Blame and the Objective Attitude (OA) So far I have been speaking mainly about responsible agency, which I have described as a cluster of capacities constrained or partially constituted by rationality, which in turn is facilitated by conditions of social justice, cooperative interdependence, and diversity. Responsibility is thus a relational... Continue reading

Earlier I said that it is objectifying to unfairly blame or praise people on the basis of identity prejudice as opposed to the person’s quality of will. When we blame people on the basis of negative social stereotypes, we don’t accurately gauge the person’s quality of will: we judge the... Continue reading

What I have said so far implies that responsibility is relational. Why? Because we’re all implicated in joint rational projects (except for total social isolates), and rationality deficits in one social group tend to precipitate correlative, but asymmetrical, rationality deficits in other social groups. For example, implicit bias in privileged... Continue reading

Another prominent locus of responsibility discourse is Strawson’s theory of the reactive attitudes. Strawson is one of the most influential contemporary responsibility theorists, being a central catalyst for mainstream compatibilism. On Strawson’s view, responsibility is an interpersonal practice in which we deploy (feel or express) the reactive attitudes, consisting of... Continue reading

There is a prodigious literature on responsibility, most of which emphasizes the internal properties of persons constitutive of responsible agency. We can call this approach ‘internalism,’ in contrast to ‘externalism’ (see previous post). Internalism is reflected, for example, in debates about whether character or control is the proper locus of... Continue reading

Much of the philosophical literature on responsibility revolves around conceptual issues: what is responsibility? Is it a capacity, a suite of capacities, a trait of persons, a privileged subset of a person’s mental states? I don’t hope to resolve these debates here—maybe they’re irresolvable, if there turns out to be... Continue reading

I’m going to post a series of blog entries that argue that responsibility is relational. What does this mean? It means, first and foremost, that responsible agency depends upon responsibility-conducive social relationships and structures. These structures include conditions of epistemic justice—conditions free from pernicious stereotypes. Epistemic injustice (EI) impairs the... Continue reading

In my last post, I argued that severe deficits of epistemic confidence can undermine responsible agency by undermining a person’s ability to form resolutions and have a deep self. In this post, I want to discuss a related notion: trust. In writing about epistemic confidence, Miranda Fricker (2007) says that... Continue reading

Today I’m going to argue that responsibility can be undermined by lack of epistemic confidence. Many responsibility theorists are interested in specifying the capacities implicated in responsible agency, and there are many fairly coarse-grained proposals, such as reasons-responsiveness (Fischer 2006, 2012), sanity (Wolf 1986), and consciousness (Levy 2014). These theorists... Continue reading

Hi. I recently read this article by Alain de Botton on romantic love and why you’ll marry the wrong person, and it reminded me of Alain de Badiou’s book, ‘In Praise of Love.’ It struck me that romantic love, as describe by these philosophers, shares certain phenomenological qualities that conflict... Continue reading

Hi all. I recently wrote an entry in my personal blog on blame and Brock Turner. Since it's rather lengthy, I'm just going to post the introduction and a link to the full post here. All feedback is welcome. ***** I’m going to write about a sensitive topic with some... Continue reading