Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

In his latest book Mechanical Choices, Michael Moore provides an explication and defence of the idea that responsibility comes in degrees. His account takes as its point of departure the view that free action and free will consist in the holding of certain counterfactuals. In this paper, I argue that Moore’s view faces several familiar counterexamples, all of which serve to motivate Harry Frankfurt’s classic insight that whether and to what extent one is responsible for one’s action has more to (...) do with what actually caused that action than with what one could or couldn’t have done instead. I then go on to sketch an alternative approach to degrees of responsibility that takes seriously this insight. I’ll argue that Moore ought to be sympathetic to this approach, inasmuch as it combines two familiar Moorean ideas: the idea that causal contribution comes in degrees, and the idea that acting freely is compatible with, and indeed entails, the fact that one’s action was caused by prior states of affairs. (shrink)

According to the response-dependence view of moral responsibility, a person is morally responsible just in case, and in virtue of the fact that, she is an appropriate target for reactive attitudes. This paper raises a new puzzle regarding response-dependence: there is a mismatch between the granularity of the reactive attitudes and of responsibility facts. Whereas the reactive attitudes are comparatively coarse-grained, responsibility facts can be quite fine-grained. This poses a challenge for response-dependence, which seeks to ground facts about responsibility in (...) facts about the reactive attitudes. Specifically, reactive attitudes are not enough for grounding facts about degrees of moral responsibility. The responsedependence view thus requires significant revisions or supplementations. (shrink)

Schiller says that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Here I attempt to defend a claim in the same spirit as Schiller’s but by different means. My thesis is that a person’s autonomous agency depends on their adopting an aesthetic identity. To act, we need to don contingent features of agency, things that structure our practical thought and explain what we do in very general terms but are neither universal nor necessary features of agency (...) as such. Without these things, the question of what to do for any individual would be underdetermined. The problem is that adopting such a contingent form of agency amounts to a restriction on what we can do, and so it is a prima facie threat to our autonomy. I will argue that one way, and indeed the only way, of meeting this challenge lies in aesthetic experience. Granting our capacity for aesthetic pleasure the authority to determine the particularities of our agency is compatible with autonomy because doing so means identifying with one’s capacity for pleasure in free and creative activity. Doing this allows us to be both particular sorts of agents and creatures regulated by the universalizing demands of reason. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses existing accounts of the nature of difficulty, finds them wanting, and proposes a new account. The concept of difficulty is routinely invoked in debates regarding degrees of moral responsibility, and the value of achievement. Until recently, however, there has not been any sustained attempt to provide an account of the nature of difficulty itself. This has changed with Gwen Bradford’s Achievement, which argues that difficulty is a matter of how much intense effort is expended. But while (...) this account captures something important about the relationship between difficulty and achievement, it fails to account for the fact that part of what makes achievements great is that they are difficult in a moderately agent-neutral kind of way. Nor is this thought captured by any other extant account. I argue that to fill this gap we should think of difficulty in terms of low probability of success. (shrink)

Failures are sometimes, but not always, causally relevant to events. For instance, the failure of the sprinkler was causally relevant to the house fire. However, the failure of the dam upstream to break (thus inundating the house with water) was not. Similarly, failures to prevent harms are sometimes, but not always, morally wrong. For instance, failing to save a nearby drowning child is morally wrong. Yet, you are also in some sense “allowing” someone on another continent to drown right now, (...) and this seems permissible. Here, I argue that these two issues are connected. Roughly, I argue that it is prima facie morally wrong to fail to prevent a particular harm if and only if one’s omission is causally relevant to that harm’s occurrence. The result is that, contrary to what Peter Singer claims, failing to donate to famine relief is not morally equivalent to failing to rescue a drowning child in a shallow pond. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

This paper considers how a number of particular disabilities can impact agency primarily by affecting what psychologists refer to as ‘executive function.’ Some disabilities, I argue, could decrease agency even without fully undermining it. I see this argument as contributing to the growing literature that sees agency as coming in degrees. The first section gives a broad outline of a fairly standard approach to agency. The second section relates that framework to the existing literature, which suggests that agency comes in (...) degrees. The third section considers the psychological literature on executive function with a particular focus on how aspects of executive function contribute to agency. I then consider, in sections 4 and 5, two disabilities that have an impact on an agent’s executive function. Other disabilities will likely involve comparable impacts, although I don’t have time to explore additional disabilities in the present paper. (shrink)

Traditionally, theories of moral responsibility feature only the minimally sufficient conditions for moral responsibility. While these theories are well-suited to account for the threshold of responsibility, it’s less clear how they can address questions about the degree to which agents are responsible. One feature that intuitively affects the degree to which agents are morally responsible is how difficult performing a given action is for them. Recently, philosophers have begun to develop accounts of scalar moral responsibility that make use of this (...) notion of difficulty (Coates and Swenson 2013; Nelkin 2016). In this paper, I argue that these accounts, although innovative, are incomplete. The degree to which agents are morally responsible is determined not only by the difficulties that agents face but also by the quality of the reasons for which they act. (shrink)

In a recent essay, Deery and Nahmias :1255–1276, 2017) utilize interventionism about causation to develop an account of causal sourcehood in order to defend compatibilism about free will and moral responsibility from manipulation arguments. In this paper, we criticize Deery and Nahmias’s analysis of sourcehood by drawing a distinction between two forms of causal invariance that can come into conflict on their account. We conclude that any attempt to resolve this conflict will either result in counterintuitive attributions of moral responsibility (...) or will undermine their response to manipulation arguments. (shrink)

One way of being responsible for an action is being praiseworthy for it. But what is the “praise” of which the praiseworthy agent is worthy? This paper provides a survey of answers to this question, i.e. a survey of possible accounts of praise’s nature. It then presents an overview of candidate norms governing our responses of praise. By attending to praise’s nature and appropriateness conditions, we stand to acquire a richer conception of what it is to be, and to regard (...) another as, a responsible agent. (shrink)

Philosophical views of responsibility often identify responsible agency with capacities like rationality and self-control. Yet in ordinary life, we frequently hold individuals responsible who are deficient in these capacities, such as children or people with mental illness. The existing literature that addresses these cases has suggested that we merely pretend to hold these agents responsible, or that they are responsible to a diminished degree. In this paper, I demonstrate that neither of these approaches is satisfactory, and offer an alternative focused (...) on the role relationships play in determining whether it is appropriate to hold someone responsible. I argue that relationships are sources of normative expectations about how parties in that relationship ought to behave, and that we can be responsible in virtue of being subject to these norms. This is so, not only for those who are impaired or immature, but for all of us. (shrink)

In this paper I consider an argument for the possibility of intending at will, and its relationship to an argument about the possibility of believing at will. I argue that although we have good reason to think we sometimes intend at will, we lack good reason to think this in the case of believing. Instead of believing at will, agents like us often suppose at will.

Although philosophers have explored several connections between neuroscience and moral responsibility, the issue of how real-world neurological modifications, such as Deep Brain Stimulation, impact moral responsibility has received little attention. In this article, we draw on debates about the relevance of history and manipulation to moral responsibility to argue that certain kinds of neurological modification can diminish the responsibility of the agents so modified. We argue for a historicist position - a version of the history-sensitive reflection view - and defend (...) that account against a rival, relational view of responsibility. We conclude that DBS can, under certain conditions, diminish responsibility, and explore the circumstances under which this might be so. We conclude by suggesting that philosophical debates about moral responsibility, manipulation, and history have greater practical relevance than is sometimes thought, and that attention to practical cases can help inform and deepen this body of scholarship. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is an influential family of views in the ethics of self-defense and war: views that ground the agent’s liability to be attacked in self-defense in the agent’s moral responsibility for the threat posed. I critically examine the concept of responsibility employed by such views, by looking at potential connections with the contemporary literature on moral responsibility. I start by uncovering some of the key assumptions that Responsibility Views make about the relevant concept of responsibility, and (...) by scrutinizing those assumptions under the lens of more general theorizing about responsibility. I identify an important conflict that arises at that point. The problem is that the concept presupposed by Responsibility Views is in tension with the standard way of understanding the connection between the neutral and non-neutral forms of moral responsibility. I draw attention to a particular strategy that could be used to address this challenge, but I also identify some important obstacles that stand in the way. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that a necessary condition on moral blameworthiness is that the wrongdoer can reasonably be expected to avoid the action for which she is blamed. Those who think so assume as a matter of course that the expectations at issue here are normative expectations that contrast with the non-normative or predictive expectations we form concerning the probable conduct of others, and they believe, or at least assume, that there is a clear-cut distinction between the two. In this paper (...) I put this widespread assumption under scrutiny and argue that it’s mistaken: although predictive and normative expectations are indeed distinct, there is no sharp separation between them. On the contrary, predictive expectations can have a substantial bearing on normative expectations in two related ways: they can recalibrate what is reasonable to expect of agents when responsibility attributions are at stake and they can help to uncover previously undetected excusing conditions. I illustrate my claims with the famous bystander effect from social psychology and show that it yields predictive expectations that affect normative expectations in these two ways. (shrink)

Sometimes ignorance is an excuse. If an agent did not know and could not have known that her action would realize some bad outcome, then it is plausible to maintain that she is not to blame for realizing that outcome, even when the act that leads to this outcome is wrong. This general thought can be brought to bear in the context of climate change insofar as we think (a) that the actions of individual agents play some role in realizing (...) climate harms and (b) that these actions are apt targets for being considered right or wrong. Are agents who are ignorant about climate change and the way their actions contribute to it excused because of their ignorance, or is their ignorance culpable? In this paper I examine these questions from the perspective of recent developments in the theories of responsibility for ignorant action and characterize their verdicts. After developing some objections to existing attempts to explore these questions, I characterize two influential theories of moral responsibility and discuss their implications for three different types of ignorance about climate change. I conclude with some recommendations for how we should react to the face of the theories' conflicting verdicts. The answer to the question posed in the title, then, is: "Well, it's complicated.". (shrink)

Drug use and drug addiction are severely stigmatised around the world. Marc Lewis does not frame his learning model of addiction as a choice model out of concern that to do so further encourages stigma and blame. Yet the evidence in support of a choice model is increasingly strong as well as consonant with core elements of his learning model. I offer a responsibility without blame framework that derives from reflection on forms of clinical practice that support change and recovery (...) in patients who cause harm to themselves and others. This framework can be used to interrogate our own attitudes and responses, so that we can better see how to acknowledge the truth about choice and agency in addiction, while avoiding stigma and blame, and instead maintaining care and compassion alongside a commitment to working for social justice and good. (shrink)

In this paper I consider what a person who finds herself religiously incapacitated ought to do. More specifically, I address people who have come to God asking for bread, but who seem to have received stones and serpents in its place. This is a manifestation of the phenomenon that I call religious trauma. My goals in this paper are twofold. First, I aim to demonstrate that, because religious trauma can be genuinely religiously incapacitating, (1) it can result in non-culpable failure (...) to worship God, and (2), if ought implies can, a religious trauma survivor may find themself in a position where they ought to deconvert, whether or not the individual’s religion is true. My second goal in this paper is to illustrate that religious trauma deserves serious consideration from philosophers and theologians. (shrink)

In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the (...) action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons-responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine-grained measures of degrees of reasons-responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty to extend the reasons-responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility. (shrink)

We propose an original response to Derk Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. This response combines a hard-line and a soft-line. Like hard-liners, we insist that the manipulated agent is blameworthy for his wrongdoing. However, like soft-liners, we maintain that there is a difference in blameworthiness between the manipulated agent and the non-manipulated one. The former is less blameworthy than the latter. This difference is due to the fact that it is more difficult for the manipulated agent to do the right thing. (...) We explain how we can make sense of this notion of difficulty in terms of Fischer and Ravizza’s notion of reasons-responsiveness. (shrink)

I argue that a capacity‐based account of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness is superior to an account based on quality of will. I focus on four types of cases about which the two accounts disagree and show that the capacity‐based view offers a better treatment. As part of my argument, I motivate the distinction between an assessment of a person's moral character, as reflected by her action, and an assessment of her blameworthiness or praiseworthiness for that action.

