David Shoemaker

For most theorists, paradigm cases of direct blame consist in the feeling and expression of resentment. It has thus seemed natural for these theorists to begin by presenting, and leaning on, an analysis of resentment. But it turns out there are numerous conflicting analyses of it, and these disagreements ramify when theorists use resentment to tell us about the nature of both blame and its resolution in forgiveness. Resentment cannot bear such theoretical weight. So instead of starting at the front end of the blaming exchange with an analysis of resentment, this chapter starts at the back end with an account of what it takes to be successfully _forgiven_. This approach promises to yield several more determinate conclusions about (a) when the withdrawal of blame and forgiveness are appropriate and why; (b) the nature of the hard feelings that paradigm forgiveness withdraws; (c) why judgment is superfluous to this blaming and forgiving exchange; and (d) why resentment has been the wrong core blaming component to lean on all along.

People with a high degree of self-control typically enjoy greater well-being than those with a low degree of self-control. They also tend to have a high degree of empathy. Further, those with low self-control also tend to have low empathy. But what possible connection could there be between self-control and empathy, given that how one regulates oneself seems to have no bearing on how one views others? This chapter aims to argue for a very tight relation between self-control and empathy, namely, that empathy is in fact one type of self-control, a previously unexplored feature of interpersonal lives. In addition, once one sees that the type of empathy exercised is also exercised when casting oneself into the shoes of one’s future self, it becomes evident how intrapersonal empathy better enables other more familiar types of self-control.

When Huckleberry Finn fails to turn in Jim, he believes he is going to hell for doing what he has been raised to believe is wrong. When Susan Wolf’s JoJo—raised by his dictator father to embrace his father’s evil values—grows up, he tortures peasants on a whim. Are they morally responsible? Many philosophers have simply assumed what our pretheoretic intuitions are in these cases, and their assumptions have prompted two thoughts: (a) childhood deprivations of moral knowledge _excuse_ from responsibility, and (b) blameworthiness and praiseworthiness are _symmetrical_, so that whatever agential features excuse from one will excuse from the other. This chapter discusses tests that were designed and implemented to reveal what people’s pretheoretic intuitions actually are in such cases. Both theses are really more nuanced than they have been taken to be, and the unified explanation for the results reveals an under-explored feature of responsibility.

For many contemporary theorists, one is morally responsible for an action or attitude just in case it is properly attributable to one’s deep self. There has been long-standing difficulty, however, in figuring out just what the deep self consists in. Two competing theories have attempted to resolve the difficulty: (a) the Humean approach, which locates the deep self in non-cognitive psychic elements like cares; and (b) the Platonic approach, which locates the deep self in cognitive, judging psychic elements like evaluative commitments. Each approach founders on counterexamples the other approach handles well, though. This chapter develops an ecumenical solution: an action or attitude is properly attributable to an agent just in case it expresses either her cares or her commitments. The chapter motivates this pluralistic view through consideration of several cases and then thwarts possible objections of various defenders of a monistic approach.

Most theorists assume criminal responsibility entails moral responsibility, an assumption allegedly illustrated by the relation between moral and criminal blame, tightly analogous practices presumed to be distinct only in virtue of the responding agents and the specific set of norm violations to which each is a response. The chapter hopes to show why this illustration fails. The chapter first examines what I take to be the most plausible recent account of general blame—T. M. Scanlon’s—to see whether it can account for criminal blame, that is, punishment. The chapter argues that it cannot, given that Scanlon’s critical notion of _meaning_ has no place in criminal blame, despite some seemingly compelling reasons to believe otherwise. The chapter will then try to show why there are actually different _conceptions_ of blame at work in the criminal and moral realms, conceptions arising from fundamentally different aspects and functions of each sort of response.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the underexplored relation between criminal and moral responsibility. Most Anglo-American legal and moral theorists simply assume the two related tenets that together make up the so-called Standard View. The first tenet is that moral responsibility is a necessary condition of criminal responsibility normatively understood, that for one to be genuinely or legitimately criminally responsible for X, one must be morally responsible for X. The second tenet is that essential elements of CR are structural and functional analogues of essential elements of MR, e.g., desert, justification, excuses, and the relevance of motivations. This chapter shows why both tenets of the Standard View are false, or at least quite misleading. The chapter begins by distinguishing three conceptions of responsibility — attributability, answerability, and accountability — and then proceeds to show how each of these three conceptions involves importantly different structural features in each of the criminal and moral realms.

The relationship between personal identity and ethics remains on of the most intriguing yet vexing issues in philosophy. It is commonplace to hold that moral responsibility for past actions requires that the responsible agent is in some respect _identical_ to the agent who performed the action. Is this true? On the other hand, can ethics constrain our account of personal identity? Do the practical requirements of moral theory commit us to the view that persons do remain identical over time? For example, does the moral status of abortion or stem cell research depend on whether personal identity is based on psychological or biological properties? Or is it the case that personal identity is not, in fact, relevant to ethics? _Personal Identity and Ethics_ provides the first comprehensive examination of these issues. Topics include personal identity and prudential rationality; personal identity’s significance for moral responsibility and ethical theory; and the practical consequences of accounts of personal identity for issues such as abortion, stem cell research, cloning, advance directives, population ethics, multiple personality disorder, and the definition of death.

