Essentially Shared Obligations

Björnsson, Gunnar

doi:10.1111/misp.12019

Cited by 42 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(29 reference statements)

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“…After all, if they had been committed to care a lot more about this, they would have found social support for their caring. This might ground shared responsibility, and shared obligations to change the circumstances (see Björnsson 2011;2014a;Forthcoming-b). )…”

Section: Gunnarbjornsson@susementioning

confidence: 99%

“…For an overview and more detailed application than can be offered here, see Björnsson Forthcoming-a; for some of my earlier discussion of this kind of account, see Björnsson 2011;Björnsson and Persson 2012;Björnsson 2014a;b;Björnsson and Pereboom 2016. The current proposal is in many ways similar to Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder's recent (2014) account of blame-and praiseworthiness of actions specifically, but covers blame and credit for omissions and non-agential events as well as for actions, and understands quality of will in relation to what can be properly demanded of agents in line with the general account of blame and credit.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Explaining Away Epistemic Skepticism about Culpability

Björnsson¹

2017

Oxford Scholarship Online

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Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the epistemic condition on moral responsibility makes blameworthiness much less common than we ordinarily suppose, and much harder to identify. This paper argues that such epistemically based responsibility skepticism is mistaken. Section 2 sketches a general account of moral responsibility, building on the Strawsonian idea that blame and credit relates to the agent’s quality of will. Section 3 explains how this account deals with central cases that motivate epistemic skepticism and how it avoids some objections to quality of will accounts recently raised by Gideon Rosen. But an intuitive worry brought out by these objections remains. Section 4 spells out this remaining worry and argues that, like traditional metaphysical responsibility skepticism, it has its source in a non-standard explanatory perspective on action, suggesting that strategies for explaining away the intuitive pull of traditional skepticism are applicable in this case too.

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Section: Gunnarbjornsson@susementioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Explaining Away Epistemic Skepticism about Culpability

Björnsson¹

2017

Oxford Scholarship Online

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“…And some authors have argued for the possibility of obligation in large unstructured groups incapable of collective control, intention, belief, decision, etc. If such obligations exist, but are not discharged, then that would imply culpability of a group that cannot author actions (Wringe, ; Björnsson, ; Schwenkenbecher, ; Pinkert, ). We think those authors are wrong, because we think collective control, intention, belief, decision, etc., are necessary preconditions for obligation, and so a necessary condition of culpability for failing to discharge obligations (Collins, , 234–5, 238–41; Lawford‐Smith, , 231–33).…”

Section: If Not Citizens Then Who Is Culpable For What the State Does?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsibility for states' actions: Normative issues at the intersection of collective agency and state responsibility

Lawford‐Smith

Collins

2017

Philosophy Compass

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Is the state a collective agent? Are citizens responsible for what their states do? If not citizens, then who, if anyone, is responsible for what the state does? Many different sub‐disciplines of philosophy are relevant for answering these questions. We need to know what “the state” is, who or what it's composed of, and what relation the parts stand in to the whole. Once we know what it is, we need to know whether that thing is an agent, in particular a moral agent capable of taking moral responsibility for its actions. We have to know what it takes for it to be capable of moral responsibility, e.g., what the functional equivalents in groups (or in that kind of group in particular) are of knowledge, intention, foreseeability, recklessness, and so on. And once we've established that it is an agent, and is responsible for what it does, we have to explain whether and in what way this implicates members, i.e., whether state responsibility distributes to the (compositional) members of states, whoever they may be (“citizens” is one possibility, but there are many). Answers to these questions come from metaphysics, social ontology, action theory, epistemology, political theory, and ethics. In what follows, we'll give an outline of some different ways of answering these questions.

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“…For example, we might say that an action is objectively wrong insofar as one would be to blame for it if one knew all the relevant facts, and that an action of kind K is pro tanto objectively wrong insofar as one is blameworthy for performing actions of kind K unless one has a complete excuse or special justification for doing it.) Given MORAL EXPLANATORY BLAME (CREDIT), requirements to care about certain matters are the ultimate foundations of moral responsibility; elsewhere, I have argued that they are also central to obligations (Björnsson 2014a) and forward-looking or normative responsibilities (Björnsson and Brülde forthcoming). One might sensibly worry, though, that moral credit-or blameworthiness can be grounded in cognitive, conative, or affective states other than states of (not) caring (I thank Michael Zimmerman for pushing me on this).…”

Section: Gunnarbjornsson@umusementioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining (Away) the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

Björnsson¹

2017

Oxford Scholarship Online

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It is clear that lack of awareness of the consequences of an action can undermine moral responsibility and blame for these consequences. But when and how it does so is controversial. Sometimes an agent believing that the outcome might occur is excused because it seemed unlikely to her, and sometimes an agent having no idea that it would occur is nevertheless to blame. A low or zero degree of belief might seem to excuse unless the agent "should have known better", but it is unclear how to spell out this normative condition.This chapter combines (a) an independently motivated account of responsibility, blame, and credit as grounded in a normal explanatory relation between agential qualities and objects of responsibility with (b) the familiar Strawsonian idea that moral blame and credit depend on the agent's quality of will. The resulting explanatory quality of will condition on moral responsibility is then further motivated by being shown to account for the effects on moral blame and credit of justifications, as well as of excuses and undermined control in cases not involving ignorance.The explanatory quality of will condition is finally applied to cases involving various degrees of lack of awareness. Though this condition itself involves no awareness requirement, it is shown how it accounts for the degrees to which lack of awareness can excuse. It is also explained how lack of awareness fails as an excuse exactly when the agent should have known better and can be blamed for not doing so.

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Essentially Shared Obligations

Cited by 42 publications

References 29 publications

Explaining Away Epistemic Skepticism about Culpability

Explaining Away Epistemic Skepticism about Culpability

Responsibility for states' actions: Normative issues at the intersection of collective agency and state responsibility

Explaining (Away) the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

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