I argue that Scanlon's Value of Choice View does not offer a plausible account of substantive responsibility. I offer a new account, which I call the Potential Value of Opportunities View. On this view, when a person is in a position to freely and capably make an informed choice, we assess her situation not by the outcome she achieves but by the potential value of her opportunities. This value depends on the value of the various things that she (...) can achieve through her choices, as well as on how disposed she is to choose her better options and avoid her worse options. This view explains the priority we give to preventing harm that a person cannot avoid by choosing appropriately over harm that a person can so avoid by the fact that the second person has a valuable opportunity that the first does not have. It explains the importance of protecting people against choosing badly by the value of being placed in circumstances in which one is disposed to choose well, and the disvalue of being exposed to the danger of coming to harm by choosing badly. (shrink)

How should the fact that a given policy offers people choice bear on policy selection? Should we favour choice-granting policies even if choices lead to harmful outcomes, and even if the causal thesis is true and people are not fully in control of how they choose? T.M. Scanlon and Alex Voorhoeve have tried to locate the significance of choice in the value or potential value that it has for choice-bearers. I show that this leaves them vulnerable to a general dilemma: (...) either they can explain the significance of choice by supposing the causal thesis is false, or they cannot explain it when faced with certain policy cases. I argue that we should locate the significance of choice in the fact that having a choice means being in a position to treat others as they are due or not. My view can be summed up in a slogan: ask not only what choice can do for you; ask what having the choice means you can do to others. (shrink)

This article describes a multilevel theoretical framework that examines the multiple causes of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in the social environment of business. We argue that substantive and/or symbolic reporting flows from individual‐, aggregate‐, organizational‐, and institution‐level phenomena, and is thus a complex outcome of CSR and corporate social performance (CSP). Theoretical lenses range from reinforcement theory at the microlevel to legitimacy and stakeholder theories at the macrolevel, and include a discussion of the emergence of lower‐level CSR‐relevant (...) characteristics to higher level constructs. Our goal is to clarify how this behavior develops from microlevel, mesolevel, and macrolevel processes with a view toward assisting corporations to better enact CSR reporting, and their stakeholders to effectively promote substantive reporting behavior. (shrink)

Social metaphysics is a source of important philosophical and moral insight. Furthermore, much social metaphysics appears to be substantive. However, some have recently argued that standard views of metaphysics cannot accommodate substantive social metaphysics. In this paper I offer a new diagnosis of this problem and defend a new solution, showing that this problem is an illuminating lens through which to examine the nature and boundaries of metaphysics. This case instantiates a broad, common pattern generated by attempts to (...) align distinctions between realism and anti-realism, mind-independence and mind-dependence, and legitimate and non-legitimate inquiry. I show that the best response is to abandon the association between substantive metaphysics and mind-independence, and I sketch a new definition of substantivity, given in terms of explanatory power, that makes room for substantive social metaphysics while also offering an attractive basis for general metaphysics. (shrink)

This chapter covers the traditional role of responsibility, and the possible connections between response and responsibility. These connections are explored through the advance of trust and the surplus of the extraordinary in relation to the Third Party. The idea of responsibility comes from the sphere of juridical law, and has a theological touch. The classical conception presented suffers from a permanent erosion that is reinforced by systemic constraints. Trust is a natural element of every community that is (...) together applied by common aims in life. The phenomenon of trust refers to the bond, the nexus, which holds together the members of a community, creating the requisite solidarity. The term ‘trust’ or ‘confidence’ should not primarily read as a substantive, but as a verb or as the derivative of a verb. Furthermore, it is noted that the responsive ethics proposed could function as a permanent corrective. (shrink)

In his commentary, David Galin raises several important issues that deserve to be addressed. In this response, I do three things. First, I briefly discuss the relation between the present work and the metaphoric theories of thought developed by cognitive lin- guists such as Lakoff and Johnson (1998). Second, I address some of the confusions that seem to have arisen about my use of the terms ''substantive thought'' and ''nucleus.'' Third, I briefly discuss some of the directions that Galin (...) suggests for further research. (shrink)

Stakeholder recognition constitutes a firm’s experience of affirmation and acknowledgment from stakeholders and is deemed essential for organizations to develop positive self-relations and a sense of themselves as morally responsible social actors. Through an in-depth case study, I show how a firm’s varied experiences of stakeholder recognition for its corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts alternately facilitated and hindered the performativity of its aspirational CSR talk through two key processes: (a) a recognition-attainment process whereby the experience of stakeholder recognition helped (...) turn aspirational CSR talk into “substantive” talk with the performative potential to catalyze other CSR practices; and (b) a subsequent recognition-commodification process induced by a perceived misrecognition that ultimately rendered such talk “ceremonial.” Elucidating stakeholder recognition as an undertheorized boundary condition of aspirational CSR talk, this study adds to performative approaches to CSR communication. It further contributes to research on recognition by demonstrating the explanatory potential of Axel Honneth’s notion of recognition in researching business and society interactions. (shrink)

