A Contextualist Account of Moral Responsibility

If the ability analysis of control is correct, it demonstrates that abilities are pivotal to an account of the control required for moral responsibility. But the precise details do not matter for the argument of the last two chapters. All that requires is the much less contentious claim that abilities to do otherwise are part of an analysis of robust control. If this is so, then the issue of the consequences of a contextualist theory of agential modals for a theory of moral responsibility arises. The aim of this chapter is to begin exploring these consequences. The first four sections outline a positive case for the view that our attributions of moral responsibility have different semantic values relative to different contexts of utterance. This argument draws upon the preceding considerations, semantic evidence, the argument from manipulation, and experimental data regarding our folk intuitions. The chapter ends by contrasting the resulting contextualist analysis of moral responsibility with an alternative proposal, offered by Björnsson and Persson.