Shame and Attributability

Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame oneself in the attributability sense, it will be argued, is to feel shame and feeling shame is also to suffer. Therefore, the different control conditions cannot be explained by a difference in the harm of blame. Instead, this paper argues that accountability and attributability are governed by different kinds of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if S deserves to feel guilty for X; an agent S is attributability blameworthy for X only if it is fitting that S feels shame for X.

Contemporary Neuroscience’s Epiphenomenal Challenge to Responsibility

This paper examines a particular challenge to responsible agency thought to be mounted by contemporary neuroscience. The challenge stems from the alleged experimental demonstration that human choices, and the actions they putatively cause, are mere epiphenomena of one another, co-effects of common causes in the brain of the acting subject. Denied by this challenge is that choices cause the actions that are their objects, seemingly an indispensable requirement for there to be responsible agency. The force of this challenge is blunted by a showing that in certain cases we can control (and thus be responsible) for more than we cause—that (more specifically) we sometimes are in control of a harm that is one horn of an epiphenomenal fork by knowing of the fork’s existence and by being in control of the other horn of that fork, even while recognizing that of course there can be no causal relationship across the horns of such forks.

Introduction to OSAR 6

This introduction to the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility briefly discusses each of the new essays being published. They were drawn from the fourth biennial New Orleans Workshop in Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), held November 2–4, 2017. The essays cover a wide range of topics relevant to agency and responsibility: the threat of neuroscience to free will; the relevance of moral emotions like shame, resentment, and guilt to responsibility; how control and self-control pertain to moral agency, oppression, and poverty; responsibility for joint agency; how one might take responsibility without blameworthy quality of will; what it means to have standing to blame others; the relevance of moral testimony to moral responsibility; and how thinking about blame better enables us to dissolve a dispute in moral philosophy between actualists and possibilists.

The Minimal Approval Account of Attributability

This paper advances a new agentially undemanding account of the conditions of attributability, the Minimal Approval account, and argues that it has a number of advantages over traditional Deep Self theories, including the way in which it handles agents with conditions like addiction, Tourette syndrome, and misophonia. It is argued that in order for an agent to be attributionally responsible, the mental process that leads to her action must dispose her to be such that she would, upon reflection, approve to some minimal degree of being moved to action by the motive on which she in fact acts.

(En)joining Others

This paper argues that under some conditions, when one person acts on the direction of another person, the two of them thereby act together, and that this explains why both the director and the directee can be responsible for what is done. In other words, a director and a directee can be a joint agent, one whose members are responsible for what they together do. This is most clearly so when the directive is a command. But it is also sometimes so when the directive is a bit of advice.

How to Be an Actualist and Blame People

The actualism/possibilism debate in ethics concerns the relationship between an agent’s free actions and her moral obligations. The actualist affirms, while the possibilist denies, that facts about what agents would freely do in certain circumstances partly determines that agent’s moral obligations. This paper assesses the plausibility of actualism and possibilism in light of desiderata about accounts of blameworthiness. This paper first argues that actualism cannot straightforwardly accommodate certain very plausible desiderata before offering a few independent solutions on behalf of the actualist. This paper then argues that, contrary to initial appearances, possibilism is subject to its own comparably troubling blameworthiness problem.

Skepticism about the Standing to Blame

There are cases thought to illustrate that appropriate blame requires special standing. One might lack the standing to blame another because the fault is private and one is a stranger or because one is guilty of the very same offense and so one’s blame would be hypocritical. But despite its prevalence as an explanation of what goes wrong in such cases, the standing to blame itself has been given relatively little attention. The aim of this paper is to cast doubt on the standing to blame. It considers a range of plausible interpretations and, finding each wanting, concludes that those who wish to endorse the standing to blame owe us more by way of a characterization and defense. In raising this challenge, the paper motivates an alternative explanation of the cases.

Who’s Afraid of a Little Resentment?

It is often argued that in order to be morally accountable for one’s behavior, and thus an eligible target of reactive attitudes such as resentment or indignation, an agent must have a “fair opportunity to avoid” being subject to these responses. This paper critically examines two common arguments in defense of this view, “the argument from moral sanction” and “the argument from communication.” It argues that it is a mistake to regard the reactive attitudes as sanctions, and that even psychopaths and those raised in unfortunate formative circumstances have the capacities necessary to give appropriate uptake to the message communicated by the reactive attitudes.

Between Strict Liability and Blameworthy Quality of Will

This chapter discusses blameworthiness for problematic acts that an agent does inadvertently. Blameworthiness, as opposed to liability, is difficult to make sense of in this sort of case, as there is usually thought to be a tight connection between blameworthiness and something in the agent’s quality of will. This chapter argues that in personal relationships we should sometimes take responsibility for inadvertent actions. Taking on responsibility when we inadvertently fail in our duties to our loved ones assures them that we respect them, take them seriously, and want to be respected and taken seriously in turn. The chapter ends with a defence of the claim that this is a genuine sort of blameworthiness.

Self-Control and Moral Security

Self-control is integral to successful human agency. But the capacity for self-control requires external support. This paper explores the connections between social conditions, self-control, agency, and the self. Part one offers a taxonomy of self-control. Part two examines the external conditions that support successful agency and self-control, and argues that moral security is a critical foundation for agency. Moral security refers to the degree to which an agent believes that her welfare and her projects are valued by others and by her society. Parts three and four explore how narratives about racism and poverty undermine moral security, and limit and distort the possibility of synchronic and diachronic self-control. Where moral security is undermined, the connection between self-control and diachronic goods often fails to obtain and agency contracts accordingly.