Moral responsibility for actions: epistemic and freedom conditions

I will argue that a desert-based justification for treating a person in a certain way is a justification that holds this treatment to be justified simply by what the person is like and what he or she has done, independent of (1) the fact that treating the person in this way will have good effects (or that treating people like him or her in this way will have such effects); (2) the fact that this treatment is called for by some (justified) institution or practice; or (3) the fact that the person could have avoided being subject to this treatment by choosing appropriately, and therefore cannot complain of it. I will explore the implications of this understanding of desert for the role of desert-based justifications of blame, punishment, and economic reward.     

Revisionism about free will: a statement &; defense

This article summarizes and extends the moderate revisionist position I put forth in Four Views on Free Will and responds to objections to it from Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Michael McKenna. Among the principle topics of the article are (1) motivations for revisionism, what it is, and how it is different from compatibilism and hard incompatibilism, (2) an objection to libertarianism based on the moral costs of its current epistemic status, (3) an objection to the distinctiveness of semicompatibilism against conventional forms of compatibilism, and (4) whether moderate revisionism is committed to realism about moral responsibility.

The alluringness of desire

In her book, Unprincipled Virtue, Nomy Arpaly is suspicious of reflective endorsement or deliberative rationality views of agency, those which tie the possibility of responsibility and moral blame to the conscious exercise of deliberation and reflection, and which require as a condition of blame- or praise- worthiness an agent's explicit commitment to ethical principles. I am in sympathy with her attack on standard autonomy theories, but argue that she confuses the phenomenon of unknowing and unreflective responsiveness to the right-making features of an action with incomplete and merely provisional commitment to principles and maxims of action, and argue that she is often arguing against straw men. I also argue that she has misinterpreted the fascinating literary examples she adduces to make her case.     

Identification and Responsibility

Real-self accounts of moral responsibility distinguish between various types of motivational elements. They claim that an agent is responsible for acts suitably related to elements that constitute the agent's real self. While such accounts have certain advantages from a compatibilist perspective, they are problematic in various ways. First, in it, authority and authenticity conceptions of the real self are often inadequately distinguished. Both of these conceptions inform discourse on identification, but only the former is relevant to moral responsibility. Second, authority and authenticity real-self theories are unable to accommodate cases in which the agent neither identifies nor disidentifies with his action and yet seems morally responsible for what he does. Third, authority and authenticity real-self theories are vulnerable to counterexamples in which the provenance of the agent's real self undermines responsibility.     

Moral Testimony and its Authority

A person sometimes forms moral beliefs by relying on another person's moral testimony. In this paper I advance a cognitivist normative account of this phenomenon. I argue that for a person's actions to be morally good, they must be based on a recognition of the moral reasons bearing on action. Morality requires people to act from an understanding of moral claims, and consequently to have an understanding of moral claims relevant to action. A person sometimes fails to meet this requirement when she relies on another person's moral testimony, and so there are moral limits on such reliance.     

Causal and moral responsibility: Antecedents and consequences of group‐based guilt

In six studies (N = 1045) conducted in three European countries, we demonstrate distinctions between causal responsibility, group‐based guilt, and moral responsibility. We propose that causal responsibility is an antecedent of group‐based guilt linking the ingroup to previous transgressions against the victim group. In contrast, moral responsibility is a consequence of group‐based guilt and is conceptualized as a sociomoral norm to respond to the consequences of the ingroup's transgressions and the current needs of the victim group. As such, moral responsibility can be stimulated by group‐based guilt and directly predicts individual action intentions. Studies 1 and 2 focus on the conceptual distinctions among the three constructs. Study 3 tests the indirect effect of causal responsibility on moral responsibility via group‐based guilt. The remaining studies explore the mediating role of moral responsibility in associations between group‐based guilt and compensatory action tendencies, that is, financial compensation (study 4), approach and avoidance tendencies (study 5) and public apology (study 6). Together these studies show that causal and moral responsibility are psychologically distinct concepts from group‐based guilt and that moral responsibility plays an important role in shaping the effects of group‐based guilt on behavioral intentions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The insanity defense: Legal standards and clinical assessment

Although the insanity defense is used infrequently, it has received significant attention from legal and mental health professionals. In this article, we review the historical development of insanity defense standards and describe the standards currently employed in the United States. We present a model for evaluating a defendant's mental nonresponsibility, and we briefly discuss the legal standards and procedures for the assessment of insanity acquittees for release. Throughout the article, we discuss some scientific, ethical, and jurisprudential issues associated with the insanity defense and nonresponsibility evaluations.     

Freedom, Preference and Autonomy

Philosophers have advocated different kinds of freedom, but each has value and none should be neglected in a complete theory of freedom and responsibility. There are three kinds of freedom of preference and action that should be distinguished. A person S may fully prefer to do A at every level, and that is one kind of freedom. A person S may autonomously prefer to do A when S has the preference structure concerning doing A because S prefers to have that very preference structure, and that is a second kind of freedom. A person S may prefer to do A when S could have preferred otherwise, and that is a third kind of freedom. These forms of freedom may be combined, but they are valuable and essentially independent. They all involve the metamental ascendence of preference over desire, but it is autonomous preference that makes a person the author of his or her preference. The responsibility a person has for what he or she does out of a preference for doing it depends on the kinds of freedom of preference the person has and must be ranked in terms of them.     

Religious Ethics, History, and the Rise of Modern Moral Philosophy: Focus Introduction

In this introduction to a cluster of three articles on eighteenth-century ethics written by Mark Larrimore, John Bowlin, and Mark Cladis, the author maintains that although the broad narrative tracing the emergence of a religiously neutral or naturalistic moral language in the eighteenth century is a familiar one, many central questions concerning this development remain unanswered and require further historical study. Against those who contend that historical study is antecedent to, but not part of, the proper substance of religious ethics, the author argues that historical and normative studies are interdependent, each helping to define the questions central to the other. The introduction concludes with an overview of the three articles and suggests ways in which religious ethicists can, in the future, make a distinctive contribution to the history of ethics.     

Normatively demanding creatures: Hobbes,the Fall and individual responsibility

This paper explores an internal relation between wrong-doing and the ability to think in moral terms, through Hobbes’ thought. I use his neglected retelling of our ‘original sin’ as a springboard, seeing how we then discover a need to vindicate our own projects in terms shared by others. We become normatively demanding creatures: greedy for normative vindication, eager to judge others amid the difficulties of our world. However there is, of course, no choice for us but to choose our own principles of judgment, or at least some authority to provide these. Unconvinced by Hobbes’ remedies, I conclude with one implication for moral philosophy@ a need to look rather differently at agency and responsibility. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Autonomy,Reciprocity, and Responsibility: Darwall and Levinas on the Second Person

Abstract

Stephen Darwall’s The Second‐Person Standpoint converges with Emmanuel Levinas’s concern about the role of the second‐person relationship in ethics. This paper contrasts their methodologies (regressive analysis of presuppositions versus phenomenology) to explain Darwall’s narrower view of ethical experience in terms of expressed reactive attitudes. It delineates Darwall’s overall justificatory strategy and the centrality of autonomy and reciprocity within it, in contrast to Levinas’s emphasis on the experience of responsibility. Asymmetrical responsibility plays a more foundational role as a critical counterpoint to ‘mean‐spirited’ reciprocity than Darwall’s laudable distinction between accountability and revenge, and responsibility even founds this distinction. The experience of being summoned to asymmetrical responsibility amplifies the meaning of ‘authority’, which is a presupposition for Darwall. Finally, asymmetrical responsibility helps develop decentred reasoning, invites risk beyond the boundaries of reciprocity at moments when autonomy appears endangered, reconciles respect and care at the experiential level, and presses to extend the scope of moral obligation.     

