A Notion of Moral Responsibility Immune to the Threat from Causal Determination

Abstract

This chapter sets out a notion of moral responsibility that incorporates the central features of the answerability conception advocated by T. M. Scanlon, Hilary Bok, and Angela Smith, and of Michael McKenna’s more specific conversational account, but which excludes any notion of desert, whether basic or non-basic. The point of blaming and praising on this notion is largely forward-looking: its main objectives are protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. Agents are blameworthy and praiseworthy by virtue of being appropriate recipients of blame and praise given these aims. Blaming on this conception can involve causing harm, but the justifiability of such harming does not reintroduce the legitimacy of desert. The resulting notion of moral responsibility is immune to any threat from the causal determination of action.

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