Resisting Tracing's Siren Song

Craig K. Agule

doi:https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v10i1.94

Volume 10, Number 1
April 2016

ARTICLE

Resisting Tracing’s Siren Song

Volume 10, Number 1, April 2016, Pages 1–25

https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v10i1.94

PDF

Abstract

Drunk drivers and other culpably incapacitated wrongdoers are often taken to pose a problem for reasons-responsiveness accounts of moral responsibility. These accounts predicate moral responsibility upon an agent having the capacities to perceive and act upon moral reasons, and the culpably incapacitated wrongdoers lack exactly those capacities at the time of their wrongdoing. Many reasons-responsiveness advocates thus expand their account of responsibility to include a tracing condition: The culpably incapacitated wrongdoer is blameworthy despite his incapacitation precisely because he is responsible for becoming incapacitated. As some skeptics have suggested, it is not clear that we need tracing. Here, however, I make a stronger case against tracing: I show that tracing gets things wrong. I consider a new sort of case, the case of the Odysseus agent, whose incapacitation is non-culpable (sometimes merely permissible and sometimes praiseworthy). Tracing would have us hold responsible and therefore blame unlucky Odysseus agents, Odysseus agents who commit a wrongdoing in the throes of their non-culpably induced incapacitation. But we should not hold these unlucky Odysseus agents responsible for their incapacitated wrongdoing. Because tracing gets these cases wrong, we should reject tracing.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

|

Reasons-Responsiveness and Time Travel

Yishai Cohen

Responsibility and the Social Dimension of Addiction

Keyao Yang

Crime, Public Health, and Inhumane Objectivity

Nadine Elzein

Rationality and Responding to Normative Reasons

Mohamad Hadi Safaei

The Point of Blaming ai Systems

Hannah Altehenger and Leonhard Menges

Inclusive Blameworthiness and the Wrongfulness of Causing Harm

Evan Tiffany

Is Morality Open to the Free Will Skeptic?

Stephen Morris

Quality of Will Accounts and Non-Culpably Developed Mental Disorders

Matthew Lamb

Defending the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility

Martin Montminy

The Comparative Nonarbitrariness Norm of Blame

Daniel Telech and Hannah Tierney

Basically Deserved Blame and Its Value

Michael McKenna

Moral Responsibility and Merit

Matt King