Control, responsibility, and moral assessment

Smith, Angela M.

doi:10.1007/s11098-006-9048-x

Cited by 175 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…9 Watson notes the difficulty and contends that we must respond to such agents broadly as if they were responsible, condemning the acts and acting to limit the damage they might cause; but, he argues, these responses 'lack their normal expressive function ' (2004, p. 281). See also Smith (2008) and Hieronymi (2007) against the idea that inability implies non-culpability. 10 In the final section, I will offer a different explanation as to why we may respond with more vigour to the wrongdoing of more virtuous agents.…”

Section: Practical Implications Of Limited Abilities To Act Well (I):mentioning

confidence: 99%

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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Section: Practical Implications Of Limited Abilities To Act Well (I):mentioning

confidence: 99%

Regulation Enables: Corporate Agency and Practices of Responsibility

Williams

2018

J Bus Ethics

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“…On Nomy Arpaly's (2003) view, for instance, the failure to do what is morally required is blameworthy only if it reflects a lack of concern for one's moral reasons. Angela Smith (2005Smith ( , 2008 has argued that one is morally responsible for some event if that event is a manifestation of the fact that one's rational judgments are in violation of moral standards. And T. M. Scanlon has similarly claimed that an agent is blameworthy for those things that express or reveal the presence of attitudes toward others that impair the relations others can have with her (1998,2008).…”

Section: S48mentioning

confidence: 99%

Good intentions and the road to hell

Paul

2017

Philosophical Explorations

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“…So, for example, we can explain Joel's failure to get the milk in terms of some prior behavior that explains why Joel fails to get the milk. 7 Similarly, proponents of the Capacity Account can note that even if people rarely possess control over and awareness of their decisions and actions, it is implausible to suppose that agents never possess control and 5 See Frankfurt (1998), Scanlon (1998Scanlon ( , 2008, Smith (2005Smith ( , 2008Smith ( , 2015 6 Clarke (2014: 164). Clarke does not cite this example in support of a scope argument.…”

Section: Arguments Against the Capacity Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsibility and vigilance

Murray

2016

Philos Stud

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My primary target in this paper is a puzzle that emerges from the conjunction of several seemingly innocent assumptions in action theory and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. The puzzle I have in mind is this. On one widely held account of moral responsibility, an agent is morally responsible only for those actions or outcomes over which that agent exercises control. Recently, however, some have cited cases where agents appear to be morally responsible without exercising any control. This leads some to abandon the control-based account of responsibility and replace it with an alternative account. It leads others to deny the intuition that agents are responsible in these troublesome cases. After outlining the account of moral responsibility I have in mind, I look at some of the arguments made against the viability of this theory. I show that there are conceptual resources for salvaging the control account, focusing in particular on the nature of vigilance. I also argue that there is empirical data that supports the control account so conceived.

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Control, responsibility, and moral assessment

Cited by 175 publications

References 15 publications

Regulation Enables: Corporate Agency and Practices of Responsibility

Regulation Enables: Corporate Agency and Practices of Responsibility

Good intentions and the road to hell

Responsibility and vigilance

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