101 research outputs found
On Losing One's Moral Voice
Although it is widely accepted that hypocritical blamers lack the standing to blame others who have committed similar wrongs, an account of what it is thatâs lost when someone loses their standing to blame remains elusive. When moral address is inappropriate because it is or would be hypocritical, what is the precise nature of the complaint that the blamed party is entitled to raise, and that so often gets voiced as âI donât have to take that from youâ? In this paper I argue that extant answers to this question fall short, and I offer a novel account that takes seriously the thought that hypocrisy somehow silences the blame of the hypocrite. To make sense of this silencing effect, I argue that we need to look closely at the role that second-personal reasons play in moral address
Understanding Source Incompatibilism
Source incompatibilism is an increasingly popular version of incompatibilism about determinism and moral responsibility. However, many self-described source incompatibilists formulate the thesis differently, resulting in conceptual confusion that can obscure the relationship between source incompatibilism and other views in the neighborhood. In this paper I canvas various formulations of the thesis in the literature and argue in favor of one as the least likely to lead to conceptual confusion. It turns out that accepting my formulation has some surprising taxonomical consequence
Blame as a Volitional Activity
Blame is fascinating yet elusive, and it is both of these things because it is so complex. It seems to have a cognitive aspect (the belief that someone has done wrong, perhaps), but it also seems to have an emotional aspect (resentment at being disrespected, perhaps). And then of course there is the outside-of-the-head aspect of blame, which manifests itself in rebukes and reprimands, accusations and distrust, cold shoulders and estrangement. Still, accounts of blame that identify it with beliefs or emotions seem inadequate. In this paper I draw on the work of Harry Frankfurt to suggest an alternative account, according to which blame most centrally involves changes in the structure of the will
Responsibility
In this encyclopedia entry I sketch the way contemporary theorists understand moral responsibility -- its varieties, its requirements, and its puzzles
The Strains of Involvement
Analytic philosophers have a tendency to forget that they are human beings, and one of the reasons that P. F. Strawsonâs 1962 essay, âFreedom and Resentmentâ, has been so influential is that it promises to bring discussions of moral responsibility back down to earth. Strawson encouraged us to âkeep before our minds...what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary interpersonal relationshipsâ, which is, after all, the context in which questions about responsibility arise in the first place. In this essay I explore what we can learn about ordinary interpersonal relationships from three works of literature â Shakespeareâs King Lear, Jane Austenâs Persuasion, and Graham Greeneâs The End of the Affair. My intention is to try to heed Strawsonâs advice without imposing upon the data any particular theoretical agenda, and my hope is that the data collected will prove useful for future theorizing about responsibility
Free Will and Time Travel
In this chapter I articulate the threat that time travel to the past allegedly poses to the free will of the time traveler, and I argue that on the traditional way of thinking about free will, the incompatibilist about time travel and free will wins the day. However, a residual worry about the incompatibilist view points the way toward a novel way of thinking about free will, one that I tentatively explore toward the end of the chapter
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