It is a common picture that Kant is committed to an uncompromising account of moral responsibility that leaves no room for excuses. I argue that this picture is mistaken. More specifically, I reconstruct a Kantian quality of will account of excuses according to which an agent is excused for performing a morally wrong (or omitting a morally obligatory) action if and only if the action (or omission) does not manifest a lack of good will on the (...) part of the agent. Based on this Kantian quality of will account of excuses, I explain why agents are often excused in cases that involve physical constraint, unintentional bodily movement, ignorance, coercion or necessity. (shrink)

In their article, Dylon McChesney & Mathieu Doucet argue that any viable account of the epistemic condition needs to account for the right scope of cases where an agent’s mental disorder results in exculpating ignorance. The authors then argue that this constraint on viability poses a serious problem for George Sher’s account of the epistemic condition, but not for quality of will views. In this discussion note, I do not challenge the viability constraint about mental disorder-based ignorance nor (...) do I challenge McChesney & Doucet’s argument that Sher’s account unjustly blames many cases of disorder-based ignorance. Instead, I argue against their position that quality of will views have the resources to accurately capture the scope of cases where mental disorders lead to exculpating ignorance. I argue that quality of will views fall short because they do not take into consideration the way that a non-culpably acquired difficulty, such as developing a mental disorder in childhood, can make an expectation that the agent avoid the disorder-based ignorance an unreasonably demanding expectation. This shortcoming results in quality of will views unjustly blaming agents for their disorder-based ignorance in some cases where the ignorance i) reflects a poor quality of will, but ii) it would be unreasonable to expect the agent to have avoided the ignorance. (shrink)

This chapter explores how far one can go accounting for the moral responsibility implications of several unusual mental conditions using a parsimonious quality-of-will account that relies on the way we talk about moral responsibility in more mundane situations. By contrasting situations involving epistemic irrationality versus cognitive impairment, it becomes clear that the presence of those often (but not always) excuses actions performed by unusual agents. The discussion turns to cases of clinical depression and sketches a way (...) for quality-of-will accounts to approach them. It is also argued that of some of these mental conditions, there is no particular reason to think that they excuse. There is also an argument against regarding the concept "mental disorder" and current DSM categories as critical to agency theory. (shrink)

Difficulty is often treated as blame-mitigating, and even exculpating. But on some occasions difficulty seems to have little or no bearing on our assessments of moral responsibility, and can even exacerbate it. In this paper, I argue that the relevance (and irrelevance) of difficulty with regard to assessments of moral responsibility is best understood via Quality of Will accounts. I look at various ways of characterising difficulty – including via sacrifice, effort, skill and ‘trying’ – (...) and set out to demonstrate that these factors are only blame-mitigating where, and to the extent that, they complicate ascriptions of insufficient concern. Matters become more complex, however, when we turn to difficult circumstances that seem to generate such objectionable attitudes. This is arguably the case with epistemic difficulty and certain instances of moral ignorance. Here I argue that certain difficult circumstances diminish the sense in which false moral beliefs are genuinely revelatory of the agents who hold them. In particular, I draw on the distinction between difficulty that generates objectionable attitudes, and objectionable attitudes that generate difficulty. I argue that the former, but not the latter, can plausibly be viewed as blame mitigating, and that this would apply to (limited) cases of moral ignorance. (shrink)

Al Mele’s Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility (OUP 2019) is an extraordinarily careful and clear little book. A central recurring element is the use of examples of radical value reversals due to manipulation. In this commentary, I discuss the relevance of these examples to a simple quality of will account of blameworthiness without explicit historical conditions. Such an account, I suggest, can fairly straightforwardly explain how value reversals might mitigate blameworthiness. But I also suggest that (...) the intuition that they completely remove blameworthiness should instead be explained away. (shrink)

One of P. F. Strawson's suggestions in “Freedom and Resentment” was that there might be an elegant theory of moral responsibility that accounted for all of our responsibility responses in a way that also explained why we get off the hook from those responses. Such a theory would appeal exclusively toquality of will: when we react with any of a variety of responsibility responses to someone, we are responding to the quality of her will (...) with respect to us, and when we let her off the hook, we are doing so in virtue of her lacking the capacity for the relevant quality of will. Strawson's own attempt to put forward such a view fails, for reasons Gary Watson has given, but several other theorists have advanced their own, more developed,Pure Quality of Willtheories in recent years. Specifically, there have been three distinct interpretations of “will” defended in the literature, yielding three different possible targets of our responsibility responses: quality ofcharacter, quality ofjudgment, or quality ofregard.My first task in this essay will be to show that none of these theories individually can captureallof our responsibility responses, given our deeply ambivalent responses to several marginal cases. One reaction to this fact might be to abandon the quality of will approach altogether. Another, more plausible, reaction is to develop a pluralistic account of responsibility, one that admits three noncompeting conceptions of responsibility, each of which emphasizes one of the three different qualities of will as the target of a distinct subset of our responsibility responses. On this pluralistic approach, marginal agents might be responsible on some conceptions, but not responsible on others. In the bulk of the paper, I discuss each of the relevant subsets of responsibility responses, the different qualities of will they target, what the capacities for the three qualities of will are, and how the pluralistic qualities of will approach could account for our ambivalence in the marginal cases. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend my book Conversation and Responsibility in response to three critics: Julia Driver, David Shoemaker, and Manuel Vargas. Driver raises questions about my account of private blame. Shoemaker finds problems with my account of quality of will. And Vargas questions the conversational nature of my account.

