Responsible Agency: A Human Distinctive?

Zygon 58 (2):504-521 (2023)
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Abstract

While agent responsibility appears to be one of the clearest examples of a human distinctive, practices of holding responsible are bound up with social expectations and emotional reactions, many of which are shared with other social animals. This essay attends to the ways in which what Peter Strawson first identified as the reactive emotions, including notably anger, resentment, and indignation, are key to making sense of both the shared and distinctive features of responsible human agency. Like human beings, other social animals express a range of reactive emotions in response to others’ conformity with or violation of implicit social expectations and norms; human beings sometimes reflect on these reactive attitudes and their justifiability, asking whether and when it is appropriate to hold others accountable, blame, and/or punish them. We should recognize that we often praise and blame others for attitudes and desires which they have not chosen and over which they have no direct control, and that this is appropriate.

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Jennifer Herdt
Yale Divinity School

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References found in this work

A Natural History of Human Morality.Michael Tomasello (ed.) - 2015 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Intention.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1957 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57:321-332.
Involuntary sins.Robert Merrihew Adams - 1985 - Philosophical Review 94 (1):3-31.
The Physiognomy of Responsibility.John Martin Fischer & Neal A. Tognazzini - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (2):381-417.

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