Many important harms result in large part from our collective omissions, such as harms from our omissions to stop climate change and famines. Accounting for responsibility for collective omissions turns out to be particularly challenging. It is hard to see how an individual contributes anything to a collective omission to prevent harm if she couldn’t have made a difference to that harm on her own. Some groups are able to prevent such harms, but it is highly contentious whether groups can (...) be loci of responsibility. This paper takes an existing and plausible framework of moral responsibility—one based on abilities—and scales it up to accommodate responsibility for collective omissions. This centrally involves identifying what the relevant collective abilities are and how they work. One significant benefit of this approach is that we can do this while remaining neutral on the debates about collective agency and collective responsibility by showing how individualist and collectivist versions of the theory work. Finally, I explore several further upshots of the scaled-up ability-based account, including that degrees of responsibility can be cashed out in terms of strengths of the relevant abilities, which has both theoretical and applied implications. (shrink)

How do the fact that an agent is morally responsible for a certain morally objectionable action and the fact that she is an appropriate target of blame for it relate to each other? Many authors inspired by Peter Strawson say that they necessarily co‐occur. Standard answers to the question of why they co‐occur say that the occurrence of one of the facts explains that the other obtains. This article presents a third option: that they are one and the same fact. (...) There is no difference between the fact that a person is an appropriate target of blame for an objectionable action and the fact that she is morally responsible for it. This view has the advantage of being metaphysically more parsimonious and of answering, in an elegant and plausible way, an interesting question about which many standard theories of responsibility keep silent: what is it to be morally responsible simpliciter? (shrink)

Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious, ‘introspectively inaccessible’ attitudes. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence of partial awareness for individuals’ moral responsibility. First, I argue that responsibility comes in degrees. Second, I argue that individuals’ partial awareness of their implicit biases makes (...) them (partially) morally responsible for them. I argue by analogy to a close relative of implicit bias: moods. (shrink)

Does having a mental disorder, in general, affect whether someone is morally responsible for an action? Many people seem to think so, holding that mental disorders nearly always mitigate responsibility. Against this Naïve view, we argue for a Nuanced account. The problem is not just that different theories of responsibility yield different verdicts about particular cases. Even when all reasonable theories agree about what's relevant to responsibility, the ways mental illness can affect behavior are so varied that a more nuanced (...) approach is needed. (shrink)

This paper takes as its starting point the thesis that one is responsible for one’s actions insofar as one has the ability to act for good reasons. Such a view faces a challenge: it is plausible that only beings with the ability to reflect are responsible agents, and yet it seems that not only is it possible to act for reasons without reflecting, it seems to happen quite frequently. Thus, advocates of the rational-ability view of responsibility must either reject as (...) a necessary condition that responsible agents must have the ability to reflect, or locate a plausible role for reflective ability. In this paper, I propose and assess a variety of ways to meet this challenge. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 687-709, November 2021.

I defend an instrumentalist account of moral responsibility and adopt Manuel Vargas’ idea that our responsibility practices are justified by their effects. However, whereas Vargas gives an independent account of morally responsible agency, on my account, responsible agency is defined as the susceptibility to developing and maintaining moral agency through being held responsible. I show that the instrumentalism I propose can avoid some problems more crude forms of instrumentalism encounter by adopting aspects of Strawsonian accounts. I then show the implications (...) for our understanding of responsibility: my account requires us to adopt a graded notion of responsibility and accept the claim that certain individuals may not be responsible because they are not susceptible to being influenced by our moral responsibility practices. Finally, I discuss whether the account is committed to allowing the instrumentalization of non-responsible individuals in cases where blaming them may benefit others’ moral agency. (shrink)

Situations are powerful: the evidence from experimental social psychology suggests that agents are hugely influenced by the situations they find themselves in, often without their knowing it. In our paper, we evaluate how situational factors affect our reasons-responsiveness, as conceived of by John Fischer and Mark Ravizza, and, through this, how they also affect moral responsibility. We argue that the situationist experiments suggest that situational factors impair, among other things, our moderate reasons-responsiveness, which is plausibly required for moral responsibility. However, (...) even though we argue that situational factors lower the degree of our reasons-responsiveness, we propose that agents remain moderately reasons-responsive to the degree required for moral responsibility. Nonetheless, those affected by situational factors are arguably less morally responsible than those who are not subject to similar situational factors. We further evaluate an understanding of reasons-responsiveness which relativizes reasons-responsiveness to agents’ circumstances. We argue that the situationist data do not warrant this kind of divergence from Fischer’s and Ravizza’s account. We conclude by discussing what situationist experiments tell us about our relationship to non-reasons. (shrink)

