is more powerful because it brings to light the quality of will condition and has the resources to flesh out the capacity to recognize and respond to moral reasons. (shrink)

According to Dewey, we are responsible for our conduct because it is “ourselves objectified in action”. This idea lies at the heart of an increasingly influential deep self approach to moral responsibility. Existing formulations of deep self views have two major problems: They are often underspecified, and they tend to understand the nature of the deep self in excessively rationalistic terms. Here I propose a new deep self theory of moral responsibility called the Self-Expression account that addresses these issues. The (...) account is composed of two parts. The first part answers the question, What is a deep self? Theorists have tended to favor cognitive views that understand the deep self in terms of rationally formed evaluative judgment. I propose instead a conative view that says one’s deep self consists of a distinctive kind of pro-attitude, cares, and I provide an account of cares in terms of their distinctive psychological functional role. The second part answers the question, When does an action express one’s deep self? I criticize the agentially demanding conditions set out in existing views and propose a more minimalist alternative. I show that the Self-Expression account handles issues that bedeviled traditional deep self views, including how to explain moral responsibility for spontaneous, out of character, and weak-willed actions. (shrink)

It has often been noted that there is some tension between engaging in decision-making and believing that one’s choices might be predetermined. The possibility that our choices are predetermined forces us to consider, in our decisions, act-state pairs which are inconsistent, and hence to which we cannot assign sensible utilities. But the reasoning which justifies two-boxing in Newcomb’s problem also justifies associating a non-zero causal probability with these inconsistent act-state pairs. Put together these undefined utilities and non-zero probabilities entail that (...) expected utilities are undefined whenever it is a possibility that our choices are predetermined. There are three ways to solve the problem, but all of them suffer serious costs: always assume that, contrary to our evidence, the outcome of our present decision-making is not predetermined; give up the reasoning that justifies unconditional two-boxing in Newcomb’s problem; or allow epistemically impossible outcomes to contribute to expected utility, leading to the wrong results in a series of cases introduced by Ahmed :665–685, 2014a, Evidence, decision and causality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014b). However they choose to respond, causal decision theorists cannot remain silent: the intuitive tension between decision-making and the possibility of predetermination can be made precise, and resolving it will require giving up something. Causal decision theorists have a predetermination problem. (shrink)

There is an argument for incompatibilism that is based on the experience of agency. Authors who endorse this argument place pro tanto evidential weight on one or more of two putative aspects of the experience of being an agent: i) the experience of being the causal source of our actions; ii) the experience of having robust alternative possibilities available to one. With some exceptions, these authors and their critics alike neglect a third significant aspect of the experience of agency: iii) (...) the experience of the future as being modally open. This aspect is either neglected or conflated with or. In this paper I rehabilitate as a notable aspect in its own right, and demonstrate that it is a good candidate for having the same pro tanto evidential weight in the experiential argument for incompatibilism. Then, I go on to assess the prospects of this revised argument in the face of central compatibilist objections that are central to the literature. I find that it fares just as well, if not better, than the original argument. (shrink)

Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states—typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we can avoid this debate. (...) I show how a more general view of action captures what is central to action without mentioning mental states, and I argue that a group’s members can fulfill the role in group action that mental states play in our actions. Group behavior is explicable in terms of reasons, regardless of whether the group itself cognizes those reasons. After discussing the kind of reasons at issue and arguing that groups can act in light of them without minds, I assess how this account bears on the question of group responsibility. (shrink)

Traditional compatibilism about free will is widely considered to be untenable. In particular, the conditional analysis of the ability to do otherwise appears to be subject to clear counterexamples. I will propose a new version of traditional compatibilism that provides a conditional account of both the ability to do otherwise and the ability to choose to do otherwise, and I will argue that this view withstands the standard objections to traditional compatibilism. For this, I will assume with incompatibilists that the (...) mere possession of a general ability to do otherwise is not sufficient for having the ability that is required for free will. This concession distinguishes the view from the traditional conditional analysis and from recent dispositional accounts of the ability to do otherwise, and we will see that this concession enables a straightforward response to the counterexamples. This, in turn, will play a crucial role in my response to the strongest version of the consequence argument for incompatibilism. (shrink)

In this paper, I demonstrate that Kant's commitment to an asymmetry between the control conditions for praise and blame is explained by his endorsement of the principle Ought Implies Can (OIC). I argue that Kant accepts only a relatively weak version of OIC and that he is hence committed only to a relatively weak requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. This suggests that whether we are transcendentally free is irrelevant to questions about moral permissibility and moral blameworthiness.

Empirical evidence challenges many of the assumptions that underlie traditional philosophical and commonsense conceptions of human agency. It has been suggested that this evidence threatens also to undermine free will and moral responsibility. In this paper, I will focus on the purported threat to moral responsibility. The evidence challenges assumptions concerning the ability to exercise conscious control and to act for reasons. This raises an apparent challenge to moral responsibility as these abilities appear to be necessary for morally responsible agency. (...) I will argue that this challenge collapses once the underlying conditions on moral responsibility are specified in sufficient detail. I will argue, in other words, that the empirical evidence does not support a challenge to the assumption that we are, in general, morally responsible agents. In the final section, I will suggest that empirical research on human agency is nevertheless relevant to various questions about moral responsibility. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that a necessary condition on moral blameworthiness is that the wrongdoer can reasonably be expected to avoid the action for which she is blamed. Those who think so assume as a matter of course that the expectations at issue here are normative expectations that contrast with the non-normative or predictive expectations we form concerning the probable conduct of others, and they believe, or at least assume, that there is a clear-cut distinction between the two. In this paper (...) I put this widespread assumption under scrutiny and argue that it’s mistaken: although predictive and normative expectations are indeed distinct, there is no sharp separation between them. On the contrary, predictive expectations can have a substantial bearing on normative expectations in two related ways: they can recalibrate what is reasonable to expect of agents when responsibility attributions are at stake and they can help to uncover previously undetected excusing conditions. I illustrate my claims with the famous bystander effect from social psychology and show that it yields predictive expectations that affect normative expectations in these two ways. (shrink)

Agent-causal theories of free will, which rely on a non-reductionist account of the agent, have traditionally been associated with libertarianism. However, some authors have recently argued in favor of compatibilist agent-causal accounts. In this essay, I will show that such accounts cannot avoid serious problems of implausibility or incoherence. A careful analysis of the implications of non-reductionist views of the agent (event-causal or agent-causal as they may be) reveals that such views necessarily imply either the denial of the principle of (...) supervenience or the assumption of bottom-level indeterminism. I will contend that the former alternative comes at a high cost, while the latter is quite plausible. Therefore, providing that they accept the condition of the truth of indeterminism, non-reductionist accounts of the agent do not have to contradict our scientific worldview. Interestingly, while they should be taken seriously by anyone who is concerned with the passivity of the agent’s role under a reductionist scenario, non-reductivist accounts end up contributing an extra incompatibilist argument to the free will debate. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine whether agents who commit testimonial injustice are morally responsible for their wrongdoing, given that they are ignorant of their wrongdoing. Fricker (2007) argues that agents whose social setting lacks the concepts or reasons necessary for them to correct for testimonial injustice are excused. I argue that agents whose social settings have these concepts or reasons available are also typically excused, because they lack the capacity to recognise those concepts or reasons. Attempts to trace this lack (...) of capacity back to an earlier culpable wrongdoing will often fail, due to there being no point at which these perpetrators knowingly chose to develop their prejudices. Attempts to ground culpability under Talbert’s (2008) Attributionist account of moral responsibility will also fail. This is because perpetrators’ lack of awareness of what they are doing makes it the case that they are not expressing objectionable evaluative judgments in the way required for blameworthiness. Finally, I argue that our temptation to blame agents who commit testimonial injustice is not completely unfounded. Appealing to Watson’s (1996) attributability/accountability distinction allows us to make sense of how some responses to the jurors are appropriate, despite their being excused. (shrink)

Laws, Mind, and Free Will is a highly valuable book for anyone interested in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, or in the problem of free will and moral responsibility. The book has three distinct but related parts. The first presents an anti-empiricist position on the laws of nature, according to which the point of the laws is not primarily to predict kinematic outcomes, but rather to characterize dynamics. One upshot of the account is that the laws have an attenuated (...) role in determining and prediction of actual motion, and this has an important consequence for the relevance of the laws to the prospects for libertarian free will. This consequence is developed in detail in the second part of the book. A further feature of the account is that proposed laws and the theories in which they are embedded are models in a sense that reflects our interests and involves idealization. In Horst’s view, this is true for theories and laws across the sciences—from physics to psychology. The l .. (shrink)

