Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1994)
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Abstract

R. Jay Wallace argues in this book that moral accountability hinges on questions of fairness: When is it fair to hold people morally responsible for what they do? Would it be fair to do so even in a deterministic world? To answer these questions, we need to understand what we are doing when we hold people morally responsible, a stance that Wallace connects with a central class of moral sentiments, those of resentment, indignation, and guilt. To hold someone responsible, he argues, is to be subject to these reactive emotions in one's dealings with that person. Developing this theme with unusual sophistication, he offers a new interpretation of the reactive emotions and traces their role in our practices of blame and moral sanction. With this account in place, Wallace advances a powerful and sustained argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behavior accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibility. Rigorously argued, eminently readable, this book touches on issues of broad concern to philosophers, legal theorists, political scientists, and anyone with an interest in the nature and limits of responsibility.

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R. Jay Wallace
University of California, Berkeley

Citations of this work

A Plea for Epistemic Excuses.Clayton Littlejohn - forthcoming - In Julien Dutant Fabian Dorsch (ed.), The New Evil Demon Problem. Oxford University Press.
There is a distinctively epistemic kind of blame.Cameron Boult - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (3):518-534.
Moral Luck and The Unfairness of Morality.Robert Hartman - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (12):3179-3197.
Free will.Timothy O'Connor & Christopher Evan Franklin - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Epistemic blame.Cameron Boult - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (8):e12762.

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