Choice-based conceptions of substantive responsibility face a number of powerful counterexamples. In order to avoid some of these counterexamples, it is widely claimed that agents are substantively responsible for disadvantage arising from their choices only when the option set from which they chose satisfied a reasonability criterion. I examine three possible justifications for a reasonability criterion: an agent-responsibility-based motivation, a voluntariness-based motivation, and what I call a ‘denied-claim’-based motivation. In each case, I argue that the putative motivation (...) cannot in fact justify a reasonability condition. I end with some comments on what this result means for choice-based conceptions of substantive responsibility. (shrink)

. The accounting profession’s image and reputation is built upon the members of the profession acting with the “highest sense of integrity” in “the public interest” (AICPA, 2003, www.aicpa.org/about). The Enron debacle initiated the latest crisis facing the profession regarding its image and reputation. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) is the largest professional body representing the accounting profession and the one to which regulators have looked in establishing and upholding professional standards relating to the public practice of (...) accounting and auditing. One of the AICPA’s responsibilities is to “promote public awareness and confidence in the integrity, objectivity, competence and professionalism of CPAs ....” (AICPA, 2003, www.aicpa.org/about). We analyze the public statements issued by the AICPA (i.e., press releases, speeches of officers, testimony, published articles) during this ethical and identity crisis beginning with the AICPA’s first public statement on the Enron debâcle (AIPCA 2001) and concluding with the AICPA recognizing the need for a “new accounting culture” (Melancon 2002). In order to better understand the public discourse, we use image restoration theory (Benoit, 1995), because it provides a typology of strategies for dealing with the public face of crises. We identify the three most common strategies the AICPA employs during this period. Proposals for taking corrective action represent the most commonly employed strategy, but the analysis also indicates an attempt to evade responsibility by claiming defeasibility and to reduce the offensiveness of the situation by employing a bolstering strategy. A second analysis using DICTION, a software package useful in revealing latent dimensions in a text, indicates that early statements tend to use language related to accomplishing specific action while the later statements tend more toward general language that relates to peoples’ everyday lives. The findings raise questions as to substantive nature of the changes proposed by the AICPA, and thus, the extent to which the public interest is being served by them. (shrink)

This paper discusses to what extent, if any, recent street uprisings in Iran have been fuelled by gender inequalities; and, what the legal challenges of transforming such gender equality demands into the constitution are. I argue that a demographic transition that commenced two decades ago in Iran changed the status of women in family and society. Such a transition has unavoidably increased the presence of women in the public sphere and challenged gender presumptions within the law. To give a constitutional (...) response to such demands, I argue, the Iranian Constitution must re-examine the correlation between women and men as biological and/or social groups, and the relationship among women themselves as a group consisting of diverse identities. Moreover, equal attention must be paid to women’s norm, diversity, and agency. (shrink)

Employees have their own understandings of corporate social responsibility (CSR) motives. This study investigated whether employees' different perceptions of CSR motives, including substantive CSR attribution and symbolic CSR attribution, influence their work attitudes, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. Moreover, we explore the mediating role of person-organization fit in the relationships among CSR attribution, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. We collected 687 responses for an overall response rate of 16%. The results of structural equation model (SEM) analyses show that (...) substantive CSR attribution decreases employee turnover intention and that symbolic CSR attribution increases employee turnover intention. Based on these results, we provide relevant theoretical and managerial implications. (shrink)

Consider the following argument for school choice, based on an appeal to the virtues of the market: allowing parents some measure of choice over their particular children's education ultimately serves the interests of all children, because creating a market mechanism in state education will produce improvements through the same pressures that lead to greater efficiency and quality when markets are deployed in more familiar contexts. The argument fails, because it is committed to a principle of equal concern, which implies that (...) a market in education is acceptable only if it is right to hold children disadvantaged by their parents' poor market choices substantively responsible for the fact. Since that claim is untenable, the market‐based argument for school choice not only fails, but also turns out to rely on principles which in fact condemn the very policy it was supposed to support. (shrink)

In response to Cohen, we point out that many of the assessment difficulties raised by the correspondence metaphor stem from the assessment of memory in meaningful, real-life contexts rather than from the assessment of memory accuracy per se; these difficulties are equally troublesome for the assessment of memory quantity in such contexts. Moreover, the need to focus on particular aspects of memory performance – correspondence-oriented or quantity-oriented – does not preclude the development of useful and general theoretical models. In response (...) to Shanon, we argue that (1) the distinction between the correspondence and storehouse metaphors of memory is metatheoretical, not substantive or methodological, (2) the correspondence metaphor is compatible with both a “representationalist” view of memory and a more “direct” view, and (3) as an epistemological strategy, metaphorical pluralism is both acceptable and desirable. (shrink)

Students coming into a third-year business ethics course I teach are often confused about the use and meaning of the terms social responsibility and ethics. This motivated me to take a closer look at a sample of the management and business ethics literature for an explanation of their confusion. I found that there are inconsistencies in the way the two terms are employed and the way the concepts are defined. This paper identifies the different ways the relationship between social (...) responsibility and ethics has been represented, the various uses of these two terms, and the contrasting views regarding the connection between morality and ethics. While this analysis does not resolve any difficult substantive questions, it does provide conceptual clarity as a necessary first step towards facilitating students critical engagement with the substantive issues. (shrink)