I argue that a capacity‐based account of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness is superior to an account based on quality of will. I focus on four types of cases about which the two accounts disagree and show that the capacity‐based view offers a better treatment. As part of my argument, I motivate the distinction between an assessment of a person's moral character, as reflected by her action, and an assessment of her blameworthiness or praiseworthiness for that action.

In this paper, I investigate the role played by Quality of Will in Michael McKenna’s conversational theory of responsibility. I articulate and press the skeptical challenge against it, and then I show that McKenna has the resources in his account to deflect it.

Within debates concerning responsibility for ignorance the distinction between moral and factual ignorance is often treated as crucial. Many prominent accounts hold that while factual ignorance routinely exculpates, moral ignorance never does so. The view that there is an in-principle distinction between moral and factual ignorance has been referred to as the “Asymmetry Thesis.” This view stands in opposition to the “Parity Thesis,” which holds that moral and factual ignorance are in-principle similar. The Parity Thesis has been closely (...) aligned with volitionist accounts of moral responsibility, whereas the Asymmetry Thesis has been closely aligned with Quality of Will accounts. Two central questions are at work here: how ignorance excuses, and whether it excuses in the same way for both moral and factual ignorance. I will argue that these questions have often been confused in the present debate, and once we have distinguished more clearly between them, it seems that Quality of Will accounts are compatible with the Parity Thesis. And more generally: that the distinction between moral and factual ignorance is far less important in debates about responsibility for ignorance than it has often appeared. (shrink)

This paper advances further three of the matters dealt with in “Reasons and Selves: Two Accounts of Responsibility in Theory and Practice” (Cartwright 2006). It discusses the two theories of responsibility at the center of “Reasons and Selves” in the light of remarks made by the two commentators. It takes the sort of person who provided the practical example in “Reasons and Selves,” namely the delinquent with a disastrous background, and assembles a variety of possible ways of (...) thinking about the responsibility of such people. It begins by develop- ing further some brief remarks in “Reasons and Selves” about the conventional and variable nature of responsibility. (shrink)

Discussion of epistemic responsibility typically focuses on belief formation and actions leading to it. Similarly, accounts of collective epistemic responsibility have addressed the issue of collective belief formation and associated actions. However, there has been little discussion of collective responsibility for preventing epistemic harms, particularly those preventable only by the collective action of an unorganized group. We propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility which fills this gap. Building on Hindriks' (2019) account of collective moral (...) responsibility, we introduce the Epistemic Duty to Join Forces. Our theory provides an account of the responsibilities of scientists to prevent epistemic harms during inquiry. (shrink)

If, as expressivists maintain, the function of normative thought and talk is not to represent or describe the world, then how can normative judgements be correct or incorrect? In particular, how can I make sense of my own normative fallibility, the possibility that my own normative judgements might be mistaken? In this paper, I construct and defend a substantive but non-representational theory of normative (in)correctness for expressivists. Inspired by Blackburn’s (1998: 318) proposal that I make sense of my fallibility in (...) terms of the possibility that my judgements might be unstable through improvement, my account is designed in the first instance to vindicate the expressivist’s conception of the nature of normative inquiry. I then defend the proposal from the charge that it leaves insufficient room for my own fallibility, and in particular from Egan’s (2007) argument that it implies a “smug” asymmetry between myself and others. Critical to the response is the appeal to indeterminacy in cases of fundamental normative disagreement between reasonable normative outlooks. (shrink)

Quality of will accounts of moral responsibility hold that ill will is necessary for blameworthiness. But all such accounts are false to ordinary moral practice, which licenses blame for agents who act wrongly from epistemically unreasonable ignorance even if the act is not ill willed. This should be especially concerning to Strawsonians about moral responsibility, who think the genuine conditions of blameworthiness are derived from the standards internal to our practice. In response, I (...) provide a theory of moral blameworthiness on which ill will is not necessary for blameworthiness. On the view I defend, “Rational Capacitarianism,” agents are blameworthy whenever they act wrongly from an unreasonable attitude which is attributable to them, where an attitude is attributable to an agent just in case she has the capacity to assess reasons for and against the attitude and modulate the attitude in light of these assessments. Acting from unreasonable ignorance is just a special case of acting from an unreasonable attitude. My theory contrasts both with both quality of will accounts of blameworthiness and the Capacitarian view, which specifies that agents who act wrongly from ignorance are culpable if they could and should have known better. On Capacitarianism, a variety of awareness-relevant capacities are pertinent, including memory; on my view it is only failures of rational capacities that render the agent culpable, because only failures of rational capacities are attributable to the agent. (shrink)

A biographical account of Watt's early 20th century work in experimental psychology, with philosophical evaluation of his significance as marking a middle position between Wundt's third-person experimental work and Husserl's first-person phenomenology. The piece goes on to interpret Husserl's Ideas I response to Watt's critique of self-observation.

