Two Dimensions of Responsibility: Quality and Competence of Will

Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-14 (2023)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Pure quality of will theories claim that ‘the ultimate object’ of our responsibility responses (i.e., praise and blame) is the quality of our will. Any such theory is false—or so I argue. There is a second dimension of (moral) responsibility, independent of quality of will, that our responsibility responses track and take as their object—namely, how adroitly we are able to translate our will into action; I call this competence of will. I offer a conjectural explanation of the two dimensions of (moral) responsibility: it matters to us that people actually perform adequately well because of how much it matters to us that we are able to live and work together successfully.

Other Versions

reprint Madigan, Taylor (2024) "Two Dimensions of Responsibility: Quality and Competence of Will". Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10(2):281-294

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Responsibility and the shallow self.Samuel Reis-Dennis - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):483-501.
Qualities of will.David Shoemaker - 2013 - Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (1-2):95-120.
Dimensions of responsibility: Freedom of action and freedom of will.Robert Kane - 2019 - Social Philosophy and Policy 36 (1):114-131.
Neuroethics and Responsibility.Neil Levy - 2016 - In Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy. Malden, MA: Wiley. pp. 270–283.
Respecting each other and taking responsibility for our biases.Elinor Mason - 2018 - In Marina Oshana, Katrina Hutchison & Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oup Usa.
Fairness and the Architecture of Responsibility.David Brink & Dana Nelkin - 2013 - Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility 1:284-313.
Omissions and their moral relevance.Pascale Willemsen - 2019 - Paderborn, Deutschland: Mentis.

Analytics

Added to PP
2023-06-01

Downloads
226 (#102,187)

6 months
71 (#80,713)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Taylor Madigan
Stanford University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Add more references