I argue that wrongdoers may be open to moral blame even if they lacked the capacity to respond to the moral considerations that counted against their behavior. My initial argument turns on the suggestion that even an agent who cannot respond to specific moral considerations may still guide her behavior by her judgments about reasons. I argue that this explanation of a wrongdoer’s behavior can qualify her for blame even if her capacity for moral understanding is impaired. A second argument (...) is based on the observation that even when a blameworthy wrongdoer could have responded to moral considerations, this is often not relevant to her blameworthiness. Finally, I argue against the view that because blame communicates moral demands, only agents who can be reached by such communication are properly blamed. I contend that a person victimized by a wrongdoer with an impaired capacity for moral understanding may protest her victimization in a way that counts as a form of moral blame even though it does not primarily express a moral demand or attempt to initiate moral dialogue. (shrink)

Those who advocate a “historicist” outlook on moral responsibility often hold that people who unwillingly acquire corrupt dispositions are not blameworthy for the wrong actions that issue from these dispositions; this contention is frequently supported by thought experiments involving instances of forced psychological manipulation that seem to call responsibility into question. I argue against this historicist perspective and in favor of the conclusion that the process by which a person acquires values and dispositions is largely irrelevant to moral responsibility. While (...) the thought experiments introduced by historicists raise perplexing questions about personal identity and involve clear instances of moral wrongs done to the manipulated subjects, neither of these considerations bear on the question of moral responsibility. Rather, questions about moral responsibility in manipulation cases should be answered, I argue, by considering whether a manipulated agent is capable of expressing through her actions the objectionable attitudes that make blame appropriate in normal cases of wrongdoing. (shrink)

Abstract: Many philosophers believe that people who are not capable of grasping the significance of moral considerations are not open to moral blame when they fail to respond appropriately to these considerations. I contend, however, that some morally blind, or 'psychopathic,' agents are proper targets for moral blame, at least on some occasions. I argue that moral blame is a response to the normative commitments and attitudes of a wrongdoer and that the actions of morally blind agents can express the (...) relevant blame-grounding attitudes insofar as these agents possess the capacity to make judgments about non-moral reasons. (shrink)

I argue against the claim that morally ignorant wrongdoers are open to blame only if they are culpable for their ignorance, and I argue against a version of skepticism about moral responsibility that depends on this claim being true. On the view I defend, the attitudes involved in blame are typically responses to the features of an action that make it objectionable or unjustifiable from the perspective of the one who issues the blame. One important way that an action can (...) appear objectionable to us is that it expresses a judgment with which we disagree about the significance of the interests of those affected by the action. A morally ignorant wrongdoer’s actions may express such judgments even if it is not her fault that she is unaware of the moral status of her behavior, and even if it would be unreasonable to expect her to be aware of its status. (shrink)

I argue that it is possible to prevent (and to be praiseworthy for preventing) an unwelcome outcome that had no chance of occurring. I motivate this position by constructing examples in which it makes sense to explain the non-occurrence of a certain outcome by referring to a particular agent's intentional and willing behavior, and yet the non-occurrence of the outcome in question was ensured by factors external to the agent. I conclude that even if the non-occurrence of an unwelcome outcome (...) is ensured, the agent whose action explains this non-occurrence is praiseworthy for preventing the outcome. My examples are similar in important respects to Frankfurt-type cases. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the relationship between my examples and Frankfurt-type cases involving both actions and omissions. I conclude that while I may be responsible for the consequences of an action even if those consequences are unavoidable, this is not necessarily so for the consequences of omissions. (shrink)

In Responsibility From the Margins, David Shoemaker distinguishes three forms of responsibility: attributability, answerability, and accountability. The introduction of various normative competence requirements lends precision to the contrasts that Shoemaker draws between these forms of responsibility. I argue, however, that these competence requirements are less well motivated than Shoemaker supposes, which raises the possibility that we cannot distinguish between forms of responsibility in the way that he hopes.

About a year after the start of the Iraq War, a story broke about the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison. Editorialists and science writers noted affinities between what happened at Abu Ghraib and Philip Zimbardo’s famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo’s experiment is part of the “situationist” literature in social psychology, which suggests that the contexts in which agents act have a larger influence on behavior, and that personality traits have a smaller influence, (...) than is ordinarily supposed. Recently, there has been increased interest among philosophers in research like Zimbardo’s and its potential for influencing ethical theories. This increase is due in part to the publication of John Doris’ Lack of Character. More recently, Doris and Dominic Murphy have argued that soldiers, including those at Abu Ghraib, often act under conditions of moral excuse because the situational pressures to which they are exposed impair their capacities for moral judgment. I argue that soldiers can be morally responsible for wartime behavior even if their moral capacities have been substantially impaired. (shrink)

In Making Sense of Free Will and Moral Responsibility Dana Nelkin defends the “rational abilities view.” According to this view, agents are responsible for their behavior if and only if they act with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. It follows that agents who act well are open to praise regardless of whether they could have acted differently, but agents who act badly are open to blame only if they could have acted on the moral reasons that (...) counted against their behavior. I summarize the main themes of Nelkin’s theory of responsibility and offer reasons for rejecting the claim that agents are blameworthy only if they could have responded to moral considerations. It is true that wrongdoers who could not have responded appropriately to moral considerations are often excused from blame, but I argue that not all the forms that such incapacity can take will furnish grounds for excuse. In other words, some circumstances that entail that a wrongdoer cannot respond to moral considerations are compatible with that agent fulfilling conditions that are sufficient for moral responsibility. (shrink)

The influential account of contractualist moral theory offered recently by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other is not intended to account for all the various moral commitments that people have; it covers only a narrow—though important—range of properly moral concerns and claims. Scanlon focuses on what he calls the morality of right and wrong or, as he puts it in his title, what we owe to each other. The question arises as to whether nonhuman animals can (...) be wronged in the narrow sense of a moral wrong with which contractualism is concerned. Can we owe things to nonhuman animals? Scanlon is sensitive to the importance of this question, but he ultimately favors an account in which the perspectives of nonhuman animals are not explicitly included in contractualist theorizing. Nevertheless, it appears that contractualism, largely as Scanlon conceives it, can accommodate duties to nonhuman animals. Moreover, if contractualism cannot make this accommodation, then its status as a theory that answers to important common-sense moral intuitions becomes questionable in ways that extend beyond its failure to live up to intuitions many share about the status of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

I respond here to an argument in David Shoemaker’s recent essay, “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility.” Shoemaker finds that “Scanlonian” approaches to moral blame err insofar as they do not include a capacity to respond to moral considerations among the conditions on blameworthiness. Shoemaker argues that wrongdoers must be able to respond to moral reasons for their behavior to express the disrespect to which blaming attitudes like resentment respond. I offer reasons for rejecting this (...) argument. (shrink)

Unlike much work on responsibility, George Sher's new book, Who Knew?: Responsibility Without Awareness , focuses on the relationship between knowledge and responsibility. Sher argues against the view that responsibility depends on an agent's awareness of the nature and consequences of her action. According to Sher's alternative proposal, even agents who are unaware of important features of their actions may be morally or prudentially responsible for their behavior. While I agree with many of Sher's central conclusions, I explore the worry (...) that, as it stands, his account may only justify ascriptions of a relatively superficial form of responsibility. (shrink)

We “prepunish” a person if we punish her prior to the commission of her crime. This essay discusses our intuitions about the permissibility of prepunishment and the relationship between prepunishment and compatibilism about free will and determinism. It has recently been argued that compatibilism has particular trouble generating a principled objection to prepunishment. The failure to provide such an objection may be a problem for compatibilism if our moral intuitions strongly favor the prohibition of prepunishment. In defense of compatibilism, I (...) argue that while no objection to prepunishment is entailed by the central tenets of compatibilism, this does not necessarily show that compatibilism conflicts with our moral intuitions. And while there may be no distinctly compatibilist objection to prepunishment, there are common-sense objections to prepunishment of which the compatibilist can make use, at least under actual-world circumstances. And, while these common-sense objections might be inoperative in certain non-actual circumstances, it is not clear that support for prepunishment would be unintuitive in these circumstances. (shrink)

The influential account of contractualist moral theory offered recently by T. M. Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other is not intended to account for all the various moral commitments that people have; it covers only a narrow—though important—range of properly moral concerns and claims. Scanlon focuses on what he calls the morality of right and wrong or, as he puts it in his title, what we owe to each other. The question arises as to whether nonhuman animals can (...) be wronged in the narrow sense of a moral wrong with which contractualism is concerned. Can we owe things to nonhuman animals? Scanlon is sensitive to the importance of this question, but he ultimately favors an account in which the perspectives of nonhuman animals are not explicitly included in contractualist theorizing. Nevertheless, it appears that contractualism, largely as Scanlon conceives it, can accommodate duties to nonhuman animals. Moreover, if contractualism cannot make this accommodation, then its status as a theory that answers to important common-sense moral intuitions becomes questionable in ways that extend beyond its failure to live up to intuitions many share about the status of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Most people would agree that a small child, or a cognitively impaired adult, is less responsible for their actions, good or bad, than an unimpaired adult. But how do we explain that difference, and how far can anyone be praised or blamed for what they have done? In this fascinating introduction, Matthew Talbert explores some of the key questions shaping current debates about moral responsibility, including: What is free will, and is it required for moral responsibility? Are we responsible for (...) the unforeseen consequences of our actions? Is it fair to blame people for doing what they believe is right? And are psychopaths open to blame? As Talbert argues, we are morally responsible for our actions when they are related to us in particular ways: when our actions express our true selves, for example, or when we exercise certain kinds of control over them. It is because we bear these relationships to our actions that we are open to praise and blame. _Moral Responsibility_ will be an important resource for students and researchers in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of agency and of great interest to all those wishing to understand an important aspect of our moral practices. (shrink)

In 2005, US Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha, including several children. How should we assess the perpetrators of this and other war crimes? Is it unfair to blame the Marines because they were subject to situational pressures such as combat stress (and had lost one of their own in combat)? Or should they be held responsible for their actions, since they intentionally chose to kill civilians? -/- In this book, Matthew Talbert and Jessica Wolfendale (...) take up these moral questions and propose an original theory of the causes of war crimes and the responsibility of war crimes perpetrators. In the first half of the book, they challenge accounts that explain war crimes by reference to the situational pressures endured by military personnel, including peer pressure, combat stress, and propaganda. The authors propose an alternative theory that explains how military personnel make sense of their participation in war crimes through their self-conceptions, goals, and values. In the second half of the book, the authors consider and reject theories of responsibility that excuse perpetrators on the grounds that situational pressures often encourage them to believe that their behavior is permissible. Such theories of responsibility are unacceptably exculpatory, implying it is unreasonable for victims of war crimes to blame their attackers. By contrast, Talbert and Wolfendale argue that perpetrators of war crimes may be blameworthy if their actions express objectionable attitudes towards their victims, even if they sincerely believe that what they are doing is right. (shrink)