Pre-natal-diagnosis technologies allow parents to discover whether their child is likely to suffer from serious disability. One argument for state funding of access to such technologies is that doing so would be “cost-effective”, in the sense that the expected financial costs of such a programme would be outweighed by expected “benefits”, stemming from the births of fewer children with serious disabilities. This argument is extremely controversial. This paper argues that the argument may not be as unacceptable as is often assumed. (...) In doing so, it sets out a more general framework for assessing the relevance of efficiency calculations to policy-making. The final section also investigates the relationship between the paper’s arguments and claims about parental responsibility for child-bearing and rearing, with reference to Scanlon’s work on “substantive responsibility”. (shrink)

Pre-natal-diagnosis technologies allow parents to discover whether their child is likely to suffer from serious disability. One argument for state funding of access to such technologies is that doing so would be “cost-effective”, in the sense that the expected financial costs of such a programme would be outweighed by expected “benefits”, stemming from the births of fewer children with serious disabilities. This argument is extremely controversial. This paper argues that the argument may not be as unacceptable as is often assumed. (...) In doing so, it sets out a more general framework for assessing the relevance of efficiency calculations to policy-making. The final section also investigates the relationship between the paper’s arguments and claims about parental responsibility for child-bearing and rearing, with reference to Scanlon’s work on “substantive responsibility”. (shrink)

Universalistic claims about the nature of justice are presumed to require larger commitments from a global perspective than partialist claims. This essay departs from standard partialist accounts by anchoring partialist claims in a different account of the nature of responsibility. In contrast to substantive responsibility, which is akin to an obligation and derived from principles, relational responsibilities grow out of relationships and their complex intertwining. While such accounts of responsibility are less clear cut, they will prove (...) in the long run to be more valuable in thinking about global ethics. I illustrate this point by considering the moral issue surrounding abandoned relationships. The approach offered here—partiality that rests upon relational responsibilities—makes the responsibilities owed by those in higher income countries towards lower income countries much richer and more complex than is usually presumed. (shrink)

Philosophers of science, particularly those working on science and values, often talk about the need for science to be socially responsible. However, what this means is not clear. In this paper, we review the contributions of philosophers of science to the debate over socially responsible science and explore the dimensions that a fruitful account of socially responsible science should address. Our review shows that offering a comprehensive account is difficult. We contend that broad calls for socially responsible science that fail (...) to attend to relevant dimensions are not the solution, as they preclude meaningful changes to research institutions and practices. We conclude that narrower, more explicit accounts are more likely to lead to substantive transformation. (shrink)

In conclusion, then, the situationist literature provides a rich area of exploration for those interested in freedom and responsibility. Interestingly, it does not do so primarily because it is situationist in the sense of supporting the substantive thesis about the role of character traits. Rather it is because it makes us wonder whether we really do act on a regular basis with the particular normative, epistemic,and reactive capacities that are central to our identity as free and responsible agents.

In this essay I agrue that contemporary Anglo-American liberal egalitarianism has at its heart a tension: the goal is to find principles of justice that are fair in respecting the distinction between choice and chance and that do not invoke controversial metaphysical arguments. This is a tension because distinguishing between choice and chance itself requires invoking controversial metaphysical arguments. I proceed by offering, and then examining, the thought that Scanlon's distinction between ?attributive? and ?substantive? responsibility offers a route (...) out of the tension described above. The greater part of the essay is taken up with examining Scanlon's account of responsibility and the distinction between substantive and attributive responsibility. My conclusion is that Scanlon does not offer a compelling account of substantive compatibilism; that his theory does not, therefore, release the liberal egalitarian from the tension; but that this does not show that the direction indicated by Scanlon's theory is the wrong one. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 3-9 [Access article in PDF] The Suspended Substantive On Animals and Men in Giorgio Agamben's The Open Leland de la Durantaye Giorgio Agamben. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. [O] Trans. of L'aperto: L'uomo e l'animale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002. [A] With a title as enigmatic as The Open, the reader might well wonder, "the open what?" Is the (...) title's adjective to stand alone? Does it need no substantive to support it? This unfamiliar title is not what one might first guess—it is not an awkward translation from the work's original title. No substantive follows in the original, and none is meant to. The idea that gives Agamben's book its title is that of an openness which is unconditioned—and perhaps unconditional, an openness which is unspecified—and perhaps unspecifiable.If the answer to the question "the open what?" can be answered with no substantive, might we ask in what this opening occurs? Between what more substantive things has an indefinable space been opened? The first answer to the question can be found in the work's subtitle—Man and Animal. The open space in question is that which separates and distinguishes man from animal. Philosophers, anthropologists, social scientists, zoologists, chemists, taxonomists—and many others—have had no small difficulty in agreeing upon the matter.Philosophers have traditionally had a low opinion of animals [cf. de Fontenay]. Descartes had especially little respect for the minds of animals and influentially classified them as automata mechanica. As Agamben notes, the great naturalist and taxonomist Linnaeus responded to this assertion with the laconic rejoinder: "Descartes obviously never saw an ape" [cf. O 23/A 30; translation modified]. Philosophers have been more eager than taxonomists to put distance between themselves and the animals—and for this reason have been particularly interested in studying what separates man from animal. The last great philosophical attempt in this regard is that of Martin Heidegger. Despite his preference for the primordial, his openness to the woods and the wilderness, his opinion of animals' faculties was not much higher than that of Descartes. In his view, animals live in an environment in which they are receptive to various stimuli, but where they have nothing approximating what we call a "world"—animals are, as he claims, "poor in world" (weltarm)—or even "without world" (weltlos). They live in such intense and incessant proximity to their environment and its stimuli that they do not see the existential forest for the environmental trees. They can never take a step away from the immediacy of their perception and for this reason cannot be said to possess a "world" in the sense that man, in Heidegger's view, does.As mentioned above, the title The Open is, for all its strangeness, not the result of [End Page 3] an awkward translation from Agamben's Italian. Its strangeness stems, nevertheless, in large part from a translation. Or, to be more precise, from two translations. The first of these is from the German. The German in question is a special one—that of the profoundly idiosyncratic technical vocabulary that Heidegger fashioned for his philosophical purposes. For Heidegger, "the open" is something literally fundamental which lay at the heart of his thought. "The open" is the space revealed to us in the moment when the world we live in, which because of our many tasks and travails we tend to take no distance from (like animals with their stimuli), opens out onto something larger. This moment of distancing ourselves from our everyday concern with means and ends, with stimuli and response, is what gives us not just an environment, but a "world." "The open" is what we find ourselves in when the bustle and haste of our environment recedes and we see that environment in all its strangeness and immensity—as a "world," greater and less graspable than our restricted and finite representations. This experience of "the open" is, for Heidegger, what makes us human, and... (shrink)