Derek Parfit claims that, at certain times and places, the metaphysical units he labels “selves” may be thought of as the morally significant units (i.e., the objects of moral concern) for such things as resource distribution, moral responsibility, commitments, etc. But his concept of the self is problematic in important respects, and it remains unclear just why and how this entity should count as a moral unit in the first place. In developing a view I call “Moderate Reductionism,” I attempt to resolve these worries, first by offering a clearer, more consistent account of what the concept of “self” should involve, and second by arguing for why selves should indeed be viewed as moral (and prudential) units. I then defend this view in detail from both “conservative” and “extreme” objections.

'Oxford studies in agency and responsibility' is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes, investigating such questions as: what does it mean to be an agent?; what is the nature of moral responsibility? Of criminal responsibility? What is the relation between moral and criminal responsibility (if any)?; What is the relation between responsibility and the metaphysical issues of determinism and free will?; what do various psychological disorders tell us about agency and responsibility?; how do moral agents develop? How does this developmental story bear on questions about the nature of moral judgment and responsibility?; what do the results from neuroscience imply (if anything) for our questions about agency and responsibility? OSAR thus straddles the areas of moral philosophy and philosophy of action, but also draws from a diverse range of cross-disciplinary sources, including moral psychology, psychology proper (including experimental and developmental), philosophy of psychology, philosophy of law, legal theory, metaphysics, neuroscience, neuroethics, political philosophy, and more. It is unified by its focus on who we are as deliberators and (inter)actors, embodied practical agents negotiating (sometimes unsuccessfully) a world of moral and legal norms.

Quarrels and wisecracks are essential features of interpersonal life. Quarrels are conflicts that typically take place only between friends, family, and those with whom we are personally engaged and whose attitudes toward us matter. Wisecracks are bits of improvised wit—banter, teasing, mockery, and ball busting—that also typically take place only in interpersonal life (note the following odd but revealing comment: “I can’t tease her like that; I barely even know her!”). Quarrels and cracks are, though, mutually exclusive. People know their quarrel is basically over once they start being amused by each others’ wisecracks again, and if you’re enjoying wisecracks with each other, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to quarrel at the same time. Why is this and what does it mean for interpersonal conflict? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question via a deep dive into the nature of wisecracking humor to explore the unrecognized—and valuable—role it plays in our interpersonal lives. In particular, there is a type of wisecracking humor that has a distinctive sort of interpersonal power, the power to dissolve the anger in quarrels in a surprising and productive way.

It has long been thought that control is necessary for moral responsibility. Call this the control condition. Given its pride of place in the free will debate, “control” has almost always been taken to be shorthand for voluntary control, an exercise of choice or will. Over the last few decades, however, many have been arguing for including a range of attitudes for which we seem to be responsible that, if controlled at all, must be controlled via a very different mechanism, namely, evaluative judgment. Call this second type of control evaluative control. In this paper I will present and discuss in detail an additional agential stance—reasonish regard—for which we treat one another as responsible, but that is ungoverned by either of the first two types of control. If we want to require a control condition for responsibility, then, we will need to introduce and include a third type of control, what I call empathic control.

In this paper, we present a set of preregistered studies inspired by both Lockean pluralism about individuation and discussions of conjoined twinning in the contemporary personal identity debate. In combination, these studies provide evidence of folk pluralism about individuation of “individuals like us” and also ways in which individuation judgments are integral to practical interests. First, our studies show that individuation judgments depend on a sortal supplied. Study participants tend to see two people or persons but only one organism in case of dicephalic twins, and they do not find these two verdicts inconsistent. Second, study participants tend to be pluralist in a sense that they find it acceptable to consider dicephalic twins to be—at the same time—two persons sharing one body and one two‐headed person. Third, while both perspectives are available, when reasons for counting are made salient, study participants tend to resolve pluralism in line with practical interests relevant in the context.

This volume brings together work in free will, ethics, metaethics, feminist theory, disability studies, experimental philosophy, and psychology. The theme for both the workshop and these papers was “Non-Ideal Agency and Responsibility,” and in these essays, our authors take a number of different and creative angles on this theme. Roughly half of the essays fall under the rubric of non-ideal agency. They discuss ways in which our agency is impacted by inherent psychological limitations, by the social contexts in which we act, or by different ways in which our abilities can break down. The other half fall under the rubric of non-ideal responsibility. They discuss both the modes by which we assess imperfect exercises of our agency and the ways in which common forms of assessment are themselves imperfect.

A philosopher’s case for the importance of good—if ethically questionable—humor. A good sense of humor is key to the good life, but a joke taken too far can get anyone into trouble. Where to draw the line is not as simple as it may seem. After all, even the most innocent quips between friends rely on deception, sarcasm, and stereotypes and often run the risk of disrespect, meanness, and harm. How do we face this dilemma without taking ourselves too seriously? In Wisecracks, philosopher David Shoemaker examines this interplay between humor and morality and ultimately argues that even morally suspect humor is an essential part of ethical life. Shoemaker shows how improvised “wisecracks” between family and friends—unlike scripted stand-up, sketches, or serials—help us develop a critical human skill: the ability to carry on and find the funny in tragedy. In developing a new ethics of humor in defense of questionable gibes, Wisecracks offers a powerful case for humor as a healing presence in human life.

Quality of Will (qw) theories of responsibility claim the target of someone’s blameworthiness for an action is their poor quality of will. There have been many “threats” to such a theory over the years, coming out of a literature interested in the metaphysical conditions of free will, threats having to do with moral luck, manipulation, and negligence. In this paper, I am more interested in surveying and thwarting two “new school” threats to qw theories, including taking responsibility for inadvertence, and holding reasonable but ostensibly wrongful beliefs. Both of these aim to ground blameworthiness independently of quality of will. I show that none of these new school threats to qw theories succeed.

Missing from P. F. Strawson’s list of pleas exempting one from the community of morally responsible agents is “He has dementia.” Why? It is the aim of this chapter to address this complicated, regularly ignored question, along with the more abstract (and fundamental) question of how we might approach discussion of these issues generally. It begins with a discussion of empirical findings regarding dementia, and then draws from these to figure out the relevant combination of incapacities in demented patients that grounds their exemption from the community of morally responsible agents. It also discusses the (ir)relevance of personal identity to the issue; why demented patients may nevertheless be morally responsible in a different sense. It introduces the idea of “care-commitment clusters” to explain cases of both seeming character change as well as partial character preservation in the demented and concludes by contrasting this to some treatments of the responsibility of children and the autonomy of the demented.

Philosophical theories of property rights struggle to adequately explain the moral significance of ownership. We propose that the moral significance of property rights is due to the intersection of what we call "the extended self” and conventionally protected rights claims. The latter, drawing on conventionalist accounts of property rights, explains the social nature and flexibility of property. The former, drawing on naturalist theories, explains their personal nature. The upshot is that we find at this intersection the full moral significance of property.

According to a popular line of thought, being excluded from interpersonal life is to be exempted from accountability, and vice versa. In ordinary life, this is most often illustrated by the treatment of people with serious psychological disorders. When people are excluded from valuable domains on the basis of their arbitrary characteristics (such as race and sex), they are discriminated against, prevented from receiving the benefits of participation in those domains for morally irrelevant reasons. Exemption from accountability—via exclusion from the interpersonal domain—seems to prevent exempted parties from receiving crucial human goods for morally irrelevant reasons. This chapter discusses two widely deployed ways of trying to ameliorate morally costly disabilities. Both fail to apply viably to various psychopathologies. The solution involves disentangling accountability and interpersonality in a way that also provides insights into our shared human nature.

It is notable that all of the leading theories of blame have to employ ungainly fixes to deflect one or more apparent counterexamples. What these theories share is a content‐based theory of blame's nature. Such approaches overlook or ignore blame's core unifying feature, namely, its function, which is to signal the blamer's commitment to a set of norms. In this paper, we present the problems with the extant theories and then explain what signaling is, how it functions in blame, why appealing to it resolves the problems in other theories, what the signaling function implies for a wider range of gray‐area cases, and what the larger significance is of blame's core function for interpersonal interactions in a variety of (non‐moral) normative domains.

In introducing the reactive attitudes “of people directly involved in transactions with each other,” P. F. Strawson lists “gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings.” To show how our interpersonal emotional practices of responsibility could not be undermined by determinism’s truth, Strawson focused exclusively on resentment, specifically on its nature and actual excusing and exempting conditions. So have many other philosophers theorizing about responsibility in Strawson’s wake. This method and focus has generated a host of quality of will theories of responsibility. What I show in this paper is that if Strawson—and his followers—had focused on hurt feelings instead of resentment, not only would quality of will theories of responsibility be disfavored, but none of our other theories of responsibility could adequately account for them. I conclude by exploring what a conundrum this poses for our methods and starting points in theorizing about responsibility.

Abstract:Some moral responsibility theorists think that certain agents (like psychopaths) can be morally responsible—and morally criticizable—for their actions and attitudes even though they lack any competence in grasping or responding to moral norms (a blindness to moral reasons that is typically called “normative incompetence” or, more accurately, “moral incompetence”). In this essay, I provide a new argument against these theorists by exploring the intersection between two normative domains, the funny and the moral. There are, it turns out, interesting and significant ways that properties from each domain bear on reasons to respond in the other, and so there are interesting and significant ways in which people’s responses to cruel jokes or insult humor may be criticizable. I then survey various personality and psychological impairments that seem to undercut criticizability in this intersecting domain. Learning about these people and their impairments yields a wealth of information about what true normative competence actually requires, as well as why competence of the specifically moral variety really is required for moral criticizability.