Abstract
If moral responsibility is real, what else must be real? — what sorts of thing must exist, and what must their most general features be?
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There are many sorts of ‘responsibility’ sentences that are irrelevant, or are not directly and immediately relevant, to the concerns of this contribution. There are for example ‘purely causal’ sentences like ‘The discarded match was responsible for the fire’. Most such sentences can be seen to be at most indirectly relevant to questions of moral responsibility for the simple reason that their subject is not a person or moral agent. But the subject of a sentence ascribing purely causal responsibility can be a person: ‘The carelessly placed sentry was responsible for the enemy’s being aware of our position’.
Whatever the historical origin of the idiom ‘it was x’s fault’ may be, the word fault’ in this idiom does not now mean ‘defect’. Someone who refused to accept responsibility for his numerous character-flaws could say, ‘I have many faults, but they’re not my fault
Of course, there is also considerable disagreement about this. Sometimes this disagreement is due to disagreements about what are objective, factual matters on anyone’s account - whether, for example, Sally pushed Bill or whether he simply fell. Sometimes it is due to other factors. Consider the following case of Parfit’s: A ninetyyear-old man, a deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, injured a policeman in a brawl when he was twenty. Parfit maintains that the old man may well not be responsible for the consequences of this act of his tempestuous youth. (Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1984), 326.) In my idiom, this must come to the following. If the policeman (now also getting on in years) says to the old man, `It’s your fault I was laid up in bed for a year and my son had to leave school and ended up as a bootblack’, the grand old man can rightly reply, `No, no. Those things used to be my fault, I grant. But I’ve changed greatly, and, because I exhibit little psychological continuity with my young self, they’re no longer my fault’. To me, this seems obviously wrong. And my disagreement with Parfit about this case seems to be philosophical. At any rate, it is not due to disagreement about the facts of the case.
Op. cit., 325–26.
For a more detailed statement of this argument, see my `Materialism and the Psychological-Continuity Account of Personal Identity’, Philosophical Perspectives 11, Mind, Causation and World, James E. Tomberlin (ed.) (Oxford/Boston: Blackwell, 1997), 305319.
Carl Ginet, On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1990), 102–103.
Holbach, Système de a Nature,X, xxi.
E.g., `Ability and Responsibility,’ The Philosophical Review 87 (1978), 201–224.
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van Inwagen, P. (2000). Moral Responsibility and Ontology. In: van den Beld, T. (eds) Moral Responsibility and Ontology. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2361-9_2
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