Introduction to the special issue by guest editor Mich Ciurria.

In this paper, I argue that virtue ethics is unfortunately committed to a developmentally detrimental form of moral evaluation in its traditional iterations. That is, first, because both action guidance and moral development are central to virtue ethic and, second, because virtue ethics permits or requires character appraisal in moral education and child-rearing through praise and blame. However, studies from developmental and clinical psychology show that praise or blame involving character appraisal can be detrimental to children and, especially, to women (...) and girls. While not all empirical studies point in this direction, the data are sufficiently murky to warrant an objection to virtue ethics along the lines of a situationism. Using a feminist and care-oriented critique, I argue this could pose a problem for virtue ethics. However, I argue that the criterion of moral evaluation can and must be distinguished from successful moral education of children to avoid this problem. By focusing on behavior instead of character, moral agents can avoid the harm virtue ethics may cause. Finally, I respond to an objection that doing so makes virtue ethics esoteric or self-effacing and argue that it fares no worse than other moral theories. (shrink)

The moral responsibility literature frequently relies on both explicit and implicit claims about “ideal” or “normal” agency that import unjustified normative assumptions into our theorizing. In doing so, it both fails to reckon with and misconstrues the reality of agential diversity. In this article I diagnose the root of this problem, which I trace back to the confluence of two factors: the search for fundamental agential capacities, and systemic discrimination toward psychological variance. I then preview three socially and politically important (...) domains of inquiry that have been obscured by this paradigm as a way of motivating the need for and value of applying a neurodiversity perspective to moral responsibility and the ethics of blame. (shrink)

Gender dysphoria is typically construed as a medical concept. This understanding of gender dysphoria reflects how cisgender people interpret trans experience. This essay proposes an alternative concept of gender dysphoria for critical theory: on this account, gender dysphoria is alienation from cisgender forms of life. If the medicalized concept of gender dysphoria tacitly takes for granted, identifies with, and thereby reinforces cisgender patriarchal society, a critical theory of gender dysphoria instead approaches the issue from the perspective of trans people, their (...) lived experiences and social situation, to offer a critique of society. While the medicalized concept of gender dysphoria refers to a “distress” caused by living in the “wrong-body,” the critical concept of gender dysphoria refers to an alienation as a result of living in the “wrong (cisgender patriarchal) society.” The critical concept of gender dysphoria may become a tool capable of describing the necessary facets of trans experience necessary to form a political coalition. The paper concludes by claiming that trans subjects are the gendered analogue of Marx’s concept of the proletariat. (shrink)

Practice-dependent approaches to moral responsibility appeal to our practices of moral responsibility in order to identify and justify the conditions for holding each other responsible. Yet, our practices are shaped by oppressive norms. For example, attributions of praise can be shaped by ableist norms, antifat norms, and norms of toxic positivity. I argue that such cases pose methodological and justificatory challenges for practice-dependent approaches of various stripes. In considering what resources these approaches might have to confront these challenges, I formulate (...) some supplementary norms for theorizing about our practices of moral responsibility and for structuring those practices themselves. This paper makes the following novel contributions: First, it advances examples that show that reactive attitudes can be oppressive irrespective of patterns of comparative distribution. Second, it articulates the implications of oppressive reactive attitudes for a range of post-Strawsonian approaches to moral responsibility. Third, it more fully articulates the norms that ought to shape our responsibility practices and locates them in relation to two recently proposed approaches to moral responsibility, from Shoemaker and Ciurria. (shrink)

Victim blaming is a harmful but quite pervasive phenomenon occurring in contemporary societies. When people engage in victim blaming, they shift the burden of the harmful act from the perpetrators and place it upon the victims instead. This article explores how the discourse on moral responsibility can help make sense of victim blaming. The distinction between moral responsibility and blameworthiness can shed light on the contradictory intuitions that people experience when they hear about a victim who took what seems to (...) be an unnecessary risk. The focus of this article is to explain these intuitions and respond to them by suggesting that victims not only are not blameworthy when they take risks that challenge specific norms but instead are praiseworthy. Finally, whether such risks are justified when the agents taking them have people dependent upon them is discussed. Attending to structural injustice can point out why some choices seem more justified than others. Victims who take justified risks are praiseworthy, even when their efforts do not produce significant results. This article aims to address the absence of victim blaming in discussions of moral responsibility and to bring philosophical attention to this issue. The goal is to disentangle the phenomenon of victim blaming while supporting victims and vulnerable groups. (shrink)

