Our ability to locate moral responsibility is often thought to be a necessary condition for conducting morally permissible medical practice, engaging in a just war, and other high-stakes endeavors. Yet, with increasing reliance upon artificially intelligent systems, we may be facing a wideningresponsibility gap, which, some argue, cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility. How then, if at all, can we make use of crucial emerging technologies? According to Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach, the advent of so-called ‘artificial (...) moral agents’ (AMAs) is inevitable. Still, this notion may seem to push back the problem, leaving those who have an interest in developing autonomous technology with a dilemma. We may need to scale-back our efforts at deploying AMAs (or at least maintain human oversight); otherwise, we must rapidly and drastically update our moral and legal norms in a way that ensures responsibility for potentially avoidable harms. This paper invokes contemporary accounts of responsibility in order to show how artificially intelligent systems might be held responsible. Although many theorists are concerned enough to develop artificial conceptions ofagencyor to exploit our present inability to regulate valuable innovations, the proposal here highlights the importance of—and outlines a plausible foundation for—a workable notion ofartificial moral responsibility. (shrink)

This paper is about an asymmetry in the justification of praising and blaming behaviour which free will theorists should acknowledge even if they do not follow Wolf and Nelkin in holding that praise and blame have different control conditions. That is, even if praise and blame have the same control condition, we must have stronger reasons for believing that it is satisfied to treat someone as blameworthy than we require to treat someone as praiseworthy. Blaming behaviour which involves serious (...) harm can only be justified if the claim that the target of blame acted freely cannot be reasonably doubted. But harmless praise can be justified so long as the claim that the candidate for praise did not act freely can be reasonably doubted. Anyone who thinks a debate about whether someone acted freely is truth-conducive has to acknowledge that reasonable doubt is possible in both these cases. (shrink)

Unwitting omissions pose a challenge for theories of moral responsibility. For commonsense morality holds many unwitting omitters morally responsible for their omissions (and for the consequences thereof), even though they appear to lack both awareness and control. For example, some people who leave dogs trapped in their cars outside on a hot day (see Sher 2009), or who forget to pick something up from the store as they promised (see Clarke 2014) seem to be blameworthy for their omissions. (...) And yet, if moral responsibility requires awareness of one’s omission and of its moral significance, as well as control, then it would appear that the unwitting protagonists of these cases are not, in fact, morally responsible for their omissions. In this paper, we consider, and ultimately reject, a number of influential views that try to solve this problem, including skepticism about responsibility for such omissions, a view we call the “decision tracing” view that grounds responsibility for such omissions in previous exercises of conscious agency, and “attributionist” views that ground responsibility for such omissions in the value judgments or other aspects of the agents’ selves. We propose instead a new tracing view that grounds responsibility for unwitting omissions in past opportunities to avoid them, where having such opportunities requires general awareness of the risk of such an omission, but not an exercise of agency, in contrast to the decision tracing view. We argue that the view can better accommodate cases, and fits well with the most plausible conception of the kind of control required for responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I engage with several of the intriguing theses Michael McKenna puts forward in his Conversation and Responsibility. For example, I examine McKenna’s claim that the fact that an agent is morally responsible for an action and the fact that an agent is appropriately held responsible explain each other. I go on to argue that despite the importance of the ability to hold people responsible, an agent’s being morally responsible for an action (...) is explanatorily fundamental, and in this sense responsibility is response-independent. I then explore some of the specific aspects of McKenna’s conversational theory before turning to his suggestion that the conversational nature of our responsibility practices gives us special kinds of reasons for accepting that agents are deserving of the harms of blame. Finally, I conclude by raising questions for his argument that the scope of blameworthy actions extends beyond that of impermissible actions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Holding Doctors Responsible at Guantánamo*Nancy Sherman (bio)I recently visited the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center with a small group of civilian psychiatrists, psychologists, top military doctors, and Department of Defense health affairs officials to discuss detainee medical and mental health care. The unspoken reason for the invitation to go on this unusual day trip was the bruising criticism the Bush administration has received for its use of psychiatrists (...) and psychologists in the interrogation of suspected terrorist detainees.1We disembarked from our Navy jet to find an island lush and green from recent storms. A small boat took us from the airfield to the naval hospital. From the boat there was no sign of Camp Delta, where the detainees are actually held. Nor was there a sign of prisons or barbed wire or the detention facility's 505 inmates.Our host was the commanding officer of Gitmo, Major General Jay W. Hood (an artillery officer by training), who had replaced Major General Geoffrey Miller, implicated in the "migration" of torture methods from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib. Dressed in fatigues, General Hood briefed us using PowerPoint. His intelligence director told us that interrogators have not used harsh "fear up" tactics—the ones designed to terrify—since 2003.We went by bus from the naval hospital to the 30-bed detainee hospital for quick briefings from a psychiatrist and a physician. Still, we were not permitted to see any detainees or hunger strikers, despite our requests. During our six hours on the ground, we had only a fleeting glimpse of a few detainees outside their cellblocks behind barbed wire and screened fences.Indeed, when I got home and saw the play "Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom," by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, I had the disquieting feeling that I had absorbed more about detainee life at the theater than I had from actually being at Gitmo. This only amplified my anxiety that what I had heard and seen during my VIP visit sidestepped the central moral issue of whether abuse is still occurring at Gitmo and whether health professionals are, or have been, a party to coercive interrogation. [End Page 199]The question that the Pentagon leadership has been focusing on, and which was a key subject of discussion during our day at Gitmo, is whether there is an ethical difference between using psychologists or psychiatrists on interrogation teams—what the Pentagon calls, "behavioral consultation teams," or BSCTs, pronounced "biscuit." Some in the Pentagon would like to have doctors and psychiatrists, who are bound by the Hippocratic teaching to "do no harm," be the clinicians treating detainees. Psychologists, who are not as bound by Hippocratic dicta, would consult with and advise interrogators. But this is a red herring. It is hair-splitting that detracts from the real issue of whether health professionals of any stripe can ethically be involved in interrogations that may involve coercive techniques or torture. The answer is clearly no. They should not be involved, directly or indirectly, in situations that may lead to the breach of confidential medical records; to torture or to cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment; or to exploitation of fears or phobias. Mental health professionals simply should not be collaborating with interrogators in inflicting psychological torture.Hood said that "rapport building" was the preferred and an effective interrogation technique, but that is no guarantee that rougher tactics will not be used. The fact is that there is enormous pressure on the people at Guantánamo Bay to get good intelligence for the war on terror, and it is as easy for behavioral scientists as it is for interrogators to compromise their moral standards. Cunning and deception to extract information may be acceptable in some cases. But many people have been outraged to learn from media reports that methods developed by military psychologists to train our own troops to resist torture—the so-called "survival, evasion, resistance, and escape" methods taught at Ft. Bragg—have been "reverse engineered" at Guantánamo Bay to create coercive, psychologically manipulative interrogation techniques for use against detainees.Plato warned long ago that a doctor's skill, abstracted from good character and wisdom, is a neutral... (shrink)

Michael McKenna’s Conversation and Responsibility is a genuine tour de force: a richly detailed, sustained argument for an innovative theory about the nature of moral responsibility, one that offers multiple layers of theoretical architectonic. Its depth repays equally deep examination, and I have learned a great deal from reading and thinking about it. Any philosopher seeking a rigorous yet generous introduction to the state of contemporary discussion on moral responsibility could hardly do better than to read this book. It is (...) true that I am not yet persuaded by McKenna’s central thesis that the most illuminating way to understand moral responsibility is to view it as a type of interpersonal conversation. And I am dubious that his strategy of accounting for the “fittingness” of blaming responses in terms of the “intelligibility” of such responses as part of a conversation can really be made to pan out. Nonetheless I greatly appreciated a great number of the positions and proposals mad .. (shrink)

In his influential paper, “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson argued that our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible and related reactive attitudes were wholly “internal” to the practices themselves and could be insulated from traditional philosophical and metaphysical concerns, including concerns about free will and determinism. This “insulation thesis” is a controversial feature of Strawson’s influential paper; and it has had numerous critics. The first purpose of this paper is to explain my own reasons for (...) thinking that our practices of holding responsible cannot be entirely insulated from incompatibilist concerns about freedom and determinism. The second purpose is to argue that these incompatibilist concerns are in fact legitimate concerns: There are sound reasons to believe that our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible do require at least sometimes in our lives that we must be capable of acting freely in a manner that is not determined. I defend this thesis by spelling out why I believe various compatibilist strategies attempting to show that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism fail to show this. In the course of this critique, a general theme will emerge: In order to do full justice to our ordinary practices of holding persons responsible and the freedoms thus involved, one must distinguish between different types of freedom, and in particular, between freedom of action and freedom of will. (shrink)

The question of corporate moral responsibility – of whether it makes sense to hold an organisation corporately morally responsible for its actions,rather than holding responsible the individuals who contributed to that action – has been debated over a number of years in the business ethics literature. However, it has had little attention in the world of health care ethics. Health care in the United Kingdom(UK) is becoming an increasingly corporate responsibility, so the issue is increasingly relevant (...) in the health care context, and it is worth considering whether the specific nature of health care raises special questions around corporate moral responsibility. For instance, corporate responsibility has usually been considered in the context of private corporations, and the organisations of health care in the UK are mainly state bodies. However, there is enough similarity in relevant respects between state organisations and private corporations, for the question of corporate responsibility to be equally applicable. Also, health care is characterised by professions with their own systems of ethical regulation. However, this feature does not seriously diminish the importance of the corporate responsibility issue, and the importance of the latter is enhanced by recent developments. But there is one major area of difference. Health care, as an activity with an intrinsically moral goal, differs importantly from commercial activities that are essentially a moral, in that it narrows the range of opportunities for corporate wrongdoing, and also makes such organisations more difficult to punish. (shrink)

Is moral responsibility the same in all contexts? Is it acceptable for our practices of holding responsible to ignore the reality of trauma, inequality, and oppression? Hundreds of philosophers, drawing on P. F. Strawson’s 1962 essay, “Freedom and Resentment,” have argued for accounts of moral responsibility that would, at least implicitly, answer these questions in the affirmative. Yet these affirmative answers are not, I shall argue, Strawson’s view. Strawson argues for a real-world approach to moral responsibility, a facet (...) of his work that should be acknowledged. That facet should also be extended, using insights from feminist philosophers, philosophers of race, and social and political philosophers. The reinterpretation of Strawson I discuss here makes better sense of moral responsibility, and also supports the improvement of our practices in assigning moral responsibility. We can’t understand the nature and limits of our moral demands—demands on ourselves and others—while ignoring the actual conditions in which those demands are deployed. (shrink)

The primary goal of this dissertation is to articulate and defend a robust commonsense libertarian theory of moral responsibility; that moral agents are the causes, and owners, of their actions, and in virtue of this it is appropriate to hold them praiseworthy or blameworthy for what they do. Here, I critique and defend two commonsense principles concerning moral responsibility - the control principle, and the principle of alternate possibilities. In recent years these principles have come under attack from philosophers seeking (...) to propose a theory of moral responsibility consistent with a deterministic worldview. The existence of moral luck would mean that the control principle is false; I argue that moral luck is impossible. Harry Frankfurt famously presents a supposed counter-example to the principle of alternate possibilities; I argue Frankfurt's case turns on an equivocation between alternate possibilities and alternate outcomes. I contend that moral responsibility requires an agent to have full control of her actions, to be the author of what she is praiseworthy or blameworthy for. This view requires indeterminism of a special kind, agent-causation, where something is an agentcause if and only if at a given time, it, and only it, determines its actions, and was not determined to act in this way by outside forces. Only agent-causes can be truly responsible for their actions because only the actions of agent-causes can be traced back to them and no further. And finally I argue we have good reason to believe we are such agent-causes. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s (1962) “Freedom and Resentment” has provoked a wide range of responses, both positive and negative, and an equally wide range of interpretations. In particular, beginning with Gary Watson, some have seen Strawson as suggesting a point about the “order of explanation” concerning moral responsibility: it is not that it is appropriate to hold agents responsible because they are morally responsible, rather, it is ... well, something else. Such claims are often developed in different ways, but (...) one thing remains constant: they meant to be incompatible with libertarian theories of moral responsibility. The overarching theme of this paper is that extant developments of “the reversal” face a dilemma: in order to make the proposals plausibly anti-libertarian, they must be made to be implausible on other grounds. I canvas different attempts to articulate a “Strawsonian reversal”, and argue that none is fit for the purposes for which it is intended. I conclude by suggesting a way of clarifying the intended thesis: an analogy with the concept of funniness. The result: proponents of the “reversal” need to accept the difficult result that if we blamed small children, they would be blameworthy, or instead explain how their view escapes this result, while still being a view on which our blaming practices “fix the facts” of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Theorists have spent considerable time discussing the concept of responsibility. Their discussions, however, have generally focused on the question of who counts as responsible, and for what. But as Gary Watson has noted, “Responsibility is a triadic relationship: an individual (or group) is responsible to others for something” (Watson Agency and answerability: selected essays, 2004 , p. 7). Thus, theorizing about responsibility ought to involve theorizing not just about the actor and her conduct, but also about those the (...) actor is responsible to—and specifically about how these people hold the actor responsible for her conduct. In this paper, I give a topology of the terrain of holding others responsible. Over the course of the paper I disambiguate two very broad senses of holding responsible—regarding another as a responsible agent and holding another responsible for a particular piece of conduct. Next, I argue that the latter sense of holding responsible is a genus with two species—what I will call “holding responsible as deep moral appraisal” and “holding responsible as accountability.” Appreciating these distinctions, I argue, sheds considerable light on a number of questions concerning the scope and nature of our practices of holding others responsible. Finally, illuminating these distinct senses of holding responsible and highlighting their features reveals an awkwardness in the most carefully explicated and influential account of holding responsible, namely R. Jay Wallace’s account in Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. (shrink)

Risks, including health and technological, attract a lot of attention in modern societies, from individuals as well as policy-makers. Human beings have always had to deal with dangers, but contemporary societies conceptualise these dangers as risks, indicating that they are to some extent controllable and calculable. Conceiving of dangers in this way implies a need to analyse how we hold people responsible for risks and how we can and should take responsibility for risks. Moral Responsibility and Risk in Societycombines (...) philosophical discussion of different concepts and notions of responsibility with context-specific applications in the areas of health, technology and environment. The book consists of two parts addressing two crucial aspects of risks and responsibility: holding agents responsible, i.e. ascribing and distributing responsibility for risks and taking responsibility for risk. More specifically, the book discusses the values of fairness and efficacy in responsibility distributions and makes distinctions between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility as well as individual and collective responsibility. Additionally, it analyses what it means to take responsibility for technological risks, conceptualizing this kind of responsibility as a virtue, and furthermore, explores the notion of responsible risk communication and the implications for adult-child relationships. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, bioethics, public health ethics, engineering ethics, philosophy of risk and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in deterministic scenarios depends on whether the deterministic laws are couched in neurological or psychological terms (Nahmias et. al. 2007), on whether actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression they seem to represent (Nichols & Knobe 2007). Finally, people are more inclined to hold an (...) agent responsible for bringing about bad than for bringing about good side effects that the agent is indifferent about (Knobe 2003). Elsewhere, we have presented an analysis of the everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, and accounts for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility. -Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93. -Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI -Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions, Noûs 41:4, 663-685. (shrink)

Many philosophers endorse the idea that there can be no moral responsibility without a moral community and thus hold that such responsibility is essentially interpersonal. In this paper, various interpretations of this idea are distinguished, and it is argued that no interpretation of it captures a significant truth. The popular view that moral responsibility consists in answerability is discussed and dismissed. The even more popular view that such responsibility consists in susceptibility to the reactive attitudes is also discussed, and it (...) is argued that this view at best supports only an etiolated interpretation of the idea that moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. (shrink)

This work presents an "actual-sequence" model of moral responsibility. In contrast to many traditional views, an "actual-sequence" model holds that ascriptions of moral responsibility do not necessarily depend upon whether agents are free to pursue alternative courses of action; rather what is important is what the agents actually do, and how their actions come to be performed. ;Part One of this work sketches an actual-sequence theory that associates moral responsibility with control. I motivate this approach through a series of "Frankfurt-type" (...) examples which illustrate that even though agents lack alternative possibilities, they still may be held responsible in virtue of freely bringing about an event; such agents are said to exercise "actual causal control." The proposed theory has the important advantage of reconciling responsibility and causal determinism, even if determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise. The next two chapters aim to defend this "semi-compatibilist" view against a variety of objections. Chapter 3 addresses a range of objections which can be raised against the Frankfurt-type examples. Chapter 4 addresses Peter van Inwagen's "direct" argument which purports to show that responsibility and determinism are incompatible. ;Part Two of this work presents a more precise analysis of actual causal control. Through an examination of several approaches , Chapters 5 and 6 develop an analysis of control which is based on the idea that in order to be responsible, agents must act in ways that are responsive to an appropriate pattern of both moral and non-moral reasons. Chapter 7 expands this account by arguing that ascriptions of responsibility depend not only on the current responsiveness of an agent, but also on the history which leads to this pattern of response. To support this point, I sketch an account of the process of taking responsibility which captures one way in which historical considerations play an important role in our ascriptions of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in deterministic scenarios depends on whether the deterministic laws are couched in neurological or psychological terms (Nahmias et. al. 2007), on whether actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression they seem to represent (Nichols & Knobe 2007). Finally, people are more inclined to hold an (...) agent responsible for bringing about bad than for bringing about good side effects that the agent is indifferent about (Knobe 2003). Elsewhere, we have presented an analysis of the everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, and accounts for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility. -Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93. -Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI -Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions, Noûs 41:4, 663-685. (shrink)

