No abstract

Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility is a much expected book, in which Dana Nelkin puts forward a new and rich account of freedom and moral responsibility. In the wake of Susan Wolf's account, the Rational Abilities view -as Nelkin calls her account -claims that "one is responsible for an action if and only if one acts with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons" (3); a central "striking feature" of this view is that the ability to do otherwise is only needed for actions that are not done for good reasons or are not good, but not for good actions done for good reasons. The idea is that when someone acts for good reasons, she is thereby exercising the ability and it is not required that she be able to act badly or for bad reasons; but when one acts for bad reasons, one needs to be able to act for good reasons in order to be morally responsible.The book has two parts. Nelkin's agenda for the first half is to present a convincing account of abilities as well as to argue for the asymmetry between good and bad actions. The second part is an account of "our sense of ourselves as free and responsible", in which a compatibilist understanding of alternatives is offered. Let us see, in order, how well she does on each of these tasks.Nelkin begins by addressing the claim that alternative possibilities are needed both for blameworthy and praiseworthy actions. In Chapter 2, she considers the argument from fairness for that view and argues that the parallel between i) the unfairness of blaming someone for a bad action, or an action done by bad reasons, which one was unable to avoid, and ii) the unfairness of praising someone for a good action that one was unable to avoid, is only apparent, since an opportunity to avoid doing something wrong and blameworthy, thus avoiding harm, seems only fair if we are going to impose such

In this essay, we explore a conception of the nature and structure of responsibility that draws on ideas about moral and criminal responsibility. Though the two sorts of responsibility are not the same, the criminal law reflects central assumptions about moral responsibility, and the two concepts of responsibility have very similar structure. Our conception of responsibility draws on work of philosophers in the compatibilist tradition who focus on the choices of agents who are reasons--responsive and work in criminal jurisprudence that understands responsibility in terms of the choices of agents who have capacities for practical reason and whose situation affords them the fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. 2 We treat these two perspectives as potentially complementary and argue that each can learn things from the other. Specifically, we think that criminal jurisprudence needs a more systematic conception of the capacities for normative competence and that ideas from the reasons--responsive literature on moral responsibility, some familiar and some novel, can fill this need. However, we think that moral philosophers tend to focus on the capacities involved in responsibility and so tend to ignore the situational element in responsibility recognized in the criminal law literature. Our conception of responsibility brings together the dimensions of normative competence and situational control, and we factor normative competence into cognitive and volitional capacities, which we treat as equally important to normative competence and, ultimately, responsibility. Moreover, we argue that normative competence and situational control can and should be understood as expressing a common concern that blame and punishment presuppose that the agent had a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. Thus, we treat the value that criminal law theorists associate with the situational element of responsibility as the umbrella concept for our conception of responsibility, one that explains the distinctive architecture of responsibility. 1 This essay is fully collaborative. The authors are listed in alphabetical order. The ideas for this essay grew out of a graduate seminar that we taught together on the topic of partial responsibility in 2008 and were refined in a seminar on responsibility that DB taught in 2011. Versions of this material were presented at

In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons‐responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza (1998) requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine‐grained measures of degrees of reasons‐responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty (contrary to the recent attempt by Coates and Swenson (2013) to extend the reasons‐responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility.

No abstract