This essay seeks to illuminate both the theory and practice of holding people responsible. It investi- gates two leading accounts of responsibility, examining some of their implications and certain difficulties that they face. It tests the two accounts by applying them to an illustrative example, which demonstrates how the questions that are decisive in judging an agent’s responsibility are notably different on the two accounts. Although both views are variously illuminating, they each face difficulties and (...) arguably depend on, or foster, fictions. (shrink)

In the last two chapters of his book ‘From Normativity to Responsibility’, Joseph Raz developed, in outline, an intriguing account of responsibility, which is based on what he called the Rational Functioning Principle and on the idea of a domain of secure competence. With these two ideas, Raz argued, we could best delimit the scope of ‘responsibility’ in the sense of something ‘being to one’s credit or discredit as a rational agent’. In the following, I will (...) argue that, while identifying some crucial aspects of our being agents ‘in the world’, Raz’s account does not fully capture the extent of the kind of responsibility he was interested in. In particular, unintentional failures that are due to the malfunctioning of capacities which are too unreliable to count as secure competences may well fall within the scope of responsibility thus understood. I will suggest Raz’s account should be supplemented by considerations drawn from ‘quality of will’ approaches, which can (inter alia) deal better with such cases. (shrink)

Quality of Will (qw) theories of responsibility claim the target of someone’s blameworthiness for an action is their poor quality of will. There have been many “threats” to such a theory over the years, coming out of a literature interested in the metaphysical conditions of free will, threats having to do with moral luck, manipulation, and negligence. In this paper, I am more interested in surveying and thwarting two “new school” threats to qw theories, (...) including taking responsibility for inadvertence, and holding reasonable but ostensibly wrongful beliefs. Both of these aim to ground blameworthiness independently of quality of will. I show that none of these new school threats to qw theories succeed. (shrink)

This chapter discusses blameworthiness for problematic acts that an agent does inadvertently. Blameworthiness, as opposed to liability, is difficult to make sense of in this sort of case, as there is usually thought to be a tight connection between blameworthiness and something in the agent’s quality of will. This chapter argues that in personal relationships we should sometimes take responsibility for inadvertent actions. Taking on responsibility when we inadvertently fail in our duties to our loved ones (...) assures them that we respect them, take them seriously, and want to be respected and taken seriously in turn. The chapter ends with a defence of the claim that this is a genuine sort of blameworthiness. -/- . (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between synchronic responsibility (SR) and diachronic responsibility (DR). SR concerns an agent’s responsibility for an act at the time of the action, while DR concerns an agent’s responsibility for an act at some later time. While most theorists implicitly assume that DR is a straightforward matter of personal identity, I argue instead that it is grounded in psychological connectedness. I discuss the implications this distinction has for the concepts of apology, forgiveness, and punishment (...) as well as the way in which this distinction can be used to defend quality of will accounts of responsibility against objections involving psychological manipulation. I argue that the intuition that a manipulated agent is not responsible can be explained by appeal to the conditions of DR and, as such, does not unproblematically shed light on the conditions of SR. (shrink)

This comprehensive study offers a balanced assessment of libertarian accounts of free will. Bringing to bear recent work on action, causation, and causal explanation, Clarke defends a type of event-causal view from popular objections concerning rationality and diminished control. He subtly explores the extent to which event-causal accounts can secure the things for the sake of which we value free will, judging their success here to be limited. Clarke then sets out a highly original agent-causal account, (...) one that integrates agent causation and nondeterministic event causation. He defends this view from a number of objections but argues that we should find the substance causation required by any agent-causal account to be impossible. Clarke concludes that if a broad thesis of incompatibilism is correct--one on which both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism--then no libertarian account is entirely adequate. (shrink)

In this comment, I raise a number of concerns about David Shoemaker’s adoption of the quality of will approach in his recent book, Responsibility from the Margins. I am not sure that the quality of will approach is given an adequate grounding that defends it against alternative models of moral responsibility; and it is unclear what the argument is for Shoemaker’s tripartite version of the quality of will approach. One possibility that might (...) fit with Shoemaker’s text is that the tripartite model is meant to be grounded in empirical claims about the structure of encapsulated emotions; but I argue that those empirical claims are not made out, and that regardless it is doubtful whether this is the most helpful model of the emotions to deploy in this context. In contrast, I propose that the quality of will approach is better defended in ethical terms, by reference to the vision of the value of living together as equals that is embodied in P.F. Strawson’s picture of the engaged attitude, and the emotions involved in it. (shrink)

In this comment, I raise a number of concerns about David Shoemaker’s adoption of the quality of will approach in his recent book, Responsibility from the Margins. I am not sure that the quality of will approach is given an adequate grounding that defends it against alternative models of moral responsibility; and it is unclear what the argument is for Shoemaker’s tripartite version of the quality of will approach. One possibility that might (...) fit with Shoemaker’s text is that the tripartite model is meant to be grounded in empirical claims about the structure of encapsulated emotions; but I argue that those empirical claims are not made out, and that regardless it is doubtful whether this is the most helpful model of the emotions to deploy in this context. In contrast, I propose that the quality of will approach is better defended in ethical terms, by reference to the vision of the value of living together as equals that is embodied in P.F. Strawson’s picture of the engaged attitude, and the emotions involved in it. (shrink)

Pure quality of will theories claim that ‘the ultimate object’ of our responsibility responses (i.e., praise and blame) is the quality of our will. Any such theory is false—or so I argue. There is a second dimension of (moral) responsibility, independent of quality of will, that our responsibility responses track and take as their object—namely, how adroitly we are able to translate our will into action; I call this competence of (...) will. I offer a conjectural explanation of the two dimensions of (moral) responsibility: it matters to us that people actually perform adequately well because of how much it matters to us that we are able to live and work together successfully. (shrink)

This rich and wide-ranging book defends a “tripartite theory” of responsibility. The general thesis is that responsibility-responses fall into three overlapping categories, each of which presumes distinct agential capacities. On the basis of a close examination of various sorts of marginal agency, these capacities are said to be independent and ground what deserves to be called distinct types or “faces” of responsibility. The first face, attributability, depends on a capacity for character, answerability on a capacity for judgment, (...) and accountability on a capacity for “regard”. This commentary questions the theory’s account of the relations among the types of responsibility, and its attempt to ground responsibility-responses in qualities of “will”. (shrink)

It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent “should have known (...) better”, but it is unclear how to spell out this normative condition. -/- This chapter combines (a) an independently motivated account of responsibility, blame, and credit as grounded in a normal explanatory relation between agential qualities and objects of responsibility with (b) the familiar Strawsonian idea that moral blame and credit depend on the agent’s quality of will. The resulting explanatory quality of will condition on moral responsibility is then further motivated by being shown to account for the effects on moral blame and credit of justifications, as well as of excuses and undermined control in cases not involving ignorance. -/- The explanatory quality of will condition is finally applied to cases involving various degrees of lack of awareness. Though this condition itself involves no awareness requirement, it is shown how it accounts for the degrees to which lack of awareness can excuse. It is also explained how lack of awareness fails as an excuse exactly when the agent should have known better and can be blamed for not doing so. (shrink)

Traditionally, theories of moral responsibility feature only the minimally sufficient conditions for moral responsibility. While these theories are well-suited to account for the threshold of responsibility, it’s less clear how they can address questions about the degree to which agents are responsible. One feature that intuitively affects the degree to which agents are morally responsible is how difficult performing a given action is for them. Recently, philosophers have begun to develop accounts of scalar moral responsibility (...) that make use of this notion of difficulty (Coates and Swenson 2013; Nelkin 2016). In this paper, I argue that these accounts, although innovative, are incomplete. The degree to which agents are morally responsible is determined not only by the difficulties that agents face but also by the quality of the reasons for which they act. (shrink)

This book argues two main things: The first is that there is no such thing as free will—at least not in the sense most ordinary folk take to be central or fundamental; the second is that the strong and pervasive belief in free will can be accounted for through a careful analysis of our phenomenology and a proper theoretical understanding of consciousness.

The purpose of the study is to determine the accounting methodology of credit transactions and find ways to improve it. The article describes the accounting process of credit transactions in the bank, the stages of monitoring the quality of accounting information and the map of problems of accounting lending, compiled as a result of the procedures for monitoring the quality of accounting information. The scientific novelty lies in the justification of the need to introduce monitoring of the (...) class='Hi'>quality of accounting information in credit organizations. As a result, an algorithm for monitoring the quality of accounting information was formulated, recommendations were made on the transformation of the functionality of the Accounting and Reporting Department and the Bank's Internal Control Service. Thus, each of the entities will perform a certain set of functions that ensure the prompt and effective monitoring of the quality of accounting information. (shrink)

It typically taken for granted that agents can be morally responsible for such things as, for example, the death of the victim and the capture of the murderer in the sense that one may be blameworthy or praiseworthy for such things. The primary task of a theory of moral responsibility, it is thought, is to specify the appropriate relationship one must stand to such things in order to be morally responsible for them. I argue that this common approach is (...) problematic because it attempts to explain the way in which an agent can be morally responsible for something that is external to her, the agent. Since, I argue, everything that matters for moral responsibility is internal to the agent, the accounts that emerge from this approach are committed to a particular form of moral luck. Instead, we should reject this form of moral luck, and with it, the possibility of moral responsibility for objects external to the agent. We are, I argue, morally responsible only for our inner willings. Thus, a form of internalism about moral responsibility is defended. (shrink)