To explain why we should be structurally rational – or mentally coherent – is notoriously difficult. Some philosophers argue that the normativity of structural rationality can be explained in terms of substantive rationality, which is a matter of correct response to reason. I argue that the psychological phenomena – positive illusions – are counterexamples to the substantivist approach. Substantivists dismiss the relevance of positive illusions because they accept evidentialism that reason for belief must be evidence. I argue that their (...) evidentialist stance would imply that we are caught in unsolvable dilemmas arising from positive illusions. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that morality faces a justificatory crisis. Rationalism seeks to resolve this crisis by means of a direct response to the moral sceptic--to the person who doubts that there is a rational way of deciding what moral position to adopt or whether to be moral at all. I argue that the very aspirations of rationalism--to seek a refutation of the sceptic that concedes her initial standpoint and to base morality on a formal concept of rationality--are misguided. As (...) an alternative, I introduce an approach which has neither of these aspirations--the substantive approach--and argue that it offers a more satisfactory justificatory ideal than rationalism. When measured by this ideal morality does not face a justificatory crisis. ;I argue that both subjectivist and inter-subjectivist rationalists fail to refute the sceptic. I consider the possibility that there is something specific to subjectivism which gives rise to the appearance that morality faces a justificatory crisis and argue that the justificatory standards set up by inter-subjective rationalism--if not met--equally give rise to the same appearance. Thus, it might be thought that rationalism's failure to refute the sceptic reveals that morality does indeed face a justificatory crisis. Instead, I contend that the rationalistic standards themselves should be rejected. To demotivate rationalism, I argue that the substantive approach makes better sense of our lives. The task of making sense of our lives includes not only the task of making our lives intelligible but also one of rendering them meaningful. With regard to subjectivist rationalism, I argue that agents employ substantive reasons in the attempt to make sense of themselves, that this employment of substantive reasons is part and parcel of a meaningful life, and that rationalism's formal concept of rationality cannot capture this use of these reasons. In the case of inter-subjectivist rationalism, I claim that in criticizing others for, say, cruel acts it is the cruelty of those acts that we should focus on and that in its attempt to refute the moral sceptic rationalism distorts our view on such matters. (shrink)

International Journal of Machine Consciousness, Volume 06, Issue 02, Page 141-161, December 2014. This paper follows directly from an earlier paper where we discussed the requirements for an artifact to be a moral agent and concluded that the artifactual question is ultimately a red herring. As before, we take moral agency to be that condition in which an agent can appropriately be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. We set a number of stringent conditions on moral agency. A (...) moral agent must be embedded in a cultural and specifically moral context and embodied in a suitable physical form. It must be, in some substantive sense, alive. It must exhibit self-conscious awareness. It must exhibit sophisticated conceptual abilities, going well beyond what the likely majority of conceptual agents possess: not least that it must possess a well-developed moral space of reasons. Finally, it must be able to communicate its moral agency through some system of signs: A "private" moral world is not enough. After reviewing these conditions and pouring cold water on recent claims for having achieved "minimal" machine consciousness, we turn our attention to a number of existing and, in some cases, commonplace artifacts that lack moral agency yet nevertheless require one to take a moral stance toward them, as if they were moral agents. Finally, we address another class of agents raising a related set of issues: autonomous military robots. (shrink)

