Responsibility and vigilance

Abstract

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.

The Place of the Trace: Negligence and Responsibility

“…This blocks the regress concern that King raises because we can, presumably, explain responsibility for some negligent decisions directly without appealing to prior choice points (cf. Clarke, 2014: 167 andMurray, 2017 for two proposals on direct responsibility for negligence). However, this also makes clear why we cannot simply apply the explanatory schema for the negligent decision directly to the negligent behavior.…”

The Nietzschean precedent for anti-reflective, dialogical agency

“…This is because when agents slip (or when agents slip in morally significant ways), there is generally some responsibility-relevant capacity that the agent fails to exercise in some scenario where she could and should have exercised that capacity. For instance, I have recently argued that in some cases of morally significant slips, the agent exhibits a failure of vigilance that makes it appropriate to blame her for those slips (Murray 2017). Insofar as vigilance is a responsibility-relevant capacity, vigilance can figure into a capacitarian theory of responsible agency that captures our intuitive reactions to cases of morally significant slips.…”

Habitual Weakness

“…Not only must we steel ourselves for the temptations that we are to face, but we must remain vigilant, simultaneously able to monitor the situation that we are in while remaining aware of our outstanding resolutions. The importance of this kind of vigilance to our moral responsibility has only recently been acknowledged (Murray ), but it is not hard to appreciate how it will require a different set of skills from those needed to stand up to temptations. As Christoph Lumer says, “Psychological research has revealed that bad habits, unlike responses to temptations, are controlled most effectively through spontaneous use of vigilant monitoring (thinking “don't do it,” and watching carefully for slip‐ups) (Quinn et al , p. 499)” (op.…”