Abstract
It is commonly held that no one can be morally responsible for a necessary truth. In this paper, I will provide various examples that cast doubt on this idea. I also show that one popular argument for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism (van Inwagen’s Direct Argument) fails given my examples.
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Notes
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for making this point.
For another discussion of the idea that one can be responsible for world-indexed propositions, see Fischer (1996). In this paper, Fischer discusses the idea that all propositions are world-indexed. Though this is not the tack I take, if one accepted this and accepted that morally responsibility is possible, one would have to accept that one is responsible for necessary truths. This is because, as Fischer points out, all truths are necessary according to this account. To my mind, Fischer’s criticisms of this idea are decisive.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for highlighting several of the points that follow.
The authors distinguish bodily omissions from complex omissions. Bodily omissions are wholly constituted by an agent’s bodily movements (thus a failure to raise one’s left hand may be constituted by placing one’s left hand by one’s side). A complex omission involves a bodily movement and some other state of the world (such as FLT being unrefuted). Fischer and Ravizza call these states ‘consequence-universals’ (for more on these, see p. 96).
See note 4.
Assuming that certain other conditions are met (such as that the agent takes responsibility for the mechanism that leads to the bodily movement).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ofra Magidor, Julia Markovits, Al Mele, Carl Ginet and an anonymous referee for comments.
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Kearns, S. Responsibility for necessities. Philos Stud 155, 307–324 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9574-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9574-4