It’s (Almost) All About Desert
On the Source of Disagreements in Responsibility Studies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21395025 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fernando Rudy-Hiller (0000-0002-7977-1216, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 386-404 |
| Publication date | 2021-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Southern Journal of Philosophy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-4283 • E-ISSN: 2041-6962 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/sjp.12405 |
| OpenAlex | W3126231368 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 39 |
In this article I discuss David Shoemaker’s recently published piece “Responsibility: The State of the Question. Fault Lines in the Foundations.” While agreeing with Shoemaker on many points, I argue for a more unified diagnosis of the seemingly intractable debates that plague (what I call) “responsibility studies.” I claim that, of the five fault lines Shoemaker identifies, the most basic one is about the role that the notion of deserved harm should play in the theory of moral responsibility. I argue that the deep divide between those theorists who affirm and those who deny that moral responsibility is essentially about the justification of desert thus understood can be traced to the disagreement about whether the focus on the reactive attitudes by itself entails that moral responsibility has nothing to do with traditional questions about desert and free will. I then show that the seeming intractableness of the other four fault lines Shoemaker identifies is expectable and explicable in light of this more basic disagreement. After this diagnostic work, I conclude by suggesting a solution to the “morass” that has taken over responsibility studies: theorists working in the field should acknowledge that it has effectively bifurcated into two discrete subareas, which I suggest calling “retribution studies” and “interpersonal studies.”
Desert (philosophy) · Economic Justice · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Excuse · Free will · Harm · Moral responsibility · Nothing · Political science · Retributive justice · Sociology · Free Will and Agency · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · War, Ethics, and Justification
Responsibility and Control
Conversation and Responsibility
Hard Luck
Building Better Beings
Responsibility from the Margins
Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life
The impossibility of moral responsibility
Perspectives on Moral Responsibility
Freedom within Reason
Responsibility
Navigating the Penumbra
What Is a Child
Basically Deserved Blame and Its Value
The Good, the Bad, and the Blameworthy
The Force and Fairness of Blame
Moral Dimensions
Moral Competence, Moral Blame, and Protest
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2024 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |