One of the most influential arguments against compatibilism is Derk Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. Professor Plum, the main character of the thought experiment, is manipulated into doing what he does; he therefore supposedly lacks moral responsibility for his action. Since he is arguably analogous to an ordinary agent under determinism, Pereboom concludes that ordinary determined agents lack moral responsibility as well. I offer a hard-line reply to this argument, that is, a reply which denies that this kind of manipulation is (...) responsibility undermining. I point out that fully fleshed-out manipulated characters in fiction can seem morally responsible for what they do. This is plausibly because we identify with such characters, and therefore focus on their options and the reasons for which they act rather than the manipulation. I further argue that we ought to focus this way when interacting with other agents. We have no reason to trust the incompatibilist intuitions that arise when we regard manipulated agents from a much more detached perspective. (shrink)

In der Einleitung in den Schwerpunkt „Ethik der Globalisierung und kollektive Verantwortung“ machen wir uns für ein Verständnis von globaler Ethik als einer neuen Disziplin innerhalb der angewandten Ethik stark. Darin geht es wesentlich um Probleme, die sich aus der globalen Kooperation und Konkurrenz in wirtschaftlicher, politischer, sozialer und kultureller Hinsicht ergeben. Nach dieser Auffassung hat es globale Ethik grundsätzlich mit der Bestimmung globaler kollektiver Verantwortlichkeiten zu tun, da sich das Handeln individueller und kollektiver Akteure heute vor dem Hintergrund einer (...) globalisierten Struktur von Handlungspfaden, Anreizen und Regeln vollzieht. In allen Bereichsethiken der globalen Ethik ist daher die Frage, wie sich kollektive Verantwortung unstrukturierten Gruppen zuschreiben lässt, zentral geworden. Worin besteht die kollektive Verantwortung von Unternehmen und Konsument*innen für globale Ausbeutung, Weltarmut oder die Folgen der Klimawandels? Die Antworten der fünf in dieser Einleitung vorgestellten Beiträge greifen dazu in erhellender Weise auf die handlungstheoretischen Debatten zu kollektiver Verantwortung zurück. Es zeigt sich, dass das Verantwortungsprinzip durch seinen prospektiven, Kollektive in den Blick nehmenden, die moralische, politische und juridische Dimension verbindenden sowie auf Strukturen scharf stellenden Charakter besonders geeignet ist, diese Probleme zu behandeln. (shrink)

Im diesem Aufsatz nehme ich die Popularität des Verantwortungsbegriffs in der Alltagssprache zum Anlass, um seinem Verhältnis zum Pflichtbegriff auf den Grund zu gehen. Dabei unterziehe ich den Verantwortungsbegriff zunächst einer allgemeinen Analyse. Anschließend diskutiere ich in Gestalt von Indeterminismus, Amoralismus und Interaktionismus drei Modi der missbräuchlichen Verwendung dieses Begriffs. Dabei handelt es sich jedoch bei genauerer Betrachtung um allgemeine rhetorische Verschleierungsstrategien, die nicht an die Verwendung des Verantwortungsbegriffs gebunden sind, sondern in der kommunikativen Bezugnahme auf moralische Forderungen generell auftreten (...) können. Dies verdeutlicht auch die anschließende Analyse des Pflichtbegriffs, der einige grundlegende Ähnlichkeiten zum Verantwortungsbegriff aufweist. Ex negativo zeigt sich so jedoch, wie ein nicht missbräuchlicher Rekurs auf beide philosophischen Grundbegriffe möglich ist. Darüber hinaus werden auch die Unterschiede dieser Termini deutlich. Der Pflichtbegriff ist trotz einiger wesentlicher Gemeinsamkeiten weniger vielseitig als der Verantwortungsbegriff und daher zumindest in der Auseinandersetzung mit einigen Themen der praktischen Philosophie weniger gut als Grundbegriff geeignet. Gleichwohl zeigt sich, dass die Frage „Verantwortung oder Pflicht?“ uns vor eine falsche Alternative stellt, wenn sie im ausschließenden Sinn verstanden wird. (shrink)

