La década de los 80 fue testigo de un renacimiento del realismo moral, sobre todo en los Estados Unidos. En artículos especializados, los filósofos Nicholas Sturgeon ("Moral Explanations" 1984), Peter Railton ("Moral Realism" 1986), Richard Boyd ("How to Be a Moral Realist" 1988), se distanciaron del "legado no-cognitivista" del siglo XX, que comienza con la metaética emotivista y prescríptivista de comienzos y mediados de siglo, y se extiende hasta las teorías más sofisticadas de Simón Blackbum, John Mackie y Gilbert Harman. David Brink perteneció también a ese gmpo de realistas y recogió sus pensamientos en el libro que ahora reseñamos, A juzgar por sus diversas reimpresiones ('89, '91, '94, '96), el libro se ha convertido en una importante herramienta de enseñanza de la filosofia moral en las universidades norteamericanas. En lo que sigue, las páginas entre paréntesis se refieren a la obra reseñada.

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

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