Moore on degrees of responsibility
In his latest book Mechanical Choices, Michael Moore provides an explication and defence of the idea that responsibility comes in degrees. His account takes as its point of departure the view that free action and free will consist in the holding of certain counterfactuals. In this paper, I argue tha...
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| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
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Springer Nature
2023
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| _version_ | 1826313084150480896 |
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| author | Kaiserman, A |
| author_facet | Kaiserman, A |
| author_sort | Kaiserman, A |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | In his latest book Mechanical Choices, Michael Moore provides an explication and defence of the idea that responsibility comes in degrees. His account takes as its point of departure the view that free action and free will consist in the holding of certain counterfactuals. In this paper, I argue that Moore’s view faces several familiar counterexamples, all of which serve to motivate Harry Frankfurt’s classic insight that whether and to what extent one is responsible for one’s action has more to do with what actually caused that action than with what one could or couldn’t have done instead. I then go on to sketch an alternative approach to degrees of responsibility that takes seriously this insight. I’ll argue that Moore ought to be sympathetic to this approach, inasmuch as it combines two familiar Moorean ideas: the idea that causal contribution comes in degrees, and the idea that acting freely is compatible with, and indeed entails, the fact that one’s action was caused by prior states of affairs. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T08:21:51Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:8cc836e4-c60d-4784-ab91-3d0d2ab2d9b0 |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-25T04:05:25Z |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| publisher | Springer Nature |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:8cc836e4-c60d-4784-ab91-3d0d2ab2d9b02024-05-24T11:45:08ZMoore on degrees of responsibilityJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:8cc836e4-c60d-4784-ab91-3d0d2ab2d9b0EnglishSymplectic ElementsSpringer Nature2023Kaiserman, AIn his latest book Mechanical Choices, Michael Moore provides an explication and defence of the idea that responsibility comes in degrees. His account takes as its point of departure the view that free action and free will consist in the holding of certain counterfactuals. In this paper, I argue that Moore’s view faces several familiar counterexamples, all of which serve to motivate Harry Frankfurt’s classic insight that whether and to what extent one is responsible for one’s action has more to do with what actually caused that action than with what one could or couldn’t have done instead. I then go on to sketch an alternative approach to degrees of responsibility that takes seriously this insight. I’ll argue that Moore ought to be sympathetic to this approach, inasmuch as it combines two familiar Moorean ideas: the idea that causal contribution comes in degrees, and the idea that acting freely is compatible with, and indeed entails, the fact that one’s action was caused by prior states of affairs. |
| spellingShingle | Kaiserman, A Moore on degrees of responsibility |
| title | Moore on degrees of responsibility |
| title_full | Moore on degrees of responsibility |
| title_fullStr | Moore on degrees of responsibility |
| title_full_unstemmed | Moore on degrees of responsibility |
| title_short | Moore on degrees of responsibility |
| title_sort | moore on degrees of responsibility |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT kaisermana mooreondegreesofresponsibility |