The compatibilism debate revolves around the question whether moral responsibility and free will are compatible with determinism. Prima facie, this seems to be a substantial issue. But according to the triviality objection, the disagreement is merely verbal: compatibilists and incompatibilists, it is maintained, are talking past each other, since they use the terms “free will” and “moral responsibility” in different senses. In this paper I argue, first, that the triviality objection is indeed a formidable one and that the standard replies (...) to it are unconvincing. This, however, does not mean that the objection succeeds. Starting with the debate about moral responsibility, I attempt to show that there is an account of moral responsibility which enables us to defend the compatibilism debate against the charge of triviality—namely, the normative conception of moral responsibility. If “moral responsibility” is defined in normative terms, then we cannot distinguish between a compatibilist and an incompatibilist sense of “moral responsibility”, because such a disambiguation would be inconsistent with the essential action-guiding force of normative expressions. Finally, I examine how the normative conception of moral responsibility can help us to defend the free will debate against the triviality objection and draw some general conclusions. (shrink)

The advent of intelligent artificial systems has sparked a dispute about the question of who is responsible when such a system causes a harmful outcome. This paper champions the idea that this dispute should be approached as a conceptual engineering problem. Towards this claim, the paper first argues that the dispute about the responsibility gap problem is in part a conceptual dispute about the content of responsibility and related concepts. The paper then argues that the way forward is to evaluate (...) the conceptual choices we have, in the light of a systematic understanding of why the concept is important in the first place—in short, the way forward is to engage in conceptual engineering. The paper then illustrates what approaching the responsibility gap problem as a conceptual engineering problem looks like. It outlines argumentative pathways out of the responsibility gap problem and relates these to existing contributions to the dispute. (shrink)

According to the Strawsonian tradition, a person is responsible for an action just in case it is appropriate to hold them responsible for that action. One important way of holding people responsible for wrongdoing is by experiencing and expressing blaming emotions. This raises the questions of what blaming emotions are and in what sense they can be appropriate. In this chapter I will provide an overview of different answers to both these questions. A common thread in the chapter will be (...) a challenge for the Strawsonian tradition. Given that this tradition understands moral responsibility in terms of the appropriateness of blaming emotions, it must provide a realistic picture of these emotions and the practices in which they take part. On the other hand, it also aims to develop a normatively plausible account of the conditions of responsibility. I will try to show that it is often difficult to strike a satisfactory balance between these two aspirations. (shrink)

This volume bridges contemporary philosophical conceptions of risk and responsibility and offers an extensive examination of the topic. It shows that risk and responsibility combine in ways that give rise to new philosophical questions and problems. -/- Philosophical interest in the relationship between risk and responsibility continues to rise, due in no small part to environmental crises, emerging technologies, legal developments, and new medical advances. Despite such interest, scholars are still working out how to conceive of the links between risk (...) and responsibility, the implications that risks may have to conceptions of responsibility (and vice versa), as well as how such theorizing might play out in applied cases. With contributions from leading scholars, this volume brings together new work examining the interplay between risk and responsibility, exploring its varied philosophical aspects and applications to contemporary issues in law, bioethics, technology, and environmental ethics. -/- Risk and Responsibility in Context will be of interest to philosophers working in ethics, bioethics, philosophy of law, and philosophy of technology, as well as scholars and practitioners in law, health and science management, public policy, and environmental studies. (shrink)

Argues that practical irrationality is akin to moral culpability: it is defective practical thought which one could legitimately have been expected to avoid. It is thus a mistake to draw too tight a connection between failure to be moved by reasons and practical irrationality (as in a certain kind of "internalism"): one's failure may be genuine, but not culpable, and therefore not irrational.

