Against Symmetry

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-67
Author(s):  
Brian Weatherson
Keyword(s):  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Moral Ignorance ◽  
Moral Uncertainty ◽  
Suboptimal Outcome

This chapter argues that there are a host of intuitive asymmetries between moral uncertainty and factual uncertainty, and these are enough to undermine the symmetry-based motivation for internalism. Our reactive attitudes to our own past failings are different if the failings were caused by factual rather than moral ignorance. Factual ignorance can motivate taking a safe but known to be suboptimal outcome; moral ignorance cannot. And unlike factual ignorance, moral ignorance can only lead to bad action if it is paired with a motivation we should not have: namely a motivation to do what is right whatever that is. Various attempts to argue that this is a good motivation are considered and mostly rejected; the attempts that are plausible do not support popular forms of normative internalism.

Blame and Moral Ignorance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Sher
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Situation ◽  
Moral Ignorance ◽  
Moral Principles

People can be mistaken either about the truth of the moral principles they accept or about the rightness of their actions. Can they legitimately be blamed for acting wrongly when they know what they are doing but don’t know that it is wrong? This chapter argues that the answer is sometimes “yes,” but that whether blame is appropriate in any given case depends on certain facts about the actor’s epistemic situation. The aims of the chapter are to establish, first, that a morally ignorant wrongdoer’s epistemic circumstances do have a bearing on that person’s culpability, but, second, that giving content to this familiar view is far harder than is generally appreciated.

Reactive Attitudes Revisited: A Modest Revision

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deigh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Reactive Attitudes

The essay offers an interpretation of P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” on which attributions of moral responsibility presuppose a practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions, and what explains the practice is our liability to such reactive attitudes as resentment and indignation. The interpretation is offered to correct a common misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay. On this common misinterpretation, attributions of moral responsibility are implicit in the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation, and consequently our liability to these attitudes cannot explain these attributions. The reason this is a misinterpretation of Strawson’s essay is that Strawson’s compatibilist solution to the free will problem requires that our liability to the reactive attitudes be conceptually prior to our attributions of moral responsibility.

Communal Values and Character-Oriented Reactive Attitudes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm
Keyword(s):  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Gary Watson

Whereas most accounts of the reactive attitudes and of responsibility focus on norms of action, we must also consider norms of character: norms that govern the kind of person we can or must be. We are bound by norms of character and so responsible to fellow members for who we are in the same way as for norms of action: via the interpersonal rational patterns in our reactive attitudes. Accordingly, this Chapter develops an account of pride, shame, esteem, and contempt as character-oriented reactive attitudes, clarifies the sense in which these are globalist emotions, distinguishes between personal and social forms of pride and shame, and provides a partial defense of the value of shame and contempt. The result both illuminates the distinction between guilt and shame and, more fundamentally, provides a unified account of responsibility without dividing it into aretaic and accountability faces as Gary Watson does.

Responsibility, Authority, and the Bindingness of Norms

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Joint Commitment ◽  
Recognition Respect

In having reactive attitudes, we hold each other responsible to the norms of a community. Doing so appropriately presupposes both that one has the requisite authority and that the other is bound by that norm. We can understand this by turning to communities of respect and the patterns of reactive attitudes discussed in Chapter 3. As a member of a community of respect, one is party to a joint commitment, constituted by interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes, to the import of that community and thereby to the import of its members and norms. This joint commitment binds one to those norms and makes one be responsible to them. Likewise, to have authority is to have dignity as a member of such a community and so be a fit object of recognition respect by others who thereby normally ought to respond to the “call” of one’s reactive attitudes.

Respect and the Reactive Attitudes

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bennett W. Helm
Keyword(s):  
Reactive Attitudes ◽  
Reactive Attitude ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Recognition Respect

The nature of both respect and the reactive attitudes is illuminated by understanding the reactive attitudes to be a class of emotions distinguished by their forming a distinctively interpersonal pattern of rationality. In feeling a reactive attitude such as resentment, one holds the wrongdoer responsible by “calling on” him to feel guilt and on witnesses to feel disapprobation or indignation; other things being equal, one’s resentment is unwarranted if that “call” is not taken up by others. This call and its uptake are made intelligible through the community members’ joint background commitment to the value of the community and its norms, and to the dignity of its members as members—a commitment undertaken and reaffirmed in their reactive attitudes. The resulting interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes constitute their joint recognition respect for its norms and for each other as a part of their joint reverence for the community.

scholarly journals Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan on Omissions and Normative Ignorance: A Critical Reply

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Husak
Keyword(s):  
Moral Ignorance

AbstractReflections on Crime and Culpability seeks to elaborate, extend, and occasionally qualify the insights reached by Larry Alexander and Kim Ferzan in their influential prior collaboration, Crime and Culpability. They deftly explore any number of new issue that all criminal theorists should be encouraged to address. In my essay, I discuss and challenge their positions on omissions as well as on moral ignorance. Their treatment of the latter issue is a clear improvement over that in their earlier book. But their views on omissions suggest to me that they should have had reservations about some of the most fundamental claims of their overarching theory.

Moral Uncertainty

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Krister Bykvist
Keyword(s):  
Moral Uncertainty
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