George Sher

Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically-oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book's most important conclusion is that blame is inseperable from morality itself - that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnation of those who violate the principles. Properly understood, blame and morality must stand or fall together.

A natural way of viewing compensation is to see it as the restoration of a good or level of well-being which someone would have enjoyed if he had not been adversely affected by the act of another. This view underlies Nozick’s assertion that “something fully compensates … person X for Y’s action A if X is no worse off receiving it, Y having done A, than X would have been without receiving it if Y had not done A”; and it has been held by many others as well. Because the notion that compensation is the restoration of a good which a person would have had but for the act of another is so pervasive, I shall refer to it as the official view of compensation. One noteworthy feature of the official view is the ease with which it allows compensation to be justified in particular cases. If compensation is just the restoration of a good which one would have had if the ordinary course of things had not been disrupted, then to provide a prima facie justification of it, one need only argue that the natural course of things should not have been disrupted in the first place.

abstractCharles Taylor analyzes purposive action as involving both teleological explicability and intentionality on the part of the agent. This paper examines (a) the adequacy of this analysis of purposiveness, and (b) an incompatibility that Taylor finds between purpose, thus analyzed, and causal explicability. My conclusions are that (1) there is at least one aspect of our concept of purpose that Taylor's analysis does not capture, and (2) even if his account were correct, it would not rule out the possibility that all actions are caused.

My aim in this essay is to explore the implications of the fact that even our most deeply held moral beliefs have been profoundly affected by our upbringing and experience—that if any of us had had a sufficiently different upbringing and set of experiences, he almost certainly would now have a very different set of moral beliefs and very different habits of moral judgment. This fact, together with the associated proliferation of incompatible moral doctrines, is sometimes invoked in support of liberal policies of toleration and restraint, but the relevance of these considerations to individual moral deliberation has received less attention. In Sections II through V, I shall argue that this combination of contingency and controversy poses a serious challenge to the authority of our moral judgments. In Section VI, I shall explore a promising way of responding to this challenge

According to one long-standing tradition, the organizing question of ethics is “What are we morally obligated to do?” However, many philosophers, inspired by an even older tradition, now urge a return to the question “What kind of person is it best to be?” According to these philosophers, the proper locus of evaluation is character rather than action, and the basic evaluative concept is virtue rather than duty. Following what has become common usage, I shall refer to the first approach as “duty ethics” and to the second as “virtue ethics.”

It seems plausible to suppose that (a) the vocabulary of action is distinct from and irreducible to that of mere movement, And (b) the causal laws of the natural sciences are couched solely in terms of the latter vocabulary. From these two suppositions, The falsehood of determinism has sometimes been said to follow. I argue that whether this does follow depends on our conception of causal explanation; on the interpretation of this concept that seems to me the most interesting, The falsehood of determinism follows only given the supplementary premise that there are no correlations between the relevant movement-Descriptions and action-Descriptions. But those who propose the two-Vocabularies argument have not shown the impossibility of establishing these correlations, And so have not proven determinism false

Luck egalitarians maintain that inequalities are always unjust when they are due to luck, but are not always unjust when they are due to choices for which the parties are responsible. In this paper, I argue that the two halves of this formula do not fit neatly together, and that we arrive at one version of luck egalitarianism if we begin with the notion of luck and interpret responsible choice in terms of its absence, but a very different version if we begin with the notion of responsible choice and interpret luck in terms of its absence. I argue, further, that the difference between the two versions is significant because many real-world inequalities fall precisely in the gap between them, and that attempts to adjudicate between them lead quickly to hard questions about the relation between equality and responsibility

Phillip Montague’s point of departure is a simple but illuminating way of conceptualizing the fact that creates the need for punishment—namely, that each society contains some people who will wrongfully kill or injure others unless held in check by a system of penalties. This fact, Montague argues, in effect confronts each society with a forced choice: either allow potential criminals to inflict harm on others, or else prevent them from doing so by maintaining a system of punishment that will harm some of them. When such forced choices arise, Montague maintains, the proper way to resolve them is to impose the burden on whoever is at fault for creating the choice. It is this principle that underlies the common intuition that individual and collective agents may harm others in self-defense or to protect the innocent. Because each society’s potential criminals are to blame for creating its forced choice, the principle also justifies the creation of systems of punishment.