It's very exciting for all of us at the Soup, and a true honor for me, to introduce T.M. Scanlon as this week's featured philosopher. Tim certainly needs no introduction to the PEA Soup crowd, as his work in moral philosophy has been truly agenda-setting. Therefore, I think I'll simply get out of the way, and let his post---which begins below the fold---speak for itself. Without further ado, then, please welcome T.M. Scanlon!
On behalf of Carolina Sartorio, who's writing a paper on a new kind of luck, I'm posting, with her permission, her core motivating cases in order to see what people's intuitions are. In each case, I am giving Carolina's report of what our intuitions likely are, but I do not include her analyses. Do you share the basic intuitions? Why or why not?
I am a fan of attributability as a conception of responsibility. The trick, as we all know, is to get clear on just what that means. Even if you don't think attributability is a conception of responsibility, it is surely necessary for responsibility, so getting clear on what it consists in is in everyone's interest. One popular theory of attributability is a kind of evaluative judgment view: an action or attitude is properly attributable to me just in case it is ultimately dependent on my evaluative judgments. I'm wondering, though, about the following possible counterexample to this view.
In honor of my favorite philosophical article, I'm pleased to pass on the following announcement from Neal Tognazzini:
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of P. F. Strawson's 'Freedom and Resentment'. In honor of its remarkable influence over the past half-century, the philosophy department at The College of William & Mary is hosting a two-day conference this fall, *Responsibility & Relationships*, that will explore Strawsonian themes in contemporary moral philosophy, psychology, and the law, including new work on blame, punishment, and the moral emotions. And you're all invited.
In the previous post, I noted that there are two important aspects of Scanlonian blame -- relationships and meaning -- and that extending Scanlon's account to cover criminal blame (punishment) was problematic with respect to the former in virtue of the fact that the necessary sort of relationship (whose impairment prompts blame) was missing in the citizenry/legal case. I want to focus here (in much briefer terms) on the second aspect, meaning.
Part 1, for those of you old enough to remember, was posted two years ago here. Yes, I'm a very slow thinker.
In Part 2, I want to explore the possibility of extending Scanlon's account of blame to include criminal blame. For both legal and moral theorists writing on these issues, criminal responsibility (and the intelligibility of criminal blame) entails moral responsibility (and the intelligibility of moral blame). I have begun to believe that this assumption is just false, or at least the relation between criminal and moral responsibility is far more complicated than people have believed. In order to explore this idea, I want to look at recent, plausible accounts of blame to see how, if at all, they might ostensibly explain both moral and criminal blame. I begin today by discussing one worry about doing so with Scanlon's view. I hope (sooner this time!) to discuss another worry of doing so, and if I'm energetic enough, I'll then turn to George Sher's account of blame to explore the same issues. If anyone's still awake by then, I may offer a diagnosis of the problem. Warning: long row to hoe ahead!
I'm helping to put together a Royal Institute of Philosophy workshop on Free Will and Moral Responsibility here at the Philosophy department of the University of Birmingham. It will from 1pm to 6pm on Saturday the 7th of May - at University of Birmingham Campus, ERI building. The workshop is free but please book a place by emailing me at jussiphil@gmail.com. The speakers are Veronica Rodriquez-Blanco (Birmingham), Raymond Tallis (Manchester), and Kevin Timpe (Northwest Nazarene University). More info below.
[My apologies if this is well-trodden ground. I am pretty ignorant of the ought-implies-can literature, and quick check over articles didn't reveal anybody discussing what I'm about to write.]
In general, philosophers take it for granted that a person morally ought to X if and only she can X. I'll treat this as equivalent to claiming that a person can have an all-things-considered moral duty to X if and only she can X. So, e.g, I cannot have an all-things-considered duty to shoot magic fireballs from my fingers because I am physically unable to do so.
Outside of ethics, though, there seem to be a few cases where intuitively we don't accept this, or, at least, I don't.
Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in any given post reflect the opinion of only that individual who posted the particular entry or comment.
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