Value and responsibility are two central concepts in philosophy and bioethics. The articles that comprise this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy engage topics of moral injury, madness, transhumanism, cognitive enhancement, and the woman’s responsibility to assist her fetus. Clearly diverse in matter, these subject articles univocally present fruitful ground for engagement with contemporary questions that impact society today. The ability to cure or to enhance, to treat or to terminate through advances in medical technology are all actions (...) that come with personal and social responsibility for their consequences. By approaching each article through the dual lens of value and responsibility, the reader is challenged to think seriously about the values we hold as human persons and the responsibility we take to pursue and protect these values. (shrink)

This short review examines the work of four Canadian scholars addressing a variety of questions about criminal responsibility. The essays under review are a small part of a recent collection of essays entitled “Rethinking Criminal Law Theory: New Canadian Perspectives in the Philosophy of Domestic, Transnational, and International Criminal Law.”.

Addiction appears to be a deeply moralized concept. To understand the entwinement of addiction and morality, we briefly discuss the disease model and its alternatives in order to address the following questions: Is the disease model the only path towards a ‘de-moralized’ discourse of addiction? While it is tempting to think that medical language surrounding addiction provides liberation from the moralized language, evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. On the other hand non-disease models of addiction may seem (...) to resuscitate problematic forms of the moralization of addiction, including, invoking blame, shame, and the wholesale rejection of addicts as people who have deep character flaws, while ignoring the complex biological and social context of addiction. This is also not necessarily the case. We argue that a deficit in reasons responsiveness as basis for attribution of moral responsibility can be realized by multiple different causes, disease being one, but it also seems likely that alternative accounts of addiction as developed by Flanagan, Lewis, and Levy, may also involve mechanisms, psychological, social, and neurobiological that can diminish reasons responsiveness. It thus seems to us that nondisease models of addiction do not necessarily involve moralization. Hence, a non-stigmatizing approach to recovery can be realized in ways that are consistent with both the disease model and alternative models of addiction. (shrink)

As neuroscience progresses, we will not only gain a better understanding of how our brains work, but also a better understanding of how to modify them, and as a result, our mental states. An important question we are faced with is whether the state could be justified in implementing such methods on criminal offenders, without their consent, for the purposes of rehabilitation and reduction of recidivism; a practice that is already legal in some jurisdictions. By focusing on a prominent type (...) of view of free action, which I call bypassing views, this paper evaluates how such interventions may negatively impact the freedom of their subjects. The paper concludes that there will be a tension between the goals of rehabilitation and reduction of recidivism, on the one hand, and the negative impact such interventions may have on free action, on the other. Other things equal, the better that a particular intervention is at achieving the former, the more likely it is to result in the latter. (shrink)

We use recent interventionist theories of causation to develop a compatibilist account of causal sourcehood, which provides a response to Manipulation Arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Our account explains the difference between manipulation and determinism, against the claim of Manipulation Arguments that there is no relevant difference. Interventionism allows us to see that causal determinism does not mean that variables outside of the agent causally explain her actions better than variables within the agent, whereas the causal (...) source of a manipulated agent’s actions instead lies outside of the agent in the intentions of the manipulator. As a result, determined agents can have free will and be morally responsible in a way that manipulated agents cannot, contrary to what Manipulation Arguments conclude. In this way, our account demonstrates not only how Manipulation Arguments fail but also how compatibilism can be strengthened by means of a plausible account of causal sourcehood. (shrink)