Discussions of the account of judgment offered in the Fourth Meditation tend to focus on its role in Descartes' epistemology and his response to skepticism. The main focus of the Fourth Meditation is the true and the false, and it completes the discussion conducted in the Second and Third Meditation about truth and falsity and the proper use of the truth rule. This chapter summarizes Descartes' view of the nature of judgment before examining more closely the account of the (...) class='Hi'>will unfolding in the Fourth Meditation, and the kind of indifference Descartes appeals to in defending his controversial doctrine of free choice. Descartes' problematic account of the will and its freedom is developed in an epistemological and theodical context, the aim being to warrant the truth rule and, perhaps even more importantly, to draw a line between God's and our own responsibility for our cognitive errors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Convention for Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine: Convention on Human Rights and BiomedicineCouncil of EuropePreambleThe Member States of the Council of Europe, the other States and the European Community signatories hereto,Bearing in mind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948;Bearing in mind the (...) Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950;Bearing in mind the European Social Charter of 18 October 1961;Bearing in mind the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966;Bearing in mind the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data of 28 January 1981;Bearing also in mind the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989;Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of a greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;Conscious of the accelerating developments in biology and medicine;Convinced of the need to respect the human being both as an individual and as a member of the human species and recognising the importance of ensuring the dignity of the human being; [End Page 277]Conscious that the misuse of biology and medicine may lead to acts endangering human dignity;Affirming that progress in biology and medicine should be used for the benefit of present and future generations;Stressing the need for international co-operation so that all humanity may enjoy the benefits of biology and medicine;Recognising the importance of promoting a public debate on the questions posed by the application of biology and medicine and the responses to be given thereto;Wishing to remind all members of society of their rights and responsibilities;Taking account of the work of the Parliamentary Assembly in this field, including Recommendation 1160 (1991) on the preparation of a Convention on bioethics;Resolving to take such measures as are necessary to safeguard human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual with regard to the application of biology and medicine;Have agreed as follows:Chapter IGeneral provisionsArticle 1. (Purpose and object)Parties to this Convention shall protect the dignity and identity of all human beings and guarantee everyone, without discrimination, respect for their integrity and other rights and fundamental freedoms with regard to the application of biology and medicine.Each Party shall take in its internal law the necessary measures to give effect to the provisions of this Convention.Article 2. (Primacy of the human being)The interests and welfare of the human being shall prevail over the sole interest of society or science.Article 3. (Equitable access to health care)Parties, taking into account health needs and available resources, shall take appropriate measures with a view to providing, within their jurisdiction, equitable access to health care of appropriate quality. [End Page 278]Article 4. (Professional standards)Any intervention in the health field, including research, must be carried out in accordance with relevant professional obligations and standards.Chapter IIConsentArticle 5. (General rule)An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it.This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks.The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.Article 6. (Protection of persons not able to consent)1. Subject to Articles 17 and 20 below, an intervention may only be carried out on a person who does not have the capacity to consent, for his or her direct benefit.2. Where, according to law, a minor does not have the capacity to consent to an intervention, the intervention may only be carried out with the authorisation of his or her representative or an authority or a person or... (shrink)

Businesses interface with the natural world through rights to property. The shape of these rights and the responsibilities we assign to managers are important determinants of both patterns of resource use and pollutant levels. Consequently, conflicts have arisen between regulating bodies, indigenous groups, and corporations over the entitlements of businesses in the use of their property when that property is ecologically sensitive or significant. In this paper I develop an account of the ethical responsibilities of managers regarding their treatment of (...) the environment and their use of natural resources. This account is based on a philosophical examination of the nature of property rights. After a tour of traditional arguments employed to defend the institution of private property, I develop a new conception of property rights over objects that have a high natural resource component. I show that in today’s world, ethical concerns that motivated John Locke will yield property rights that are insufficiently strong to override a democratic say in overall use patterns and must be sensitive to factors such as need, scarcity, and the interests of stakeholders. I show a similar result for utilitarian arguments for property. On this foundation I develop a conception of property in key environmental resources that includes a stewardship element. To embody this, I suggest a set of ethical responsibilities for managers over certain natural resources that springs from it. I argue for obligations restricting harmful use patterns as a way of including the other goals (eg public participation, sustainability) that we care about, in a manner which clashes least with the liberty of owners and the efficiency of production. The outcome is a set of rights and responsibilities that take global environmental interests into account, but preserve the thrust of what is good about the institution of private property: that it rewards labour and facilitates a stable and efficient free exchange system. As a version of private property, it retains many of the advantages of global capitalism while attaching responsibilities to business decision makers. (shrink)

In this chapter we deal with the challenge to the existence of free will and moral responsibility that is raised by the threat of determinism from a Wittgensteinian perspective. Our argument starts by briefly recapitulating Wittgenstein’s analysis of the practice of doubt in On Certainty. We subsequently turn to the problem of free will. We argue that the existence of free will is a basic certainty and that the thesis of determinism fails to cast doubt on (...) it. We thereby make use of – but also try to go beyond – Wittgenstein’s own remarks in his “Lectures on Freedom of the Will”. In the final section we focus more explicitly on moral responsibility. Inspired by P.F. Strawson’s work on free will and moral responsibility, which we take to be deeply Wittgensteinian, we argue that our practices of holding each other responsible manifest basic human certainties which cannot be meaningfully challenged by invoking the thesis of determinism. (shrink)

Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the epistemic condition on moral responsibility makes blameworthiness much less common than we ordinarily suppose, and much harder to identify. This paper argues that such epistemically based responsibility skepticism is mistaken. Section 2 sketches a general account of moral responsibility, building on the Strawsonian idea that blame and credit relates to the agent’s quality of will. Section 3 explains how this account deals with central cases that motivate (...) epistemic skepticism and how it avoids some objections to quality of will accounts recently raised by Gideon Rosen. But an intuitive worry brought out by these objections remains. Section 4 spells out this remaining worry and argues that, like traditional metaphysical responsibility skepticism, it has its source in a non-standard explanatory perspective on action, suggesting that strategies for explaining away the intuitive pull of traditional skepticism are applicable in this case too. (shrink)