According to classical theism, the universe depends on God in a way that goes beyond mere (efficient) causation. I have previously argued that this ‘deep dependence’ of the universe on God is best understood as a type of grounding. In a recent paper in this journal, Aaron Segal argues that this doctrine of deep dependence causes problems for creaturely free will: if our choices are grounded in facts about God, and we have no control over these facts, then we do (...) not control our choices and are therefore not free. This amounts to a grounding analogue of the Consequence Argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. If successful, it would have application beyond classical theism: similar concerns would apply to any view that takes our choices to be grounded in a deeper reality which is beyond our control. However, I show that the argument is not successful. Segal’s Grounding Consequence Argument is so closely analogous to the Causal Consequence Argument that any response to the one provides a response to the other. As a result, if you don’t think that prior causes (whether deterministic or indeterministic) undermine free will, you shouldn’t think that prior grounds undermine free will. (shrink)

On the one hand, there seem to be compelling parallels to moral responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness in domains other than the moral. For example, we often praise people for their aesthetic and epistemic achievements and blame them for their failures. On the other hand, it has been argued that there is something special about the moral domain, so that at least one robust kind of responsibility can only be found there. In this paper, I argue that we can adopt a (...) unifying framework for locating responsible agency across domains, thereby capturing and explaining more of our actual practices. The key, I argue, is to identify the right conditions for being morally accountable, which I take to be a matter of having an opportunity of a good enough quality to act well. With this account in hand, I argue that we can adopt a unifying framework that allows us to recognize parallels across domains, even as it points the way to important differences among them. (shrink)

In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the (...) action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons-responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine-grained measures of degrees of reasons-responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty to extend the reasons-responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this essay, I assess what I call the “Duty View,” subtly articulated and defended by Victor Tadros in Wrongs and Crimes. According to the Duty View, wrongdoers incur enforceable duties, including the duty to be punished in some circumstances, in virtue of their wrongdoing; therefore, punishment can be justified simply on the ground that wrongdoers’ duties are being legitimately enforced. I argue that, while wrongdoers do incur important duties, these are not necessarily fulfilled by providing protection against future offenses, (...) and I offer a comparative evaluation of the Duty View and an alternative approach, which I call the “Desert Plus View.” The Desert Plus View shares some of the key commitments of the Duty View, such as the rejection of the intrinsic goodness of wrongdoers getting what they deserve. More positively, however, according to the Desert Plus View, the fact that people are deserving can, together with certain additional conditions, such as the need for protection of its citizens, provide a reason for the state to give them what they deserve. (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)

In a recent article, Robert Lockie brings about a critical examination of three Frankfurtstyle cases designed by David Widerker and Derk Pereboom. His conclusion is that these cases do not refute either the Principle of Alternative Possibilities or some cognate leeway principle for moral responsibility. Though I take the conclusion to be true, I contend that Lockie's arguments do not succeed in showing it. I concentrate on Pereboom's Tax Evasion 2. After presenting Pereboom's example and analyzing its structure, I distinguish (...) two strategies of Lockie's to defend PAP against it, which I call "No True Alternative Decision" and "No Responsibility", respectively. According to NTAD, Pereboom's example fails because the agent has alternatives to his decision. I hold that this strategy is faulty because the alternatives that Lockie points to are arguably not robust enough to save PAP. According to NR, the example fails because the agent is not blameworthy for his decision. After defending the intuitiveness of the agent's blameworthiness, I present Lockie's arguments against this blameworthiness and suggest that they might beg the question against Frankfurt theorists. I examine Lockie's main response to this question-begging objection and hold that it does not clearly succeed in meeting it. Moreover, I hold that this response faces other important problems. Additional responses appear to be unsatisfactory as well. Hence, Lockie's defense of the agent's blamelessness lacks justification. The general conclusion is that Lockie does not succeed in defusing Pereboom's Tax Evasion 2 as a counterexample to PAP. (shrink)

