Austin Duggan

On a basic desert conception of moral responsibility, any agent who freely, knowingly, and inexcusably acts immorally deserves a negative response just because s/he so acted. The predominant view is that blame is the negative response at issue. I argue that, even if we know that an agent has freely, knowingly, and inexcusably acted immorally, there is no reliable evidence that this fact alone renders the agent deserving of blame or other form of censure. We ought, then, to be skeptical about the desert of blame, and in turn forego blaming or censuring on that basis. I argue that this does not entail that agents are never morally responsible for immoral acts. Some agents may still deserve to feel guilt for their immoral acts, and it is this guiltworthiness that explains their moral responsibility. Moreover, I argue that skepticism about the desert of blame does not impugn the rationality of our blaming emotions. These views stand in stark contrast to extant views concerning blame and moral responsibility, and offer solutions to heretofore unresolved issues in ethics.

It is often alleged that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves a negative interpersonal response for that transgression, blaming responses such as resentment and indignation being paradigms. Aside from a few exceptions, guilt is cited in recent discussions of moral responsibility, if at all, as merely an effect of being blamed, or as a reliable indicator of moral responsibility, but not itself an explanation of moral responsibility. In this paper, I argue that an agent is morally responsible in a liability sense for a transgression just in case s/he deserves to feel moral guilt for that transgression. I argue that this alternative view offers all that the predominant blame-focused view offers, while also solving some puzzling features of moral responsibility. Specifically, it offers a compelling way to reconcile conflicting intuitions about the suberogatory, and allows those who do not understand what Darwall calls ‘second-personal’ reasons to be morally responsible for their immoral acts.