Presently, the social responsibility literature is replete with the diverse ways in which work organizations and the regulatory nation states in which they are domiciled can improve the quality of their workers’ lives. But do workers themselves become motivated to contribute (i.e., give back) to society when they experience a work life of better quality than their peers? Specifically, which sectors of society do such workers contribute to? Through a questionnaire that was administered to a cross section (...) of workers in the private sector of Nigeria, this study found out that quality of work life (QWL) correlates significantly and positively with workers’ motivation to contribute to society. However, workers were less motivated to contribute to Nigeria’s government sector that is globally known for corruption than making contributions to the piety and social infrastructural sectors. Results also revealed that both the paternalistic and consultative forms of social responsibility were positively related with QWL. These results imply that social responsibility should be seen as a veritable platform on which satisfied stakeholders of business organizations can reciprocally make their own contributions for the overall good of society. By virtue of stakeholders’ contributions, the benefits of corporate social responsibility can actually reverberate into other sectors of societal life (e.g., the piety sector) that were never thought of during the design phase of socially responsible programmes. Finally, the study’s findings give credence to Anil Sarin’s Contributory Theory of Existence which states that people who have once received help from a particular organ of society (e.g., educational system, health care system, etc.) will be motivated to contribute to that organ or other organs of society. (shrink)

The paper considers the problem of various different forms of pre‑cognitive affective appraisal and their role in the process of gaining self-knowledge. According to the phenomenological approach, if we are to understand our inner states (our emotional experiences), these cannot be extracted from the context within which they arise. Emotions not only refer to the inner states of the subject, but also to the outer world to which they are a form of response. Brentano, Husserl and Scheler claimed that emotions (...) are directed towards values. It is to this essential feature of emotional experience that I would like to turn. I shall therefore re-examine Sartre’s views concerning affectivity (i.e. the capacity to reveal evaluatively significant qualities of one’s environment), as well as the dual-aspect theory of (reflective and non-reflective) consciousness. The main argument of this paper is that a plausible account of the essential role of affectivity in the emotions may be provided on the basis of a phenomenological theory of pre-reflective consciousness and its relation to reflexivity. I will focus on three different claims about pre-reflective (affective) consciousness. According to the first of these, a large part of cognition is of a prelinguistic (pre-reflective) nature; I argue that the evaluative content of emotion is not only conceptually determined, but may also take a non-conceptual form (as affective appraisal). The second claim refers to the notion of affect, which ought to be distinguished from (unintentional) bodily sensations. The third conceives of the relation between pre-reflective (affective) consciousness and reflective consciousness (propositional attitudes) as normative (rather than causal). I aim to demonstrate that a plausible view of emotional affectivity must appeal to a phenomenological account of the pre-reflective aspect of consciousness. (shrink)

In recent years the benefit corporation has emerged as a new organizational form dedicated to legitimizing the pursuit of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Eschewing traditional governmental authority, the benefit corporation derives its moral legitimacy from the values of its owners and the oversight of a third party evaluator. This research identifies the benefit corporation as a new type of gray sector organization (GSO) and applies extant theory on GSOs to analyze its design. In particular, it shows how the theory (...) of GSO accountability can be used to assess the potential of benefit corporations for enhancing CSR. This research first examines the statutes that have established benefit corporations in five states in the US, along with bills in other states, to show how legislation defines their specific public benefits and holds them accountable for delivering these benefits. It then compares the accountability of the benefit corporation with that of other corporate - centric GSOs, e.g., GSOs that closely resemble traditional corporations. It concludes with significant design-based concerns about the utility of the benefit corporation as an effective organization for implementing CSR. (shrink)

