Associative Responsibility and the Possibility of Blameworthiness Without Culpability

This paper defends the idea that we can sometimes be blameworthy for things simply in virtue of having played a role in bringing them about (that is, even in cases where the fact of our responsibility does not implicate the quality of our will in any way). To defend this claim, I explore how the norms that mediate our responses to accidents are shaped by two important aspects of social life: 1) the opacity of our intentions and 2) the fact that we live in a world in which our lives are inescapably intertwined and our actions are influenced by myriad things beyond our control. Each of these has important revisionary implications for the concepts of blame and responsibility as they have traditionally been understood. While these implications do not require us to give up most of what we have come to know about these concepts, I argue that they shed light on the existence of a distinct and heretofore unexamined kind of moral responsibility that I call associative responsibility. As the paper speculatively concludes, embracing this kind of responsibility has the theoretical virtue of making the concepts of individual and collective responsibility more synonymous

Blame · Collective responsibility · Compatibilism · Culpability · Moral responsibility · Quality (philosophy) · Social responsibility · Virtue · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Free Will and Agency · Philosophical Ethics and Theory

• ‘Piacular, though not guilty’

  Open Access•Emily Kelahan•Journal of Scottish Philosophy•2026

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