When you must take responsibility though you're not to blame

When you must take responsibility though you're not to blame Public Deposited

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Creator

Svirsky, Larisa
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy

Abstract

There are many situations where an agent's responsibility for morally problematic behavior, attitudes, or aspects of her character seems to entail that she is blameworthy. There are some cases, however, where intuitively claims about responsibility and blameworthiness can and should come apart. In this paper, I argue that there is a sense of responsibility that agents have in virtue of having an obligation to take responsibility for behavior and features of their psychology that are attributable to them. In contrast, for agents to be blameworthy for some bad state they find themselves in, there must have been some reasonable expectation that they could have avoided that state. I illustrate this distinction between moral responsibility for something bad on the one hand and blameworthiness on the other with several cases, with the aim of arguing for additional subtlety in our evaluation of agents as morally responsible.

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