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Embracing Moral Luck: Accidents, Apologies, and the Foundations of Social Cooperation

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/560948
Date January 2015
CreatorsHankins, Keith
ContributorsSchmidtz, David, Gill, Michael, McKenna, Michael, Nichols, Shaun, Schmidtz, David
PublisherThe University of Arizona.
Source SetsUniversity of Arizona
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext, Electronic Dissertation
RightsCopyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

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