The hospital has legal liability. Does it also have moral responsibility? Is it a moral agent, and if so in what sense? There are two issues involved, one conceptual and the other normative. The conceptual issue is whether a hospital can be morally responsible. If seen not only as a physical facility but as a formal organization, it can be said to act rationally, choose between alternatives, and affect human beings. It thus satisfies die criteria for moral responsibility, (...) even though it is not a person. Though moral responsibility can be attributed intelligibly to a hospital, such responsibility can be assumed only by those within it who act for it. Such responsibility is agent responsibility and may be shared in a number of ways. Hospital responsibilities can be separated from the professional moral responsibility and the personal moral responsibility held by doctors, nurses, and others within a hospital. Assuming these three types of responsibility makes possible conflicts of responsibility for those who hold them. Normatively, the moral responsibility of the hospital is appropriately limited by its purpose and is primarily administrative. It has designatable moral responsibilities to its patients, doctors and nurses, and the public. These can be distinguished from the responsibilities of doctors and nurses to the public. The responsibility of a doctor on the hospital staff is different from the responsibility of a doctor who simply practices in the hospital; that of a staff nurse from that of a private nurse. The difference is in large part a function of the one sharing die responsibility of the hospital and the other not. An analysis of a hospital's moral responsibilities suggests structures appropriate to a hospital that wishes to meet its moral responsibilities. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this book the author examines the stubborn philosophical belief in moral responsibility, surveying the philosophical arguments for it, but focusing on the system that supports these arguments: powerful social and psychological factors that hold the belief in moral responsibility firmly in place.--Publisher's description.

Michael Zimmerman has recently argued against the twofold Strawsonian claim that there can be no moral responsibility without a moral community and that, as a result, moral responsibility is essentially interpersonal. I offered a number of objections to Zimmerman’s view, to which Zimmerman responded. In this article, I respond to Zimmerman’s responses to my criticisms.

Robert Hoffman's note, ‘Scientific Research and Moral Rectitude’ , 475–7), is a highly misleading introduction to this important topic. Hoffman points out that there are some people who ‘believe that the researcher's claim to freedom of inquiry should be upheld only if his discovery does not adversely affect mankind or any significant segment thereof’ , and his aim is to reject this belief. But such people are right, as can be shown by some counter-arguments and examples. But first a slight (...) qualification is necessary, for, as Hoffman points out, it is impossible before an inquiry to state categorically that its outcome will adversely affect mankind. But it may be possible to estimate whether it is likely to affect mankind adversely, and it is surely reasonable to hold that a researcher's claim to freedom of inquiry should not be upheld if it is likely that the inquiry will adversely affect mankind. If a nuclear physicist interested in particle fusion wishes to carry out research which is likely to lead to an uncontrolled nuclear explosion, no one would seriously uphold his right to carry out this research in a laboratory situated in a densely populated area. And to reply that he still has a right to carry out this research alone on a desert island would be to concede, not to circumvent, the claim that scientific research ought to be under the critical eye of moral responsibility. The critic of science would not in any case accept this reply, since he believes not unreasonably that nuclear explosions adversely affect mankind wherever on earth they occur. (shrink)

• But this rests on the debatable view that understanding a moral reason implies being motivated to conform to it. Psychopaths do seem to have at least a “rote” or emotionally shallow understanding that their acts are wrong.

Does having a mental disorder, in general, affect whether someone is morally responsible for an action? Many people seem to think so, holding that mental disorders nearly always mitigate responsibility. Against this Naïve view, we argue for a Nuanced account. The problem is not just that different theories of responsibility yield different verdicts about particular cases. Even when all reasonable theories agree about what's relevant to responsibility, the ways mental illness can affect behavior are so varied that (...) a more nuanced approach is needed. (shrink)

Since philosophers generally agree that free will is understood partly by the relation it holds to moral responsibility, achieving a better understanding of free will requires that we have a clear idea of the sort of moral responsibility to which free will is thought to be connected. I argue that examining the substantive differences that exist between compatibilists and incompatibilists reveals a specific notion of moral responsibility that is best suited for philosophical debates regarding free will. Upon examination, it becomes (...) apparent that the primary substantive disputes between compatibilists and incompatibilists—as well as between libertarians and skeptics—have to do with the issue of whether retributivist reward or punishment is ever appropriate for certain kinds of agents. Drawing from this, I suggest that participants in the free will debate adopt a particular understanding of moral responsibility that can ground the propriety of retributivist justice. (shrink)

In the paper, I try to cast some doubt on traditional attempts to define, or explicate, moral responsibility in terms of deserved praise and blame. Desert-based accounts of moral responsibility, though no doubt more faithful to our ordinary notion of moral responsibility, tend to run into trouble in the face of challenges posed by a deterministic picture of the world on the one hand and the impact of moral luck on human action on the other. Besides, grounding responsibility in desert (...) seems to support ascriptions of pathological blame to agents trapped in moral dilemmas as well as of excess blame in cases of joint action. Desert is also notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to determine (at least with sufficient precision). And, finally, though not least important, recent empirical research on people’s responsibility judgments reveals our common-sense notion of responsibility to be hopelessly confused and easily manipulated. So it may be time to rethink our inherited theory and practice of moral responsibility. Our theoretical and practical needs may be better served by a less intractable, more forward-looking notion of responsibility. The aim of the paper is to contrast the predominant, desert-based accounts of moral responsibility with their rather unpopular rival, the consequence- based accounts, and then show that the latter deserve more consideration than usually granted by their opponents. In the course of doing so, I assess, and ultimately reject, a number of objections that have been raised against consequentialist accounts of moral responsibility: that it (i) doesn’t do justice to our common-sense theory and practice of responsibility; (ii) ties responsibility too closely to influenceability, thereby exposing itself to the charge of counter-intuitivity; (iii) assigns undeserved responsibility (praise, blame) to agents; (iv) confuses ‘being responsible’ with ‘holding responsible’‚ and (v) provides the wrong-kind-of-reason for praise and blame. My negative and positive case may not add up to a knockdown argument in favor of revising our ordinary notion of responsibility. As long as the considerations adduced succeed in presenting the consequentialist alternative as a serious contender to a pre-arranged marriage between moral responsibility and desert, however, I’m happy to rest my case. (shrink)

