Agency and Answerability

Watson, Gary

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199272273.001.0001

Cited by 226 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…28 See Frankfurt (1999). 29 See, e.g., various essays in Watson (2004), Velleman (2000), and Wallace (2006, esp. the essay ''Caring, Reflexivity, and the Structure of Volition'').…”

Section: Self-identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-exposure and exposure of the self: informational privacy and the presentation of identity

Shoemaker

2009

Ethics Inf Technol

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“…28 See Frankfurt (1999). 29 See, e.g., various essays in Watson (2004), Velleman (2000), and Wallace (2006, esp. the essay ''Caring, Reflexivity, and the Structure of Volition'').…”

Section: Self-identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-exposure and exposure of the self: informational privacy and the presentation of identity

Shoemaker

2009

Ethics Inf Technol

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“…If we think of holding responsible as imposing a cost or harm, a limitation or a restriction, then an agent ought to have a fair opportunity to avoid this. We find this sort of view in many writers advocating compatibilist accounts of responsibility, such as Wolf (1990), Wallace (1994), Fischer and Ravizza (1998), Watson (2004), and, most recently, Nelkin (2011). These accounts overcome an obvious perplexity of metaphysical free will (how is responsibility meant to follow simply from being uncaused to act in any particular way?)…”

Section: A Philosophical Perplexity About Responsibilitymentioning

confidence: 93%

Regulation Enables: Corporate Agency and Practices of Responsibility

Williams

2018

J Bus Ethics

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Both advocates of corporate regulation and its opponents tend to depict regulation as restrictive-a policy option that limits freedom in the name of welfare or other social goods. Against this framing, I suggest we can understand regulation in enabling terms. If well designed and properly enforced, regulation enables companies to operate in ways that are acceptable to society as a whole. This paper argues for this enabling character by considering some wider questions about responsibility and the sharing of responsibility. Agents who are less able or willing to act well are obviously more likely to face criticism, mistrust, and adverse responses. It will be more difficult to hold those agents responsible, especially so when there are many who fail in their responsibilities or where there are wide-reaching disagreements about those responsibilities. Regulatory standards, like other norms and ways of defining responsibilities, address these problems: by restricting, they also enable social cooperation. Like other forms of holding responsible, ways of enforcing those standards against recalcitrant agents, or encouraging conformity to them, may also seem restrictive. Again, however, these practices play an important role in enabling responsible agency. This is partly because they can bolster readiness to act well in agents who experience or witness such responses. It is also because they free other agents to exercise initiative and commitment in defining their individual responsibilities in line with higher standards.

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“…Gary Watson [2004] has compared the claim that indeterminism enhances control to a kind of alchemy. He argues, 'What is incredible, I submit, is that the mere addition of indeterminacy to [a world that satisfies all the compatibilist conditions for free will and moral responsibility] could have the significance that [eventcausal] libertarians attribute to it ' [ibid.…”

Section: The Problem Of Enhanced Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Problem of Enhanced Control

Franklin

2011

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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A crucial question for libertarians about free will and moral responsibility concerns how their accounts secure more control than compatibilism. This problem is particularly exasperating for event-causal libertarianism, as it seems that the only difference between these accounts and compatibilism is that the former require indeterminism. But how can indeterminism, a mere negative condition, enhance control? This worry has led many to conclude that the only viable form of libertarianism is agent-causal libertarianism. In this paper I show that this conclusion is premature. I explain how event-causal libertarianism secures more control than compatibilism by offering a novel argument for incompatibilism. Part of the reason my solution has gone unnoticed is that it is often mistakenly assumed that an agent's control is wholly exhausted by the agent's powers and abilities. I argue, however, that control is constituted not just by what we have the ability to do, but also by what we have the opportunity to do. And it is by furnishing agents with new opportunities that event-causal libertarianism secures enhanced control. In order to defend this claim, I provide an analysis of opportunities and construct a novel incompatibilist argument to show that the opportunity to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism.

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Agency and Answerability

Cited by 226 publications

References 73 publications

Self-exposure and exposure of the self: informational privacy and the presentation of identity

Self-exposure and exposure of the self: informational privacy and the presentation of identity

Regulation Enables: Corporate Agency and Practices of Responsibility

The Problem of Enhanced Control

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