Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility

Abstract

Introduction We distinguish between creatures who can legitimately be held morally responsible for their actions and those who cannot. Among the actions a morally responsible agent performs, we distinguish between those actions for which the agent is morally responsible and those for which he is not. An agent is morally responsible for an action insofar as he is rationally accessible to certain kinds of attitudes and activities as a result of performing the action. The attitudes include resentment, indignation, respect, and gratitude; and the activities include moral praise and blame, and reward and punishment. With this approach, an agent can be a rational candidate for praise or blame, even though he is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy. For instance, an agent can be morally responsible for a morally “neutral” act. A theory of moral responsibility sets the conditions under which we believe that an individual is a rational candidate for praise or blame on account of his behavior. This theory needs to be supplemented by a further moral theory that specifies which agents, among those who are morally responsible, ought to be praised or blamed (and to what extent) for their actions. Whereas both kinds of theory are obviously important, I focus here on the first sort of theory – one that explains rational accessibility to the pertinent attitudes and activities.

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