CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Réz, Anna Dorottya |
|---|---|
| Title | Responsibility as Attributability: Control, Blame, Fairness |
| Summary | Attributionism is a fairly new type of theory of moral responsibility. In his influential book What We Owe to Each Other Thomas Scanlon distinguished two senses of responsibility, substantive responsibility and responsibility as attributability and provided a nuanced description and analysis of both concepts. Elaborating on the latter notion in a series of articles Angela Smith developed a unified account of attributonism, the “rational relations view”. According to Neil Levy’s formulation, “on the attributionist account, I am responsible for my attitudes, and my acts and omissions insofar as they express my attitudes, in all cases in which my attributes express my identity as a practical agent. Attitudes are thus expressive of who I am if they belong to the class of judgment-sensitive attitudes” (Levy 2005). One of the main advantages of attributionist accounts is that they are able to explain and justify some puzzling cases of responsibility: responsibility for attitudes and responsibility for involuntary omissions. These cases are troubling because they reveal an inconsistency in our ethical thinking: on the one hand, we seem to be committed to an important moral principle, the Control Principle, which states that it is unfair to hold people responsible for things beyond their control. But, on the other hand, with our ordinary judgments of responsibility we frequently assess people on the basis of such things over which they do not exercise control. In my thesis I wish to accomplish a dual aim. First, I give a comprehensive and thorough analysis of attributionist theories. I explore how they differ from apparently similar accounts, the strengths and weaknesses of their solutions to traditional problems of moral responsibility. I raise several objections and investigate whether attributionist accounts have the resources to answer them. Although I do not attempt to defend attributionist theories from every criticism, hopefully I can demonstrate that attributionism has several appeals which make it a genuine rival of more traditional accounts of moral responsibility. iv Second, exploring attributionist accounts serves more general purposes. The analysis, as I indicated, will lead us to the discussion of the Control Principle. I explore the problem emerging from the principle and give an abstract mapping of the possible solutions for it. One of these strategies lead us to the discussion of R. J. Wallace’s much debated normative interpretation, which claims that one is morally responsible for something if and only it is fair to hold her responsible—facts about responsibility are defined by normative considerations regulating the fairness of responsibility-attribution. The normative interpretation, put forward as a general schema, has far-reaching methodological consequences. Most importantly, as I will argue, any theory of responsibility has to define three variables: the scope of responsibility-attribution, the nature of the relevant responsibility-attributing practices and the substantive moral considerations about fairness which should be applied. Thus, in the second part of the thesis I will explore these topics as they arise for attributionist theories. Also, the normative interpretation raises fundamental and often neglected questions about the methodology of building up a theory of free will and responsibility and the division of labor between theories of responsibility and substantive normative ethical theories. At the end of the discussion I focus on these questions and try to clarify some important methodological issues which often remain implicit in the relevant literature. |
| Supervisor | Ferenc Huoranszki |
| Department | Philosophy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/rez_anna.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University