Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme

Abstract

form of compatibilism" An action or attitude manifests a virtue or vice "Judgments indicate what reactive attitudes are reactions to, but they are not themselves reactions." (pg. 226

Pushing the Margins of Responsibility: Lessons from Parks’ Somnambulistic Killing

“…By insisting on the importance of Parks' general moral status for his responsibility we are endorsing here a point already made, among others, by Watson [28], Scanlon [24] and McKenna [23] in the literature on moral responsibility. 18 The main idea is that attributions of (moral) responsibility are, in McKenna's words, calls for conversation.…”

Free will in context: a contemporary philosophical perspective

“…The complex of normative attitudes we form in response to others' actions, as Gary Watson characterizes the view, is, ''as natural and primitive in human life as friendship and animosity, sympathy and antipathy. It rests on needs and concerns that are not so much to be justified as acknowledged'' (Watson, 1987, p. 259, quoted by Haji, 2002. Here an important term is ''primitive''; the concepts at issue are taken to be as irreducibly basic as the primitive concepts of logic.…”

The Three-Fold Significance of the Blaming Emotions

“…Strawson (1982) in understanding claims about someone's moral responsibility or the phenomenon of holding people morally responsible in terms of the appropriateness of a certain class of emotions (Bennett 1980;Watson 1993;Wallace 1994;Fischer and Ravizza 1998;McKenna 1998;Macnamara 2009). But even those who would not follow Strawson in identifying moral responsibility attributions with the appropriateness of emotions hold that emotions do play a role in our moral responsibility practices (Scanlon 2008, 143).…”

“…Here they are inspired by Gary Watson's (1996) distinction between these two concepts, but urge that conceptual clarity about moral responsibility requires far more distinctions.…”