I defend the principle that a person is blameworthy for her action only if that action was morally wrong. But what should we say about an agent who does the right thing based on bad motives? I present three types of cases that have these features. In each, I argue, the agent is not culpable for her action; however, she violates the norm of moral responsibility, and thus acts in a morally irresponsible way. This analysis, I show, has several virtues. (...) It also has important theoretical ramifications: it allows for a more nuanced approach to moral luck and paves the way for an unexplored line of defense in favor of a particular norm of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Frankfurt-type cases with covered manipulation received a great attention in the debates about freedom of will and moral responsibility. They pretend to give the refutation of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities and to show that we can intuitively blame or praise an agent who was not able to do otherwise. In this paper, I will try to make explicit some basic intuitions underlying the agent’s responsibility in Frankfurt-type cases, which were surprisingly ignored in the contemporary debates. The key intuition is (...) that the responsibility of the agent in Frankfurt-type cases is always grounded at the point of overcoming the uncertainty preceding action. This overcoming is crucially important for agent’s responsibility and immune to any manipulation of counterfactual intervener. (shrink)

The idea of self-forgiveness poses a serious challenge to any philosopher interested in giving a general account of forgiveness. On the one hand, it is an uncontroversial part of our common psychological and moral discourse. On the other, any account of self-forgiveness is inconsistent with any general account of forgiveness which implies that only the victim of an offense can forgive. To avoid this conclusion, one must either challenge the particular claims that preclude self-forgiveness or offer an independently plausible account (...) of self-forgiveness. I deploy both strategies in this article, explaining what self-forgiveness is and how it is possible. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend my book Conversation and Responsibility in response to three critics: Julia Driver, David Shoemaker, and Manuel Vargas. Driver raises questions about my account of private blame. Shoemaker finds problems with my account of quality of will. And Vargas questions the conversational nature of my account.

_ Source: _Page Count 36 The situationist movement in social psychology has caused a considerable stir in philosophy. Much of this was prompted by the work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. Both contended that familiar philosophical assumptions about the role of character in the explanation of action were not supported by experimental results. Most of the ensuing philosophical controversy has focused upon issues related to moral psychology and ethical theory. More recently, the influence of situationism has also given rise (...) to questions regarding free will and moral responsibility. There is cause for concern that a range of situationist findings are in tension with the reasons-responsiveness putatively required for free will and moral responsibility. We develop and defend a response to the alleged situationist threat to free will and moral responsibility that we call pessimistic realism. We conclude on an optimistic note, exploring the possibility of strengthening our agency in the face of situational influences. (shrink)

The situationist movement in social psychology has caused a considerable stir in philosophy. Much of this was prompted by the work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. Both contended that familiar philosophical assumptions about the role of character in the explanation of action were not supported by experimental results. Most of the ensuing philosophical controversy has focused upon issues related to moral psychology and ethical theory. More recently, the influence of situationism has also given rise to questions regarding free will (...) and moral responsibility. There is cause for concern that a range of situationist findings are in tension with the reasons-responsiveness putatively required for free will and moral responsibility. We develop and defend a response to the alleged situationist threat to free will and moral responsibility that we call pessimistic realism. We conclude on an optimistic note, exploring the possibility of strengthening our agency in the face of situational influences. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that new attempts to undermine the principle of alternative possibilities via appeal to time travel fail. My argument targets a version of a Frankfurt-style counterexample to the principle recently developed by Spencer. I argue that in avoiding one prominent objection to standard Frankfurt-style counterexamples Spencer’s time travel case runs afoul of another. Furthermore, the very feature of the case which makes it initially appealing also makes it impossible to revise the case such that it can (...) avoid this further objection. Thus Spencer’s time travel case and cases like it provide no dialectical advantages over other Frankfurt-style cases. I conclude that this strategy for refining such cases should be abandoned. (shrink)

