Moral Responsibility Reconsidered

Moral Responsibility Reconsidered PDF Author: Gregg D. Caruso
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009219766
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
This Element examines the concept of moral responsibility as it is used in contemporary philosophical debates and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with it, including moral praise/blame, retributive punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. After identifying and discussing several different varieties of responsibility-including causal responsibility, take-charge responsibility, role responsibility, liability responsibility, and the kinds of responsibility associated with attributability, answerability, and accountability-it distinguishes between basic and non-basic desert conceptions of moral responsibility and considers a number of skeptical arguments against each. It then outlines an alternative forward-looking account of moral responsibility grounded in non-desert-invoking desiderata such as protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. It concludes by addressing concerns about the practical implications of skepticism about desert-based moral responsibility and explains how optimistic skeptics can preserve most of what we care about when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, morality, and meaning in life.

Moral Responsibility Reconsidered

Moral Responsibility Reconsidered PDF Author: Gregg D. Caruso
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009219766
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Get Book

Book Description
This Element examines the concept of moral responsibility as it is used in contemporary philosophical debates and explores the justifiability of the moral practices associated with it, including moral praise/blame, retributive punishment, and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. After identifying and discussing several different varieties of responsibility-including causal responsibility, take-charge responsibility, role responsibility, liability responsibility, and the kinds of responsibility associated with attributability, answerability, and accountability-it distinguishes between basic and non-basic desert conceptions of moral responsibility and considers a number of skeptical arguments against each. It then outlines an alternative forward-looking account of moral responsibility grounded in non-desert-invoking desiderata such as protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. It concludes by addressing concerns about the practical implications of skepticism about desert-based moral responsibility and explains how optimistic skeptics can preserve most of what we care about when it comes to our interpersonal relationships, morality, and meaning in life.

Perspectives on Moral Responsibility

Perspectives on Moral Responsibility PDF Author: John Martin Fischer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721569
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Explores aspects of responsibility, including moral accountability; hierarchy, rationality, and the real self; and ethical responsibility and alternative possibilities.

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

Free Will and Moral Responsibility PDF Author: Justin Caouette
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443853232
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Determinism is, roughly, the thesis that facts about the past and the laws of nature entail all truths. A venerable, age-old dilemma concerning responsibility distils to this: if either determinism is true or it is not true, we lack “responsibility-grounding” control. Either determinism is true or it is not true. So, we lack responsibility-grounding control. Deprived of such control, no one is ever morally responsible for anything. A number of the freshly-minted essays in this collection address aspects of this dilemma. Responding to the horn that determinism undermines the freedom that responsibility (or moral obligation) requires, the freedom to do otherwise, some papers in this collection debate the merits of Frankfurt-style examples that purport to show that one can be responsible despite lacking alternatives. Responding to the horn that indeterminism implies luck or randomness, other papers discuss the strengths or shortcomings of libertarian free will or control. Also included in this collection are essays on the freedom requirements of moral obligation, forgiveness and free will, a “desert-free” conception of free will, and vicarious legal and moral responsibility. The authors of the essays in this volume are philosophers who have made significant contributions to debates in free will, moral responsibility, moral obligation, the reactive attitudes, philosophy of action, and philosophical psychology, and include John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Michael McKenna, Alfred Mele, and Derk Pereboom.

Moral Responsibility

Moral Responsibility PDF Author: Christopher Cowley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317547101
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
How and to what degree are we responsible for our characters, our lives, our misfortunes, our relationships and our children? This question is at the heart of "Moral Responsibility". The book explores accusations and denials of moral responsibility for particular acts, responsibility for character, and the role of luck and fate in ethics. Moral responsibility as the grounds for a retributivist theory of punishment is examined, alongside discussions of forgiveness, parental responsibility, and responsibility before God. The book also discusses collective responsibility, bringing in notions of complicity and membership, and drawing on the seminal contemporary discussion of collective agency and responsibility: the Nuremberg trials.

Responsibility and Control

Responsibility and Control PDF Author: John Martin Fischer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316583759
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive, systematic theory of moral responsibility. The authors explore the conditions under which individuals are morally responsible for actions, omissions, consequences, and emotions. The leading idea in the book is that moral responsibility is based on 'guidance control'. This control has two components: the mechanism that issues in the relevant behavior must be the agent's own mechanism, and it must be appropriately responsive to reasons. The book develops an account of both components. The authors go on to offer a sustained defense of the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism.

Moral Responsibility

Moral Responsibility PDF Author: Matthew Talbert
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509505172
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Most people would agree that a small child, or a cognitively impaired adult, is less responsible for their actions, good or bad, than an unimpaired adult. But how do we explain that difference, and how far can anyone be praised or blamed for what they have done? In this fascinating introduction, Matthew Talbert explores some of the key questions shaping current debates about moral responsibility, including: What is free will, and is it required for moral responsibility? Are we responsible for the unforeseen consequences of our actions? Is it fair to blame people for doing what they believe is right? And are psychopaths open to blame? As Talbert argues, we are morally responsible for our actions when they are related to us in particular ways: when our actions express our true selves, for example, or when we exercise certain kinds of control over them. It is because we bear these relationships to our actions that we are open to praise and blame. Moral Responsibility will be an important resource for students and researchers in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of agency and of great interest to all those wishing to understand an important aspect of our moral practices.

The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility

The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility PDF Author: Bruce N. Waller
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262327414
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
An examination of the powerful social and psychological factors that hold the belief in moral responsibility firmly in place. The philosophical commitment to moral responsibility seems unshakable. But, argues Bruce Waller, the philosophical belief in moral responsibility is much stronger than the philosophical arguments in favor of it. Philosophers have tried to make sense of moral responsibility for centuries, with mixed results. Most contemporary philosophers insist that even conclusive proof of determinism would not and should not result in doubts about moral responsibility. Many embrace compatibilist views, and propose an amazing variety of competing compatibilist arguments for saving moral responsibility. In this provocative book, Waller 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. Waller argues that belief in moral responsibility is not isolated but rather is a central element of a larger belief system; doubting or rejecting moral responsibility will involve major adjustments elsewhere in a wide range of beliefs and values. Belief in moral responsibility is one strand of a complex and closely woven fabric of belief, comprising threads from biology, psychology, social institutions, criminal justice, religion, and philosophy. These dense interconnections, Waller contends, make it very difficult to challenge the belief in moral responsibility at the center. They not only influence the philosophical arguments in favor of moral responsibility but also add powerful extraphilosophical support for it.

Moral Responsibility and Ontology

Moral Responsibility and Ontology PDF Author: A. van den Beld
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401723613
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Ton van den Beld This book is one of the results of the international conference on Moral Responsibility and Ontology, which was held at Utrecht University in 1 June 1998. It contains a selection of the revised versions of the papers discussed at the conference. The theme is in need of some clarification. In the first place, 'responsi bility' is an ambiguous term. Although addition of the adjective 'moral' reduces the variety of its meanings (for example, moral responsibility cannot be confused with causal responsibility), different interpretations are still possible. Thus, the care of dependent children is a parental moral responsibility. That is, parents have the moral obligation to care for their children. It is their moral task, or role, to do so. If they fail to fulfil this obligation, they might be morally responsible for the result of this failure. Here, another meaning of 'moral responsibility' is involved: the children's misery might be imputed to their parents. They may be liable to blame. Moral responsibility in this sense is what the conference was and this book is about. It is about the conditions which must be met for a person to be justly held responsible for his or her moral faults and failures.

Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments

Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments PDF Author: R. Jay Wallace
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674268210
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
R. Jay Wallace advances a powerful and sustained argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behavior accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibility.

Moral Responsibility and Desert of Praise and Blame

Moral Responsibility and Desert of Praise and Blame PDF Author: Audrey L. Anton
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739191764
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This book challenges a basic assumption held by many responsibility theorists: that agents must be morally responsible in the retrospective sense for anything in virtue of which they deserve praise or blame (the primacy assumption). Anton sets out to defeat this assumption by showing that accepting it as well as the much more intuitive causality assumption renders us incapable of making sense of cases whereby agents seem to deserve praise and blame. She argues that retrospective moral responsibility is a species of causal responsibility (the causality assumption). Then, she illustrates several examples in which agents are not causally responsible for any morally relevant consequences, but they seem to be deserving of praise or blame nonetheless. Anton concludes that such cases are counterexamples to the primacy assumption, and turns her attention towards discerning what grounds desert of praise and blame if not retrospective moral responsibility. Anton advances the moral attitude account, whereby agents deserve praise and blame in virtue of moral attitudes they have in response to moral reasons. These moral attitudes must be sufficiently sincere, which means they reach a threshold that distinguishes such attitudes as eligible for praise and blame. Anton adds that whether one deserves praise or blame and to what degree is sensitive to the agent’s personal moral progress as well as the status quo of her society. This addition brings with it the welcome consequence that morality may be objective, but we are still justified in judging one another charitably based on personal and societal limitations.