King_Getting Traction without Tracing.pdf ViewDownload
In a recent article in Noûs, John Martin Fischer & Neal Tognazzini remark that they “do not see how a theory of moral responsibility could adequately handle the range of drunk-driving cases, “Martin Luther cases,” and manipulation cases without some sort of tracing component; tracing just seems both highly plausible and theoretically indispensable” (‘The Truth About Tracing’, Noûs 43, p.40). ‘Tracing’ is the term used to denote a certain “backwards looking” strategy for explaining ascriptions of responsibility in certain sorts of problematic cases, and its most striking feature is that virtually every party in the literature seems to agree that tracing is needed to explain some case or other. This paper addresses F&T’s (albeit implicit) “challenge”: to sketch a strategy for handling drunk-driving cases, “Martin Luther cases”, and manipulation cases, without resort to any significant notion of tracing. I endeavor to illustrate that there are defensible views of each type of case that do not require appeal to tracing, and thus tracing is not obviously “theoretically indispensable.”
King_Moral Responsibility and Consciousness.pdf ViewDownload
(with Peter Carruthers). Our main purpose in this paper is to raise a general question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. There is empirical psychological data suggesting that there are no conscious mental states that play the right causal roles to count as decisions, judgments, or evaluations. We propose that all theorists should determine whether their theories (or the examples that motivate them) could survive the discovery that there are no conscious judgments, decisions, and evaluations. Since we take it that theories of moral responsibility should, in general, operate with the weakest possible empirical assumptions about the natural world, they should try to frame their theories in such a way as to be free of any commitment to the existence of conscious attitudes, given the very real possibility that there might turn out not to be any.
In a recent article in Analysis, Saul Smilansky argues that compatibilists can offer no principled rejection of prepunishing people when we know for certain that they will commit some crime in the future and that we’ll be unable to punish them later. In this very short paper I show why Smilansky’s conclusion is false. Compatibilists can offer a principled rejection of prepunishment; in fact, it’s a rejection anyone can, in principle, offer.
In this paper, I observe a set of symmetries exposed by examining cases of excused blameworthiness and mitigated praiseworthiness. I argue both that they warrant explanation, and that a prominent contemporary approach to explaining moral responsibility is ill-suited to explaining why the symmetry obtains.
(Forthcoming, *Social Theory and Practice*) Ordinary morality judges agents blameworthy for negligently produced harms. In this paper I offer two main reasons for thinking that explaining just how negligent agents are responsible for the harms they produce is more problematic than one might think. First, I show that negligent conduct is characterized by the lack of conscious control over the harm, which conflicts with the ordinary view that responsibility for something requires at least some conscious control over it. Second, I argue that negligence is relevantly indistinguishable from inadvertence, which is ordinarily thought to excuse agents from responsibility. I argue that the parallels between negligence and inadvertence suggest that negligent agents are not responsible for the harms they produce, while proposing an alternative model for distinguishing between negligence and inadvertence that does justice to our intuitions.
