Many accounts of moral responsibility have emerged recently that question the importance of conscious choice for moral responsibility. Instead of this ‘volitional’ requirement, these ‘attributionist’ accounts claim that agents are responsible for their actions when their actions reflect who they are and what they value. This paper argues that attributionist accounts are too quick to dismiss the connection between volition and moral responsibility. By excising conscious control from their accounts, attributionists leave open the undesirable possibility that an agent may fulfil (...) all necessary conditions for moral responsibility even when she is under the conscious control of another person. Through analyzing situations in which attributionist conditions for moral responsibility are met while an agent is controlled by someone else, the link between an agent's volition and her moral responsibility becomes more apparent. (shrink)

We sometimes fail unwittingly to do things that we ought to do. And we are, from time to time, culpable for these unwitting omissions. We provide an outline of a theory of responsibility for unwitting omissions. We emphasize two distinctive ideas: (i) many unwitting omissions can be understood as failures of appropriate vigilance, and; (ii) the sort of self-control implicated in these failures of appropriate vigilance is valuable. We argue that the norms that govern vigilance and the value of self-control (...) explain culpability for unwitting omissions. (shrink)

© The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...Philosophy of law was until recently dominated by abstract investigation into the nature of law, a pursuit known as ‘general jurisprudence’. In this way, it resembled a branch of metaphysics or mid-twentieth century philosophy of mind, seeking to uncover the essential properties (...) of a general and multiply realizable phenomenon. Today, philosophers study law with a sharper focus, and with a more specialized lens – that of ethicists, for example, or epistemologists, or philosophers of action.That is not to say there has been a drop in groundbreaking work in general jurisprudence (see, for... (shrink)

In matters of responsibility, there are often two sides to the transaction: one party who holds another responsible, and the other who takes responsibility for her conduct. The first side has been closely scrutinized in discussions of the nature of responsibility, due to the influential Strawsonian conjecture that an agent is responsible if and only if it is appropriate to hold her responsible. This preoccupation with holding responsible – with its focus on the second-personal perspective and on responses like blame (...) – contrasts with a relative neglect of the perspective of the agent and the role that she has to play by taking responsibility. I aim to show that this neglect is undeserved – that taking responsibility is both distinct in character from holding responsible and fundamentally important in its own right. I develop a conception of taking responsibility that reveals an under-explored dimension of our responsibility practices. (shrink)