Abstract

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Shoemaker’s new book, Responsibility from the Margins, is an excellent and insightful explication of Shoemaker’s tripartite theory of moral responsibility. After setting out the main elements of his account, Shoemaker uses underexplored marginal cases of responsible agency to illustrate, support and shape his main theses concerning responsibility. The book as a whole thus presents us with a thoroughly defended, subtle, and plausible theory of the extent and the nature of moral responsibility.Shoemaker takes as his starting point Peter Strawson’s claim that an agent’s responsibility for an action stems from the ‘quality of will’ expressed by that action. In particular, the appropriateness of our reactive attitudes towards an...