Jay Spitzley

Most contemporary accounts of moral responsibility take desert to play a central role in the nature of moral responsibility. It is also assumed that desert is a backward-looking concept that is not directly derivable from any forward-looking or consequentialist considerations, such as whether blaming an agent would deter the agent from performing similar bad actions in the future. When determining which account of moral responsibility is correct, proponents of desert-based accounts often take intuitions about cases to provide evidence either in favor of or against a proposed theory. In this paper, I discuss two experiments that test whether folk intuitions accord with what desert-based accounts would predict. Results suggest that moral responsibility intuitions are sensitive to forward-looking considerations, thus posing a problem for desert-based accounts of moral responsibility. If appealing to intuitions about cases is a valid method of discovering the nature of moral responsibility and desert, it seems either desert is not entirely backward-looking or moral responsibility is not exclusively desert-based. These experimental results also suggest that consequentialist accounts of moral responsibility, which have largely been abandoned due to their counterintuitive nature, are perhaps not so counterintuitive after all.

Many find it intuitive that those who use enhancements like steroids and Adderall in Olympic weightlifting and education are due less praise than those who perform equally well without using these enhancements. Nonetheless, it is not easy to coherently explain why one might be justifiably due less praise for using these technologies to enhance one’s performance. Justifications for this intuition which rely on concerns regarding authenticity, cheating, or shifts in who is responsible for the performance face serious problems. Santoni de Sio et al., however, have recently defended a justification for this intuition which avoids the problems competing justifications face; the nature-of-activities justification. This justification relies on a conceptual analysis of the nature of activities and does not require the defense of any particular ethical stance concerning the use of enhancements. Santoni de Sio et al. claim that the success of the nature-of-activities account requires distinguishing between practice-oriented activities and goal-directed activities. I, however, show that this distinction is both deeply problematic and unnecessary. After exposing the weaknesses of Santoni de Sio et al.’s original account, I defend a simpler and less problematic version of the nature-of-activities account. The revised account is capable of both justifying this intuition of less praise and allowing one to determine when enhancements should be deemed permissible, impermissible, or obligatory for a given activity.

Research suggests that intuitions about thought experiments are vulnerable to a wide array of seemingly irrelevant factors. I argue that when arguments hinge on the use of intuitions about thought experiments, research on the subtle factors that affect intuitions must be taken seriously. To demonstrate how failing to consider such psychological influences can undermine an argument, I discuss Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. I argue that by failing to consider the impact of subtle psychological influences such as order effects, Pereboom likely mis-identifies what really leads us to have the intuitions that we have about his cases, and this in turn undermines his argument for incompatibilism. Last, I consider objections and discuss how to empirically test my hypothesis.