86:2 April 2003
Responsibility 

Advisory Editor: Catherine Wilson, University of British Columbia

Many political philosophers regard it as right to compensate people for deprivations that are not their own faults, but not for deprivations which are the consequences of their own free choices and for which they are responsible. It is held for example that those who have severe visual impairments, limited mobility, or cerebral pathologies have a claim to extra resources to enable them to live happier lives, but not those who suffer from chronic laziness, low motivation, or “bad habits” that contribute to an agent’s lack of economic success or worldly achievement. The problem with this position is that responsibility as thus conceived does not appear to be an empirical concept. There is little scientific basis for a sharp distinction between determined and freely-embraced and self-cultivated traits; responsibility-attributions have been noted by social scientists to be influenced by contextual features of situations, and they are held by some to be demonstrably irrational. Many economists and sociologists accordingly regard the attempt to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor as doomed to fail. On the other hand, the notion of responsibility is taught, learned and understood, arguably with beneficial consequences.

Is responsibility more than a useful, perhaps an essential fiction? Has the Strawsonian attempt to rescue responsibility from the criticisms of determinists been successful? Can responsibility be salvaged as an autobiographically-available concept even if it has no reference-conditions applicable by a third-person? Or are quasi-empirical attempts to capture the notion with the help of partitions and reference classes a step in the right direction? More generally, under what conditions are moral and social philosophers permitted to make use of concepts of folk-psychology, even if contemporary science does not acknowledge them? The present issue of The Monist will deal with these and related questions on the topic of responsibility.

Table of Contents:

Neil Levy 

Cultural Membership and Moral Responsibility

Bernard Weiner 

A Naïve Psychologist Examines Bad Luck and the Concept of Responsibility

Susan Dwyer 

Moral Development and Moral Responsibility

Raymond C. Tallis 

Human Freedom as a Reality-Producing Illusion

Ishtiyaque Haji 

Determinism and its Threat to the Moral Sentiments

David Zimmerman 

Sour Grapes, Self-Abnegation and Character Building: Responsibility and Non-Responsibility for Self-Induced Preferences

John E. Roemer 

Defending Equality of Opportunity

Ted Honderich

20 Million Years of Living Time

David Braybrooke

A Progressive Approach to Personal Responsibility for Global Beneficence