Moral Responsibility and Merit

King, Matt

doi:10.26556/jesp.v6i2.64

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…For example, I might deserve to feel guilty in virtue of having acted knowingly, freely and wrongly. 21 "Fittingness" is sometimes used interchangeably with "merit" (King 2012;Shoemaker 2015). But perhaps the relation picked out by "merit" is identical, or at least close enough, to the one picked out by desert?…”

Section: Fittingness and Desertmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shame and Attributability

Carlsson¹

2019

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6

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Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame oneself in the attributability sense, it will be argued, is to feel shame and feeling shame is also to suffer. Therefore, the different control conditions cannot be explained by a difference in the harm of blame. Instead, this paper argues that accountability and attributability are governed by different kinds of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if S deserves to feel guilty for X; an agent S is attributability blameworthy for X only if it is fitting that S feels shame for X.

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Section: Fittingness and Desertmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shame and Attributability

Carlsson¹

2019

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6

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“…Not all actions are blameworthy. For example, some researchers identify what they call morally neutral acts as those actions where a person can be morally responsible but not blameworthy (King, 2012 ). Morally obligatory actions are those that people should do, and moral supererogatory acts are activities that are especially praiseworthy or even heroic.…”

Section: Moral Responsibility and Moral Agencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Feldman and Skow ( 2020 ) distinguish moral responsibility from causal responsibility as people can be morally responsible for something for which determining causality would be difficult. Moral responsibility has been a subject of intense philosophical debates for years setting up competing claims and tensions (Strawson, 1962 , King 2012 ; Wallace, 1994 ; Watson, 2004 ). At the heart of those debates is determining when an agent is a candidate for blame or praise.…”

Section: The Nature Of Moral Responsibility: Theoretical Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vulnerability, Moral responsibility, and Moral Obligations: the case of Industrial Action in the Medical and Allied Professions

Adobor

2022

Med Health Care and Philos

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The article addresses issues at the nexus of physician industrial action, moral agency, and responsibility. There are situations in which we find ourselves best placed to offer aid to those who may be in vulnerable positions, a behavior that is consistent with our everyday moral intuitions. In both our interpersonal relationships and social life, we make frequent judgments about whether to praise or blame someone for their actions when we determine that they should have acted to help a vulnerable person. While the average person is unlikely to confront these kinds of situations often, those in the medical professions, physicians especially, may confront these and similar situations regularly. Therefore, when physicians withhold their services for whatever reason in support of industrial action, it raises issues of moral responsibility to patients who may be in a vulnerable position. Using theories of moral responsibility, vulnerability, and ethics, this paper explores the moral implications of physician industrial action. We explore issues of vulnerability of patients, as well as the moral responsibility and moral agency of doctors to patients. Determining when a person is vulnerable, and when an individual becomes a moral agent, worthy of praise or blame for an act or non-action, is at the core of the framework. Notwithstanding the right of physicians to act in their self-interest, we argue that vulnerability leads to moral obligations, that physicians are moral agents, and the imperatives of their obligations to patients clear, even if limited by certain conditions. We suggest that both doctors and governments have a collective responsibility to prevent harm to patients and present the theoretical and practical implications of the paper.

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“…These considerations, perhaps among others, have led some authors to (tacitly or overtly) equate desert with fittingness (Feinberg, , p. 82; Zimmerman, , p. 57). And indeed several (other) authors have explicitly suggested an analysis of the latter in terms of the former (King, ; Thomson, ). According to this proposal, what it is for an attitude to be fitting just is for its object to deserve it.…”

Section: A Desert‐based Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fittingness

Howard¹

2018

Philosophy Compass

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The normative notion of fittingness figures saliently in the work of a number of ethical theorists writing in the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and has in recent years regained prominence, occupying an important place in the theoretical tool kits of a range of contemporary writers. Yet the notion remains strikingly undertheorized. This article offers a (partial) remedy. I proceed by canvassing a number of attempts to analyze the fittingness relation in other terms, arguing that none is fully adequate. In explaining why various analyses of fittingness fail, I draw into relief certain of the relation's constitutive features and spotlight some of its interesting and important connections to various other properties. Along the way, I highlight the relation's relevance to a number of ongoing debates in normative and metanormative philosophy. I conclude by indicating some directions for further research.

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Moral Responsibility and Merit

Cited by 13 publications

References 15 publications

Shame and Attributability

Shame and Attributability

Vulnerability, Moral responsibility, and Moral Obligations: the case of Industrial Action in the Medical and Allied Professions

Fittingness

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