Theories of moral responsibility have often assumed that praise does not require justification in the way that blame might. In line with recent accounts, this article argues that praise does require such justification. Oppressive praise is an erroneous attribution of moral or normative responsibility that contributes to the production and reproduction of oppressive and dominating structures. This article provides a taxonomy of oppressive praising practices. Oppressive praise will track and enforce oppressive norms. It can be categorized into that which misrecognizes (...) an agent as either (1) less deserving of praise (“underrecognition”) or (2) more deserving of praise (“overrecognition”) than would be consistent with nonoppressive norms. Two further normative concerns are addressed: first, the conditions under which disingenuous praise will be oppressive; and second, where issues of standing to praise do and do not arise. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that we currently face a climate crisis insofar as the climatological effects of excessive carbon emissions risk destabilizing advanced civilization and jeopardize cherished modern institutions. The threat posed by climate change is treated as unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind. In this essay, we argue that this framework—the default climate crisis motif—perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that (...) ultimately reinforce the dynamics driving climate change and its attending injustices. By centering Indigenous feminist environmental discourses, which privilege the role of richly interweaving networks of responsibilities composing extended more-than-human kinship arrangements, we contend that climate crisis is instead primarily a manifestation of devastating multidimensional relational disruptions of Indigenous lands and lives. More pointedly, it is a rebound effect of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against responsible lifeways that are critical for socioecological adaptability and responsiveness. Framing climate crisis as relational crisis hereby creates discursive space for much needed transformational Indigenous feminist visions for justly and effectively addressing climate change. (shrink)

Much modern philosophy considers whether addicts—people who have normatively atypical relationships to various substances—possess genuine moral responsibility. Are addicts the subjects of apt attributions of blame, particularly in the context of their drug use and the negative consequences thereof? One group, “choice theorists,” tend to think so; another, “disease theorists,” think not. Rather than take a side or synthesize them somehow, I argue that we should stop arguing about this question entirely. In order for the discussion to be worthwhile, it (...) must satisfy the basic condition of pragmatic bearing: some action, permissible to execute in reaction to addicts’ wrongdoing if they are morally responsible, but impermissible if they are not. I describe the set of arguably harmful actions often performed by addicts and enumerate the common penalties (which I collectively term “addict oppression” or, more neutrally, “addict sanctions”) imposed upon them by institutions in response. If the basic condition holds, those who view addicts as morally responsible and those who do not must disagree on the permissibility of at least some such sanctions, on responsibility grounds. But dispatches from the discourse demonstrate that choice and disease theorists generally agree on the appropriateness of the sanctions and on the (nonresponsibilist) nature of the justification. When dispute does arise, it doesn’t concern responsibility either. Neither the conclusion that addicts are morally responsible nor the conclusion that they aren’t licenses a meaningful change in the social treatment of addicts by nonaddicts and institutions. In particular, discussion of addict moral responsibility is irrelevant to the material conditions of addicts. Finally, I turn to an idiosyncratic attitude of indecision about addict responsibility, often detectable in the literature and in public life. I suggest that this indecision reflects the uneasy superimposition of two distinct possible addict futures—recovery and liberation—and hang my hat on liberation. (shrink)

In 1983, Andrea Dworkin gave a speech entitled “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce during Which There Is No Rape,” in which she argued that the only way to put an end to the culture of rape in society is for men to take responsibility for it. The view that it is up to men to dismantle the culture of rape—including “friendly” men, who do not actively endorse and perpetuate this culture—might have been considered radical at the time, but the same (...) is no longer true today. Dworkin’s view, or something very close to it, is now garnering widespread attention and credibility. The purpose of this article is to find a philosophical theory of responsibility that can vindicate and elucidate Dworkin’s claims. In order to do so, I develop a view that combines Zheng’s role-ideal model of responsibility with Witt’s conception of gender as a mega social role. I argue that by combining these accounts we find a philosophically satisfying theory of what it means to say, with Dworkin, that men are responsible for the culture of rape. (shrink)

One problem highlighted by intersectional and Black feminist theory is that not all oppressed agents are oppressed in the same ways and to the same degree. One of the implications of this for responsibility practices is that social practices of exculpation will not apply equally across all agents. This article explores two false social narratives about far-right women and evaluates them according to the standard view of moral responsibility. The first narrative of misogyny as exculpation holds that far-right women are (...) themselves victims of oppression (of the misogyny of their own movements) and thus not blameworthy for their actions, as misogyny undermines their control and knowledge on the standard view of moral responsibility. The second narrative of infantilization as exculpation also proposes that women lack both knowledge and control on the standard view. The narrative tells us that (White) women, unable to protect themselves, must be protected and avenged by (White) men. If we assume the standard view of moral responsibility, both of these narratives impede our ability to hold far-right women responsible. By instead proposing the adoption of the rational relations view of Angela Smith, this article seeks to demonstrate how a nonvolitionalist account of responsibility can itself become a feminist response to far-right women’s extremism with larger implications for our responsibility practices as a whole. (shrink)

White supremacy dominates the academy and political discussions. It first consists of conflating the geography of the West (where Black, Indigenous, and People of Color—BIPOC—are to be found) with a specific colonizing tradition originating in ancient Greek thought—call this tradition the West. Secondly, and more profoundly, it consists in treating this tradition as the frame for the study of every other intellectual tradition, which since the Romans it brands as religion. The political function of this marginalization of BIPOC philosophy is (...) to shield Western colonialism from moral philosophical criticism. The mechanism of colonialism is interpretation—explanation in terms of propositional attitudes, like belief. Not only is this a basic commitment of the Western tradition owing to its foundational linguistic account of thought (LAT), the South Asian moral philosophy of Yoga shows interpretation to be the essence of irresponsibility: it undermines the possibilities of choice as it is antilogical and is the mechanism of oppression. In contrast, Yoga, a fourth basic ethical theory (in addition to virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) identifies an alternate metaethical choice as the essence of moral responsibility: explication—understanding in terms of inferential relationships. Yoga is not only the locus classicus for a nondiscriminatory, antioppressive approach to moral standing: it constitutes reason-based, (both ideal and nonideal) normative practices of solidarity with people (including nonhumans and celestial bodies like the Earth). This paper explores the mutually exclusive disjunction between interpretation and explication, the historical impact of these methodologies, and the colonization by the West of philosophy in the game of Publish or Perish. Shaking this off is as easy as returning to the philosophically indigenous practice of explication. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to demonstrate that moral responsibility theory produces, legitimates, and even magnifies the considerable social injustice that accrues to disabled people insofar as it implicitly and explicitly promotes a depoliticized ontology of disability that construes disability as a naturally disadvantageous personal characteristic or deleterious property of individuals rather than identifies it as an effect of power, an apparatus. In particular, I argue that the methodological tools of “analytic” philosophy that philosophers of moral responsibility theory employ to (...) establish the philosophical domain in which they engage have distinctly detrimental effects on disabled people. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the social norms that underlie our emotion regulation practices can result in further oppression of girls and women under conditions of patriarchy. One aspect of this oppression is the disproportionate responsibility for emotions that is taken on by girls and women in the wake of emotional distress caused by misogynistic aggression. I show that although emotion-regulation techniques are understood as ideal tools for enhancing agency and subjective well-being, and emotional labor is not necessarily oppressive, (...) they may not only enable a perpetrator’s ability to evade accountability but also, by outsourcing emotional regulation, allow the perpetrator to fail to cultivate emotional intelligence, which leads to a vicious cycle. In these cases, girls and women also face a double bind. If certain emotion-regulation practices succeed in aligning emotions with dominant social norms, we face emotional labor that not only benefits the regulator but feeds the cycle described above, and we face alienation from our apt feelings. If we fail to regulate our emotions by accepted standards and patriarchal entitlements, we may be outcast, pathologized, or otherwise marginalized. I argue that the consequences of this double bind constitute a site of affective injustice and expose asymmetrical relations of moral accountability in evaluations of the fittingness of emotions. (shrink)