Ned Block argues that the higher-order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (xxx).1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block’s notion of what-it’s-like-ness. After doing so, I will argue that the HO (...) approach accounts for the sense of what-it’s-like-ness that matters in a theory of consciousness. I will also argue that the only incoherence present in the HO theory is that generated by embracing Block’s controversial notion of what-it’s-like-ness, something no theorist of any stripe ought to do. Block is famous for (among other things) having introduced the notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ into contemporary philosophy of mind (Block 1995). This term is widely employed in the philosophical literature and it even appears in the empirical literature. But wide-speared usage has brought about divergent interpretations of the term. We can distinguish a ‘moderate’ and a ‘zealous’ reading of ‘phenomenal consciousness’. On the moderate reading, ‘phenomenal consciousness’ just means ‘experience’. Many people have embraced this sense of the term and use it to roughly pick out conscious experience involving sensory quality (states like conscious visual experiences or conscious pains, for example).2 On the zealous reading, however, phenomenal consciousness is held to be ‘distinct from any cognitive, intentional, or functional property’ (Block 1995: 234). That is, any explanation of phenomenal consciousness in exclusively cognitive, intentional, or functional terms will fail to capture, without remainder, what is really distinctive about phenomenal consciousness. Block, of course, is fully clear about embracing the zealous reading; indeed, his initial introduction of the notion is in those terms. The same ambiguity occurs with the much-used (and abused) idea of ‘what-it’s-like-ness’.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 55-59 [Access article in PDF] Response to Bennett Reimer, "Once More with Feeling: Reconciling Discrepant Accounts of Musical Affect" Charlene Morton University of British Columbia, Canada In A Philosophy of Music Education, Bennett Reimer reminds us that "the starting point is always an examination of values linked to the question, 'Why and for what purpose should we educate?'"1 But because, as (...) he puts it, the nature of pluralism in multicultural societies makes consensus about the purpose of education impossible, he suggests looking for the answer within the subject itself. For this reason, he returns to the debate about the relationship between inherent and delineative meaning in music. One of his objectives is to caution music educators against constructing "artificial" lessons that define musical feeling as exclusively manifest in either inherent or delineative meaning. I believe that this caution is warranted: contrived or superficial lessons can be miseducative and disappointing. I am less inclined to go the step further to investigate Reimer's position that "it is the complex middle-where both dimensions of music's power help shape and reshape musical reception-that poses the provocative dilemmas" because, although I acknowledge that sound stimulates psycho-physiological reactions, I am more sympathetic with Tia DeNora's observation that we need to think more [End Page 55] about "an interactionist conception of musical affect that moves beyond conundrums concerning whether music's affect is 'immanent' or 'attributed.'"2DeNora explains an interactionist conception of musical affect as an "appropriation of aesthetic materials" by consumers to construct meaning and identity in the context of their everyday lives.3 Her observation and research affirms John Shepherd's claim that music has not simply musical and extra-musical meaning but also ideological significance, "form[ing] an integral part of the social process."4 All to say that I am not going to involve myself in a conundrum revolving around inherent and delineated meaning, appreciated best by musicologists and psychologists. Instead, I want to return to "the starting point" Reimer identifies above, to a discussion about the purpose of public schooling.Beginning with the premise that people appropriate music to construct their realities and, subsequently, music has socio-political significance in how it is produced, presented, and received, I argue that, in addition to the more familiar raisons d'etre of developing subject-specific outcomes such as musicianship, musical intelligence, and, of course, musical enjoyment, music education should be better and explicitly fashioned as a path toward the broad goals of public education. Thus, the thesis of this response advocates a philosophical understanding of what music education can offer that is less about "involving all students in the very same matters to which [many of us] are devoted"-that is, musicianship, musical intelligence, and related philosophical and pedagogical conundrums-and more about realizing the purpose of education through the musical lives of students. To explore this line of thought, I will first review familiar and exceptional mission statements about the purpose of education. I will then revisit Reimer's second story which will serve as an autobiographical episode illustrating what might be educative about an interactionist understanding of musical affect. My conclusion will emphasize that although music, like "each subject studied in schools affords the student a distinctive window or frame through which the world can be viewed,"5 music educators, like all educators, should attend to teaching outside the subject itself if public schooling is to succeed in its distinctive and important mission. The Purpose of Education When anyone asked him where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."6As a starting point for her study of cosmopolitan citizenship and its importance in educational reform in the United States, Martha Nussbaum cites the words of Diogenes. Her concerns about the force and consequences of American [End Page 56] nationalism and ethnocentrism motivate her argument "for making world citizenship, rather than democratic/national citizenship, as education's central focus." She is clear that her position does not... (shrink)

Animals are often presumed to lack moral agency insofar as they lack the capacities for reflection or the ability to understand their motivating reasons for acting. In this paper, I argue that animals are in some cases morally responsible. First, I outline conditions of moral action, drawing from a quality of will account of moral responsibility. Second, I review recent empirical research on the capacities needed for moral action in humans and show that animals also have such (...) capacities. I conclude that though it may be difficult to engage in the practice of holding animals morally responsible, given the communication barrier and lack of mutual understanding, some animals nevertheless act in ways for which they are morally responsible. (shrink)

There is no technical language with which to speak of patients' quality of life, there are no standard measures and no authority to validate criteria of measurement. It is well known that 'professionals' tend, often for institutional reasons, to play down or undervalue factors which are not defined by their particular expertise. It is fortunate that, despite this tendency, there is a growing interest in broadening the evaluation of medical care, but there is still a need to clarify what (...) is at issue in considerations of quality of life. This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of one approach to assessing quality of life, and sketches out the implications for anyone concerned to establish a framework within which both medical and non-medical objectives of care can be taken into account. (shrink)

I highlight three features of P.F. Strawson’s later, neglected work on freedom and responsibility. First, in response to a criticism by Rajendra Prasad, Strawson explicitly rejects an argument put forward in ‘Freedom and Resentment’ against the relevance of determinism to moral responsibility. Second, his remarkable acceptance of Prasad’s criticism motivates him to take the ‘straight path’, that is, to be straightforward about the relation between determinism, freedom, the ability to do otherwise and the conditions of responsibility. He (...) claims that the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition of responsibility and provides a list of additional conditions, including a knowledge condition. Third, he clarifies the relation between responsibility, quality of will and the reactive attitudes. The latter do not figure essentially in his answer to the question, ‘What are the conditions of responsibility?’, but they do play an essential role in his answer to the question, ‘Why do we have the concept of responsibility?’ We have it, Strawson suggests, because of our natural concern about the quality of will with which people act, a concern expressed in our reactive attitudes. I argue that, although Strawson’s later work definitely involves a shift of emphasis when compared to ‘Freedom and Resentment’, his overall account of freedom and responsibility is coherent. The later work helps to better understand the nature and significance of Strawson’s contribution, and to identify problems with common interpretations of and objections to ‘Freedom and Resentment’. (shrink)

