Taylor Madigan

Many theories of responsibility claim that holding someone responsible is "incipiently communicative," but it has been difficult to pin down just what this amounts to. We offer an account of (1) a distinctive sense in which blaming is communicative; (2) what is communicated; and (3) how communication is achieved. Building on Fricker (2016) and others, our account is that blaming is communicative in the sense that it updates a body of mutually represented expectations — normative common ground — which happens via a process of presupposition accommodation.

Skeptics about moral responsibility are skeptical about “basic desert moral responsibility.” They claim that “we” are committed to basic desert moral responsibility in a wide range of ordinary practices; accordingly, if skeptics are right, “our” practices rest on a widespread mistake. In turn, the (purported) fact that “we” are systematically in error motivates the skeptic's revisionary proposals for alternative social practices. I aim to head off this line of thought at the first step: we do not have sufficient reason to think that we are committed to basic desert moral responsibility as pervasively as the skeptic contends. The significance of skepticism is proportional to how widespread commitment to basic desert moral responsibility is; accordingly, the less confident we should be that such a commitment is widespread, the less confident we should be that skepticism poses a significant challenge.

Pure quality of will theories claim that ‘the ultimate object’ of our responsibility responses (i.e., praise and blame) is the quality of our will. Any such theory is false—or so I argue. There is a second dimension of (moral) responsibility, independent of quality of will, that our responsibility responses track and take as their object—namely, how adroitly we are able to translate our will into action; I call this competence of will. I offer a conjectural explanation of the two dimensions of (moral) responsibility: it matters to us that people actually perform adequately well because of how much it matters to us that we are able to live and work together successfully.

There is a recurrent sort of skeptical character in philosophical debates who believes that some social practice must be abolished because it involves a false presupposition about how things ‘really’ are. I examine this style of skeptical argument, using the moral responsibility skeptic as my main illustration. I excavate two unstated and un-argued for premises that it requires (which I call Undistorted Truth and Privileged Conception). This exposes the full extent of the argumentative burdens that such a skeptic must discharge. I aim to make progress by offering skeptics and anti-skeptics alike a way forward: the skeptic is provided a clear agenda, while the anti-skeptic is provided a diagnostic tool to assess this style of skeptical arguments at key junctures.