Moral Responsibility: Beyond Free Will and Determinism

✍ Scribed by Nicole A Vincent, Ibo van de Poel (auth.), Nicole A. Vincent, Ibo van de Poel, Jeroen van den Hoven (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 260
• Series: Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy 27
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

It is well over a decade since John Fischer and Mark Ravizza – and before them, Jay Wallace and Daniel Dennett – defended responsibility from the threat of determinism. But defending responsibility from determinism is a potentially endless and largely negative enterprise; it can go on for as long as dissenting voices remain, and although such work strengthens the theoretical foundations of these theories, it won’t necessarily build anything on top of those foundations, nor will it move these theories into new territory or explain how to apply them to practical contexts.

To this end, the papers in this volume address these more positive challenges by exploring how compatibilist responsibility theory can be extended and/or applied in a range of practical contexts. For instance, how is the narrow philosophical concept of responsibility that was defended from the threat of determinism related to the plural notions of responsibility present in everyday discourse, and how might this more fine-grained understanding of responsibility open up new vistas and challenges for compatibilist theory? What light might compatibilism shed, and what light might be shed upon it, by political debates about access to public welfare in the context of responsibility for one’s own health, and by legal debates about the impact of self-intoxication on responsibility. Does compatibilist theory, which was originally designed to cater for analysis of individual actions, scale to scenarios that involve group action and collective responsibility — e.g. for harms due to human-induced climate change?

This book’s chapters deal with a range of theoretical problems discussed in classic compatibilist literature — e.g. the relationship between responsibility and capacity, the role of historical tracing in discounting the exculpatory value of incapacities, and the justifiability of retributive punishment. But instead of motivating their discussions by focusing on the alleged threat that determinism poses to responsibility, these chapters’ authors have animated their discussions by tackling important practical problems which crop up in contemporary debates about responsibility.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-vii
Introduction....Pages 1-13
A Structured Taxonomy of Responsibility Concepts....Pages 15-35
The Relation Between Forward-Looking and Backward-Looking Responsibility....Pages 37-52
Beyond Belief and Desire: or, How to Be Orthonomous....Pages 53-70
Blame, Reasons and Capacities....Pages 71-81
Please Drink Responsibly: Can the Responsibility of Intoxicated Offenders Be Justified by the Tracing Principle?....Pages 83-99
The Moral Significance of Unintentional Omission: Comparing Will-Centered and Non-will-centered Accounts of Moral Responsibility....Pages 101-120
Desert, Responsibility and Luck Egalitarianism....Pages 121-140
Communicative Revisionism....Pages 141-160
Moral Responsibility and Jointly Determined Consequences....Pages 161-179
Joint Responsibility Without Individual Control: Applying the Explanation Hypothesis....Pages 181-199
Climate Change and Collective Responsibility....Pages 201-218
Collective Responsibility, Epistemic Action and Climate Change....Pages 219-245
Back Matter....Pages 247-251

✦ Subjects

Ethics; Philosophy of Law; Philosophy of Medicine; Philosophy of Mind