A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (3):611-639 (2013)
Abstract
Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of surprising factors, sometimes prompting apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibilityAuthor's Profile
ISBN(s)
0031-8205
DOI
10.1111/j.1933-1592.2012.00603.x
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Citations of this work
Explaining (away) the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.Gunnar Björnsson - 2017 - In Philip Robichaud & Jan Willem Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition. Oxford University Press. pp. 146–162.
A Normative Approach to Artificial Moral Agency.Dorna Behdadi & Christian Munthe - 2020 - Minds and Machines 30 (2):195-218.
Essentially Shared Obligations.Gunnar Björnsson - 2014 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 38 (1):103-120.
Explaining away epistemic skepticism about culpability.Gunnar Björnsson - 2017 - In Shoemaker David (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. Oxford University Press. pp. 141–164.
Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility.Alex Madva - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (S1):53-78.
References found in this work
Freedom of the will and the concept of a person.Harry Frankfurt - 1971 - Journal of Philosophy 68 (1):5-20.
Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility.John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza - 1998 - Cambridge University Press.