George Sher

Early in my teaching career, I made a mistake about when the academic term began and missed the first few days of a semester. Taking my blameworthiness as given, I use this incident to explore the different ways of explaining why agents can be blamed for unintended omissions. In the course of my discussion, I first criticize the tracing and Attributionist approaches, and then present my own positive view: that the reason I was blameworthy is that my omission was caused by a collection of states and traits whose interaction generally gave rise to reasons-responsive behavior. This approach provides a natural explanation of why a merely local incapacity to respond to a given reason does not exculpate while a global incapacity to respond to reasons does. In so doing, it neatly answers a question that is problematic for other forms of compatibilism.

Does justice require that goods be distributed in accordance with people’s deserts? The claim that it does is appealing, but has been the target of many objections. The current paper first argues briefly against three of these familiar objections, but then introduces another objection that has more force. Given this new objection, we cannot plausibly say that what justice requires is that each person gets what he deserves. However, even if desert plays no role in structuring the distribution of options among persons, it may still enter by affecting the pay-offs that attach to the various options. The paper’s final section defends this proposal by arguing that it can plausibly be paired with each of four major approaches to justice.

In his recent book _Conversation and Responsibility_, Michael McKenna has argued that our interactions with those whom we hold responsible bear important affinities to conversations. Drawing on this analogy, he argues that the activity of holding responsible is neither metaphysically prior nor metaphysically posterior to the phenomenon of responsibility itself: instead, being and holding responsible are interdependent. This chapter asks whether McKenna’s appeal to the conversational analogy succeeds in establishing the interdependence thesis. The conclusion is that it does not.

To be responsible for their acts, agents must both act 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. This book seeks to remedy that imbalance: it first criticizes a popular but inadequate way of understanding the epistemic condition and then seeks to develop a more adequate alternative. The popular but inadequate view asserts that agents are responsible only for what they are consciously aware of doing or bringing about. (Because this view takes an agent's responsibility to extend only as far as the searchlight of his consciousness, the book refers to it as the searchlight view.) By contrast, on the proposed alternative, even agents who unwittingly act wrongly or foolishly can be responsible if (1) they have information that supports the conclusion that their acts are wrong or foolish, and (2) their failure to draw that conclusion on the basis of that information falls short of meeting some appropriate standard, and (3) the failure is caused by the constellation of psychological and/or physical features that makes them the persons they are. Because it integrates first- and third-personal elements, this alternative account is well suited to capture the complexity of responsible agents, who at once have their own private perspectives and live in a public world.

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 paws. 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 may or may not be flaws, and that, if flaws, may or may not be bad in the same way that the act itself is.

It is commonly believed that agents can be culpable for acting on false moral beliefs that they have good reason not to hold, and this paper considers two ways of explaining how that can be so. The first explanation construes the agents' culpability for their actions as an extension of their culpability for holding their false and unjustified moral beliefs, while the second maintains that they are culpable only for the larger wholes that include both the beliefs and the behavior. Because no one can be subject to blame unless he has breached some moral requirement, the first explanation, but not the second, implies that morality governs even our private beliefs. However, the paper argues that the two main ways of elaborating the first explanation both fail while the second explanation encounters no comparable difficulties. This means that we can make sense of the morally ignorant agent's culpability for his actions without having to suppose that his beliefs are subject to moral regulation.

This paper argues that a sweeping prohibition against content‐based censorship is called for by the need to protect two distinct but related vital interests: first, our autonomy interest in making and implementing our own judgments about what is worth having or doing and, second, our social interest in living in contact with others. Because the most readily available way of overcoming our isolation is to bring the thoughts of others into either alignment or engaged opposition with our own by talking to them, every instance of censorship undermines our autonomy by preempting a choice that should properly be ours alone.

Because the past can never be undone, it is not immediately clear why wrongdoing is thought to call for backward-looking responses such as blame, punishment, and the making of amends. However, in recent years, a number of philosophers have sought to elucidate the backward-looking component of morality by emphasizing the destructive impact that wrongdoing has on people’s relationships. By interposing damaged relationships between wrong acts and our backward-looking responses to them, these philosophers hope to gain access to new ways of justifying those responses. But can this approach succeed when the wrongdoer and his victim are strangers? How, in that case, can they have any relationship at all? This chapter attempts to assess the seriousness of this difficulty by examining a number of possible responses to it. In each case, the chapter's conclusion is that the difficulty has not been fully met.

The idea that we should simply live in the moment, and should not concern ourselves about the future or the past, has long been a staple of popular philosophy. In this paper, I first attempt to clarify the doctrine and then examine the case for accepting it. My conclusions are, first, that a number of its implications seem quite unpalatable; second, that the main advantages that living in the moment are said to yield are greatly overstated; and, third, that to live by any version of the doctrine that was not highly watered down would be to sacrifice much of what gives meaning to our lives.

This book addresses two main topics—first, the morality of thought and, second, what’s involved in having a free mind. It connects these topics by arguing that to have a free mind, a person must be willing to follow his thoughts wherever they lead, and that this just isn’t possible if the person thinks that some thoughts are morally off limits. The book therefore defends the unpopular position that it is not morally wrong to have even the nastiest of attitudes, the most biased of beliefs, or the vilest of fantasies. Even when some of what we think is ugly, there is beauty and value in our being able to think it.

This paper is a critical discussion of the recent tendency to moralize various aspects of life that were previously viewed as private and discretionary. The paper takes as its starting point six recently unearthed moral prohibitions, and it examines the prospects for defending each as an extension of some familiar moral requirement. Its conclusion is not only that none of the extended prohibitions are defensible, but also that each impedes morality's function by limiting the ability of those whose lives it governs to pursue their own aims as they see fit.

ABSTRACT The question that this paper seeks to answer is that of whether the resistance to change that characterizes the conservative temperament has any rational basis. More precisely, my question is whether we have good grounds for accepting any version of the principle that if something exists then we need a reason to change it but don’t need a reason to keep it. The paper defends a version of this principle whose scope is restricted to familiar traditions and customs on the one hand, and aging artifactual objects (houses, cars, toasters, and the like) on the other. The argument for that principle is that our current traditions and artifacts stand in various relations to the purposive activities of past agents—a different relation in each case—that give rise to presumptive but easily overridden reasons for their preservation.

At one point or another, most of us have been accused of not trying our hardest, and most of us have leveled similar accusations at others. The disputes that result are often intractable and raise difficult questions about effort, ability, and will. This essay addresses some of these questions by examining six representative cases in which the accusation is leveled. The questions discussed include what trying one's hardest involves, and the conditions under which complaints about lack of effort are true, and how much their truth matters. One conclusion that emerges is that both the relevant form of effort and the impediments to making it can vary greatly, while another is that trying one's hardest is less important than trying as hard as one could reasonably be expected to try.