This paper discusses some of the current literature around the precautionary principle in environmental philosophy and law with reference to the possibility of transgenic food in Uganda (GMO bananas specifically). My suggestion is that the distinction between formal and substantive versions of a principle, familiar from legal theory, can be useful in imposing some conceptual clarity on aspects of debates concerning the precautionary principle. In particular, most of the negative critical response to the principle has been to formal versions (...) of it, and follows a pattern not unfamiliar from discussions of how to get from rules to outcomes. For its part, the less-discussed substantive account admits of at least two very different emphases. The first, which I call “Heideggerian,” exhibits a deep distrust of technology. The second, “autonomist,” is less concerned with the fact of technology than with the question of who controls it. As with any exercise of analytic taxonomy, this one will fail to adequately treat many of the objects it studies. However, I hope to illuminate what I take to be serious philosophical differences within the precautionary camp, and to highlight some of the questions they suggest in terms of the differences in political philosophy that might underlie and support them. (shrink)

This paper sketches some developments in the discussion of liberal nationalism since the early 1990s and proposes a generic understanding of nationalism according to which its main feature is the act of sorting people into members and non-members of the nation with a view to regulating access to political goods linked to the state. One discussion of liberal nationalism that has recently received renewed attention is the relation between nationalism and multiculturalism. Liberal nationalism sees nationalism as a response to increased (...) diversity and involves normative demands on nationalism for accommodating this diversity. In light of the proposed generic understanding of nationalism, the question arises whether such a liberal nationalism is coherent. This question requires us to distinguish between a substantive and a performative perspective on nationalism, raising the possibility that liberal nationalism can be substantively coherent but performatively incoherent. (shrink)

In this essay, I will examine how technological progress affects the responsibilities of human agents. To this end, I will distinguish between two interpretations of the concept of responsibility, viz. responsibility as attributability and substantive responsibility. On the former interpretation, responsibility has to do with the idea of authorship. When we say that a person is responsible for her actions we mean that she is to be seen as the author of these actions. They can (...) be attributed to her, such that she can be normatively appraised – i.e. blamed, praised, etc. – on that basis. In discussing this kind of responsibility I will show that the responsibility of human agents tends to increase as their technologies progress. This claim is often taken for granted, but seldom clarified and argued for. I will give it a clear interpretation and provide a semi-formal reasoning that supports it. The second interpretation of responsibility that I will discuss is substantive responsibility. It has to do with the normative demands that confront us with what we are required to do. I will argue that technological change can affect, firstly, what our substantive responsibilities are on a case-by-case basis. Secondly, I will try to show that it can affect the way we think about our substantive responsibilities at the level of theoretical normative ethics. (shrink)

We are grateful for the thoughtful attention the commentators and editors have given our paper. They raise many substantive points that warrant a response, but for reasons of journal space our reply must be brief. In our paper, we argue for an amended hybrid account of ‘disease’ in human medicine that takes normative ethics seriously, guards against pernicious classifications of disease and reconnects the concept with the goals of healthcare institutions in which disease diagnosis is embedded. Carel and Tekin, (...) in their respective pieces, raise issues about the objectivity and effective operationalisation of our account, Agar makes an ‘evolutionary’ case for disease concept eliminativism in mental health, and Wakefield and Conrad contend that our proposed modification to the harmful dysfunction account is unnecessary and undesirable. We will respond to each in turn. The rational moral justification component of our account raises difficult moral epistemological questions regarding which reasons are the weightiest ones and who should be allowed to participate in the rational justification process. Carel suggests that inevitable disagreement on this point undermines the alleged objectivity of our proposal. We agree with Tekin, however, that this is a feature of our account rather than a bug. What constitutes a good reason in moral deliberation is a question that goes to the very philosophical foundation of ethics ; but disagreement over which reasons are the weightiest ones does not prevent ethicists and policy makers from objectively assessing the strength of moral arguments by evaluating their empirical adequacy and logical structure, and this can take us a long way toward adjudication. The fact that rational justification has been used to support immoral practices and institutions does not warrant abandoning a reason-based approach to ethics any more than …. (shrink)

Behaviour, including criminal behaviour, takes place in lived contexts of embodied action and experience. The way in which abstract models of selfhood efface the individual as a unique, living being is a central aspect of the ‘ethical-other’ debate; if an individual is modelled as abstracted from this ‘living’ context, that individual cannot be properly or meaningfully linked with his or her behaviour, and thus cannot justly be understood as responsible. The dominant rational choice models of criminal identity in legal theory (...) involve at least a partial abstraction of this ‘unethical’ type by prioritising the rational will over the more fluid dimensions of lived reality. From a phenomenological perspective, an approach of ‘restlessness’ is proposed which precludes the development of settled or general abstract categories, and can thus move us closer to an ethical understanding of living individuals on a theoretical level. Although such a move may initially seem to threaten criminal justice with an irrational nihilism, by maintaining awareness of the irreducibility of ‘living’ reality a restless theoretical understanding of moral selfhood may be able to shape or underpin the attribution of responsibility in more practical or substantive contexts without succumbing to meaninglessness. (shrink)

