One of the most significant questions in ethics is this: under what conditions are people morally responsible for what they do? Assuming that people can only be praised or blamed for actions they perform of their own free will, the particular question that interests me is how we should understand the nature of this freedom – with what kind of freedom must people act, if they are to be morally responsible for what they do? A natural answer to this question – and the one I think is correct – is to point to the freedom to do otherwise. This is encapsulated in the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), the principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. PAP has led many to believe that the freedom required for moral responsibility must be incompatible with determinism or the existence of God because it is plausible to argue that if determinism is true or if God exists, then people would lack genuine freedom of choice and hence could not be morally responsible for their behavior. In the light of two important articles by Harry Frankfurt almost four decades ago, which challenged the claim that moral responsibility requires the freedom to do otherwise, compatibilism – the opposing view that the freedom for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism – has experienced a resurgence. Inspired by Frankfurt’s work, those wanting to reject PAP – typically compatibilists – attack the principle on two main grounds: directly and indirectly. First, they have argued directly that PAP is false by developing alleged counterexamples to it. Second, they have challenged PAP indirectly by arguing that there are alternative conceptions of freedom from freedom of choice that, it is claimed, are not reliant on alternative possibilities but are sufficient to capture the freedom required for moral responsibility. My dissertation evaluates these two lines of attack on PAP. In particular, I attempt to defend the truth of PAP against both kinds of challenge. / text

<p>Some philosophers (Blum 2002 and Anderson 2010) have argued that ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ have been used so widely that they have lost their conceptual potency and are no longer effective moral evaluations. For this reason, they think we should use other terms to identify racial injustices. It is the goal of this dissertation to argue against this conclusion. In Chapter 2, I develop tools for diagnosing the individualist versus structuralist debate within philosophical accounts of racism. I use these tools to show that both individualists and structuralists are committed to entity type monism or the view that only certain kinds of entities can be racist. I reject this view and argue for entity type pluralism. In Chapter 3, I move from entity type pluralism to develop an account of the application conditions for the predicate ‘racist’ that tell us when and why we should apply the predicate to particular entities. These two chapters serve to clarify RACISM. In Chapter 4, I develop new resources for understanding moral responsibility for racism, specifically for how agents can be held accountable for intervening upon racist non-agential entities like norms, policies, and institutions. I call these resources “oblique blame” and “intervention-sensitive moral responsibility.” Intervention-sensitive moral responsibility gives way to a problem. Given the ways in which our current epistemic practices exclude the testimony of People of Color, we will have a hard time knowing when we are responsible in this intervention-sensitive way. I call this the Knowledge Problem. In Chapter 5, I bring together the literature on epistemic oppression and the empirically-informed norms literature to show that interventions into epistemic norms help solve this problem. I provide four candidate norms from activist and organizing communities as examples. Taken together, this dissertation shows that we need not discontinue our use of ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ and that the terms can be used effectively to hold each other accountable toward anti-racist aims and a liberated future.</p>

Nathan Phillip Stout

In my dissertation, I explore the connection between cultural membership and moral responsibility. In particular, I consider what sorts of mitigating excuses, if any, are available to perpetrators of what we take to be serious wrong action due to their unique cultural circumstances. I utilize real-life case studies, and apply various philosophical theories of moral responsibility to these examples. One such theory--offered by Susan Wolf--suggests that these "cultural defendants" may not be responsible for their participation in morally wrong practices due to the possibility that they may have been rendered by their cultures unable to recognize and/or appreciate that these practices were in fact wrong. This would supposedly allow us to claim that they were not culpable for their resulting ignorance or for their morally wrong actions which resulted from acting in accordance with their (actually false) beliefs. I argue that this approach to understanding the relation between moral responsibility and cultural membership is seriously flawed, and provides us with counter-intuitive results about the case studies in question. Consequently, I next examine theories of responsibility which suggest that responsibility may be mitigated not because of an alleged inability to recognize the truth, but rather due to the alleged reasonability of the beliefs of the perpetrators. Lawrence Vogel and Neil Levy offer versions of this strategy. They argue that, because certain morally wrong practices (such as slavery) were endorsed by the societies of certain individuals, their resulting beliefs in the propriety of their actions were epistemically reasonable. It is argued that these persons should not be considered culpable for holding their actually false beliefs or for acting in accordance with them. I argue that the strategy is in many ways preferable to Wolf's inability thesis, yet it nonetheless suffers from ambiguity. The final portion of my project explores the connection between the epistemic status of a belief and a person's moral culpability for holding and acting upon it. I outline the grounds upon which the subjects in the case studies can be held morally culpable for their epistemic mistakes and for their failure to develop and exercise epistemic virtues.

The norms that mediate our responses to accidents play a critical role in facilitating social cooperation. My dissertation explores these norms with an eye towards what they can tell us about the nature of moral responsibility. Drawing on Adam Smith's brief, but important discussion of moral luck, I argue that our responses to accidents reveal the extent to which the obligations we incur and the moral appraisals we make of one another are often appropriately influenced by fortune. In particular, I show how making sense of these responses requires us to embrace the idea that we can sometimes be morally responsible for things without being culpable, and I argue that doing so need not do violence to our moral intuitions.

This thesis explores the merits and limits of John Hawthorne’s contextualist analysis of free will. First, I argue that contextualism does better at capturing the ordinary understanding of ‘free will’ than competing views because it best accounts for the way in which our willingness to attribute free will ordinarily varies with context. Then I consider whether this is enough to conclude that the contextualist has won the free will debate. I argue that this would be hasty, because the contextualist, unlike her competitors, cannot tell us whether any particular agent is definitively free, and therefore cannot inform any practices that are premised on whether a particular agent is morally responsible. As such, I argue that whether the contextualist “wins the free will debate” depends on whether it is more important to capture the ordinary understanding of ‘free will’ or more important to inform our practices of ascribing moral responsibility.

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This thesis develops a tectonic theory of moral responsibility. The word ‘tectonic’ is used metaphorically, to bring to mind the interaction of tectonic plates in the earth’s crust. The theory of moral responsibility developed in the thesis posits that there are two aspects of persons that should be considered within moral responsibility judgments: agency and patiency. I suggest that the ways that these relate to and influence each other can be thought of as similar to the interactions between tectonic plates. I use the term ‘agency’ in its usual sense to refer to the control component of moral responsibility judgments. A person must be an agent, i.e. have a normal degree of self-control in order to be held morally responsible for her actions. This is a vague take on agency, to be sure. However, the tectonic theory is meant to apply to any of the common conceptions of agency in the moral responsibility literature. The vagueness in my treatment of agency is thus intended to allow the tectonic theory to be pluralist in regards to various conceptions of agency on offer. Whether one subscribes to a reasons-responsiveness view of agency, or an identificationist view, the tectonic theory’s prescribed concern for patiency can function as a fairness-enhancing counterweight to the agentic considerations of either view. The novelty of the tectonic theory derives from its use of the concept of patiency, which has been neglected in philosophical discussions of moral responsibility. Patiency refers to the features of a person and her life that she cannot control. The tectonic theory takes both agentic and patientic features of persons into account when making moral responsibility judgments. I argue that doing so can enhance the fairness of moral responsibility judgments, while for the most part avoiding the pitfalls of more conventional approaches to moral responsibility such as compatibilism and incompatibilism. To develop the tectonic theory, I draw from work in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

In this thesis, I defend compatibilism from all manipulation arguments. Manipulation arguments are supported by control cases. These cases purport to be counter-examples to all plausible current compatibilist conditions on moral responsibility. Some compatibilists – historicists – have argued that manipulation arguments can be undermined by endorsing the view that an individual’s moral responsibility for her actions is, in some sense, sensitive to her history. In Part One, I first argue that historicism is without motivation and is untenable. I then sketch a form of compatibilism – the structural-narrative view. This view differs from standard compatibilist accounts because it not only makes clear the synchronic ‘ownership’ (the free will or control condition), but also the diachronic ‘ownership’ conditions (normally taken to be personal identity) on moral responsibility. Both conditions have a narrative component, which I draw from narrative views of personal identity. These conditions insulate my structural-narrative from the manipulation arguments that motivate historicism, thereby providing compatibilists with a tenable alternative to historicism. In Part Two, I argue that the remaining manipulation arguments do not show that compatibilism is false. I first clarify the structure of manipulation arguments. In particular I argue that compatibilists ought to focus their efforts on showing that the control cases that support manipulation arguments are not in fact counter-examples to the compatibilist conditions on moral responsibility. I then distinguish two types of control case: threatening and unthreatening. I argue that the remaining threatening control cases only seem to be counter-examples because of ambiguities in their descriptions that result in us misidentifying the locus of moral responsibility in those cases; once these ambiguities are clarified, the non-responsibility judgement elicited by those cases soon dissipates. I then present three related to arguments to support the claim that unthreatening cases are not counter-examples the compatibilist conditions on moral responsibility; hence I conclude that manipulation arguments do not show that compatibilism is false.

This thesis examines the excusing and exempting conditions in Strawsonian accounts of moral responsibility. More specifically, it notes some concerns for Strawsonian accounts with regards to exempting individuals on the basis of psychological abnormalities, namely that the excusing/exempting distinction is unclear, and more importantly that treating a person's brain as an entity distinct from the person suggests a dualistic picture of the self that is not consistent with neuroscientific accounts of the brain. If we redraw the distinction to be between external/internal features, and focus on brain processes as the responsible entities for any given action, we can avoid these worries and have a more empirically accurate account of responsibility. / Master of Arts