In this article, I argue for four theses. First, libertarian and compatibilist accounts of moral responsibility agree that the capability of practical reason is the central feature of moral responsibility. Second, this viewpoint leads to a reasons-focused account of human behavior. Examples of human action discussed in debates about moral responsibility suggest that typical human actions are driven primarily by the agent’s subjective reasons and are sufficiently transparent for the agent. Third, this conception of self-transparent action is a questionable idealization. (...) As shown by psychological research on self-assessment, motivated reasoning, and terror management theory, humans oftentimes have only a limited understanding of their conduct. Self-deception is rather the rule than the exception. Fourth, taking the limited self-transparency of practical reason seriously leads to a socially contextualized conception of moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper I explore graded attributions of blameworthiness—that is, judgments of the general sort, "A is more blameworthy for x-ing than B is," or "A is less blameworthy for her character than B is." In so doing, I aim to provide a philosophical basis for the widespread, if not completely articulate, practice of altering the degree to which we hold others responsible on the basis of facts about them or facts about their environments. To vindicate this practice, I disambiguate (...) several related properties and identify the properties of being more blameworthy for an action with a complex set of relations between what an agent deserves for her action and how good it is from the point of view of desert that she receives that response. (shrink)

One thing wrong with lying is that it can be manipulative. Understanding why lying can be a form of manipulation involves understanding how our telling someone something can give them a reason to believe it, and understanding this requires seeing both how our telling things can invite trust and how trust can be a reason to believe someone. This paper aims to outline the mechanism by means of which lies can be manipulative and through doing so identify a unique reason (...) for accepting testimony; a reason based on trusting a speaker’s telling. (shrink)

Abstract: In this paper, I defend a view according to which one is responsible for one's actions to the extent that one has the ability to do the right thing for the right reasons. The view is asymmetrical in requiring the ability to do otherwise when one acts badly or for bad reasons, but no such ability in cases in which one acts well for good ones. Despite its intuitive appeal, the view's asymmetry makes it a target of both of (...) the main camps in the debate over responsibility. In addressing objections, I explore the relationship between fairness and responsibility, and the nature of the ability to do otherwise. (shrink)

This paper starts by introducing a tripartite conception of responsibility for health consisting of a moral agent having moral responsibilities and being held responsible, that is blamed, for failing to meet them and proceeds to a brief discussion of the nature of the blame, noting difficulties in agency and obligation when the concept is applied to health‐threatening behaviours. Insights about the obligations that we hold people to and the extent of their moral agency are revealed by interrogating our blaming behavior, (...) and to facilitate this, my own blaming attitudes and actions are analysed in respect of an imagined adult son who seeks thrills by jumping from a pier into the sea, an activity common around coastlines and intended to be analogous in varying degrees to a range of health‐threatening behaviours. I consider my responses to this imagined act in relation to some features of moralism, the excess of morality, concluding that blame can be justified when it is proportionate and within interpersonal relationships. There is evidence that some nurses hold negative blaming attitudes towards groups of patients considered to have caused or contributed to their illness, but this is not justified, not only because of impaired agency, but also because if there is responsibility for health, associated obligations are owed to those who share our lives, and it is those people who are entitled to hold individuals responsible. Nurses who hold negative blaming attitudes towards groups of patients are invited to identify the status of moral agency, the precise natures of their (failed) obligations, and of the patient–nurse relationship. It is concluded that reflection on these matters and the difference between justified blame and moralism demonstrates that blaming behaviour in the context of professional health care is built on nothing stronger than prejudice. (shrink)

In this article we survey six recent developments in the philosophical literature on free will and moral responsibility: (1) Harry Frankfurt's argument that moral responsibility does not require the freedom to do otherwise; (2) the heightened focus upon the source of free actions; (3) the debate over whether moral responsibility is an essentially historical concept; (4) recent compatibilist attempts to resurrect the thesis that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise; (5) the role of the control condition in free (...) will and moral responsibility, and finally (6) the debate centering on luck. (shrink)

This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. (...) By using an agnostic, flexible, data-driven approach to isolate luck and ultimately measure desert, this proposal makes equal opportunity initiatives both more accurate and effective as it adapts to a changing economy. It grants to each individual the freedom to genuinely choose their place in the distribution. It provides two policy variations that are perfectly economically efficient, and two others that are conditionally so. It straightforwardly aligns outcomes with widely shared, fundamental moral intuitions. Lastly, it demonstrates much of the above by modeling four policy variations using 40 years of survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. (shrink)

In recent years, a growing discussion about how we should design our cities has emerged, particularly for the more controversial modes of design such as “defensive,” “hostile,” or “disciplinary” architecture (i.e., benches on which one cannot sleep, or metal studs on which one cannot skate). Although this debate is relatively mature, many studies have argued that these design notions are undertheorized and are, thus, challenging to study from an empirical and normative perspective. In this paper, I will defne the most (...) common terms used in the literature and show how they are interconnected by utilizing a set of “conditions of adequacy” from philosophy to facilitate a more transparent and well-grounded discussion of them. Terms such as “hostile” and “defensive” design are underlined by several diferent phenomena, not just one as is sometimes commonly assumed. I will also show that these phenomena and their conceptualizations require—and sometimes force us to use—diferent moral reasons when justifying the utilization of diferent designs. (shrink)

The Limits of Free Will presents influential articles by Paul Russell concerning free will and moral responsibility. The problems arising in this field of philosophy, which are deeply rooted in the history of the subject, are also intimately related to a wide range of other fields, such as law and criminology, moral psychology, theology, and, more recently, neuroscience. These articles were written and published over a period of three decades, although most have appeared in the past decade. Among the topics (...) covered: the challenge of skepticism; moral sentiment and moral capacity; necessity and the metaphysics of causation; practical reason; free will and art; fatalism and the limits of agency; moral luck, and our metaphysical attitudes of optimism and pessimism. (shrink)

It is an increasingly popular view among philosophers that moral responsibility can, in principle, be attributed to unconscious autonomous agents. This trend is already remarkable in itself, but it is even more interesting that most proponents of this view provide more or less the same argument to support their position. I argue that as it stands, the Extension Argument, as I call it, is not sufficient to establish the thesis that unconscious autonomous agents can be morally responsible. I attempt to (...) show that the Extension Argument should overcome especially strong ethical considerations; moreover, its epistemological grounds are not too solid, partly because the justifications of its premises are in conflict. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, I argued against the popular twofold Strawsonian claim that there can be no moral responsibility without a moral community and that, as a result, moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. Benjamin De Mesel has offered a number of objections to my argument, including in particular the objection that I mischaracterized Strawson’s view. In this article, I respond to De Mesel’s criticisms.

Many philosophers endorse the idea that there can be no moral responsibility without a moral community and thus hold that such responsibility is essentially interpersonal. In this paper, various interpretations of this idea are distinguished, and it is argued that no interpretation of it captures a significant truth. The popular view that moral responsibility consists in answerability is discussed and dismissed. The even more popular view that such responsibility consists in susceptibility to the reactive attitudes is also discussed, and it (...) is argued that this view at best supports only an etiolated interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. (shrink)

Many writers accept the following thesis about responsibility: (R) For one to be responsible for something is for one to be such that it is fitting that one be the object of some reactive attitude with respect to that thing. This thesis bears a striking resemblance to a thesis about value that is also accepted by many writers: (V) For something to be good (or neutral, or bad) is for it to be such that it is fitting that it be (...) the object of some pro-attitude (or indifference, or some contra-attitude). V has been the subject of intense debate in recent years, in part because of its incorporation into what has come to be called the “buck-passing” account of value. In particular, V is open to three challenges: that it is not necessarily the case that whatever is good is the fitting object of a pro-attitude; that it is not necessarily the case that whatever is the fitting object of a pro-attitude is good; and that, even if there is a strict equivalence between what is good and what is the fitting object of a pro-attitude, still the former is not to be analyzed in terms of the latter. The resemblance between V and R has not been previously commented on, but, once it is recognized, it is clear that R is open to challenges that resemble those to which V is vulnerable. This paper explores both the challenges to V and the parallel challenges to R and discusses responses that may be given to these challenges. The interrelation between V and R is then examined, and a general lesson is drawn concerning how to adjudicate disputes about the nature of moral responsibility. (shrink)

In Ignorance of Law, Douglas Husak’s main thesis is that ignorance of the law typically provides an excuse for breaking the law, but in the case of recklessness he claims that the excuse it provides is only a partial one, and in the case of willful ignorance he claims that it provides no excuse at all. In this paper I argue that, given the general principle to which Husak appeals in order to support his main thesis, he should revise his (...) position on the exculpatory significance of both recklessness and willful ignorance. (shrink)

Philosophers frequently distinguish between causal responsibility and moral responsibility, but that distinction is either ambiguous or confused. We can distinguish between causal responsibility and a deeper kind of responsibility, that licenses reactive attitudes and judgments that a merely causal connection would not, and we can distinguish between holding people accountable for their moral qualities and holding people accountable for their nonmoral qualities. But, because we sometimes hold people deeply responsible for nonmoral qualities of behavior and character, these distinctions are not (...) the same. A number of recent accounts of responsibility identify deep responsibility with moral responsibility and in consequence miss some key features of the concept of which they are trying to give an account. A view that distinguishes two levels of responsibility, according to which the conditions of attributability are weaker than the conditions of accountability, might seem to account for a kind of non.. (shrink)

New scientific advances have created previously unheard of possibilities for enhancing combatants' performance. Future war fighters may be smarter, stronger, and braver than ever before. If these technologies are safe, is there any reason to reject their use? In this article, I argue that the use of enhancements is constrained by the importance of maintaining the moral responsibility of military personnel. This is crucial for two reasons: the military's ethical commitments require military personnel to be morally responsible agents, and moral (...) responsibility is necessary for integrity and the moral emotions of guilt and remorse, both of which are important for moral growth and psychological well-being. Enhancements that undermined combatants' moral responsibility would therefore undermine the military's moral standing and would harm combatants' well-being. A genuine commitment to maintaining the military's ethical standards and the well-being of combatants therefore requires a careful analysis of performance-enhancing technologies before they are implemented. (shrink)

This paper looks at judgments of guilt in the face of alleged wrong-doing, be it in public or in private discourse. Its concern is not the truth of such judgments, although the complexity and contestability of such claims will be stressed. The topic, instead, is what sort of activities we are engaged in, when we make our judgments on others' conduct. To examine judging as an activity it focuses on a series of problems that can occur when we blame others. (...) On analysis, we see that these problems take the form of performative contradictions, so that the ostensible purposes of assigning guilt to others are undermined.There is clear evidence from social psychology that blame is especially frequently and inappropriately attributed to individuals in modern Western societies. On the other hand, it has often been observed how suspicious we are about the activity of judging – thus a widespread perception that a refusal to judge is somehow virtuous. My suggestion is that the sheer difficulty of attributions of responsibility, in the face of a complex and often arbitrary moral reality, frequently defeats us. This leads to a characteristic set of distortions when we blame, so that it is no surprise that we have become suspicious of all blaming activities. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have long noted that automated behavior is the rule, while consciousness acts of self-regulation are the exception to the rule. On the face of it automated actions appear to be immune to moral appraisal because they are not subject to conscious control. Conventional wisdom suggests that sleepwalking exculpates, while the mere fact that a person is performing a well-versed task unthinkingly does not. However, our apparent lack of conscious control while we are undergoing automaticity challenges the idea that (...) there is a relevant moral difference between these two forms of unconscious behavior. In both cases the agent lacks access to information that might help them guide their actions so as to avoid harms. In response it is argued that the crucial distinction between the automatic agent and the agent undergoing an automatism, such as somnambulism or petit mal epilepsy, lies in the fact that the former can preprogram the activation and interruption of automatic behavior. Given that, it is argued that there is elbowroom for attributing responsibility to automated agents based on the quality of their will. (shrink)

In a recent article, David Hunt has proposed a theological counterexample to the principle of alternative possibilities involving divine foreknowledge (G-scenario). Hunt claims that this example is immune to my criticism of regular Frankfurt-type counterexamples to that principle, as God’s foreknowing an agent’s act does not causally determine that act. Furthermore, he claims that the considerations which support the claim that the agent is morally responsible for his act in a Frankfurt-type scenario also hold in a G-scenario. In reply, Icontest (...) Hunt’s symmetry claim and also raise a worry whether, given theological fatalism, the agent’s act in a G-scenario can be deemed a free act in the libertarian sense. Finally, I offer an independent argument why in a G-scenario the agent should not regarded morally blameworthy for his act. (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)

Philosophers usually discuss responsibility in terms of responsibility for past actions or as a question about the nature of moral agency. Yet the word responsibility is fairly modern, whereas these topics arguably represent timeless concerns about human agency. This paper investigates another use of responsibility, that is particularly important to modern liberal societies: responsibility as a virtue that can be demonstrated by individuals and organisations. The paper notes its initial importance in political contexts, and seeks to explain why we now (...) demand responsibility in all spheres of life. In reply, I highlight the distinctively institutional character of modern liberal societies: institutions specify many of the particular responsibilities each of us must fulfil, but also require responsibility to sustain them and address their failings. My overall argument is that the virtue of responsibility occupies a distinctive place in the moral needs, and moral achievements, of liberal societies; and this, in turn, explains why it now occupies such a prominent place in our moral discourse. (shrink)

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...) out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions. (shrink)

Contextualist accounts of free will recently proposed by Hawthorne and Rieber imply that the same action can be both free and unfree (depending on the attributor's context). This paradoxical consequence can be avoided by thinking of contexts not as constituted by arbitrary moves in a conversation, but rather by (relatively stable) social practices (such as the practices of attributing responsibility or of giving scientific explanations). The following two conditions are suggested as each necessary and jointly sufficient for free will: (i) (...) the agent is able to form considered practical judgements and to act accordingly, and (ii) the agent (or some agent‐involving event) is the original cause of her actions. A contextualist reformulation of the second condition is developed according to which only contexts in which responsibility is attributed are relevant for the kind of original causation required for free will, which allows for a non‐relativist contextualism about free will. (shrink)

Moral responsibility invariantism is the view that there is a single set of conditions for being morally responsible for an action (or omission or consequence of an act or omission) that applies in all cases. I defend this view against some recent arguments by Joshua Knobe and John Doris.

It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the (...) view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore. (shrink)

Neuroscientists have located brain activity that prepares or encodes action plans before agents are aware of intending to act. On the basis of these findings and broader agency research, activity in these regions has been proposed as the neural realizers of practical intention. My aim in this paper is to evaluate the case for taking these neural states to be neural representations of intention. I draw on work in philosophy of action on the role and nature of practical intentions to (...) construct a framework of the functional profile of intentions fit for empirical investigation. With this framework, I turn to the broader empirical neuroscience literature on agency to assess these proposed neural representations of intention. I argue that while these neural states in some respects satisfy the functions of intention in planning agency prospective of action, their fit with the role of intention in action execution is not well supported. I close by offering a sketch of which experimental task features could aid in the search for the neural realizer of intention in action. (shrink)

Some people of colour feel shame in response to racist incidents. This phenomenon seems puzzling since, plausibly, they have nothing to feel shame about. This puzzle arises because we assume that targets of racism feel shame about their race. However, I propose that when an individual is racialised as non-White in a racist incident, shame is sometimes prompted, not by a negative self-assessment of her race, but by her inability to choose when her stigmatised race is made salient. I argue (...) that this can make sense of some shame responses to racism. My account also helps to highlight some of the emotional and cognitive costs of racism that have their root in shame as well as a new form of hermeneutical injustice and distinctive communicative harms, contributing to a fuller picture of what is objectionable about racism. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s account of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” has been widely influential. In both that paper and in the contemporary literature, much attention has been paid to Strawson’s account of blame in terms of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation. The Strawsonian view of praise in terms of gratitude has received comparatively little attention. Some, however, have noticed something puzzling about gratitude and accountability. We typically understand accountability in terms of moral demands and expectations. Yet gratitude does not (...) express or enforce moral demands or expectations. So, how is it a way to hold an agent accountable? In a more general manner, we might ask if there is even sense to be made of the idea that agents can be accountable—i.e., “on the hook”—in a positive way. In this paper, I clarify the relationship between gratitude and moral accountability. I suggest that accountability is a matter of engaging with others in a way that is basically concerned with their feelings and attitudes rather than solely a matter of moral demands. Expressions of gratitude are a paradigmatic form of this concerned engagement. I conclude by defending my view from the objection that it leads to an overly generous conception of holding accountable and suggest in reply that moral responsibility skeptics may not help themselves to as many moral emotions as they might have thought. (shrink)

(Part of a symposium on an OUP collection of Paul Russell's papers on free will and moral responsibility). Paul Russell’s The Limits of Free Will is more than the sum of its parts. Among other things, Limits offers readers a comprehensive look at Russell’s attack on the problematically idealized assumptions of the contemporary free will debate. This idealization, he argues, distorts the reality of our human predicament. Herein I pose a dilemma for Russell’s position, critical compatibilism. The dilemma illuminates the (...) tension between Russell’s critical and compatibilist commitments. The problem is not obviously insurmountable, and as a compatibilist who is sympathetic to the view, my aim is to spark further discussion. (shrink)

It is a platitude that morality is normative, but a substantive and interesting question whether morality is normative in a robust and important way; and although it is often assumed that morality is indeed robustly normative, that view is by no means uncontroversial, and a compelling argument for it is conspicuously lacking. In this paper, I provide such an argument. I argue, based on plausible claims about the relationship between moral wrongs and moral criticizability, and the relationship between criticizability and (...) normative reasons, that moral facts necessarily confer normative reasons upon moral agents. (shrink)

A defence of the idea that there are sui generis duties of love: duties, that is, that we owe to people in virtue of standing in loving relationships with them. I contrast this non-reductionist position with the widespread reductionist view that our duties to those we love all derive from more generic moral principles. The paper mounts a cumulative argument in favour of the non-reductionist position, adducing a variety of considerations that together speak strongly in favour of adopting it. The (...) concluding section connects this debate with larger issues in moral theory concerning the general idea of obligation. (shrink)

Direct brain intervention based mental capacity restoration techniques-for instance, psycho-active drugs-are sometimes used in criminal cases to promote the aims of justice. For instance, they might be used to restore a person's competence to stand trial in order to assess the degree of their responsibility for what they did, or to restore their competence for punishment so that we can hold them responsible for it. Some also suggest that such interventions might be used for therapy or reform in criminal legal (...) contexts-i.e. to make non-responsible and irresponsible people more responsible. However, I argue that such interventions may at least sometimes fail to promote these responsibility-related legal aims. This is because responsibility hinges on other factors than just what mental capacities a person has-in particular, it also hinges on such things as authenticity, personal identity, and mental capacity ownership-and some ways of restoring mental capacity may adversely affect these other factors. Put one way, my claim is that what might suffice for the restoration of competence need not necessarily suffice for the restoration of responsibility, or, put another way, that although responsibility indeed tracks mental capacity it may not always track restored mental capacities. (shrink)