Might epistemic justification be, to some substantive extent, a function of epistemic responsibility—a belief's being formed, or its being maintained, in an epistemically responsible way? I will call any analysis of epistemic justification endorsing that kind of idea epistemic responsibilism—or, for short, responsibilism. Many epistemic internalists are responsibilists, because they think that what makes a belief justified is its being appropriately related to one's good evidence for it, and because many of them regard this appropriate relation as somehow (...) involving one's being epistemically responsible. Alvin Goldman describes internalism as relying upon a guidance-deontological conception of epistemic justification, at the heart of which is a concept of epistemic responsibility. Alvin Plantinga, too, characterises internalism in deontological terms, epistemic responsibility being one of the most prominent such terms. And the concept of epistemic responsibility might feature in attempts to develop a virtue epistemology. Epistemic responsibility would be an epistemic virtue, and epistemic justification would be present partly due to one's being epistemically virtuous. (shrink)

A Buchner and E. Erdfelder (this volume) provide a commentary on our analysis of response bias correction in the process dissociation procedure. Unfortunately, this commentary fails to address the substantive issues that were raised in M. J. Wainwright and E. M. Reingold (1996). In the present article, we attempt to clarify some of their misrepresentations and the inconsistency inherent in their position. ©1996 Academic Press..

Employing a time-lagged sample of 371 North American individuals working full time in a wide range of industries, occupations, and levels, we contribute to research on employee outcomes of corporate social responsibility attributions as substantive or symbolic. Utilizing a mediated moderation model, our study extends previous findings by explaining how and why CSR attributions are related with work-related attitudes and subsequent individual performance. In support of our hypotheses, our findings indicate that the relationships between CSR attributions and individual (...) performance are mediated through person–organization fit and work-related attitudes. Additionally, when CSR is perceived as important, substantive CSR is positively related to, and symbolic CSR is negatively related to, perception of fit with the organization. These findings contribute toward our understanding of the complex effect CSR has on employees’ work outcomes. Practical implications and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines Thomas Scanlon’s Value of Choice account of substantive responsibility, on which the fact that choice has value accounts both for why people should be provided with certain opportunities and for why it may be permissible, in those cases, to let people bear certain opportunity-accompanying burdens. Scanlon contrasts his view with the familiar one according to which it is permissible to require people to bear certain burdens if and only if they have actively chosen those burdens, (...) because of the legitimating force of choice. The paper argues that Scanlon’s account, in its most distinctive version, is at best incomplete and can only justify claims about responsibility for a restricted class of burdens. It then goes on to suggest that, when Scanlon’s account is supplemented so as to be able to generate judgments of responsibility about a wider range of burdens, it is no longer clear that there is a difference between the Value of Choice account and a plausible version of the Forfeiture View. (shrink)

No one has done more than John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza to advance our understanding of the important dispute in the theory of responsibility between structuralists and historicists. This makes it all the more important to take the measure of Responsibility and Control, their most recent contribution to the historicist side of the discussion. In this paper I examine some novel features of their most recent version of responsiblity-historicism, especially their new notions of "moderate reasons-responsiveness" and "ownership-of-agency." (...) Fischer and Ravizza intend these new elements to solve two problems untouched by earlier versions of their theory: the "problem of strange preference patterns" and the "reasons-responsiveness problem of induction." I argue that they cannot solve these problems within the theoretical strictures they place upon themselves, namely a minimalist meta-ethics of value and practical reason, and attention only to certain formal features of preference-acquisition. I conclude that historicist compatibilists cannot hope to meet the challenge of structuralist compatibilism, from the one side, and of incompatibilism, from the other, unless they take on the full task of accounting for the difference between the child's acquisition of autonomous substantive preferences and values and her acquisition of heteronomous ones. (shrink)

What is it to be morally responsible for something? Recent philosophical work reveals considerable disagreement on the question. Indeed, some theorists claim to distinguish several varieties of moral responsibility, with different conditions that must be satisfied if one is to bear responsibility of one or another of these kinds. -/- Debate on this point turns partly on disagreement about the kinds of responses made appropriate when one is blameworthy or praiseworthy. It is generally agreed that these include "reactive (...) attitudes" such as resentment and gratitude, but theorists disagree about the nature of these attitudes. They dispute the connections between moral responsibility, desert, and the justification of punishment as well. -/- Many theorists take it that, whatever the appropriate responses are, they are responses to an agent's "quality of will," but there is no consensus on what this comes to. Are the agent's beliefs about the moral status of her behavior what matter, or is it what she cares about, or what she judges important? -/- This volume presents twelve original essays from participants in these debates. The contributors include prominent established figures as well as influential younger philosophers. A substantive introduction by the editors surveys recent debates and situates the contributions within it. (shrink)

In voicing commitments to the principle that the adoption of artificial-intelligence (AI) tools by armed forces should be done responsibly, a growing number of states have referred to a concept of “Responsible AI.” As part of an effort to help develop the substantive contours of that concept in meaningful ways, this position paper introduces a notion of “responsible reliance.” It is submitted that this notion could help the policy conversation expand from its current relatively narrow focus on interactions between (...) an AI system and its end-user to also encompass the wider set of interdependencies involved in fulfilling legal obligations concerning the use of AI in armed conflicts. The authors argue that to respect international humanitarian law and ensure accountability, states ought to devise and maintain a framework that ensures that natural persons involved in the use an AI tool in an armed conflict could responsibly rely at least on: (1) the tool’s technical aspects, (2) the conduct of other people involved in development and use of that AI tool; and (3) the policies and processes implemented at the state level. According to the authors, the “responsible reliance” notion could serve, among other examples, as a basis on which to articulate legal requirements, prohibitions, and permissions across diverse areas, from the design of AI tools to human-machine interactions to configuration of responsible-command frameworks. (shrink)

