Responsibility in a World of Causes

Philosophy Compass, 2007

In this article I examine the relation between causation and moral responsibility. I distinguish four possible views about that relation. One is the standard view: the view that an agent's moral responsibility for an outcome requires, and is grounded in, the agent's causal responsibility for it. I discuss several challenges to the standard view, which motivate the three remaining views. The final viewthe view I argue for -is that causation is the vehicle of transmission of moral responsibility. According to this view, although moral responsibility does not require causation, causation still grounds moral responsibility.

Philosophical Psychology, 2021

Why do we find agents less blameworthy when they face mitigating circumstances, and what does this show about philosophical theories of moral responsibility? We present novel evidence that the tendency to mitigate the blameworthiness of agents is driven both by the perception that they are less normatively competent—in particular, less able to know that what they are doing is wrong—and by the perception that their behavior is less attributable to their deep selves. Consequently, we argue that philosophers cannot rely on the case strategy to support the Normative Competence theory of moral responsibility over the Deep Self theory. However, we also outline ways in which further empirical and philosophical work would shift the debate, by showing that there is a significant departure between ordinary concepts and corresponding philosophical concepts, or by focusing on a different type of coherence with ordinary judgments.

University of San Francisco law review, 2016

BLAMEWORTHINESS, OR CULPABILITY, IS CENTRAL TO THE LAW, to morality, and, generally, to many social norms. Other than for consensual obligations, such as contracts, a common intuition is that a person should not be liable for harms caused to another person or to the state if she has not engaged in blameworthy conduct. Furthermore, if a person does harm another through blameworthy conduct, the intuition often extends to the belief that the degree of culpability should be a factor in gauging a just requital.1 Malicious homicide, for instance, deserves greater punishment than negligent homicide does, and an intentional battery should occasion a more extensive liability than a comparable negligent injury. While there may be proper arenas for strict liability, typically it is applied only for substantial reasons that trump the common urge to free a person from responsibility to others for the consequences of her conduct that was reasonable and not culpable.2 Even utilitarians, who champi...

European Public Law, 2012

Journal of Experimental Social …, 2003

doctoral dissertation, 2013

What We Owe to Each Other Thomas Scanlon distinguished two senses of responsibility, substantive responsibility and responsibility as attributability and provided a nuanced description and analysis of both concepts. Elaborating on the latter notion in a series of articles Angela Smith developed a unified account of attributonism, the "rational relations view". According to Neil Levy's formulation, "on the attributionist account, I am responsible for my attitudes, and my acts and omissions insofar as they express my attitudes, in all cases in which my attributes express my identity as a practical agent. Attitudes are thus expressive of who I am if they belong to the class of judgment-sensitive attitudes" (Levy 2005).

Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, 2015

According to the conventional view, causal and moral responsibility have a strict hierarchical relationship. Determining causal responsibility comes first; then we sort through the factors to which we have assigned causal responsibility and determine which, if any, should be assigned moral responsibility too. Moral inquiry accordingly stands not only apart but also above causal inquiry. But I am going to argue that this way of looking at causal and moral responsibility is a mistake. Rather than being separate and independent inquires with different purposes and concerns, I am going to argue that finding causal responsibility actually entails finding moral responsibility even when there is no evidence of what we would call traditional fault. Indeed, I am going to argue we cannot find someone causally responsible without finding them morally responsible too.

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.

In this paper it is argued that we can have defensible attributions of responsibility without first answering the question whether determinism and free will are compatible. The key to such a defense is a focus on the fact that most actions for which we hold one another responsible are quite ordinary—trespassing traffic regulations, tardiness, or breaking a promise. As we will show, unlike actions that problematize our moral competence — e.g. akratic and ‘moral monster’- like ones—ordinary ‘wrong’ actions often disclose this competence. Hence, no counterfactual assumption is needed to establish that some of us are sometimes responsible for some of the actions we perform.

Philosophical Studies, 2019

P.F. Strawson's compatibilism about free will and his attendant account of moral responsibility have had a considerable influence on contemporary work. 2 This is so even among those who do not count themselves as followers of Strawson's overall compatibilist program. Even opponents address Strawson's main themes: the moral emotions and our practices of interpersonal expectations and demands. 3 Despite this influence, there are two damning problems for Strawson's theory. First, it appears to restrict the class of morally responsible agents to those who are in fact members of the moral community. However, as Gary Watson has argued in "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil" (2008/1987), this has a disturbing consequence: extreme evil exempts an agent from moral responsibility. If so, why shouldn't we view this as a reductio? Second, in some cases our emotional reaction to an evildoer's history clashes with our emotional expressions of blame. We might then worry that anyone's actions can be explained by his or her history, and thereby, conflict with our present blame. We might also worry that had our history been like the unfortunate evildoer, we too might have been evil. This compromises our standing to blame. Together, this would undermine the expression of blame, generally, and so be self-defeating. It is critical to the Strawsonian project to respond to these problems. I will do so in a novel way. As I see it, we have an impoverished vocabulary of reactive attitudes. Expanding our vocabulary can dissolve the problems. To do so, I will

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy

This paper takes up the question of whether the consequences of a person’s volitional actions can contribute to their blameworthiness. On the one hand it is intuitively plausible to hold that if D1 volitionally shoots V with the intention of killing V then D1 is blameworthy for V’s death. On the other hand, if the only difference between D1 and D2 is resultant luck, many find it counter-intuitive to hold that D1 is more blameworthy than D2. There are three broad (non-skeptical) strategies for resolving this tension: accept resultant moral luck, deny that one can be morally responsible for outcomes, or accept that outcomes can be within the scope of things one is morally responsible for while denying that they can affect the degree of blameworthiness. This paper aims to defend resultant moral luck against both the scoping and the internalist strategies by drawing on an “inclusive conception” of blameworthiness, according to which how much blame one deserves is a function of two i...

Inquiry, 2015

Philosophers have been concerned with and puzzled by the nature of responsibility at least since Aristotle's time. What does it take to be a responsible agent? Under what conditions is it justifiable to hold someone responsible for her character or behavior? Notoriously, it seems to many that genuine responsibility requires a kind of metaphysical freedom that is hard to understand much less believe in, while others insist that no such metaphysical freedom is necessary. A common way of introducing the subject calls attention to two senses of responsibility. Sometimes when we say "X is responsible for Y' we mean only to name a causal connection: X is an individual or a state of affairs that makes a salient causal contribution to the occurrence of Y. In this sense, your cat might be responsible for the spilled milk, the rain might be responsible for spoiling the picnic. By contrast, this paradigmatic introduction continues, when we charge an individual with moral responsibility, we mean something more. Like the cat, a person can be causally responsible for the spilled milk if she knocks over the bottle during an epileptic seizure; like the rain, a person can be causally responsible for spoiling the picnic if in the course of it she is stung by a bee and goes into anaphylactic shock. But a person might also spill the milk on purpose, wanting to ruin her host's tablecloth or disrupt the family brunch; she might spoil the picnic by her irritable carping or by rudely insulting the other guests. In these latter cases the person's connection to the event under discussion appears to reflect more deeply on her, and, at least initially, it does not seem inappropriate to blame her. These latter cases

Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility, ed. Andreas Brekke, Cambridge UP, 2022

Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering.