Responsibility from the Margins
David Shoemaker
Abstract
This book develops a pluralistic quality of will theory of responsibility, motivated by our ambivalence to real life cases of marginal agency, such as those with clinical depression, scrupulosity, psychopathy, autism, intellectual disability, and more. Our ambivalent responses suggest that such agents are responsible in some ways but not others. A tripartite theory is developed to account for this fact of our ambivalence via exploration of the appropriateness conditions of three distinct categories of our pan-cultural emotional responsibility responses (sentiments). The first type of responsib ... More
This book develops a pluralistic quality of will theory of responsibility, motivated by our ambivalence to real life cases of marginal agency, such as those with clinical depression, scrupulosity, psychopathy, autism, intellectual disability, and more. Our ambivalent responses suggest that such agents are responsible in some ways but not others. A tripartite theory is developed to account for this fact of our ambivalence via exploration of the appropriateness conditions of three distinct categories of our pan-cultural emotional responsibility responses (sentiments). The first type of responsibility, attributability, is about the quality of an agent’s character, as expressed in various attitudes. The second type of responsibility, answerability, is about the quality of an agent’s judgments of the worth of certain kinds of reasons. The third type of responsibility, accountability, is about the quality of an agent’s regard for others, which itself implicates various empathic capacities. In Part 1 of the book, the tripartite theory is developed and defended. In Part 2 of the book, the tripartite theory’s predictions about several specific marginal cases are tested, once certain empirical details about the nature of those agents have been filled in.
Keywords:
marginal agents,
quality of will,
responsibility,
depression,
psychopathy,
autism,
sentiments,
attributability,
answerability,
accountability
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198715672 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198715672.001.0001 |