How are we to understand one person's responsibility to another when one person wrongs another? Within legal and philosophical literature, we can identify a prevailing paradigmatic approach to answering this question. The key distinguishing feature of this paradigmatic approach is the assumption that there is a division between what defines a person's wrongdoing on one hand, and the significance of losses suffered by another person on the other hand. Throughout this thesis, I argue against this approach and the theories (...) that participate in it, including theories presented by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Stephen Perry, Jules Coleman, and Ernest Weinrib. ;As an alternative to theories that take up this paradigmatic approach, I present the duty/right based theory of responsibility. I build this theory of responsibility from the bottom up, starting with the structure and content of the wrong a person is responsible to another for. I argue that the wrong one person does to another is defined in terms of the freedom one person rightfully holds in relation to another. Since duties and rights set out the limits of each person's freedom in relation to the freedom of others, the formal and substantive content of those duties and correlative rights explain not only the nature of the wrong one person does to another, but also what one person must do in relation to another to appropriately address such a wrong. To appropriately address a relational wrong, an actor must give back the measure of the freedom she illicitly takes from another person when she commits a relational wrong against that person. One means of doing this is for the wrongdoer to compensate a person for the illicit harm he suffers as part of a relational wrong. The coherent explanation this theory provides as to the role compensation plays in appropriately addressing a wrong one person does to another explains some of our basic intuitions and practices surrounding the issue of responsibility between persons, including those that concern the extent to which the use of damages in tort law enforces the kind of responsibility in question. (shrink)

Abstract: This article explains and motivates an account of one way in which we might have substantive a priori knowledge in one important class of domains: domains in which the central concepts are response-dependent. The central example will be our knowledge of the connection between something's being harmful and the fact that it is irrational for us to fail to be averse to that thing. The idea is that although the relevant responses (basic aversion in the case of harm, (...) and a kind of interpretive failure in the case of irrationality) are produced by independent psychological mechanisms, they have distal causes that turn out to be related in ways that—once language enters the picture—yield epistemically accessible necessary connections between the referents of their corresponding terms. (shrink)

In environmental ethics a debate has arisen over the extent to which the individual should make changes in personal lifestyle in a long-term program of ameliorating environmental degradation, as opposed to directing energies toward public-policy change. In opposition are the facts that an individual’s contribution to environmental degradation can only have a negligible effect. Public policy offers the only real hope for such massive coordinated effort, and environmental degradation is only one of many global problems to which ethi­cally oriented people (...) must focus their attentions and energies. So far, the pro-personal responsibility side has urged that personal lifestyle changes are necessary for moral coher­ence, thus in turn for integrity of character, and lifestyle changes can affect others in a kind of chain reaction because humans are socially submerged beings. The stalemate here can only stymies the needed coordinated effort toward ameliorating environmental degradation. Further, moral concerns need to be brought into this issue; namely, the ramifications of pursuing a policy-only approach, emphasizing policy as the sole (or even primary) means of ameliorating environmental degradation, implicitly undercuts the role of individual agents in morality in general, in terms of (1) individual responsibility, (2) autonomy, and (3) creativity in solving problems. All these problems not only bear on the program to reverse environmental degradation, but undermine other widely held moral values. Emphasizing personal lifestyle responsibility is not only the most moral alternative but is also the most assured way to affect long-term changes and the better way to make policy changes credible and sufficiently substantive for change. (shrink)

What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable to punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the (...) offender, meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution. Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether responsibility could be borne vicariously. I distinguish between three different senses of responsibility: attributional responsibility, practices of holding people responsible, and substantive responsibility. I argue that it is doubtful both whether attributional responsibility could be borne vicariously, and whether it could be appropriate to hold someone vicariously responsible. However, I suggest that substantive responsibility can genuinely be borne vicariously. Getting clear on these conceptual issues has important implications for (...) how we approach more concrete legal and political questions. More specifically, I argue these abstract arguments can be used to inform views on the common-law doctrine of joint enterprise, and on reparations for historic injustice. (shrink)

This paper offers an evaluation of corporate policy and practice in respect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) deriving from an analysis of qualitative data, obtained during semi-structured interviews with the representatives of 16 companies from a variety of UK sectors including retail, mining, financial services and mobile telephony. The findings of the empirical survey are presented in five sections that trace chronologically the process of CSR policy development. The first identifies the meaning attributed to CSR by the respondent companies (...) followed in the second section by the factors that are driving them to implement the CSR agenda. The third examines the use of the language of CSR and the concept’s role as either a substantive concept or simple label. The fourth identifies the criteria used for determining CSR policies and the objectives underlying them. The fifth and final section offers an analysis of the respondents’ predictions as to the future development of CSR. On the basis of the findings of the survey, this paper argues that, despite genuine attempts on the part of those responsible for CSR policy development to address stakeholder concerns, the context within which CSR has been implemented hinders its potential to offer stakeholders sufficient information by which to evaluate corporate performance in respect of CSR and the ability of CSR to operate as a meaningful and systematic constraint on corporate behaviour. (shrink)

