Abstract

It is widely thought to be unfair to hold people responsible, or to blame or punish them, for wrongful acts or omissions that are beyond their control. Because this principle is often taken to support incompatibilism, and because it has led many to deny the possibility of moral luck, we might expect its normative underpinnings to have been carefully scrutinized. However, surprisingly, they have not. In the current paper, I will try to fill this gap by first reconstructing, and then criticizing, what I take to be the principle’s most compelling rationale. Because I will argue that that rationale is irretrievably flawed, the thrust of my discussion will be to raise doubts both about the principle itself and about the philosophical theses that it is said to support.