Erasmus Mayr

Alternative possibilities and asymmetry

It has often been noted that many of our intuitive assessments of particular actions suggest that there is an asymmetry between blameworthy and praiseworthy actions with regard to the question of whether moral responsibility requires that the agent could have acted otherwise. It is a quite different question, though, whether such an asymmetry between good and bad cases can be supported by more systematic considerations. In this paper, I will develop a new argument for a restricted version of the asymmetry, by showing that in cases of praiseworthy actions responsibility cannot generally presuppose that the agent could have acted otherwise. This argument will be based on a distinction between two different kinds of roles that moral norms can play in determining whether an action is right and in guiding our deliberation. That agents can sometimes be responsible for their praiseworthy actions even though they cannot act otherwise is best seen as a reflection of the fact that moral norms can prohibit treating certain courses of action as genuine options at all.

Kant and Hegel on purposive action

This essay discusses Kant and Hegel’s philosophies of action and the place of action within the general structure of their practical philosophy. We begin by briefly noting a few things that both unite and distinguish the two philosophers. In the sections that follow, we consider these and their corollaries in more detail. In so doing, we map their differences against those suggested by more standard readings that treat their accounts of action as less central to their practical philosophy. Section 2 discusses some central Kantian concepts (Freedom, Willkür, Wille, and Moral Law). In Section 3, we take a closer look at the distinction between internal and external action, as found in Kant’s philosophy of morality and legality. In Section 4, we turn to Hegel and his distinctions between abstract right (legality), morality, and ethical life, as well as the location of his account of action within his overall theory of morality. We discuss the distinction between Handlung and Tat, and non-imputable consequences. The overall aims of our essay are to shed light on some puzzles in Kant and Hegel’s conceptions and to examine where their exact disputes lie without taking a stand on which philosophy is ultimately the most satisfactory.

Acting sub specie boni

On a traditional view of human agency, intentional actions are performed sub specie boni: Agents, in acting intentionally, must see some good in what they are doing. This view has come under heavy criticism, which has partly focussed on several putative counterexamples, and partly on the view’s underlying rationale. In this paper, I defend one version of the sub specie boni view and try to show that it still deserves its old standing as the “default view” about acting with an intention. For, as I argue, this view helps us to make sense of some crucial features of intentions – in particular, that we are sometimes rationally permitted to abandon intentions in the light of obstacles and costs – , for which an alternative explanation will be hard to find.

Reasons and Causes: Do Dispositions Help Us Resolve the Old Debate?

John Hyman’s impressive and insightful Action, Knowledge and Will treats far too wide a range of different questions for me to try to address its overall argument here. I will therefore concentrate on one single issue, namely on Hyman’s proposed solution to the old ‘reasons and causes’ controversy. This debate, which dominated philosophy of action in the 1960s and 1970s, centred on the twin questions of whether reasons (and particularly the desires) ‘for which’ we act, should be understood as causes of the actions which are performed ‘for them’, and of whether explaining actions in terms of these reasons and desires amounts to providing a causal explanation. Hyman argues in chapter 5 that the old ‘causalist’ position on reasons-explanations of actions can be upheld in letter, if not in spirit. Desires should indeed be understood as causes (or as he puts it slightly more cautiously ‘causal factors’) of the actions performed in order to satisfy them. But they should not be understood as causes in the sense in which the classic exponents of the position, such as Donald Davidson in Actions, Reasons, and Causes, had maintained, i.e. in the sense of the Humean theory of causation. Rather, desires should be seen as dispositions which are manifested in those actions, and dispositions are causal factors, too, which are responsible for the acts and events in which they are manifested. Hyman’s move is made all the more attractive by fitting in with the current general revival of interest in dispositions and powers as genuine properties, whose manifestations cannot be simply understood in terms of the obtaining of an event-causal link between stimulus and response. One special promise of connecting the ‘reasons and causes’ debate with these more recent debates is that in this way the notorious problem of deviant causal chains, which beset Davidson’s own causalist analysis of acting for reasons from Actions, Reasons, and Causes, need no longer be seen as a special problem about acting for reasons or intentional

Hart, Punishment and Excusing Conditions

Herbert Hart’s writings on the significance of responsibility for criminal punishment constitute one of the most important and impressive attempts to develop a principled argument for ‘excusing conditions’ within the framework of a basically utilitarian justification of punishment. It has been a common complaint against utilitarian approaches to criminal punishment that they have insufficient resources to explain why punishment should be restricted to those agents who acted voluntarily or in possession of the mental capacities relevant for free agency. Only desert-based, backward-looking theories of punishment could explain such restrictions satisfactorily, so the criticism has gone, because only they could explain why the state of the malefactor at the time of his action should be crucial for his criminal culpability. As Hart famously argued, however, such conditions on punishment can also be justified on grounds which have nothing to do with the issue of moral responsibility or moral blame but with the maximization of individual freedom and the protection of the efficacy of the individuals’ decisions.1

International Criminal Law, Causation, and Responsibility

In this article, I explore the question whether criminal responsibility, within the international criminal law, should be considered as a causal notion. I start off with the connection between causation and criminal responsibility in general and introduce three more specific claims about this connection (Sections 1 and 2). Afterwards, I go on to examine a much-discussed case in international criminal law, the case of command responsibility from failure to punish, where responsibility for harmful effects is apparently attributed without causal control on the agent’s part (Section 3). I argue that, even in this case, the notion of responsibility must remain linked to causation in the ways discussed earlier, but try to show that the constraints arising from these links can be met.