Doing One's Reasonable Best: What Moral Responsibility Requires

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN MONTMINY
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
General Condition ◽  
Skeptical Argument ◽  
Epistemic Condition ◽  
Michael Zimmerman

ABSTRACT:Moral responsibility, I argue, requires agents to do what is within their abilities to act morally. This means that an agent is to blame just in case his wrongdoing is due to an underperformance, that is, to a failure to do what he can to act morally. I defend this account by considering a skeptical argument about responsibility put forth by Gideon Rosen and by Michael Zimmerman. I explain why the epistemic condition they endorse is inadequate and why my alternative epistemic condition, which directly follows from my general condition on culpability, should be preferred. I then defend my view against potential criticisms.

scholarly journals On Responsibility and Original Sin: A Molinist Suggestion

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-25
Author(s):  
Mark B. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Michael Zimmerman

A crucial objection to the doctrine of original sin is that it conflicts with a common intuition that agents are morally responsible only for factors under their control. Here, I present an account of moral responsibility by Michael Zimmerman that accommodates that intuition, and I consider it as a model of original sin, noting both attractions and difficulties with the view.

scholarly journals Responsibility: The Epistemic Condition

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
High Time ◽  
Epistemic Condition ◽  
Quality Of Will ◽  
Independent Condition ◽  
Moral Ignorance ◽  
Full Volume

Philosophers have long agreed that moral responsibility might not only have a freedom condition, but also an epistemic condition. Moral responsibility and knowledge interact, but the question is exactly how. Ignorance might constitute an excuse, but the question is exactly when. Surprisingly enough, the epistemic condition has only recently attracted the attention of scholars, and it is high time for a full volume on the topic. The chapters in this volume address the following central questions. Does the epistemic condition require akrasia? Why does blameless ignorance excuse? Does moral ignorance sustained by one’s culture excuse? Does the epistemic condition involve knowledge of the wrongness or wrongmaking features of one’s action? Is the epistemic condition an independent condition, or is it derivative from one’s quality of will or intentions? Is the epistemic condition sensitive to degrees of difficulty? Are there different kinds of moral responsibility and thus multiple epistemic conditions? Is the epistemic condition revisionary? What is the basic structure of the epistemic condition?

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Regress Argument ◽  
Epistemic Condition ◽  
Section 8 ◽  
The Core ◽  
Current State

This Introduction provides an overview of the current state of the debate on the epistemic condition of moral responsibility. Its main goal is to offer a framework that contextualizes the chapters that follow. Section 1 discusses the main concepts of ‘ignorance’ and ‘responsibility’. Section 2 asks why agents should inform themselves. Section 3 describes what is taken to be the core agreement among the main participants in the debate. Section 4 explains how this agreement invites a regress argument with a revisionist implication. Section 5 provides an overview of the main responses to the regress argument. Section 6 addresses the question of why blameless ignorance excuses. Section 7 describes further issues that are addressed in the book. Section 8 concludes with some discussion of future directions the debate might take.

On Knowing What’s Right and Being Responsible for It

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Intentional Action ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Philosophy Of Action ◽  
Right Action ◽  
Epistemic Condition ◽  
Moral Ignorance ◽  
Wrong Thing ◽  
The Right ◽  
Central Claim

The debate about whether moral responsibility has an epistemic condition has traditionally focused on whether and, if so, when moral ignorance can provide an excuse for wrong actions. This chapter takes up the question of moral responsibility for right actions. Its central claim is that whether an agent is morally responsible for her right action depends on whether she knows what the right thing is to do. The chapter’s argument for this appeals to considerations from the philosophy of action. It argues that moral knowledge matters to moral evaluations because it is a central ingredient in intentional action. Our knowledge of what the right and wrong thing is to do partly determines whether we do the right or wrong thing intentionally. Moral responsibility inherits its epistemic condition from the epistemic condition on intentional action.

scholarly journals Defending the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Montminy
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Epistemic Condition ◽  
Quality Of Will ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wrong Action

I consider three challenges to the traditional view according to which moral responsibility involves an epistemic condition in addition to a freedom condition. The first challenge holds that if a person performs an action A freely, then she thereby knows that she is doing A. The epistemic condition is thus built into the freedom condition. The second challenge contends that no epistemic condition is required for moral responsibility, since a person may be blameworthy for an action that she did not know was wrong. The third challenge invokes the quality of will view. On this view, a person is blameworthy for a wrong action just in case the action manifests a bad quality of will. The blameworthy person need not satisfy an additional epistemic condition. I will argue that contrary to appearances, none of these challenges succeeds. Hence, moral responsibility does require a non-superfluous epistemic condition.

