Mark Ravizza

Responsibility and Control: Acknowledgments

Acknowledgements 1. Moral responsibility: the concepts and challenges 2. Moral responsibility for actions: weak reasons-responsiveness 3. Moral responsibility for actions: moderate reasons-responsiveness 4. Responsibility for consequences 5. Responsibility for omissions 6. The direct argument for incompatibilism 7. Responsibility and history 8. Taking responsibility 9. Conclusion Bibliography.

Responsibility and Inevitability

Persons can be held morally responsible for their actions, omissions, and the consequences of those actions (and omissions). We propose to present a sketch of a theory of moral responsibility which shows how the conditions for moral responsibility for consequences are connected to the conditions for moral responsibility for actions and omissions. A major aim of this paper is to employ a principle (defended elsewhere) which associates moral responsibility for actions and omissions with control in order to generate an account of moral responsibility for consequences.

Equal consideration : a theory of moral justification

This book presents a comprehensive method for justifying norms of morality and proposes a system by which peoples conflicting moral intuitions can be adjudicated. It is based on giving each individuals interests equal consideration and as developed is applicable to norms of all social values.

Responsibility and Control: Moral Responsibility for Actions: Moderate Reasons-Responsiveness

INTRODUCTION In order to give a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility, we need to attend to the full range of items for which agents are typically held morally responsible. The full “content” of moral responsibility ascriptions – “what we hold individuals morally responsible for” – includes, at least, actions, failures to act (or omissions), and the consequences of those actions and omissions. Let us begin our overall project by beginning to give an account of the freedom-relevant condition for moral responsibility for actions . In the following chapter, we shall further elaborate and refine the approach sketched here. In Chapter 1 we developed a set of challenges based on causal determinism to the intuitive and natural picture of ourselves as having a certain sort of control. This sort of control implies that we have various genuinely open pathways branching into the future (at least at certain important points in our lives). The challenges – modal and nonmodal – are very potent and distressing. They suggest the rather startling thought that we may not in fact have the sort of control that implies alternative possibilities. And if moral responsibility and personhood require this sort of control, it is not clear that we can legitimately hold each other morally responsible for our behavior. Perhaps it is then advisable to ask about the control requirement for moral responsibility rather more carefully. Do we really require the sort of control that involves alternative possibilities? Would its absence imply that we are not relevantly different from mere brutes or fancy machines?

The Non-Reality of Free Will.

This monograph offers a new argument concerning free will and moral responsibility. Double identifies hierarchical compatibilism - a view espoused by such philosophers as Frankfurt, Neely, Watson, Levin, and Dennett - as the most plausible account of free will, showing how compatibilism can be successfully defended against incompatibilist objections. He goes on, however, to demonstrate that even the compatibilist account of free will ultimately faces insuperable objections, and concludes that free will is an essentially incoherent notion.