Volume 19, Number 1
January 2021
ARTICLE

Blaming for Unreasonableness: Accountability Without Ill Will

Volume 19, Number 1, January 2021, Pages 56–79
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v19i1.836
PDFPDF

Abstract

Quality of will accounts of moral responsibility hold that ill will is necessary for blameworthiness. But all such accounts are false to ordinary moral practice, which licenses blame for agents who act wrongly from epistemically unreasonable ignorance even if the act is not ill willed. This should be especially concerning to Strawsonians about moral responsibility, who think the genuine conditions of blameworthiness are derived from the standards internal to our practice. In response, I provide a theory of moral blameworthiness on which ill will is not necessary for blameworthiness. On the view I defend, “Rational Capacitarianism,” agents are blameworthy whenever they act wrongly from an unreasonable attitude which is attributable to them, where an attitude is attributable to an agent just in case she has the capacity to assess reasons for and against the attitude and modulate the attitude in light of these assessments. Acting from unreasonable ignorance is just a special case of acting from an unreasonable attitude. My theory contrasts both with both quality of will accounts of blameworthiness (Strawson, Wallace, Rosen, McKenna) and the Capacitarian view (Sher, Rudy-Hiller, Clarke), which specifies that agents who act wrongly from ignorance are culpable if they could and should have known better. On Capacitarianism, a variety of awareness-relevant capacities are pertinent, including memory; on my view it is only failures of rational capacities that render the agent culpable, because only failures of rational capacities are attributable to the agent.
Copyright © 2021 Alisabeth Ayars
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Action and Production

Stephen J. White

You Just Didn’t Care Enough: Quality of Will, Causation, and Blameworthiness for Actions, Omissions, and Outcomes

Mattias Gunnemyr and Caroline Torpe Touborg

On Giving Yourself a Sign

Justin Dealy

The Right to Mental Autonomy: Its Nature and Scope

William Ratoff

The Essence of Structural Irrationality: The Impossibility of Attitudinal Success

Julian Fink

Resolution and Resolve: Rationally Resisting Temptation

Abigail Bruxvoort

Contextualizing, Clarifying, and Defending the Doctrine of Double Effect

Melissa Moschella

Radical Cognitivism About Practical Reason

William Ratoff

Uncertainty and Intention

Benjamin Lennertz

Games Unlike Life: A Reply to Camp and Millgram

C. Thi Nguyen

All Reasons Are Fundamentally for Attitudes

Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way

Planning on a Prior Intention

Facundo M. Alonso

Portico