Matt King

There are cases thought to illustrate that appropriate blame requires special _standing_. One might lack the standing to blame another because the fault is private and one is a stranger or because one is guilty of the very same offense and so one’s blame would be hypocritical. But despite its prevalence as an explanation of what goes wrong in such cases, the standing to blame itself has been given relatively little attention. The aim of this paper is to cast doubt on the standing to blame. It considers a range of plausible interpretations and, finding each wanting, concludes that those who wish to endorse the standing to blame owe us more by way of a characterization and defense. In raising this challenge, the paper motivates an alternative explanation of the cases.

This book defends a general theory of responsibility, arguing that the blameworthy artist is responsible in just the same way that the blameworthy thief is. Individuals can be responsible for all kinds of different activities, but the basic responsibility relation is the same in every case. Individuals are responsible for the things they do first, then blameworthy or praiseworthy for having done them in light of whether they’re good or bad, according to a variety of standards. Moreover, the book develops this view with modest theoretical resources, offering minimal accounts of agency, control, blame and praise, and desert, delivering a comprehensive picture of being responsible for all the many things humans do.

How exactly do mental disorders affect one’s agency? How might therapeutic interventions help patients regain or improve their autonomy? Do only some disorders excuse morally inappropriate behavior, such as theft or child neglect? Or is there nothing about having a disorder, as such, that affects whether we ought to praise or blame someone for their moral success or failure? Our volume gathers together empirically-informed philosophers who are well equipped to tackle such questions. Contributors specialize in free will, agency, and responsibility, but they are informed by current scientific and clinical approaches to a wide range of psychopathologies, including autism, addiction, Tourette syndrome, personality disorders, depression, dementia, phobias, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. These conditions exhibit a diverse array of symptoms that can contribute quite differently to being blameworthy or praiseworthy.

Much has been written lately about cases in which blame of the blameworthy is nonetheless inappropriate because of facts about the blamer. Meddlesome and hypocritical cases are standard examples. Perhaps the matter is none of my business or I am guilty of the same sort of offense, so though the target is surely blameworthy, my blame would be objectionable. In this paper, I defend a novel explanation of what goes wrong with such blame, in a way that draws the cases together. In brief, I argue that blaming is essentially an attentive activity, and that, consequently, meddlesome and hypocritical blamers are attending to the wrong things.

Does having a mental disorder, in general, affect whether someone is morally responsible for an action? Many people seem to think so, holding that mental disorders nearly always mitigate responsibility. Against this Naïve view, we argue for a Nuanced account. The problem is not just that different theories of responsibility yield different verdicts about particular cases. Even when all reasonable theories agree about what's relevant to responsibility, the ways mental illness can affect behavior are so varied that a more nuanced approach is needed.

It is often charged that compatibilists have a problem with manipulation. There are certain cases in which victims of manipulation seem to be not responsible for what they do, despite meeting compatibilist conditions on moral responsibility. This essay argues that these arguments, as a class, fail. Their success is depen- dent on a particular incompatibilist assumption, one that is dialectically infelici- tous in this context. My aim, however, is not to defend compatibilism but only to reject a popular argument for incompatibilism.

Manipulation arguments have become almost a cottage industry in the moral responsibility literature. These cases are used for a variety of purposes, familiarly to undermine some proffered set of conditions on responsibility, usually compatibilist conditions. The basic idea is to conceive of a case which intuitively includes responsibility-undermining manipulation but which meets the target account’s set of sufficient conditions on responsibility. The manipulation thereby serves as a counterexample to the target theory. More specifically, recent concern with manipulation cases has often been part of an argument for historical conditions on moral responsibility. Exercising control over an action is not necessarily enough to be responsible for it, one must have come to exercise that control in a non-deviant way. Manipulation cases are meant to illustrate how an agent can exercise the supposed sufficient control over an action, and yet intuitively fail to be responsible as a result of some manipulation. The argument concludes that manipulation of this sort must then be ruled out by one’s conditions on responsibility. Accounts that fail to rule out such manipulation are objectionable as a result. Manipulation arguments usually fit a general schema.1 One presents a case intuitively involving responsibility-undermining manipulation, but where all the conditions of the target account are met. Then one argues that there is no relevant difference between that case and ordinary action under the target account. Thus, one can conclude, the target account gets the wrong verdict for manipulation cases. Some variations on this schema seek a slightly grander conclusion. For example, some incompatibilists argue from the manipulation case through a principle that claims there to be no relevant difference between such a case and ordinary action in a deterministic universe. Thus, the conclusion reached is that if determinism is true, all responsibility is undermined.

Control-based accounts of moral responsibility face a familiar problem. There are some actions which look like obvious cases of responsibility but which appear equally obviously to lack the requisite control. Drunk-driving cases are canonical instances. The familiar solution to this problem is to appeal to tracing. Though the drunk driver isn't in control at the time of the crash, this is because he previously drank to excess, an action over which he did plausibly exercise the requisite control. Tracing seeks to show that an agent's responsibility for some outcome can be traced back to a prior exercise of control which caused the later lack of control. These and related cases have led many theorists to treat tracing as an indispensable component of any adequate theory of responsibility. This paper argues that tracing is in fact dispensable. I offer two strategies for explaining responsibility in drunk-driving cases : responsibility can either be exhaustively modeled on recklessness, or exhaustively modeled on negligence. Neither explanation, however, relies on tracing. If I'm right, the case for tracing is seriously weakened.

Our aim in this paper is to raise a question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. Our question has rarely been raised previously. Among those who believe in the reality of human freedom, compatibilists have traditionally devoted their energies to providing an account that can avoid any commitment to the falsity of determinism while successfully accommodating a range of intuitive examples. Libertarians, in contrast, have aimed to show that either physical indeterminacy or a certain kind of agent causation can find a place in the world for what they take to be genuine freedom. Few have considered whether moral responsibility requires a commitment to conscious attitudes.2 Our question derives from a confluence of two sources. First, there is reason to think that conscious attitudes matter to theories of responsibility, either directly, as a result of the latter’s commitments, or indirectly, by virtue of the assumptions that they make about certain intuitive examples. Second, there is accumulating evidence suggesting that there aren’t any conscious mental states possessing the sorts of causal roles required of propositional attitudes. Since theorists of responsibility should in general be concerned to make their views compatible with plausible claims about the natural world, the implications of this data should be carefully considered. Our aim is therefore to motivate and begin exploring answers to the following conditional question: If it should turn out that there are no conscious attitudes, then what would be the implications of this fact (if any) for theories of responsibility? We propose that theorists who aren’t skeptics about moral responsibility should examine their accounts, asking whether their theories (or the examples that motivate them) could survive the discovery that there are no conscious judgments, decisions, or evaluations. Since we take it that moral theorizing in general should operate with the weakest possible empirical assumptions about the natural world, such theorists should consider whether their accounts could be motivated in such a way as to be free of any commitment to the existence of conscious attitudes..

There are two broadly competing pictures of moral responsibility. On the view I favor, to be responsible for some action is to be related to it in such a way that licenses attributing certain properties to the agent, properties like blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Responsibility is attributability. A different view understands being responsible in terms of our practices of holding each other responsible. Responsibility is accountability, which “involves a social setting in which we demand (require) certain conduct from one another and respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson, Philos Top 24:227–248, 1996). My concern here is the relation between moral responsibility and desert. Plausibly, if someone is morally responsible for something wrong then they deserve blame, and it is on the basis of them being morally responsible and its being wrong that they deserve blame. In this paper, I try to make progress toward understanding why it would follow that being morally responsible for something supports a desert claim. I propose to do this by exploring how the “two faces” of responsibility should proceed. An important upshot is that we gain a new currency by which to evaluate extant theories of responsibility that might favor one or the other conception: do they carry plausible desert commitments? To illustrate this benefit, I argue that accountability theory carries implausible implications for deserved praise

One way in which fact finders are supposed to determine the reasonableness of a defendant is via a counterfactual test that personifies the reasonable person. We are to imagine the reasonable person being in the defendant’s circumstances. Then we are to determine whether the reasonable person would have done as the defendant did. This paper argues that, despite its prevalence, the counterfactual test is a hopeless guide to determining defendant reasonability. In brief, the test is of the wrong sort to give fact finders the requisite guidance. What we are after is not a counterfactual judgment but instead is a question of possibility. However, since the only thing impossible of the reasonable person is being unreasonable, personifying the reasonable person cannot offer any useful guidance on this question.

In the contemporary moral responsibility debate, most theorists seem to be giving accounts of responsibility in the ‘desert-entailing sense’. Despite this agreement, little has been said about the notion of desert that is supposedly entailed. In this paper I propose an understanding of desert sufficient to help explain why the blameworthy and praiseworthy deserve blame and praise, respectively. I do so by drawing upon what might seem an unusual resource. I appeal to so-called Fitting-Attitude accounts of value to help inform a conception of desert or merit, one that can be usefully applied to discussions of moral responsibility. I argue that the view, which I call, Desert as Fittingness (DAF), merits additional attention. I do so by making two claims: First, that it does better than extant Fitting Attitude accounts of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness; second, that it has an initial plausibility with respect to informing a general account of desert. While these reasons are insufficient to show the view is true, they do make the case for taking the view seriously.

Ordinary morality judges agents blameworthy for negligently produced harms. In this paper I offer two main reasons for thinking that explaining just how negligent agents are responsible for the harms they produce is more problematic than one might think. First, I show that negligent conduct is characterized by the lack of conscious control over the harm, which conflicts with the ordinary view that responsibility for something requires at least some conscious control over it. Second, I argue that negligence is relevantly indistinguishable from inadvertence, which is ordinarily thought to excuse agents from responsibility. I argue that the parallels between negligence and inadvertence suggest that negligent agents are not responsible for the harms they produce, while proposing an alternative model for distinguishing between negligence and inadvertence that does justice to our intuitions.

The majority of recent work on the moral standing to blame (the idea that A may be unable to legitimately blame B despite B being blameworthy) has focused on blamers who themselves are blameworthy. This is unfortunate, for there is much to learn about the standing to blame once we consider a broader range of cases. Doing so reveals that challenged standing is more expansive than previously acknowledged, and accounts that have privileged the fact that the blamers are themselves morally culpable likely require revision. One such account figures in Patrick Todd’s (2012) argument for incompatibilism, which ostensibly depends on considerations involving the standing to blame. I believe this argument fails. But its failure is instructive, for it allows us to appreciate the numerous ways in which one’s blame can be morally problematic, and hence ways in which one’s standing to blame can be challenged. Thus, while one objective of this paper is to show why Todd’s argument fails, the larger aim is to use that argument to frame discussion of some important (and novel) ways in which the standing to blame can be compromised.