I argue that to remove all backward-looking grounds and justification from the practice, as some theorists recommend, is to remove (not revise) moral responsibility. The most paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility must feature desert and retributive elements. So, moral responsibility must be (at least partially) backward-looking. When we hold people responsible, one reason we do so is that we believe that they deserve punishment or reward simply in virtue of the action for which we hold them responsible. None (...) of this rebuts responsibility skepticism. For instance, forward-looking theories might adopt Myisha Cherry's proposal: anger as love without blameworthiness. (shrink)

A common philosophical view holds that moral assessments of people will depend entirely upon their possession or not of a sufficiently good will or character1—arguably, indeed, the moral assessment...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Holding Psychopaths ResponsibleMatt Matravers (bio)Keywordspsychopathy, responsibility, meta-ethics, blameILevy's interesting paper seeks to resolve the issue of the psychopath's moral responsibility in a way that avoids traditional meta-ethical debates. In what follows, I take issue both with the substantive arguments he offers about the responsibility of psychopaths and with whether those arguments can be completed while avoiding meta-ethics.I shall take it for granted that psychopathy is a genuine phenomenon (...) and that it is of the kind described by Levy. Moreover, I am sympathetic to Levy's claim that addressing the moral responsibility of psychopaths is not best done by starting with meta-ethical debates about the capacities relevant to moral responsibility in general. However, because I think that these debates come back to haunt Levy's arguments, it is worth saying a little more about the role meta-ethical considerations have had in discussions of psychopathy.The core question is this: "Are psychopaths properly held morally responsible?" It seems an obvious way to go about answering this question either to ask what capacities are needed for moral responsibility and then check whether psychopaths possess them, or to ask what capacities psychopaths possess (or lack) and then check the relevance of those capacities to moral responsibility. Either way, the method juxtaposes a list of the capacities needed for moral responsibility and a list of the capacities possessed (or lacked) by psychopaths and then simply asks whether the lists match in relevant respects.Although it seems that this must be the right approach, it has a serious flaw, which is that there is no agreement—and little prospect of agreement—among moral philosophers on what capacities are critical for moral responsibility. Kantian political philosophers connect morality with a certain kind of practical reasoning and thus think that whether psychopaths are morally responsible will turn on whether they possess some purely intellectual incapacity. Humeans, by contrast, relate morality to emotional responses and thus think the critical issue is whether psychopaths possess a capacity for "sympathy." Finally, Aristotelians think that a proper grasp of morality requires a combination of intellectual and emotional capacities.As Levy remarks, "we cannot settle a disputed question [the moral responsibility of psychopaths] by invoking principles [in this case meta-ethical principles] that are even more controversial than the original question" (2007, p. 130). That is right. Levy's response is to try to settle the 'original question' without recourse to controversial meta-ethical issues. For obvious reasons, it would be a neat trick if it could be done. For reasons given below, I do not think that it can.Levy's paper relies on a number of arguments. Two are of particular importance: First, that what [End Page 139] characterizes psychopathy is an inability to distinguish moral from conventional transgressions such that "all offences are merely conventional" (2007, p. 132); and, second, that psychopaths are not responsible for becoming psychopathic (they have a causal history of a certain kind).IIThe first of these arguments is presented around interesting empirical findings that do, indeed, suggest that psychopaths think of all transgressions as breaking conventional rules and that they do not appreciate the distinction between such transgressions and those that are, we might say, mala in se, or moral rather than conventional. Levy moves extremely quickly in concluding from this that the moral responsibility of psychopaths is significantly reduced. The argument is as follows: (i) "psychopaths … take harm to others to be wrong only because such harms are against the rules." (ii) "But, the kind and degree of wrongness, and therefore blame, which attaches to infringements of … rules is very different, and usually much less significant, than the kind and degree attaching to moral wrongs." From these two premises, Levy concludes (iii) "their degree of responsibility is smaller, arguably much smaller, than it would be for a comparable harm committed by a normal agent" (2007, p. 132).As an aside, it is not obvious whether the distinction between moral and conventional rules is, in itself, of any great significance. Rather, moral rules generally cover more serious wrongs (malicious wounding is a more serious wrong than insulting one's aunt's... (shrink)

Morally responsible agency and agentive authority are familiar themes in the philosophical literature on ethics and agency. Morally responsible agents are those who are apt candidates for the blaming attitudes and actions by which we hold one another accountable for moral violations. Those who lack morally responsible agency—e.g., non-human animals, very young children, and (some) individuals with severe cognitive impairments—are typically considered exempt from moral responsibility. Agentive authority is a normative position that grounds powers, (...) claims, and rights to which one is entitled in virtue of being a particular kind of agent. As an autonomous agent, you have a claim-right against me (and I, a corresponding obligation to you) not to interfere with certain of your self-regarding decisions. In this paper, I consider whether and how exemption from moral responsibility might imply diminished agentive authority. Using (one type of) psychopathic agency as a test case, I argue that, contra some theoretical frameworks, one can retain agentive authority even if exempt from moral responsibility. (shrink)

This is a selection of essays on moral responsibility that represent the major components of John Martin Fischer's overall approach to freedom of the will and moral responsibility. The collection exhibits the overall structure of Fischer's view and shows how the various elements fit together to form a comprehensive framework for analyzing free will and moral responsibility. The topics include deliberation and practical reasoning, freedom of the will, freedom of action, various notions of control, and moral accountability. The essays seek (...) to provide a foundation for our practices of holding each other (and ourselves) morally and legally accountable for our behavior. A crucial move is the distinction between two kinds of control. According to Fischer, "regulative control" involves freedom to choose and do otherwise ("alternative possibilities"), whereas "guidance control" does not. Fischer contends that guidance control is all the freedom we need to be morally responsible agents. Further, he contends that such control is fully compatible with causal determinism. Additionally, Fischer argues that we do not need genuine access to alternative possibilities in order for there to be a legitimate point to practical reasoning. Fischer's overall framework contains an argument for the contention that guidance control, and not regulative control, is associated with moral responsibility, a sketch of a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility (that ties together responsibility for actions, omissions, consequences, and character), and an account of the value of moral responsibility. On this account, the value of exhibiting freedom (of the relevant sort) and thus being morally responsible for one's behavior is a species of the value of artistic self-expression. (shrink)

I argue against two of the most influential contemporary theories of moral responsibility: those of Harry Frankfurt and John Martin Fischer. Both propose conditions which are supposed to be sufficient for direct moral responsibility for actions. (By the term direct moral responsibility, I mean moral responsibility which is not traced from an earlier action.) Frankfurt proposes a condition of 'identification'; Fischer, writing with Mark Ravizza, proposes conditions for 'guidance control'. I argue, using counterexamples, that neither is sufficient for direct moral (...) responsibility. -/- My counterexample cases are based on recent research in psychology which reveals many surprising causes of our actions. Some of this research comes from the field of situationist social psychology; some from experiments which reveal the influence of automatic processes in our actions. Broadly, I call such causes 'subverting' when the agent would not identify with her action, if she knew all the causes of the action. When an action has subverting causes, the agent is not directly morally responsible for it, even though she may meet the conditions specified by Frankfurt and Fischer. -/- I also criticise the theories of Eddy Nahmias and John Doris, who have both engaged specifically with the threats posed to moral responsibility by situationist research. Against Doris and Nahmias, I argue that their conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient for direct moral responsibility. -/- My final objective is to argue that there are many everyday actions for which we mistakenly hold agents morally responsible. I review evidence that there are many everyday actions which have subverting causes. Many of those are actions for which we currently hold agents morally responsible. But I argue that, in many of those same actions, the agents are not in fact morally responsible – they bear neither direct nor traced moral responsibility. (shrink)

I consider three challenges to the traditional view according to which moral responsibility involves an epistemic condition in addition to a freedom condition. The first challenge holds that if a person performs an action A freely, then she thereby knows that she is doing A. The epistemic condition is thus built into the freedom condition. The second challenge contends that no epistemic condition is required for moral responsibility, since a person may be blameworthy for an action that she did not (...) know was wrong. The third challenge invokes the quality of will view. On this view, a person is blameworthy for a wrong action just in case the action manifests a bad quality of will. The blameworthy person need not satisfy an additional epistemic condition. I will argue that contrary to appearances, none of these challenges succeeds. Hence, moral responsibility does require a non-superfluous epistemic condition. (shrink)

When software is written and then utilized in complex computer systems, problems often occur. Sometimes these problems cause a system to malfunction, and in some instances such malfunctions cause harm. Should any of the persons involved in creating the software be blamed and punished when a computer system failure leads to persons being harmed? In order to decide whether such blame and punishment are appropriate, we need to first consider if the people are “morally responsible”. Should any of (...) the people involved in creating the software be held morally responsible, as individuals, for the harm caused by a computer system failure?This article provides one view of moral responsibility and then discusses some barriers to holding people morally responsible. Next, it provides information about the Therac-25, a computer-controlled medical linear accelerator, and its computer systems failures that led to deaths and injuries. Finally it investigates whether two key people involved in the Therac-25 case could reasonably be considered to have some degree of moral responsibility for the deaths and injuries. The conclusions about whether or not these people were morally responsible necessarily rest upon a certain amount of speculation about what they knew and what they did. These limitations, however, should not cause us to conclude that discussions of moral responsibility are fruitless. In some cases, determinations of moral responsibility may be made and in others the investigation is still worthwhile, as the article demonstrates. (shrink)

[Opening paragraph:] Ontological realism or holism about social groups is the thesis that groups are composite material particulars. Social groups are entities over which we quantify in the set of our best descriptions and explanations of the social world. The realist explains that a group considered in its own right can be causally responsible for the production of events or states of affairs. We do more than just describe and furnish explanations of the phenomena of the social world. In (...) our ordinary discourse and in the arenas of policy formation, legislation and the administration of laws we make moral judgments of groups and seek to direct action toward them. Granted realism about groups the concern of the present paper is the sense in or extent to which we can talk literally of a group as such being morally responsible, and, in particular, of whether it is apt to make responsibility judgments of large groups such as nations. That is, whether a group considered as an entity in its own right can be the appropriate bearer of the full-blown ascription of moral responsibility. For when we talk of individuals being collectively responsible we seem to just pick out as the responsible party them as a group—the individual members regarded jointly or collectively as one unit. (shrink)

Judging a person as morally responsible involves believing that certain responses (such as punishment, reward, or expressions of blame or praise) can be justifiably directed at the person. This paper develops an account of the evolution of moral responsibility judgment that adopts Michael Tomasello’s two-step theory of the evolution of morality and borrows also from Christopher Boehm’s work. The main hypothesis defended is that moral responsibility judgment originally evolved as an adaptation that enabled groups of cooperative individuals to (...) hold free riders responsible more safely by acting in a coordinated way. (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)

Strawsonians about moral responsibility often claim that our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, rather than the other way round. Many have argued that such ‘reversal’ claims have an unwelcome consequence: If our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, does this not imply, absurdly, that if we held severely mentally ill people responsible, they would be responsible? We provide a new Strawsonian answer (...) to this question, and we explore the relation between reversal claims and (in)compatibilism. (shrink)

Proponents of manipulation arguments against compatibilism hold that manipulation scope (how many agents are manipulated) and manipulation type (whether the manipulator intends that an agent perform a particular action) do not impact judgments about free will and moral responsibility. Many opponents of manipulation arguments agree that manipulation scope has no impact but hold that manipulation type does. Recent work by Latham and Tierney (2022, 2023) found that people's judgments were sensitive to manipulation scope: people judged that an agent was less (...) free and responsible when a manipulation was existential (impacting at least one but not all agents) than when the manipulation was universal (impacting every agent). This study examines people's judgements about existential and universal manipulation cases that involve both intentional and non‐intentional outcomes. We found that manipulation scope also affects people's free will and responsibility judgments in manipulation cases involving both intentional and non‐intentional outcomes. Interestingly, we also found that manipulation type influences the effect that manipulation scope has on people's free will judgments but not their moral responsibility judgments, which indicates that people's free will and responsibility judgments can come apart. This puts pressure on the prevalent assumption that judgments about free will and moral responsibility are conceptually bound together. (shrink)

This paper examines the resources of Kantian ethics to establish corporate moral responsibility. I defend Matthew Altman’s claim that Kantian ethics cannot hold corporations morally responsible for corporate malfeasance. Rather than following Altman in interpreting this inability as a reason not to use Kantian ethics, however, I argue that the Kantian framework is correct: business ethicists should not seek to hold corporations morally responsible. Instead, they should use Kantian resources to criticize the actions of individual businesspeople. (...) I set forth a model for decomposing business actions into their individual parts and reconstituting them in a context-specific “maxim” that Kantian ethics can evaluate. The reconstituted form of Kantian ethics that I defend is better able to manage decision-making complexity than traditional interpretations. To demonstrate the usefulness of my approach, I apply it to the recent Wells Fargo bogus-accounts scandal. (shrink)

One of the core challenges presented by ascriptions of moral responsibility to corporations is to identify who or what is being held responsible. A significant source of controversy in attempts to answer this challenge is whether or not responsibility can fall on a ‘corporate entity’ distinct from the individuals that make it up. In this article I argue that both sides of this debate have incorrectly assumed that the possession of moral agency is a necessary condition for holding (...) moral responsibility. I go on to argue that it is sufficient for a corporate entity to be a ‘morally significant system’, that is a non-agential system created by moral agents, and I develop an account of such systems. I conclude by setting out the implications of this analysis for our practices of holding corporations morally responsible. (shrink)

The actions performed by individuals, as consumers and citizens, have aggregate negative consequences for the environment. The question asked in this paper is to what extent it is reasonable to hold individuals and institutions responsible for environmental problems. A distinction is made between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility. Previously, individuals were not seen as being responsible for environmental problems, but an idea that is now sometimes implicitly or explicitly embraced in the public debate on environmental problems is that individuals (...) are appropriate targets for blame when they perform actions that are harmful to the environment. This idea is criticized in this paper. It is argued that instead of blaming individuals for performing actions that are not environmentally friendly we should ascribe forward-looking responsibility to individuals, a notion that focuses more on capacity and resources than causation and blameworthiness. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that a great share of forward-looking responsibility should also be ascribed to institutional agents, primarily governments and corporations. The urge to ascribe forward-looking responsibility to institutional agents is motivated by the efficiency aim of responsibility distributions. Simply put, if responsibility is ascribed to governments and corporations there is a better chance of creating a society in which the opportunities to act in an environmentally friendly way increase. (shrink)

Moral responsibility theorists divide over whether facts about holding someone morally responsible are dependent on facts about being morally responsible, or whether the dependence relation runs in the other direction. A novel answer, proposed by Michael McKenna, is that neither side depends on the other. Instead, they are interdependent. Call this the ‘interdependence thesis’. A worry is that the interdependence thesis violates formal principles of metaphysical dependence in terms of ground. This paper analyses and defends (...) the interdependence thesis, interacting with recent work in the metaphysics of grounding. I vindicate the interdependence thesis from the charge that it violates the formal principles of metaphysical grounding. I then pull from recent work in communication theory and apply it to McKenna's ‘conversational theory of moral responsibility’, in order to respond to two new objections. One upshot is that I advance the conversational theory of moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this chapter, we recount some of the most pressing objections to character scepticism, pointing out their limitations and, when appropriate, incorporating their suggestions. From here, we consider what empirically informed moral improvement might look like by turning to the skill analogy. While the skill analogy provides a realistic rubric for becoming a better person, many of the questions concerning the details of how moral improvement might take place remain unanswered. When developing expertise in domains like chess and morality, a (...) wide range of factors will likely be important and it is unlikely than any one individual factor will be especially important. Given this, for any account of moral improvement, our optimism should be bounded: the effect of any particular intervention is likely to be limited, in both magnitude and domain. Lastly, we consider how character scepticism has reshaped the way we think about moral responsibility, whether this is cashed out in reasons-responsiveness or self-expression accounts. While both views face challenges, by distinguishing the possession of the responsibility-making feature from failures to manifest that property in behaviour, we gain a certain degree of wiggle room that allows us to accommodate empirical findings while holding on to notions of responsibility. This chapter highlights that the ‘person-situationism debate’ has expanded far beyond its beginnings, giving way to new accounts of moral improvement and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Properly speaking, the corporation, considered as an entity distinct from its members, cannot be morally responsible for wrongful corporate acts. Setting aside (in this abstract) acts brought about through negligence or omissions, we may say that moral responsibility for an act attaches to that agent (or agents) in whom the act "originates" in this sense: (1) the agent formed the (mental) intention or plan to bring about that act (possibly with the help of others) and (2) the act (...) was intentionally brought about through bodily movements over which that agent had direct control (i.e. the kind of direct mental control that I have over the body I refer to as "my" body) and through which the agent carried out his (mental) intention or plan. Corporate acts do not thus originate in some corporate entity distinct from its members because the corporation has neither a mind to form intentions nor a body it directly controls: it lacks the proper mind/body unity. Instead, corporate acts originate in individual autonomous human beings who make up the corporation and who intentionally bring about corporate acts through their own bodily movements. Such human individuals, and not "the corporation," are morally responsible for corporate acts. Moreover, to say that an entity is "morally responsible" for a wrongful act is to say that the entity is liable to blame and punishment. But it is not possible to impose blame and punishment on a corporation without inflicting it on corporate members. Thus, to say that a corporation (as an entity distinct from its members) is "morally responsible" for a wrongful corporate act is to imply that a (possibly innocent) corporate member legitimately may be punished for something for which another entity was morally responsible. This violates the moral principles that underlie blame and punishment. To hold that the corporation can be morally responsible for its acts is to adopt a dangerous organicism. (shrink)

Can we hold agents responsible for their implicitly biased behavior? The aim of this text is to show that, from the nurturing stance, holding subjects responsible for their implicitly biased behavior is justified, even though they are not blameworthy. First, I will introduce the nurturing stance as Daphne Brandenburg originally developed it. Second, I will specify what holding somebody responsible from the nurturing stance amounts to. Third, I show how and why holding responsible (...) can help a subject develop an impaired capacity. Fourth, I analyze empirical data about holding prejudiced subjects responsible and highlight that the internal motivation to control prejudiced reactions decreases implicit attitudes’ influences. Furthermore, the data show that in order to be appropriate moral demands have to acknowledge the target's autonomy and competence. In sum, from the nurturing stance, holding implicitly biased subjects responsible is appropriate if they can adequately respond to the moral demands. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss Gerbert Faure’s Vrije wil, moraal en het geslaagde leven (Free Will, Morality, and the Well-lived Life). I summarize and elucidate Faure’s argument. My criticisms are directed primarily at the first chapter of the book, in which Faure develops what he regards as a Strawsonian account of free will and moral responsibility. Faure denies that we have free will; I argue that Strawsonians should not deny this. Faure argues that, although we do not have free will, (...) it is often justified to hold others responsible, because we owe it to the victim(s) of a wrong to hold the perpetrator responsible; it is our moral duty. I argue that we only have a moral duty to hold perpetrators responsible if they are morally responsible. I also comment on the way in which Faure presents Strawson’s distinction between theory and practice. (shrink)

In this article, we will identify two issues that deserve greater attention from those researching lay people’s attitudes to moral responsibility and determinism. The first issue concerns whether people interpret the term “moral responsibility” in a retributive way and whether they are motivated to hold offenders responsible for pre-determined behaviour by considerations other than retributivism, e.g. the desires to condemn the action and to protect society. The second issue concerns whether explicitly rejecting moral responsibility and retributivism, after reading about (...) determinism, would have any impact on “implicit” retributivism when recommending a sentence for a hypothetical offender. We will report the results of an exploratory study that investigated these questions. Our preliminary findings raise the possibility that a significant proportion of participants either i) may not interpret “moral responsibility” in the basic, retributive sense of the term, which is at issue in the determinism debate, or ii) may be unconsciously motivated by non-retributive considerations to judge that the offender is morally responsible, in the basic, retributive sense. If this is confirmed by future research, a wider implication would be that theorists’ arguments against retributivism are more likely to affect public attitudes to punishment when non-retributive ways of achieving important punishment goals are emphasised. Our preliminary findings also suggested that explicit retributivism did not correlate with implicit retributivism. If this is confirmed in future research, it would imply that free will theorists who wish to affect public attitudes toward punishment should, when communicating their research to the public, give detailed consideration to the implications for sentencing. (shrink)

In this book, Professor Ross attempts both to establish the compatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility and to explain the justificatory grounds for blame and punishment. Assuming that all actions have causal antecedents, he contends that traditional attempts to find a basis for ascribing responsibility to some men but not others is misguided. All men, regardless of the cause of their behavior, should be deemed responsible moral agents; and criteria should be developed for deciding which such agents should (...) be held accountable and condemned and which should be excused. Ross disposes of "the theoretical problem of the relationship between freedom and responsibility by holding everyone pervasively responsible without limit, but not necessarily censurable for those acts that are either too far beyond the agents capacities or entail too great a risk of an opposing value." The contention that all men are responsible leads Ross to deny the dictum that "ought implies can," since men can be responsible for acts they could not perform. The fact that one has failed to do what is objectively right, however, does not make condemnation obligatory. Decisions to condemn someone rests on his abilities to do the right act and the educational or social value of the condemnation. (shrink)

It has often been argued that Hannah Arendt ‘let off’ Eichmann through her concept of the banality of evil. In this paper I argue, through revisiting and modifying the concept of the banality of evil, that we can reject such criticism. That is, by judging that a perpetrator, like Eichmann, commits evil banally in no way undermines the grounds for holding them to be responsible for their actions, but it does help us to understand why such perpetrators act (...) as they do and to teach us how we might prevent such evil from occurring again. (shrink)

Lampert and Waldrop have recently presented a puzzle about moral responsibility and logical truth, in which they derive a contradiction from three apparently plausible principles: (A) no one is responsible for any logical truth; (B) if no one is responsible for something, then no one is responsible for what it strictly implies; and (C) someone is responsible for something. They argue that, in response, we must give up (B)—a principle that plays a key role in arguments (...) for incompatibilism. In this paper, I argue that this response is mistaken, and that the lesson to be drawn lies elsewhere. For the puzzle also rests on a conception of logical truth according to which there are contingent logical truths. And, given this conception, (A) is false—for reasons independent of (B). So the import here concerns, not a connection between responsibility and the debate over incompatibilism, but a connection between responsibility and the debate over the correct conception of logical truth: one can hold on to (A), or hold on to the relevant conception of logical truth, but not both. (shrink)