Angela Smith

This paper explores one facet of Paul Russell’s unique “critical compatibilist” position on moral responsibility, which concerns his rejection of R. Jay Wallace’s “narrow construal” of moral responsibility as a concept tied exclusively to the Strawsonian reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and guilt. After explaining Russell’s critique of Wallace’s view, the paper considers a Wallace-inspired challenge based on the idea that questions of moral responsibility raise distinct issues of “fairness” that apply only to a narrow subset of the Strawsonian reactive attitudes. The paper offers a defense of Russell’s view against this challenge.

In his paper “The Difficulty of Tolerance,” T. M. Scanlon argues that tolerance is sometimes a morally ideal attitude to hold toward other citizens in society with whom one disagrees. My aim in this paper is to critically evaluate this claim, by looking more carefully at the nature of tolerant attitudes and the conditions under which they are, and are not, appropriately directed toward other citizens. I argue that there is a moral tension present even in allegedly “pure” cases of tolerance that Scanlon’s account overlooks. I go on to argue that what Scanlon has in fact given us is a compelling defense of tolerance as a virtue of character, rather than an attitude, and that the _virtue_ of tolerance only rarely calls upon us to take up _attitudes_ of tolerance toward our fellow citizens. I conclude by reflecting on one situation in which a person with the virtue of tolerance may legitimately adopt an attitude of tolerance toward a fellow citizen.

This paper, which has both a historical and a polemical aspect, investigates the view, dominant throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that the sense of sight is, originally, not phenomenally three-dimensional in character, and that we must come to interpret its properly two-dimensional data by reference to the sense of 'touch'. The principal argument for this claim, due to Berkeley, is examined and found wanting. The supposedly confirming findings concerning 'Molyneux subjects' are also investigated and are shown to be either irrelevant or disconfirming. Recent investigations on infant and neonatal perception are discussed and are also found to be disconfirming. An innatist version of the theory is then considered and is shown to be undermined by the largely 'Gibsonian' character of early space-perception. Finally three recent arguments in favour of the theory - two from psychologists, one from a philosopher - are considered and answered

An attempt is made to pinpoint the way in which perception is related to belief. Although, for familiar reasons, it is not true to say that we necessarily believe in the existence of the objects we perceive, nor that they actually have their ostensible characteristics, it is argued that the relation between perception and belief is more than merely contingent.There are two main issues to address. The first is that ‘collateral’ beliefs may impede perceptual belief. It is argued that this still assigns an essential role to belief in perception, though the belief may be of an attenuated form. The second is Fred Dretske’s claim that even attenuated belief may be entirely absent from perception. It is argued that ‘non-epistemic’ perception can be understood only by employing the concept of ‘epistemic’ perception; that the former can occur only partially---i.e., within perceptions that are otherwise epistemic; and that by switching attention from the perception of objects to the Phenomenological tradition’s concern with the perception of world, we can see that perception must be entirely permeated with ‘doxastic’ force

In her careful consideration of my book, The Problem of Perception, Susanna Siegel highlights what she takes to be a number of shortcomings in the work. First, she suggests that a sense-datum theorist has two options—what she calls the “complex sense-data option” and the “two-factor option”—that survive the argument of my book unscathed. I consider these two options in the first two sections of this reply. Secondly, she criticizes my suggestion that there are three and only three basic and independent sources of perceptual consciousness: an issue I take up in my third section. Thirdly, she expresses reservations about my response to the argument from hallucination. In particular, she argues that the phenomenological considerations on which I put so much weight cannot settle the fundamental issue here. I address this criticism in the fourth section of this reply. Finally, she spends a certain amount of time discussing the notion of a “veridicality-relevant property”, a topic to which I devote the concluding section of this reply.

There is an apparent tension in our everyday moral responsibility practices. On the one hand, it is commonly assumed that moral responsibility requires voluntary control: an agent can be morally responsible only for those things that fall within the scope of her voluntary control. On the other hand, we regularly praise and blame individuals for mental states and conditions that appear to fall outside the scope of their voluntary control, such as desires, emotions, beliefs, and other attitudes. In order to resolve this apparent tension, many philosophers appeal to a tracing principle to argue that agents are morally responsible for those attitudes whose existence can be traced back, causally, to a voluntary action or omission in the past. My aim in this article is to critically evaluate this tracing strategy and to argue that it gives us a misguided picture of when and why we are morally responsible for our attitudes. I argue that we should accept a ‘judgment sensitivity’ condition of moral responsibility rather than a ‘voluntary control’ condition, and defend this account against various objections

In his recent article “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility,” David Shoemaker argues that our actual moral practices embody three distinct conceptions of responsibility and that some recent accounts of moral responsibility that draw their inspiration from the work of T. M. Scanlon fail to capture these distinct conceptions. My aim in this essay is to argue that our moral practices do not, in fact, embody three different conceptions of moral responsibility and that what Shoemaker aptly calls “responsibility as answerability” is indeed the only kind of moral responsibility there is.

A number of philosophers have recently argued that we should interpret the debate over moral responsibility as a debate over the conditions under which it would be “fair” to blame a person for her attitudes or conduct. What is distinctive about these accounts is that they begin with the stance of the moral judge, rather than that of the agent who is judged, and make attributions of responsibility dependent upon whether it would be fair or appropriate for a moral judge to react to the agent in various (negative) ways. This is problematic, I argue, because our intuitions about whether and when it would be fair to react negatively to another are sensitive to a host of considerations that appear to have little or nothing to do with an agent’s responsibility or culpability for her attitudes or behavior. If this is correct, then theories which make attributions of responsibility dependent upon the appropriateness of our reactions as moral judges will turn out to be fundamentally misguided.

ABSTRACTIt has recently become fashionable among those who write on questions of moral responsibility to distinguish two different concepts, or senses, of moral responsibility via the labels ‘responsibility as attributability’ and ‘responsibility as accountability’. Gary Watson was perhaps the first to introduce this distinction in his influential 1996 article ‘Two Faces of Responsibility’ , but it has since been taken up by many other philosophers. My aim in this study is to raise some questions and doubts about this distinction and to argue that it has led to confusion rather than clarification in debates over moral responsibility. In place of the attributability/accountability distinction, I propose that there is a single concept of moral responsibility underlying our actual moral practices. This core notion of moral responsibility, which I call ‘responsibility as answerability’, is well positioned to explain thos..