It has often been noted that many of our intuitive assessments of particular actions suggest that there is an asymmetry between blameworthy and praiseworthy actions with regard to the question of whether moral responsibility requires that the agent could have acted otherwise. It is a quite different question, though, whether such an asymmetry between good and bad cases can be supported by more systematic considerations. In this paper, I will develop a new argument for a restricted version of the asymmetry, (...) by showing that in cases of praiseworthy actions responsibility cannot generally presuppose that the agent could have acted otherwise. This argument will be based on a distinction between two different kinds of roles that moral norms can play in determining whether an action is right and in guiding our deliberation. That agents can sometimes be responsible for their praiseworthy actions even though they cannot act otherwise is best seen as a reflection of the fact that moral norms can prohibit treating certain courses of action as genuine options at all. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose and defend a structural ownership condition on moral responsibility. According to the condition I propose, an agent owns a mental item if and only if it is part of or is partly grounded by a coherent set of psychological states. As I discuss, other theorists have proposed or alluded to conditions like psychological coherence, but each proposal is unsatisfactory in some way. My account appeals to narrative explanation to elucidate the relevant sense of psychological coherence.

Accounts of heavenly freedom typically attempt to reconcile the claim that the redeemed have free will with the claim that the redeemed cannot sin. In this paper, I first argue that Pawl and Timpe :396–417, 2009) tracing account of heavenly freedom—according to which the redeemed in heaven have only ‘derivative’ free will—is untenable. I then sketch an alternative account of heavenly freedom, one which eschews derivative free will. On this account, the redeemed are able to sin in heaven.

T. M. Scanlon has argued that the intentions with which one acts, or more specifically, one’s reasons for acting, are non-derivatively irrelevant to the moral permissibility of one’s actions. According to one of his arguments in favor of that thesis, it can be permissible to act for one reason rather than another only if one can choose to act for a reason but, since that choice is impossible since believing as will is impossible, one can be permitted to act but (...) one cannot be permitted to act for a reason. This paper aims to show that that argument is unsound. It first argues that the assumption that choosing an action is necessary for it being an object of a moral duty or permission cannot be made consistent with Scanlon’s idea that the same does not hold for an action being an object of blame. It then argues that even if direct control over forming beliefs is impossible, it is not impossible to choose one’s reason for action and, therefore, to be permitted or forbidden to act for it. (shrink)

Three recent ‘state of the art’ Frankfurt cases are responded to: Widerker’s Brain-Malfunction-W case and Pereboom’s Tax Evasion cases (2 & 3). These cases are intended by their authors to resurrect the neo-Frankfurt project of overturning the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) in the teeth of the widespread acceptance of some combination of the WKG (Widerker-Kane-Ginet) dilemma, the Flicker of Freedom strategy and the revised PAP response (‘Principle of Alternative Blame’, ‘Principle of Alternative Expectations’). The three neo-Frankfurt cases of Pereboom (...) and Widerker shown to be insufficient for their intended purpose. Of central importance to any account of responsibility is that this applies at the level of the Right and not the Good. Arguments of Carlos Moya are expanded and augmented by considerations from Chisholm, Lucas, Dummett and Lockie (2003) to show that a number of severe problems remain for anyone attempting to resurrect the Frankfurt project. (shrink)

The Blockage Argument is designed to improve upon Harry Frankfurt’s famous argument against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities by removing the counterfactual intervener altogether. If the argument worked, then it would prove in a way that Frankfurt’s argument does not that moral responsibility does not require any alternative possibilities whatsoever, not even the weakest “flicker of freedom”. -/- Some philosophers have rejected the Blockage Argument solely on the basis of their intuition that the inability to do otherwise is incompatible with (...) moral responsibility. I will argue, however, that it is not merely the inability to do otherwise by itself but rather the inability to do otherwise in combination with the absence of a counterfactual intervener that is incompatible with moral responsibility. If I cannot do otherwise and it is not because of a counterfactual intervener, then it must be the case that I am being forced to choose and therefore act as I do, in which case I cannot be morally responsible for this action. -/- Because the Blockage Argument fails, and because it was really the only way to establish that moral responsibility does not require any alternative possibilities whatsoever, it follows that moral responsibility does indeed require at least one alternative possibility in any given situation. But it turns out that this conclusion does not tip the balance in favor of incompatibilism over compatibilism. It would have if blockage and determinism were equivalent. But they are not. Unlike blockage, determinism is compatible with certain counterfactuals that compatibilists traditionally believed the ability to do otherwise reduces to. So even though moral responsibility is incompatible with blockage, it does not necessarily follow that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. (shrink)