Tracing the Epistemic Condition

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Epistemic Condition ◽  
Adequate Theory ◽  
Culpable Ignorance ◽  
General Line ◽  
Epistemic Dimension ◽  
Explanatory Mechanism

Tracing is an explanatory strategy which proposes to explain responsibility for some present action (where a necessary condition on responsibility is missing) by tracing back to some past one (in which the conditions are met). Tracing is thought by many theorists of moral responsibility to be an indispensable element of an adequate theory of responsibility. Previously, the author has argued that we can dispense with tracing for cases in which control is absent, by appealing to either a recklessness model or a negligence model. This chapter considers the prospects for that general line of argument with respect to tracing applied to the epistemic condition on responsibility, notably cases of culpable ignorance. It draws out how the author understands tracing to apply to the epistemic dimension and argues that we need no special explanatory mechanism like tracing to explain responsibility and blameworthiness.

scholarly journals Enhancing responsibility: Directions for an interdisciplinary investigation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Fischborn
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Skeptical Argument ◽  
Original Experiment ◽  
Discussion Section ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Legal Punishment ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Central Claim

[Note: articles are in English; Intro, Discussion, and Conclusion are in Portuguese.] Responsibility practices that are part of our daily lives involve, among other things, standards about how one should praise, blame, or punish people for their actions, as well as particular acts that follow those standards to a greater or lesser extent. A classical question in philosophy asks whether human beings can actually be morally responsible for what they do. This dissertation argues that addressing this classical question is insufficient if one wants the investigation of moral responsibility to serve the goal of improving ordinary responsibility practices. As an alternative, I offer directions for an interdisciplinary investigation that I take to be in a better position to promote that goal. My argument is developed in five articles and a discussion section. The first four articles describe limitations of skeptical views, which deny the existence of moral responsibility. The first article assesses a skeptical argument based on results from neuroscience that intends to show that there is no free will. I argue that a premise in the argument—which says that choices are determined by events in the brain—is not supported by the available results. The second article argues that, despite the fact that existent results do not show that choices are determined by brain events, further studies in neuroscience could in principle do that. The third article begins the discussion of limitations that concern the implementability of some of the changes in responsibility practices recommended in skeptical approaches. Specifically, I describe challenges that attempts to reduce the severity of legal punishment are likely to face due to psychological facts about belief in free will and desire to punish. The forth article presents results from an original experiment that sought to test a hypothesis about the workings of belief in free will and the desire to punish, namely the hypothesis that the desire to punish causally affects beliefs about free will. Results failed to support the hypothesis. Finally, the fifth article presents what I call the enhancement model, i.e., a proposal about how to structure an interdisciplinary investigation that can promote the enhancement of ordinary responsibility practices. The final discussion section shows how the enhancement model overcomes some of the limitations of recent discussions about the existence of moral responsibility, which includes not just the skeptical views considered in earlier articles, but also views that affirm the existence of moral responsibility and free will. The central claim of this dissertation, therefore, is that the investigation of moral responsibility can be rearranged so as to further the goal of improving ordinary responsibility practices.

scholarly journals Explaining (Away) the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Epistemic Condition ◽  
Quality Of Will ◽  
Explanatory Relation ◽  
Moral Blame

This chapter combines the familiar Strawsonian idea that moral blame and credit depend on the agent’s quality of will with an independently motivated account of responsibility as grounded in a normal explanatory relation between agential qualities and objects of responsibility. The resulting “explanatory quality of will condition” on moral responsibility is then further motivated by being shown to account for the effects on moral blame and credit of justifications, excuses, and undermined control in cases where agents are fully aware of what they are doing. Having been independently motivated, the explanatory quality of will condition is then applied to cases involving lack of awareness. Though this condition involves no explicit epistemic condition on responsibility, it is shown how it accounts for the degrees to which lack of awareness can excuse.

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