Abstract

In everyday life it is common to judge people morally responsible for their actions, but there is a time-honored philosophical challenge to this practice with which we are all familiar. The challenge can be put briefly as follows: moral responsibility requires that agents have a certain kind of control that is compatible with neither causal determinism nor its contradictory, causal indeterminism; hence moral responsibility is impossible. Haji notes that judgments about moral responsibility- which I will call hypological judgments—are not the only category of moral, or morally relevant, judgments. There are also deontic judgments, which have to do with moral obligation, right, and wrong; aretaic judgments, which have to do with moral virtue and vice; and axiological judgments, which have to do with intrinsic and extrinsic value. In principle, a challenge to all such judgments can be made that parallels the challenge to hypological judgments: that they presuppose a certain kind of control that is compatible with neither determinism nor indeterminism and are therefore to be rejected. It is a surprising fact that, whereas the challenge to hypological judgments has been the subject of intense debate for centuries, the analogous challenges to the other kinds of judgments have received comparatively little, if any, attention. In this book, Haji seeks to rectify this omission. He concerns himself primarily with the challenge to deontic judgments. During the course of his discussion he deals in depth with the original challenge to hypological judgments, devotes a chapter to the challenge to aretaic judgments, and makes certain remarks in passing about the challenge to axiological judgments.