Neal Tognazzini

This chapter focuses on the notion of _tracing_ in the theory of moral responsibility. _Tracing_ states that individuals' moral responsibility can be _traced back_ to an action of which they had control. It also presents Manuel Vargas' case that explains the tension between the idea of tracing and the epistemic condition on moral responsibility. The chapter argues that each of Vargas' case fails to satisfy at least one of his contentions. If tracing cannot be proven true, this would seem to be a devastating challenge to some theories like Kane's and Fischer's. However, as the chapter applies similar analysis to some intriguing examples presented by Angela Smith, the notion of _tracing_ remains valid.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of Michael Otsuka's “Principle of Avoidable Blame” (PAB). Otsuka argues that Frankfurt-type examples are indeed counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, they do _not_ impugn PAB. The PAB states that one is blameworthy for performing an act of a given type only if one could instead have behaved in a manner for which one would have been entirely blameless. The chapter also discusses the key points of Otsuka's argument, especially the claim that PAB cannot be refuted by Harry Frankfurt's cases. It concludes that adding an alternative possibility, in which an agent “accidentally” avoids blame, cannot explain the agent's measure of blameworthiness.

Fischer and Tognazzini critically evaluate recent work by Storrs McCall, Trenton Merricks, and Jonathan Westphal. These theorists employ the notion of “dependence” in seeking to reply to the argument for incompatibilism about God’s foreknowledge and human freedom to do otherwise. Fischer and Tognazzini contend that their strategy is guilty of begging the question against incompatibilism. They argue that it is not sufficient to point to the relationship of asymmetric dependence between God’s prior beliefs and future human behavior, in order to reject incompatibilism. Rather, the theorists in question must contend that God’s beliefs depend on human behavior in which the agent was indeed free to do otherwise. But this is question-begging in the relevant dialectical context. The relationship between dependence and the evaluation of the argument for incompatibilism is explored in a preliminary way.

Fischer, Todd, and Tognazzini “reread” Nelson Pike’s seminal article, “Divine Foreknowledge and Voluntary Action,” in light of the discussions of this paper (and related issues) in the approximately fifty years since its publication. Nelson Pike presented a powerful version of the argument for incompatibilism about God’s foreknowledge and human freedom—a version that exhibits it as a valid argument that does not commit any obvious modal fallacy. Various ways of responding to Pike’s argument for incompatibilism are explored, and links between the evaluation of the argument and recent work in philosophy of time (including issues surrounding eternalism and presentism) are noted. Special attention is given to Open Theism as a reply to Pike’s argument.

This paper evaluates a new argument for the fixity of the past, recently defended by Wesley H. Holliday in ‘Freedom and the Fixity of the Past’ (_The Philosophical Review_ 121). The fixity of the past is a premise used to argue for incompatibilism, and one that many compatibilists deny. Holliday claims that his argument ends the stalemate between compatibilists and incompatibilists concerning this premise. It is argued that Holliday’s argument, while superficially quite plausible, has two related faults. First, it employs a premise that compatibilists are antecedently committed to rejecting. Second, the intuitive motivation given for that premise does not in fact motivate the premise. Together, these problems render Holliday’s argument question-begging.

Analytic philosophers have a tendency to forget that they are human beings, and one of the reasons that P. F. Strawson’s 1962 essay “Freedom and Resentment” has been so influential is that it promises to bring discussions of moral responsibility back down to earth. Strawson encouraged us to “keep before our minds… what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary interpersonal relationships,” which is, after all, the context in which questions about responsibility arise in the first place. In this chapter explores what we can learn about ordinary interpersonal relationships from three works of literature—Shakespeare’s _King Lear_, Jane Austen’s _Persuasion_, and Graham Greene’s _The End of the Affair_. The chapter’s intention is to try to heed Strawson’s advice without imposing upon the data any particular theoretical agenda, in the hope that the data collected will prove useful for future theorizing about responsibility.

John Martin Fischer has long championed semicompatibilism, the view that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility even if determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Since (as Fischer agues) moral responsibility is grounded in facts about the actual sequence, it is not threatened by the Consequence Argument, which threatens only the idea that we have access to alternative sequences. This view is attractive in part because it allows us to sidestep thorny questions about the fixity of the past and the fixity of the laws. But in this paper I explore two alternative ways we might be able to sidestep those thorny questions while defending a more thoroughgoing compatibilism, about both moral responsibility and free will. My alternative proposals both depend on coming to see free will, in addition to moral responsibility, as an actual-sequence notion.

This volume celebrates the career of John Martin Fischer, whose work on a wide range of topics over the past forty years has been transformative and inspirational. Fischer's semicompatibilist view of free will and moral responsibility is perhaps the most widely discussed view of its kind, and his emphasis on the significance of reasons-responsiveness as the capacity that underlies moral accountability has been widely influential. Aside from free will and moral responsibility, Fischer is also well-known for his work on freedom and foreknowledge, the problem of evil, the badness of death, the meaning of life, and the allure of immortality. This volume gathers new essays by leading scholars on some of the major themes of Fischer's work, and it also includes a new piece by Fischer in which he offers a systematic reflection on and defense of the motivations that have shaped his theorizing about moral responsibility. Freedom, Responsibility, and Value will be of interest to scholars and students working on a variety of issues in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion.

This paper explores what the metaphysics of time travel might teach us about moral responsibility. We take our cue from a recent paper by Yishai Cohen, who argues that if time travel is metaphysically possible, then one of the most influential theories of moral responsibility (i.e., Fischer and Ravizza’s) is false. We argue that Cohen’s argument is unsound but that Cohen’s argument can serve as a lens to bring reasons-responsive theories of moral responsibility into sharper focus, helping us to better understand actual-sequence theories of moral responsibility more generally and showing how actual-sequence theorists should respond to a recent criticism.

One common reaction to criticism is to try to deflect it by calling into question the motivations of the person doing the criticizing. For example, if I feel like you are blaming me for something that you yourself are guilty of having done in the past, I might respond with the retort, "Who are you to blame me for this?", where this retort is meant to serve not as an excuse but rather as a challenge to the standing of the blamer. The notion of standing has taken center stage in much recent literature on the ethics of blame, though there is no consensus on how best to understand the precise force of the "who are you" retort. In this paper, I look at a different sort of retort, one that also calls into question the motivations of the criticizer. Instead of accusing the criticizer of being motivated by self-righteousness, however, this retort accuses the criticizer of being motivated by envy. How are these two retorts related to each other? If the accusation of envy isn't a challenge to the blamer's standing, then what sort of challenge is it and what normative force does it carry (if any)? Taking my cue from the ethics of blame literature, I try to address these and other questions about the interaction between envy and blame.

Blame is fascinating yet elusive, and it is both of these things because it is so complex. It seems to have a cognitive aspect (the belief that someone has done wrong, perhaps), but it also seems to have an emotional aspect (resentment at being disrespected, perhaps). And then of course there is the outside-of-the-head aspect of blame, which manifests itself in rebukes and reprimands, accusations and distrust, cold shoulders and estrangement. Still, accounts of blame that identify it with beliefs or emotions seem inadequate. In this paper I draw on the work of Harry Frankfurt to suggest an alternative account, according to which blame most centrally involves changes in the structure of the will.

Although it is widely accepted that hypocritical blamers lack the standing to blame others who have committed similar wrongs, an account of what it is that’s lost when someone loses their standing to blame remains elusive. When moral address is inappropriate because it is or would be hypocritical, what is the precise nature of the complaint that the blamed party is entitled to raise, and that so often gets voiced as “I don’t have to take that from you”? In this paper I argue that extant answers to this question fall short, and I offer a novel account that takes seriously the thought that hypocrisy somehow silences the blame of the hypocrite. To make sense of this silencing effect, I argue that we need to look closely at the role that second-personal reasons play in moral address.

This chapter explores the concept of judgmentalism: what it is and why it’s morally problematic. After criticizing an account offered by Gary Watson, the paper argues for a broader understanding of what it is to be judgmental, encompassing not just the overall beliefs that we form about someone else, but also the very pattern of our thoughts about those with whom we are involved in interpersonal relationships. The thesis is that to care about someone is to be oriented toward them, or to see them through a particular mental lens, in a way that produces a particular pattern of salience and silence. That is: caring about someone (at least ideally) has the effect of making some features of that person particularly salient, and silencing or screening off other features from one’s consciousness. One is aptly described as judgmental when one’s thoughts do not display this sort of pattern, indicating a failure to fully adopt the orientation that constitutes properly caring about the person.

Our focus in this chapter will be the role the pride has played, both historically and contemporarily, in Christian theology and philosophical theology. We begin by delineating a number of different types of pride, since some types are positive (e.g., when a parent tells a daughter “I’m proud of you for being brave”), and others are negative (e.g., “Pride goes before a fall”) or even vicious. We then explore the role that the negative emotion and vice play in the history of Christianity, with particular attention to a number of influential figures. We conclude by exploring how pride connects with a number of other central issues in Christian theology.

Hudson has formulated two local deterministic theses and argued that both are incompatible with freedom. We argue that Hudson has half the story right. Moreover, reflection on Hudson’s theses brings out an important point for debates about freedom generally: that instead of focusing on the notion of entailment, debates about freedom should focus on the notions of explanation and sourcehood. Hudson’s theses provide an excellent case study for why the latter notions ought to take precedence over the former in debates about freedom.

One mark of interpersonal relationships is a tendency to blame. But what precise evaluations and responses constitute blame? Is it most centrally a judgment, or is it an emotion, or something else? Does blame express a demand, or embody a protest, or does it simply mark an impaired relationship? What accounts for its force or sting, and how similar is it to punishment?The essays in this volume explore answers to these (and other) questions about the nature of blame, but they also explore the various norms that govern the propriety of blame. The traditional question is whether anyone ever deserves to be blamed, but the essays here provide a fresh perspective by focusing on blame from the blamer's perspective instead. Is our tendency to blame a vice, something we should work to replace with more humane ways of relating, or does it rather lie at the very heart of a commitment to morality? What can we legitimately expect of each other, and in general, what sort of attitude do would-be blamers need to have in order to have the standing to blame? Hypocritical or self-righteous blame seems objectionable, but why?The contributions to this volume aim to give us a fuller picture of the nature and norms of blame, and more generally of the promises and perils of membership in the human moral community.

Blame is usually discussed in the context of the free will problem, but recently moral philosophers have begun to examine it on its own terms. If, as many suppose, free will is to be understood as the control relevant to moral responsibility, and moral responsibility is to be understood in terms of whether blame is appropriate, then an independent inquiry into the nature and ethics of blame will be essential to solving (and, perhaps, even fully understanding) the free will problem. In this article we first survey and categorize recent accounts of the nature of blame – is it action, belief, emotion, desire, or something else? – and then we look at several proposed requirements on appropriate blame that look beyond the transgressor himself, considerations that will form part of a full account of the ethics of blame.

One of the most influential accounts of blame—the affective account—takes its cue from P.F. Strawson’s discussion of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone, on this account, is to target her with resentment, indignation, or (in the case of self-blame) guilt. Given the connection between these emotions and the demand for regard that is arguably central to morality, the affective account is quite plausible. Recently, however, George Sher has argued that the affective account of blame, as understood both by Strawson himself and by contemporary Strawsonians, is inadequate because it cannot make sense of blameworthiness. In this paper I defend the affective account of blame against several of Sher’s arguments for this conclusion. In the process, I clarify the Strawsonian account of moral responsibility, and I discuss how the affective account of blame ought to be understood and articulated

Although libertarians and compatibilists disagree about whether moral responsibility requires the falsity of determinism, they tend to agree that moral responsibility is at least compatible with the falsity of determinism. But there is a real worry about how that can be: after all, if my actions aren’t determined, then isn’t their occurrence just a matter of luck? In this paper, I offer a suggestion for how to understand and deal with this problem by appealing to the influential and powerful theory of moral responsibility developed by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza.