Abstract

A satisfactory account of the nature of moral responsibility needs to accomplish several things. First, the account should not imply that there is anything more than persons who perform actions and have beliefs and intentions concerning the causal consequences of such actions. Second, it must preserve our reflective judgments concerning moral responsibility in idealized cases, including comparative judgments of degrees of moral responsibility. Third, it must be able to explain certain problem cases, including cases involving omission, ignorance, causal overdetermination, "wayward" causal chains, intervening agents, moral luck, and various kinds of excuses. My dissertation is a sustained attempt to locate and defend a satisfactory account of moral responsibility, one which meets all of these criteria. ;My first step towards locating such an account is to classify the different kinds of accounts which one might adopt. I reject "compatibilist" accounts of moral responsibility, which imply that a person might be morally responsible for performing an action which she was determined to perform, both because there are good arguments against these kinds of accounts , and because such accounts are implausible in themselves . ;After rejecting compatibilist accounts of moral responsibility, I develop an incompatibilist account according to which one's intentions in acting, beliefs about the consequences of her possible actions, and extent of causal contribution together determine the degree to which one is morally responsible for the obtaining of a given state of affairs. Not only can this account handle obvious objections, but it can also help to explain the problem cases mentioned earlier. I develop and defend this account of degrees of moral responsibility in chapter 5, and extend the account to cover omissions to act in chapter 6. In a brief appendix, I appeal to my account of moral responsibility in order to argue that there are good reasons for traditional theists to embrace some incompatibilist account of the nature of free action