Impulse and Self-Reflection: Frankfurtian Responsibility versus Free Will

Harry Frankfurt's early work makes an important distinction between moral responsibility and free will. Frankfurt begins by focusing on the notion of responsibility, as supplying counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities; he then turns to an apparently independent account of free will, in terms of his well-known hierarchy of desires. But the two notions seem to reestablish contact in Frankfurt's later discussion of issues and cases. The present article sets up a putative Frankfurtian account of moral responsibility that involves the potential for free will, as suggested by some of Frankfurt's later remarks about taking responsibility. While correcting what seem to be some common misinterpretations of Frankfurt's view, the article attempts to extract some reasons for dissatisfaction with it from consideration of cases of unfreedom, particularly cases involving addiction.     

Shared intentions,public reason,and political autonomy

John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing upon an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier.     

Moral Responsibility: The Difference of Strawson,and the Difference it Should Make

P.F. Strawson’s work on moral responsibility is well-known. However, an important implication of the landmark “Freedom and Resentment” has gone unnoticed. Specifically, a natural development of Strawson’s position is that we should understand being morally responsible as having externalistically construed pragmatic criteria, not individualistically construed psychological ones. This runs counter to the contemporary ways of studying moral responsibility. I show the deficiencies of such contemporary work in relation to Strawson by critically examining the positions of John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, R. Jay Wallace, and Philip Pettit for problems due to individualistic assumptions.Thanks to an audience at Carleton University for helpful discussion.     

利他行为的自我控制过程模型:自我损耗下的道德情绪的正向作用

本研究通过3个实验验证和探讨了利他行为的自我控制过程模型。实验1采用自我损耗的双任务范式,考察了自我损耗对利他行为水平的影响。实验2考察行动控制导向在自我损耗和利他行为之间关系的调节作用。实验3通过诱发道德情绪,探讨了道德情绪对自我控制资源损耗个体的利他行为决策的作用。研究得到了以下结论:(1)自我控制资源损耗会对利他行为产生不利影响。(2)行动控制导向对自我损耗和利他行为之间的关系起调节作用。(3)道德情绪能够缓解自我损耗对利他行为的不利影响。     

Responsibility, Control, and Omissions

Previously, I have argued that moral responsibility for actions is associated with guidance control. This sort of control does not necessarily involve the freedom to do otherwise. In this paper I extend the view to apply to omissions. That is, moral responsibility for an omission is associated with guidance control of that omission. This helps to provide a systematic, unified account of moral responsibility.     

Confucianism,food, and sustainability

This paper addresses the issue of ecological sustainability and the dilemma between instrumental rationality and protection of the environment through a discussion of food production. In Confucianism, all human activities, including consumption of food, are seen as inseparable from problems of value. While Confucianism stresses the importance of healthy food, it rejects viewing nature as only having instrumental value. The Confucian view of sustainability can be seen from three parts: (1) Humans should follow the murmuring of their 'heart/mind' and seek to restrict the use of natural resources as much as possible to ‘let every being manifest its mandate to the full’; (2) Harmony with nature is a premise for sustaining humanity; and (3) Finally, taking care of the fundamental needs of the people is a premise for ecological sustainability.     

Voluntary Action and Rational Sin in Anselm of Canterbury

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) holds that freedom of the will is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. This condition, however, turns out to be trivially fulfilled by all rational creatures at all times. In order to clarify the necessary conditions for moral responsibility, we must look more widely at his discussion of the nature of the will and of willed action. In this paper, I examine his theory of voluntariness by clarifying his account of the sin of Satan in De casu diaboli. Anselm agrees with Augustine that the sinful act cannot be given a causal explanation in terms of a distinct preceding act of will or desire or choice. He thus rejects volitionalist accounts of Satan's sin and thus of voluntary action in general. He moves beyond his predecessor, however, in insisting on the necessity of an explanation in terms of reasons, and his theory of the dual nature of the rational will is designed to meet this demand. A comparison of Satan's case with the case of the miser of De casu diaboli 3, finally, shows that Anselm's account requires that acts of the will or ‘willings’ qualify as voluntary, a suggestion as interesting as problematic.