The Problem with Negligence

King, Matt

doi:10.5840/soctheorpract200935433

Cited by 46 publications

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“…The argument here is meant to illustrate why such attempts fail. I defend a similar line of reasoning (in greater detail) in King .…”

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confidence: 85%

Traction without Tracing: A (Partial) Solution for Control‐Based Accounts of Moral Responsibility

King¹

2011

European J of Philosophy

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Control‐based accounts of moral responsibility face a familiar problem. There are some actions which look like obvious cases of responsibility but which appear equally obviously to lack the requisite control. Drunk‐driving cases are canonical instances. The familiar solution to this problem is to appeal to tracing. Though the drunk driver isn't in control at the time of the crash, this is because he previously drank to excess, an action over which he did plausibly exercise the requisite control. Tracing seeks to show that an agent's responsibility for some outcome (over which he lacked control) can be traced back to a prior exercise of control which caused (in the right way) the later lack of control. These and related cases have led many theorists to treat tracing as an indispensable component of any adequate theory of responsibility. This paper argues that tracing is in fact dispensable. I offer two strategies for explaining responsibility in drunk‐driving cases (and those with a similar structure): responsibility can either be exhaustively modeled on recklessness, or exhaustively modeled on negligence. Neither explanation, however, relies on tracing. If I'm right, the case for tracing is seriously weakened.

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“…The argument here is meant to illustrate why such attempts fail. I defend a similar line of reasoning (in greater detail) in King .…”

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confidence: 85%

Traction without Tracing: A (Partial) Solution for Control‐Based Accounts of Moral Responsibility

King¹

2011

European J of Philosophy

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“…Perhaps one could be blamed for earlier adverting to such traits and not doing anything about them. This mode of being to blame is part and parcel of what has come to be known in the literature on negligence as the 'tracing strategy' (King 2009;Vargas 2005) (so called because one traces responsibility from some earlier time when the actor adverted to the risk his traits posed to others, to some later time when that risk materializes in harm).…”

Section: The 'Tracing' Strategy: Finding Earlier Advertences Punishablementioning

confidence: 97%

Punishing the Awkward, the Stupid, the Weak, and the Selfish: The Culpability of Negligence

Moore

Hurd

2011

Criminal Law, Philosophy

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Negligence is a problematic basis for being morally blamed and punished for having caused some harm, because in such cases there is no choice to cause or allow-or risk causing or allowing-such harm to occur. The standard theories as to why inadvertent risk creation can be blameworthy despite the lack of culpable choice are that in such cases there is blame for: (1) an unexercised capacity to have adverted to the risk; (2) a defect in character explaining why one did not advert to the risk; (3) culpably acquiring or failing to rid oneself of these defects of character at some earlier time; (4) flawed use of those practical reasoning capacities that make one the person one is; or (5) chosen violation of per se rules about known precautions. Although each of these five theories can justify blame in some cases of negligence, none can justify blame in all cases intuitively thought to be cases of negligence, nor can any of these five theories show why inadvertent creation of an unreasonable risk, pure and simple, can be blameworthy.

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“…So if there's something interesting to the notion that both are responsible, that both deserve certain treatment because they are responsible, we should want our theory to explain why this is so in a way that sheds light on this shared feature of the cases. We should want a general explanation (King 2009;587).…”

Section: A General Account Of Responsibility For Negligence Cases Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, King believes that "negligence is unique in that it does not require consciously entertaining the risk one's conduct poses. It only has to be the case that one's conduct is unreasonably risky, not that one acted in the recognition that it was so" (King 2009;p. 578).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Negligence, Inadvertence, and Moral Responsibility

Mosqueda

2019

Anál. Filos.

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This paper is an assessment of the conclusion that negligent agents are not morally responsible for the damages they cause, reached by Matt King in “The Problem with Negligence” (2009). King’s argument involves two difficult issues that are often disregarded in discussions about moral responsibility. One is that it is not clear why we usually attribute responsibility in cases of negligence but not in cases of inadvertence even though both phenomena are characterized by the absence of conscious mental elements. The other is that any explanation of the responsibility attributed in cases of negligence and in paradigmatic cases should shed light on the features that both cases share. I will review these issues involved in King’s argument in order to avoid his conclusion and to clarify some important matters of our attribution of responsibility in cases of negligence and in cases of inadvertence.

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The Problem with Negligence

Cited by 46 publications

References 0 publications

Traction without Tracing: A (Partial) Solution for Control‐Based Accounts of Moral Responsibility

Traction without Tracing: A (Partial) Solution for Control‐Based Accounts of Moral Responsibility

Punishing the Awkward, the Stupid, the Weak, and the Selfish: The Culpability of Negligence

Negligence, Inadvertence, and Moral Responsibility

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