Description

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Making judgments about whether a person is morally responsible for her behavior, and holding others and ourselves responsible for actions and the consequences of actions, is a fundamental and familiar part of our moral practices and our interpersonal relationshipsMost people would agree that a small child, or a cognitively impaired adult, is less responsible for their actions, good or bad, than an unimpaired adult. But how do we explain that difference, and how far can anyone be praised or blamed for what they have done?
In this fascinating introduction, Matthew Talbert explores some of the key questions shaping current debates about moral responsibility, including: What is free will, and is it required for moral responsibility? Are we responsible for the unforeseen consequences of our actions? Is it fair to blame people for doing what they believe is right? And are psychopaths open to blame?
As Talbert argues, we are morally responsible for our actions when they are related to us in particular ways: when our actions express our true selves, for example, or when we exercise certain kinds of control over them. It is because we bear these relationships to our actions that we are open to praise and blame.
Moral Responsibility will be an important resource for students and researchers in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of agency and of great interest to all those wishing to understand an important aspect of our moral practices.
This article focuses on compatibilist approaches to moral responsibility-that is, approaches that see moral responsibility as compatible with the causal order of the world. A separate Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy article considers "Free Will" and incompatibilist perspectives. Those approaches tend to give less attention to the forms of interaction involved in holding responsible and to the position of those who suffer wrongdoing. However, as Peter Strawson pointed out in a seminal essay (see Responsibility and the Reactive Sentiments), moral responsibility is intimately related to our reactions to one another. Similarly, consequentialist thinkers stress the social effects of holding people responsible for their actions, and these approaches have seen a marked revival in recent years (see Utilitarian and Consequentialist Approaches). This reflects a wider trend to consider the practices by which we hold people responsible and how these bear on relationships and wider social and political structures. Moral responsibility also bears on other topics of great practical importance, only briefly mentioned here. These include responsibility under the law (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy article on "Punishment"), the responsibilities of groups and organizations, accountability within organizations, and how distributive justice and individual responsibility are related.
When philosophers talk about "moral responsibility" they usually have in mind a relationship that can hold between people and the actions they perform, or between people and the consequences of their actions. We typically say that a person is "morally responsible for" an action or a consequence: