Research

Drafts available upon request

Published

Two Dimensions of Responsibility: Quality and Competence of Will

Quality of Will Theories claim that “the ultimate object” of our responsibility responses (i.e., praise and blame) is the quality of our will. Any such theory is false; or so I argue. There is a second dimension of (moral) responsibility, independent of quality of will, that our responsibility responses track and take as their object -- namely, how adroitly we are able to translate our will into action, or what I call competence of will. I offer a conjectural explanation of the two dimensions of (moral) responsibility -- namely that it matters to us that people actually perform adequately well, because of how much it matters to us, both for its own sake and for the sake of what it brings about, that we are able to successfully live and work together. 

The Significance of Skepticism

Nihilists about responsibility argue that there is no such thing as "real" responsibility; abolitionists argue we ought to abandon practices of holding one another responsible. Often, abolitionists are abolitionists because they are nihilists. I evaluate the argument from nihilism to abolitionism, and argue that it is unconvincing. Bridging the gap from nihilism to abolitionism is more difficult than the abolitionist thinks, requiring two often unstated and un-argued for bridge premises (which I call Undistorted Truth and Privileged Conception). I then explain how abolitionism can and should pose an interesting skeptical challenge that is independent of the truth or falsity of nihilism.

Under Review 

Who's Afraid of Basic Desert?

Skeptics about moral responsibility are skeptical about “basic desert moral responsibility.” Just what basic desert moral responsibility amounts to us is not as clear as skeptics let on. The skeptic is skeptical about three different things that are often lumped together: first, the fact that our reasons or motives in holding someone responsible for something are problematic, either because they are malicious, backwards-looking, or both; second, the purported basicness, or fundamental grounds, of our judgments or practices; and, third, a particular conception of desert according to which it is non-instrumentally good that people who are responsible for something are harmed or benefited. I consider and reject a recent proposal about what skeptics should be skeptical about, and offer an alternative. 

Cooperation-Based Functionalism

I propose to understand our social practices of holding one another responsible at least partly in terms of what our responsibility practices do -- what functions they serve in social life. I offer a pluralist functionalist account -- our practices have a number of different functions -- and catalog some familiar functions and explore other, less familiar functions, such as what I call "group composition," or how groups are organized in terms of properties like size, distribution of tasks or roles, and ways of effectively altering these properties.

Strawsonian Redux: Cooperation and the Sociality of Responsibility

In the anti-skeptical spirit of Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" and drawing on the work of Margaret Gilbert and work in biological anthropology and comparative psychology, I show there is a (quasi)constitutivist argument in defense of our responsibility practices: holding one another responsible is (quasi)constitutive of an important kind of joint action, namely cooperation; it is "practically inconceivable" that we should abandon cooperation; therefore, it is "practically inconceivable" that we should abandon holding one another responsible. 

The Communicative Nature of Responsibility: 

Expectations, Presupposition, and the Normative Common Ground (w/ Edward Schwartz, UC Berkeley)

Many theories of responsibility claim that holding someone responsible is "incipiently communicative," but it has been difficult to pin down just what this amounts to in an interesting and informative way. We propose that relationships are (implicitly) structured by a presupposed common ground of norms (mutual demands and expectations, often that we have of one another given some perceived social role). One function of holding one another responsible is to "update" or reinforce the common ground of norms that bind some relationship together. We model this by adapting common ground accounts from the philosophy of language.

In Progress

How to Think About Responsibility 

The extant literature on moral responsibility focuses on the appropriateness of blame, typically understood as a reactive attitude. While there may be good reasons to focus on this phenomenon, there are also good reasons to zoom out and examine a more generic phenomenon of “holding responsible” that is not necessarily a response to moral success or failure nor is essentially about the appropriateness of praise or blame. We hold one another for a wide variety of non-moral successes and failures (such as aesthetic, athletic, epistemic, etc.) in a wide variety of ways (via praising and blaming, rewarding and punishing, including and ostracizing, esteeming and disesteeming, etc.). This wider range of phenomenon is unified by the practical problems they pose, namely that they all involve ways of singling people out for differential treatment in virtue of how someone conducted themselves, in ways that tend to perpetuate inequality. Stepping back to examine this more generic phenomenon is relevant because whether or not a theory of some phenomenon (e.g., responsibility) is adequate depends on the "data" taken to be within its purview; accordingly, if the range of data that needs to be explained is wider than extant theories suppose, this poses a threat to the adequacy of extant theories insofar as they cannot accommodate the broader data (which, I argue, many extant theories of "moral" responsibility cannot). ​

Three Kinds of Joint Action

One task for theories of action is to capture what action is, in general (as opposed to mere behavior). Another task is to capture a particular kind of action that is of some special importance. I distinguish between three kinds of joint action, organized around shared goals, shared "settled objectives," and shared intentions, respectively. The first captures something like what joint action is, in general. The third captures something like distinctively human joint action. The design specification for the latter is realized, in part, by practices of holding one another responsible; or so I argue. 

Unwitting Wrongdoing, Omissions, and Adequate Opportunities

I show how we can understand unwitting wrongdoing, omissions, and the nature of "adequate" opportunities if we view responsibility through the lens of cooperation, or a specific kind of joint action. In particular, we use a contrastive style of explanation, reminiscent of the "reasonable person" standard in some legal systems, but one that is instead pegged to salient social roles or identities that the person is taken to occupy (e.g., parent, teacher, quarterback, spouse, etc.).

New Projects (no drafts available at this time)

Responsible Agents, Peerhood, and the Resentment of Children

One question a theory of responsibility needs to shed light on is: Which agents are candidates for appropriately being held responsible, and in virtue of what? For example, many writers state or assume that mature, functioning adults are responsible agents, but young children and non-human animals are not. A common explanation for this is that adults are "normatively competent," or have some mental capacities, as individuals, that other individuals do not. While it seems that something like this must be right, I pursue an alternative: part of what makes someone a responsible agent is that they are capable of entering into certain sorts of relationship, especially the kind of relationships paradigmatic of peers. This account better accords with many actual judgements we seem to make. For example, I claim that children can appropriately hold one another responsible. The reason that children can appropriately hold one another responsible in a way that it is often inappropriate for adults to hold children responsible is that children stand in a peerhood relation to one another in a way that they do not with adults.