The idea of using responsibility in the allocation of healthcare resources has been criticized for, among other things, too readily abandoning people who are responsible for being very badly off. One response to this problem is that while responsibility can play a role in resource allocation, it cannot do so if it will leave those who are responsible below a “sufficiency” threshold. This paper considers first whether a view can be both distinctively sufficientarian and allow responsibility to play a role (...) even for those who will be left with very poor health. It then draws several further distinctions that may affect the application of responsibility at this level. We conclude that a more plausible version of the sufficientarian view is to allow a role for responsibility where failure to do so will leave someone else who is not responsible below the sufficiency threshold. However, we suggest that individuals must exhibit “sufficient responsibility” in order for this to apply, involving both a sufficient level of control and an avoidable failure to respond adequately to reasons for action. (shrink)

Is moral responsibility essentially historical, or does an agent's moral responsibility for an action depend only on their psychological structure at that time? In previous work, I have argued that the two main (non‐skeptical) views on moral responsibility and agents’ histories—historicism and standard structuralism—are vulnerable to objections that are avoided by a third option, namely history‐sensitive structuralism. In this paper, I develop this view in greater detail and evaluate the view by comparing it with its three dialectical rivals: skepticism about (...) moral responsibility, historicism, and standard structuralism. Each comparison includes discussion of new work on moral responsibility and agents’ histories, and along the way I offer new arguments for preferring history‐sensitive structuralism, paying special attention to the view's explanatory power. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a version of compatibilism against luck-related objections. After introducing the types of luck that some take to be problematic for moral responsibility, I consider and respond to two recent attempts to show that compatibilism faces the same problem of luck that libertarianism faces—present luck. I then consider a different type of luck—constitutive luck—and provide a new solution to this problem. One upshot of the present discussion is a reason to prefer a history-sensitive compatibilist account over (...) a purely nonhistorical structuralist account. (shrink)

In this paper I explore graded attributions of blameworthiness—that is, judgments of the general sort, "A is more blameworthy for x-ing than B is," or "A is less blameworthy for her character than B is." In so doing, I aim to provide a philosophical basis for the widespread, if not completely articulate, practice of altering the degree to which we hold others responsible on the basis of facts about them or facts about their environments. To vindicate this practice, I disambiguate (...) several related properties and identify the properties of being more blameworthy for an action with a complex set of relations between what an agent deserves for her action and how good it is from the point of view of desert that she receives that response. (shrink)

While some form of loss of control is often assumed to be a common feature of the diverse manifestations of addiction, it is far from clear how loss of control should be understood. In this paper, I put forward a concept of decrease in control in addiction that aims to fill this gap and thus provide a general framework for thinking about addictive behavior. The development of this account involves two main steps. First, I present a view of degrees of (...) control as the degree to which an agent would be responsive to potential or counterfactual sufficient reasons to do otherwise. Second, I sketch an account of the relevant control-undermining factors in addiction that is consonant with my proposed view of degrees of control. Being a high-level functional property, reasons-responsiveness is particularly well suited to frame an account of control-undermining factors that is doubly pluralistic: it encompasses the contribution of factors both internal and external to the agent, and it is consistent with various proposals as to the precise nature of the anomaly taking place in the psychology of addiction. (shrink)

We argue against Thomson’s view that abortion is permissible even if fetuses have high moral status. Against this, we argue that, because many mothers are morally responsible for their pregnancies, they have a special obligation to assist. Finally, we address an objection according to which many mothers whose pregnancies are not a product of rape are not morally responsible to a sufficient degree, and so an obligation to assist is not generated. This objection assumes that the force of the mother’s (...) right to bodily integrity is not diminished if she is insufficiently morally responsible. We challenge this assumption. Our complete thesis is as follows: If a mother is morally responsible to a sufficient degree, she acquires an obligation to assist. If she is not, the force of her right to bodily integrity may be reduced. (shrink)

This paper argues that “free will” is vague. The argument has two steps. First, I argue that free will is a matter of degrees and, second, that there are no sharp boundaries separating free decisions and actions and non‐free ones. After presenting the argument, I focus on one significant consequence of the thesis, although others are mentioned along the way. In short, considerations of vagueness help understand the logic behind so‐called manipulation arguments, but also show why these arguments are ultimately (...) flawed. (shrink)

For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...) we should blame, rather than as cases giving us ready insight into the nature of moral responsibility. (shrink)