This paper is about an asymmetry in the justification of praising and blaming behaviour which free will theorists should acknowledge even if they do not follow Wolf and Nelkin in holding that praise and blame have different control conditions. That is, even if praise and blame have the same control condition, we must have stronger reasons for believing that it is satisfied to treat someone as blameworthy than we require to treat someone as praiseworthy. Blaming behaviour which involves serious harm (...) can only be justified if the claim that the target of blame acted freely cannot be reasonably doubted. But harmless praise can be justified so long as the claim that the candidate for praise did not act freely can be reasonably doubted. Anyone who thinks a debate about whether someone acted freely is truth-conducive has to acknowledge that reasonable doubt is possible in both these cases. (shrink)

I defend the following version of the ought-implies-can principle: (OIC) by virtue of conceptual necessity, an agent at a given time has an (objective, pro tanto) obligation to do only what the agent at that time has the ability and opportunity to do. In short, obligations correspond to ability plus opportunity. My argument has three premises: (1) obligations correspond to reasons for action; (2) reasons for action correspond to potential actions; (3) potential actions correspond to ability plus opportunity. In the (...) bulk of the paper I address six objections to OIC: three objections based on putative counterexamples, and three objections based on arguments to the effect that OIC conflicts with the is/ought thesis, the possibility of hard determinism, and the denial of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. (shrink)

This paper argues that John Fischer and Mark Ravizza's compatibilist theory of moral responsibility cannot justify reactive attitudes like blame and desert-based practices like retributive punishment. The problem with their account, I argue, is that their analysis of moderateness in regards to reasons-responsiveness has the wrong normative features. However, I propose an alternative account of what it means for a mechanism to be moderately reasons-responsive which addresses this deficiency. In a nut shell, while Fischer and Ravizza test for moderate reasons-responsiveness (...) by checking how a mechanism behaves in a given time slice across other possible worlds, on my account we should ask how that mechanism behaves in this world over a span of time – specifically, whether it responds to reasons sufficiently often. My diachronic account is intended as a drop-in replacement for Fischer and Ravizza's synchronic account. (shrink)

Philosophical compatibilism reconciles moral responsibility with determinism, and some neurolaw scholars think that it can also reconcile legal views about responsibility with scientific findings about the neurophysiological basis of human action. Although I too am a compatibilist, this paper argues that philosophical compatibilism cannot be transplanted “as-is” from philosophy into law. Rather, before compatibilism can be re-deployed, it must first be modified to take account of differences between legal and moral responsibility, and between a scientific and a deterministic world view, (...) and to address a range of conceptual, normative, empirical and doctrinal problems that orbit its capacitarian core. (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)

The notion of responsible innovation suggests that innovators carry additional responsibilities beyond those commonly suggested. In this paper, we will discuss the meaning of these novel responsibilities focusing on two philosophical problems of attributing such responsibilities to innovators. The first is the allocation of responsibilities to innovators. Innovation is a process that involves a multiplicity of agents and unpredictable, far-reaching causal chains from innovation to social impacts, which creates great uncertainty. A second problem is constituted by possible trade-offs between different (...) kinds of responsibility. It is evident that attributing backward-looking responsibility for product failures diminishes the willingness to learn about such defects and to take forward-looking responsibility. We will argue that these problems can be overcome by elaborating what it is exactly that innovators are responsible for. In this manner, we will distinguish more clearly between holding responsible and taking responsibility. This opens a space for ‘supererogatory’ responsibilities. Second, we will argue that both innovation processes and outcomes can be objects of innovators’ responsibility. Third, we will analyze different kinds of responsibility and show that the functions of their attribution are not necessarily contradictory. Based on this conceptual refinement, we will argue that accountability, responsibility-as-virtue and the willingness to take responsibility are crucial for responsible innovation. (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)