Responsibility Without Identity

The Harvard Review of Philosophy 18 (1):109-132 (2012)
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Abstract

Many people believe that for someone to now be responsible for some past action, the agent of that action and the responsible agent now must be one and the same person. In other words, many people that moral responsibility presupposes numerical personal identity. In this paper, I show why this platitude is false. I then suggest an account of what actual metaphysical relationship moral responsibility presupposes instead.

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David Shoemaker
Cornell University

Citations of this work

Diachronic Self-Making.David Mark Kovacs - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2):349-362.
Is Blameworthiness Forever?Andrew C. Khoury & Benjamin Matheson - 2018 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4 (2):204-224.
Blameworthiness is Terminable.Benjamin Matheson - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
Moral responsibility.Andrew Eshleman - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Freedom and Resentment.Peter Strawson - 1962 - Proceedings of the British Academy 48:187-211.
Freedom of the will and the concept of a person.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1971 - Journal of Philosophy 68 (1):5-20.
What We Owe to Each Other.Thomas Scanlon - 2002 - Mind 111 (442):323-354.

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