The approach to innovations known as Responsible research and innovation aims to move the innovation system towards creating products that strive to realize social values along with economic benefits. This paper discusses the systematic assessment of assistive technologies in order for them to meet the aims expressed in RRI. A central issue in the discussion is how to facilitate an integration of insights from the discourse on RRI with more established assessment approaches such as Health Technology Assessment. Based on the (...) literature on existing socio-ethical assessment tools, I investigate how these tools can be combined with HTA and how they can add perspectives from RRI that might increase the socio-ethical value of assistive technologies. Through a discussion on how to understand RRI, HTA, assessment and integration, I suggest a list of four possible approaches that have the potential to be applied as assessment approaches that integrate insights from RRI and HTA. These are then evaluated on their ability to address issues that have emerged from a literature review on RRI and assistive technologies, on empirical studies in this technology field and on their product focus. In conclusion, I argue that the Ethical Impact Assessment, the Socratic approach, the Ethical Matrix, and the HTA Core Model seem to be the most promising methodologies, but that these need adjustments to cover substantive themes from RRI. _Keywords:_ energy scenarios, justice, future generations, capabilities approach. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Turing’s responses to the mathematical objection are straightforward, despite recent claims to the contrary. I then go on to show that by understanding the importance of learning machines for Turing as related not to the mathematical objection, but to Lady Lovelace’s objection, we can better understand Turing’s response to Lady Lovelace’s objection. Finally, I argue that by understanding Turing’s responses to these objections more clearly, we discover a hitherto unrecognized, substantive thesis in his (...) philosophical thinking about the nature of mind. (shrink)

Virtue epistemologies about knowledge have traditionally been divided into two camps: virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. Initially, what set them apart was that virtue responsibilism took intellectual character virtues and responsible agency to be necessary to knowledge acquisition, whereas virtue reliabilism took reliable cognitive faculties to be constitutive of it instead. Despite recent concessions between these camps, there are residual disagreements. Chapter 8 focuses primarily on Linda Zagzebski’s account of virtue responsibilism and John Greco’s and Ernest Sosa’s defenses of virtue (...) reliabilism. It argues that despite their misgivings about virtue responsibilism, Greco and Sosa are ultimately required to accept that intellectual character virtues involve a substantial truth-motivational component, and that knowledge requires a kind of epistemic responsibility that is far more substantive than a causal, naturalistic notion of attribution. (shrink)

Considering the lack of substantive scientific or theoretical studies about ethics in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Latin America, this paper examines the context of an existent paradox, based upon the perspective of experts and academicians of Latin America and the Caribbean. These countries live different realities, due to their respective European cultural influences, as well as to racial and economic issues. Such facts impact the size and characteristics of their industries. On the other hand, the SMEs (...) face more similarities in the region, so they will be treated as a group in the discussion of ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Latin American SMEs. As this topic has not been sufficiently investigated in this geographic area, the objective of this exploratory study is to offer a contribution for future research. It raises the main dilemmas and intends to explain how legislation and common practices enable and perhaps lead SMEs to choose unethical strategies to survive and compete in the market. These enterprises are growing in number and in job creation, but do not participate in the Gross National Product in the same proportion. Informality, tax evasion and corruption are gradually caused or erode morality in business, but can contribute to corporate social responsibility in the region. The paper tries to show positive and negative aspects of apparently unethical practices and discusses challenging ways to solve complex problems that are common in most Latin America. (shrink)

Contrary to what I have contended, Michael McKenna argues that basic desert does not have an essential role in the free will debate. On his alternative construal, what is central is whether our practice of holding morally responsible, and blaming in particular, can be justified, and what notion of free will is required for that justification. Notions distinct from basic desert can ground our practice, and so the free will debate is independent of basic desert. Here I argue that the (...) one best candidate for such a notion is basic fairness, but in the area of moral responsibility there is no substantial difference between basic desert and basic fairness. (shrink)

In Building Better Beings, Vargas develops and defends a naturalistic account of responsibility, whereby responsible agents must possess a feasibly situated capacity to detect and respond to moral considerations. As a preliminary step, he also offers a substantive account of how we might justify our practices of holding responsible—viz., by appeal to their efficacy in fostering a ‘valuable form of agency’ across the community at large, a form of agency that precisely encompasses sensitivity to moral considerations. But how (...) do these accounts relate to one another? Though I find much that is appealing in Vargas’s general approach, I challenge his insistence that these accounts should be treated as ‘conceptually independent’, arguing that this generates an objectionable “justification gap”: on his analysis, someone could remain an appropriate target of our responsibility practices and yet fail to be a morally responsible agent. In closing, I offer a potential solution to this problem, though it means re-visioning how the account of moral responsibility is conceptually tied to the justification of our responsibility practices. (shrink)

Researchers do not owe their subjects the same level of care that physicians owe patients, but they owe more than merely what the research protocol stipulates. In keeping with the dynamics of the relationship between researcher and subject, they have limited but substantive fiduciary obligations.