Situationism, capacities and culpability

Philosophical Studies 179 (6):1997-2027 (2022)
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Abstract

The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people's behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects' responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability of behaviour, and appeals to base rates of wrongdoing. It then proposes we should think a certain factor impeded capacities when this is the best explanation of a change in patterns of responses. With this approach in hand, I then argue that subjects in many of the situationist experiments are (mostly) excused for their actions.

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Adam Piovarchy
University of Notre Dame Australia

Citations of this work

VIII—Situational Dependence and Blame’s Arrow.Jessica Isserow - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (2):167-190.
Character Skepticism and the Virtuous Journalist.Joseph Spino - 2024 - Journal of Media Ethics 39 (3):206-222.

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References found in this work

Two Dogmas of Empiricism.W. Quine - 1951 - [Longmans, Green].
Two Dogmas of Empiricism.Willard V. O. Quine - 1951 - Philosophical Review 60 (1):20–43.
Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility.John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza - 1998 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Mark Ravizza.
Famine, Affluence, and Morality.Peter Singer - 1972 - Oxford University Press USA.

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