Desert, Control, and Moral Responsibility

Acta Analytica 34 (4):407-426 (2019)
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Abstract

In this paper, I take it for granted both that there are two types of blameworthiness—accountability blameworthiness and attributability blameworthiness—and that avoidability is necessary only for the former. My task, then, is to explain why avoidability is necessary for accountability blameworthiness but not for attributability blameworthiness. I argue that what explains this is both the fact that these two types of blameworthiness make different sorts of reactive attitudes fitting and that only one of these two types of attitudes requires having been able to refrain from φ-ing in order for them to be fitting.

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Douglas W. Portmore
Arizona State University

Citations of this work

True Blame.Randolph Clarke & Piers Rawling - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):736-749.
Deserved Guilt and Blameworthiness over Time.Andreas Brekke Carlsson - 2022 - In Andreas Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Guilt, Desert, Fittingness, and the Good.Coleen Macnamara - 2020 - The Journal of Ethics 24 (4):449-468.
Still guilty.Randolph Clarke - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (8):2579-2596.

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References found in this work

Freedom and Resentment.Peter Strawson - 1962 - Proceedings of the British Academy 48:187-211.
Moral dimensions: permissibility, meaning, blame.Thomas Scanlon - 2008 - Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments.R. Jay Wallace - 1994 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Responsibility From the Margins.David Shoemaker - 2015 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.

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