Abstract

What must the world be like, and what must we agents be like, in order to be morally responsible for our actions? In Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility, Dana Nelkin develops and defends what she dubs the ‘rational abilities’ view (RA) of moral responsibility. On this compatibilist view, an agent is morally responsible for an action, in a sense which makes it appropriate to hold her accountable for that action, if she has ‘the ability to do the right thing for the right reasons, or a good thing for good reasons’ (7). The most distinctive features of Nelkin’s view are that (i) the conditions for moral responsibility are asymmetric, (ii) those conditions are compatibilist, that is, consistent with a deterministic world, (iii) in which causal relations hold between substances (rather than events) some of which are agents. An agent exercises her rational abilities when she is determined by her nature to act for certain reasons.