In Complicity and Moral Accountability, Gregory Mellema presents a philosophical approach to the moral issues involved in complicity. Starting with a taxonomy of Thomas Aquinas, according to whom there are nine ways for one to become complicit in the wrongdoing of another, Mellema analyzes each kind of complicity and examines the moral status of someone complicit in each of these ways. Mellema's central argument is that one must perform a contributing action to qualify as an accomplice, and that it is (...) always morally blameworthy to perform such an action. Additionally, he argues that an accomplice frequently bears moral responsibility for the outcome of the other's wrongdoing, but he distinguishes this case from cases in which the accomplice is tainted by the wrongdoing of the principal actor. He further distinguishes between enabling, facilitating, and condoning harm, and introduces the concept of indirect complicity. Mellema tackles issues that are clearly important to any case of collective and shared responsibility, yet rarely discussed in depth, always presenting his arguments clearly, concisely, and engagingly. His account of the nonmoral as well as moral qualities of complicity in wrongdoing--especially of the many and varied ways in which principles and accomplices can interact--is highly illuminating. Liberally sprinkled with helpful and nuanced examples, Complicity and Moral Accountability vividly illustrates the many ways in which one may be complicit in wrongdoing. "In Complicity and Moral Accountability, Gregory Mellema has made an immensely important contribution to the discussion of group morality and collective responsibility both within and far beyond professional academic philosophy. His clearly written book will be essential reading." --Fergus Kerr, Honorary Fellow, University of Edinburgh. (shrink)

In response to the increasingly popular manipulation argument against compatibilism, some have argued that libertarian accounts of free will are vulnerable to parallel manipulation arguments, and thus manipulation is not uniquely problematic for compatibilists. The main aim of this article is to give this point a more detailed development than it has previously received. Prior attempts to make this point have targeted particular libertarian accounts but cannot be generalized. By contrast, I provide an appropriately modified manipulation that (...) targets all libertarian accounts of freedom and responsibility—an especially tricky task given that libertarian accounts are a motley set. I conclude that if manipulation arguments reveal any theoretical cost then it is one borne by all accounts according to which we are free and responsible, not by compatibilism in particular. (shrink)

The present chapter is concerned with revisionism about free will. It begins by offering a new characterization of revisionist accounts and the way such accounts fit (or do not) in the familiar framework of compatibilism and incompatibilism. It then traces some of the recent history of the development of revisionist accounts, and concludes by remarking on some challenges for them.

Augustine of Hippo is often regarded as the champion of the doctrine of weakness of the will. John M. Rist in his 1994 'Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized' draws an interesting analogy between Aristotle's 'akrasia' and Augustine's 'concupiscentia'. However, such an analogy without further qualification is defective and misleading because it implies that Augustine commits himself to the notion that since everyone is perpetually akratic and, thus, always morally blameworthy. I argue that, for Augustine, weakness of the will has (...) equivocal meanings and is manifested in four kinds of case--their scope goes far beyond Aristotle's discussion of 'akrasia' in Book Seven of the 'Nicomachean Ethics'. There are, therefore, considerable differences between Aristotle's and Augustine's account of weakness of the will. Consequently, for Augustine, moral responsibility for the moral agent also varies in each of the four cases. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest that there is a way to make sense of blameworthiness for morally problematic actions even when there is no bad will behind such actions. I am particularly interested in cases where an agent acts in a biased way, and the explanation is socialization and false belief rather than bad will on the part of the agent. In such cases, I submit, we are pulled in two directions: on the one hand non-culpable ignorance is (...) usually an excuse, but in the case of acting in a biased way we feel some pull to find the agent blameworthy. I argue that agents are sometimes blameworthy, (where I really mean that they are blameworthy, and not just that it is permissible to reproach them), even if they do not have any bad will. I argue that although the paradigmatic account of blameworthiness is based on quality of will, we can and should be willing to allow that there are non-paradigmatic cases. I argue that the zone of responsibility can be extended to include acts that we are not fully in control of, and acts whose moral status we are non-culpably ignorant about at the time of acting. This extension of responsibility happens through a voluntary taking of responsibility. I argue that there are certain conditions under which we should take responsibility, and that when we do so, we genuinely are responsible. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of the strength of an accounting firm's ethical environment on the quality of auditor judgment, across different levels of audit expertise. Using a 2 × 2 full factorial 'between subjects' experimental design, with audit managers and audit seniors, the impact of different levels of strength of the ethical environment on auditor judgments was assessed with a realistic audit scenario, requiring participants to make judgments in respect of an inventory writedown. Based on prior research, and (...) as hypothesized, participants possessing greater auditing experience made higher quality technical judgments. While there were no significant differences between the quality of audit judgments made by participants in the stronger ethical environment, over-all results indicate that managers are more sensitive to differences in the strength of the ethical environment than seniors. This is consistent with the hypothesis, and with prior research which suggests that the impact of the code will only be significant if it has been bilaterally internalized by individuals. This has important implications for accounting firms and regulators, given that the International Standard on Quality Control 1, requires the communication and reinforcement of ethical principles as part of firms' quality control processes. It suggests that firms will need to carefully consider the means by which they communicate and reinforce ethical principles, as it is possible to differentially impact auditors of different rank. (shrink)