George Sher

A number of philosophers from Hume on have claimed that it does not make sense to blame people for acting badly unless their bad acts were rooted in their characters. In this paper, I distinguish a stronger and a weaker version of this claim. The claim is false, I argue, if it is taken to mean that agents can only be blamed for bad acts when those acts are manifestations of character flaws. However, what is both true and important is the weaker claim that an act is not blameworthy unless it is rooted in some enduring aspect or aspects of the agent’s character that mayor may not be flaws, and that, if flaws, mayor may not be bad in the same way that the act itself is.

Much that is written about professional ethics concerns the requirements imposed by specific roles. We are often told what professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers should do—or, alternatively, what a good doctor, lawyer, or teacher will do. In this paper, I shall try to clarify these claims as they pertain to one particular role—that of a faculty member at a college or university—by asking what special requirements the role imposes, and why faculty members are obligated to live up to those requirements. The thrust of my argument will be that the most promising answer to each question leaves the other question unresolved. Thus, disturbingly, the moral status of the requirements imposed by the role of faculty member—and, by extension, other professional roles—remains unclear.

Many liberals believe that government should not base its decisions on any particular conception of the good life. Many believe, further, that this principle of neutrality is best defended through appeal to some normative principle about autonomy. In this essay, I shall discuss the prospects of mounting one such defense. I say only “one such defense” because neutralists can invoke the demands of autonomy in two quite different ways. They can argue, first, that because autonomy itself has such great value, the state can produce the best results by simply allowing each citizen to shape his own life; or they can argue, second, that even if non-neutral policies would produce the most value, the state remains obligated to eschew them out of respect for its citizens' autonomy. Here I shall discuss only the first and more consequentialist of these arguments

To be responsible for their acts, agents must both perform those acts voluntarily and in some sense know what they are doing. Of these requirements, the voluntariness condition has been much discussed, but the epistemic condition has received far less attention. In Who Knew? George Sher seeks to rectify that imbalance. The book is divided in two halves, the first of which criticizes a popular but inadequate way of understanding the epistemic condition, while the second seeks to develop a more adequate alternative. It is often assumed that agents are responsible only for what they are aware of doing or bringing about--that their responsibility extends only as far as the searchlight of their consciousness. The book criticizes this "searchlight view" on two main grounds: first, that it is inconsistent with our attributions of responsibility to a broad range of agents who should but do not realize that they are acting wrongly or foolishly, and, second, that the view is not independently defensible. The book's positive view construes the crucial relation between an agent and his failure to recognize the wrongness or foolishness of what he is doing in causal terms: the agent is responsible when, and because, his failure to respond to his reasons for believing that he is acting wrongly or foolishly has its origins in the same constitutive psychology that generally does render him reason-responsive.

This book offers a new and compelling account of distributive justice and its relation to choice. Unlike luck egalitarians, who treat unchosen differences in people's circumstances as sources of unjust inequality to be overcome, Sher views such differences as pervasive and unavoidable features of the human situation. Appealing to an original account of what makes us moral equals, he argues that our interest in successfully negotiating life's ever-shifting contingencies is more basic than our interest in achieving any more specific goals. He argues, also, that the state's obligation to promote this interest supports a principled version of the view that what matters about resources, opportunity, and other secondary goods is only that each person have enough. The book opens up a variety of new questions, and offers a distinctive new perspective for scholars of political theory and political philosophy, and for those interested in distributive justice and luck egalitarianism.