No Excuses

Philosophical accounts of moral responsibility are standardly framed by two platitudes: blame requires (1) the presence of a moral defect in the agent and (2) the absence of excuses. In this essay, this kind of approach is challenged. It is argued that (a) people sometimes violate moral norms due to performance mistakes, (b) it often appears reasonable to hold them responsible for it, and (c) their mistakes cannot be traced to their moral qualities or to the presence of excuses. In the end, the implications for discussions of moral responsibility are discussed.

On the Concept and the Nature of Law

The central argument of this chapter turns on the dual-nature thesis. This thesis sets out the claim that law necessarily comprises both a real or factual dimension and an ideal or critical dimension. The dual-nature thesis is incompatible with both exclusive legal positivism and inclusive legal positivism. It is also incompatible with variants of non-positivism according to which legal validity is lost in all cases of moral defect or demerit or, alternatively, is affected in no way at all by moral defects or demerits. The dual nature of law is expressed, on the one hand, by the Radbruch Formula, which says that extreme injustice is no law, and, on the other, by the correctness argument, which says that law’s claim to correctness necessarily includes a claim to moral correctness. Thus, what the law is depends not only on social facts but also on what the law ought to be.

The Actor, the Mirror, the Soul and the Sylph

The ‘unnatural’ mixed emotions of Chimène, heroine of Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid (1636), almost destroyed the dramatist. The 17th century brought strong new attempts to create a taxonomy of clearly defined and acceptably knowable ‘passions’. Stimulated by Descartes, Charles Le Brun produced his famous graphic representations of individual emotions as physically expressed in the face. Such catalogues of emotions attracted English theorists of acting, such as Aaron Hill whose Art of Acting interested Samuel Richardson. A standard feat of English poets from Dryden to Gray and Collins is to run through the passions, briefly exhibiting the activities and nature of the distinctive emotions. That the passions could be so well noted and imitated produced new problems, rendering representation of the passions doubtful, chicanery lacking in soul, as the acting of Garrick seemed to Diderot. New interest in mixed emotions and more fluid affections turned against the single passion and the encyclopedic list. Literary works moved towards a more dynamic and changeable account of emotional states and possibilities. Innovative large mirrors brought the self more literally to the eye, stimulating reflection on variability; we glimpse the possibility of future emotions and affective states not yet known. Mixed emotions and half shades become more engrossing than grand passions. Pope’s Sylphs, rooted in Paracelsian fiction, proffer new versions of both self and emotions, or emotional states. The mirror becomes not a diagnostic instrument detecting moral defect, but, as in Richardson’s novels, an opening to a possible future self.

Architecture, Art, And Moderate Moralism

In this essay Noël Carroll explores the question of whether a moral defect in a work of architectural art can ever also count as an aesthetic /artistic defect. Adopting the stance of a moderate moralist and mobilizing what has been called the “uptake argument,” he argues against the moderate autonomist that sometimes a moral defect in an architectural artwork can also be an aesthetic/artistic defect

Hamartia in Aristotle And Greek Tragedy

It is now generally agreed that in Aristotle's Poetics, ch. 13 means ‘mistake of fact’. The moralizing interpretation favoured by our Victorian forebears and their continental counterparts was one of the many misunderstandings fostered by their moralistic society, and in our own enlightened erais revealed as an aberration. In challenging this orthodoxy I am not moved by any particular enthusiasm for Victoriana, nor do I want to revive the view that means simply ‘moral flaw’ or ‘morally wrong action’. I shall try to show that the word has a range of applications, from ‘ignorance of fact’ at one end to ‘moral defect’, ‘moral error’, at the other, and that the modern orthodoxy, though not as clearly wrong as the moralizing interpretation it displaced, restricts Aristotle's meaning in a way he did not intend, and does lessthan justice to his analysis of classical drama.

“Pseudologia Phantastica, or Pathological Lying, in a Case of Hysteria with Moral Defect.”

So little has been written in this country on Pseudologia Phantastica, or Pathological Lying, that Dr. George Robertson, Physician Superintendent of the Royal Asylum, Edinburgh, has urged me to report the following case of this disorder associated with hysteria and a certain degree of moral defect.