TY - JOUR
T1 - Building a better theory of responsibility
AU - McGeer, Victoria
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
PY - 2015/10/7
Y1 - 2015/10/7
N2 - In Building Better Beings, Vargas develops and defends a naturalistic (compatibilist) account of responsibility, whereby responsible agents must possess a feasibly situated capacity to detect and respond to moral considerations. As a preliminary step, he also offers a substantive account of how we might justify our practices of holding responsible—viz., by appeal to their efficacy in fostering a ‘valuable form of agency’ across the community at large, a form of agency that precisely encompasses sensitivity to moral considerations. But how do these accounts relate to one another? Though I find much that is appealing in Vargas’s general approach, I challenge his insistence that these accounts should be treated as ‘conceptually independent’, arguing that this generates an objectionable “justification gap”: on his analysis, someone could remain an appropriate target of our responsibility practices and yet fail to be a morally responsible agent. In closing, I offer a potential solution to this problem, though it means re-visioning how the account of moral responsibility is conceptually tied to the justification of our responsibility practices.
AB - In Building Better Beings, Vargas develops and defends a naturalistic (compatibilist) account of responsibility, whereby responsible agents must possess a feasibly situated capacity to detect and respond to moral considerations. As a preliminary step, he also offers a substantive account of how we might justify our practices of holding responsible—viz., by appeal to their efficacy in fostering a ‘valuable form of agency’ across the community at large, a form of agency that precisely encompasses sensitivity to moral considerations. But how do these accounts relate to one another? Though I find much that is appealing in Vargas’s general approach, I challenge his insistence that these accounts should be treated as ‘conceptually independent’, arguing that this generates an objectionable “justification gap”: on his analysis, someone could remain an appropriate target of our responsibility practices and yet fail to be a morally responsible agent. In closing, I offer a potential solution to this problem, though it means re-visioning how the account of moral responsibility is conceptually tied to the justification of our responsibility practices.
KW - Capacities
KW - Compatibilism
KW - Moral influence
KW - Moral scaffolding
KW - Reason responsiveness
KW - Responsibility
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84940993940&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11098-015-0478-1
DO - 10.1007/s11098-015-0478-1
M3 - Article
SN - 0031-8116
VL - 172
SP - 2635
EP - 2649
JO - Philosophical Studies
JF - Philosophical Studies
IS - 10
ER -