EXCUSE, CAPACITY AND CONVENTION

The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2009

ethic@ - An international Journal for Moral Philosophy, 2015

In this paper I will argue, following Moody-Adams's (1994) paper "Culture, responsibility and affected ignorance," that inability does not excuse in general, but against Moody-Adams I will argue that this is not because of "affected ignorance" but simply because of responsibilities individual agents have by virtue of belonging to and participating in the collective actions of a certain kind of collective. Excusability has been misdiagnosed as depending on whether the ignorance of wrongdoing involved is culpable or non-culpable.

Some sort of freedom is a pre-condition for moral responsibility. If we are not free in some such fundamental way, then moral responsibility is unintelligible and its associated categories become inapplicable or dispensable. Not all sorts of practices become dispensable when their key concepts become unintelligible. Arguably, there may be good reasons to keep practices of holding each other responsible even when the pre-conditions of applicability of their key concepts have been denied. The issue of dispensability of concepts may be not thoroughly or completely conceptual; that is, it may be determined by considerations that have nothing to do with the nature of concepts. But I will not be concerned with such external considerations. I am interested in elucidating the concept of moral responsibility, where an agent is responsible for x if he is appropriately held accountable and it is answerable for x.

Criminal Responsibility and Partial Excuses, 1998

An introduction to the theory of justification and excuse in the criminal law.

Tópicos, Revista de Filosofía

Excuses and exempting conditions aim to mitigate responsibility. This paper proposes a distinction between excuses and exemptions in terms of the distinctive kind of judgement each of them aims to respond. I argue that exemptions affect the explanatory relevance of the accused, while excuses fully or partially justify her, by affecting the evaluative claim involved in responsibility attributions. This distinction supports the claim that attributing responsibility is a two‑step process, each of them corresponding to a different kind of responsibility—agential and moral—whose attribution is guided by two different although related cognitive and argumentative tasks: explaining an outcome, and evaluating its moral significance.

Public Affairs Quarterly, 2020

Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they improve themselves, make reparations for the harm caused, and retract the meaning expressed in the original wrong. Failure to do these things expresses a lack of regard for the victims, and can make those wrongdoers appropriate targets of blame.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 82, No. 2, 2011

Our aim in this paper is to put the concept of moral responsibility under a microscope. At the lowest level of magnification, it appears unified. But Gary Watson has taught us that if we zoom in, we will find that moral responsibility has two faces: attributability and accountability. 1 It is one thing to talk about the connection the agent has with her action;

Hiroshima Law Journal , 2024

This essay examines the issue of criminal liability from the viewpoint of the character theory of responsibility, with particular attention being paid to the role of excuse-based defences. Two different versions of the character theory are examined and compared: the traditional character theory and the utilitarian motivational theory of responsibility. Following a brief overview of the distinction between justification and excuse in common law jurisprudence, the two versions of the character theory are discussed and their implications are highlighted. The essay concludes that the traditional character theory, with its emphasis on moral blameworthiness, offers a better basis for understanding the nature of criminal responsibility in relation to offences which also constitute moral wrongs. The utilitarian motivational theory, on the other hand, may be given priority when considering the question of responsibility in relation to offences in which the element of moral blame is absent, minimal or questionable.

The paper has dual aim: to analyse the structure of negligence, and to use it to offer an explanation of responsibility (for actions, omissions, consequences) in terms of the relations which must exist between the action (omission, etc.) and the agents powers of rational agency if the agent is responsible for the action. The discussion involves reflections on the relations between the law and the morality of negligence, the difference between negligence and strict liability, the role of excuses and the grounds of duties to pay damages.

Philosophical Studies, 2011

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.