This book explores the epistemic or knowledge requirement of moral responsibility. Haji argues that an agent can be blamed (or praised) only if the agent harbors a belief that the action in question is wrong (or right or obligatory). Defending the importance of an "authenticity" condition when evaluating moral responsibility, Haji holds that one cannot be morally responsible for an action unless the action issues from sources (like desires or beliefs) that are truly the agent's own. Engaging crucial (...) arguments in moral theory to elaborate his views on moral responsibility, Haji addresses as well fascinating, underexamined topics such as assigning blame across an intercultural gap and the relevance of unconscious or dream thoughts when evaluating responsibility. (shrink)

Something is subject to luck if it is beyond our control. In Luck's Mischief, Haji argues that owing frequently to precluding our being able to otherwise, luck limits both the range of what is morally obligatory for us and things for which we are morally responsible.

The role of freedom in assigning moral responsibility is one of the deepest problems in metaphysics and moral theory. _Incompatibilism’s Allure_ provides original analysis of the principal arguments for incompatibilism. Ishtiyaque Haji incisively examines the consequence argument, the direct argument, the deontic argument, the manipulation argument, the impossibility argument and the luck objection. He introduces the most important contemporary discussions in a manner accessible to advanced undergraduates, but also suited to professional philosophers. The result is a unique and compelling (...) account for incompatibilism’s continuing allure. (shrink)

This book extends our understanding of the nature of moral obligation and moral responsibility by arguing that they are far more similar in pertinent respects than frequently conceived. First, the view that, unlike obligation, responsibility does not require freedom to do otherwise is challenged. Conceptual ties between obligation and responsibility largely speak in favor of responsibility’s requiring alternatives. Second, many philosophers champion responsibility semicompatibilism, the thesis that even if determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise, it is compatible with (...) responsibility. Essential relations between obligation and responsibility are deployed against this thesis, and the parallel thesis of obligation semicompatibilism is rejected. An upshot of forsaking these species of semicompatibilism is that determinism threatens both obligation and responsibility in virtue of eliminating alternate possibilities. Third, many concur that whereas you may now no longer have an obligation that you previously had, you cannot now fail to be blameworthy for something for which you were formerly to blame. This immutability thesis about blameworthiness is shown to be false, and significant ramifications of its falsity are exposed. Finally, a legitimate difference between obligation and responsibility is uncovered: while how you acquire your values may significantly influence whether you are responsible for much of your conduct, obligation is not “historical” in this way. The impact of these similarities and the one difference on whether obligation is overriding and whether various accounts of practical rationality, love, and punishment are cogent is discussed. (shrink)

I examine John Martin Fischer's attempt to block an argument for the conclusion that without alternative possibilities, morally deontic judgments (judgments of moral right, wrong, and obligation) cannot be true. I then criticize a recent attempt to sustain the principle that an agent is morally blameworthy for performing an action only if this action is morally wrong. I conclude with discussing Fisher's view that even if causal determinism undermines morally deontic judgments, it still leaves room for other significant moral assessments (...) including assessments of moral blameworthiness. (shrink)

To have free will with respect to an act is to have the ability both to perform and to refrain from performing it. In this book, Ishtiyaque Haji argues that no one can have practical reasons of a certain sort - "objective reasons" - to perform some act unless one has free will regarding that act.

This book addresses a dilemma concerning freedom and moral obligation (obligation, right and wrong). If determinism is true, then no one has control over one's actions. If indeterminism is true, then no one has control over their actions. But it is morally obligatory, right or wrong for one to perform some action only if one has control over it. Hence, no one ever performs an action that is morally obligatory, right or wrong. The author defends the view that this dilemma (...) can be evaded but not in a way traditional compatibilists about freedom and moral responsibility will find congenial. For moral obligation is indeed incompatible with determinism but not with indeterminism. He concludes with an argument to the effect that, if determinism is true and no action is morally obligatory, right or wrong, then our world would be considerably morally impoverished as several sorts of moral appraisal would be unjustified. (shrink)

In this paper, I restrict discussion to cases of psychopathy in which it is assumed that psychopaths who satisfy epistemic requirements of responsibility, including the requirement that one is culpable for an action only if one performs it in light of the belief that one is doing wrong, can and do perform actions they take to be immoral or illegal. I argue that in such cases, the well-documented emotional impairment of psychopaths fails to subvert moral culpability. In particular, it does (...) not undermine the sort of control required for moral blameworthiness and, hence, assuming all other conditions of responsibility have been met, the psychopaths of concern are indeed culpable for their behavior. Drawing, however, from certain lessons regarding the effects of coercion on responsibility, I propose that emotional impairment is a factor that should abate, perhaps even significantly, negative reaction to or treatment of such agents. (shrink)

An overarching aim of education is the promotion of children's personal well-being. Liberal educationalists also support the promotion of children's personal autonomy as a central educational aim. On some views, such as John White's, these two goals—furthering well-being and cultivating autonomy—can come apart. Our primary aim in this paper is to argue for a species of a stronger view: assuming preferentism as our axiology, we suggest that there is an essential association between the autonomy of our springs of action, such (...) as desires and beliefs, on the one hand, and personal well-being, on the other. If we are right about this link, then we have at our disposal a partial (non-instrumental) validation of the liberal ideal of autonomy. (shrink)

Introduction: The metaphysics of responsibility and philosophy of education -- Moral responsibility, authenticity, and the problem of manipulation -- A novel perspective on the problem of authenticity -- Forward-looking authenticity in the internalism/externalism debate -- Authentic education, indoctrination, and moral responsibility -- Moral responsibility, hard incompatibilism, and interpersonal relationships -- On the significance of moral responsibility and love -- Love, commendability, and moral obligation -- Love, determinism, and normative education.

Externalism is the view that facts about one's history or past in the external world that bear on the acquisition of one's responsibility-grounding psychological elements are pertinent to whether one's actions are free and, hence, pertinent to whether one can be morally responsible for them. Internalism is the thesis that the conditions of moral responsibility can be specified independently of facts about how the person acquired her responsibility-grounding psychological elements. In this paper we defend a position that navigates between externalism (...) and internalism: moral responsibility does not require that one have a past but it does require that one not have certain kinds of past. (shrink)

Derk Pereboom has advanced a four-case manipulation argument that, he claims, undermines both libertarian accounts of free action not committed to agent-causation and compatibilist accounts of such action. The first two cases are meant to be ones in which the key agent is not responsible for his actions owing to his being manipulated. We first consider a “hard-line” response to this argument that denies that the agent is not morally responsible in these cases. We argue that this response invites a (...) dialectically uncharitable reading of the argument. We then propose an alternative interpretation; it affirms that, at least prima facie, the manipulated agent in the first two cases is not responsible. Finally, we question Pereboom’s rationale for why the manipulation in these cases subverts responsibility. (shrink)

Determinism is, roughly, the thesis that facts about the past and the laws of nature entail all truths. A venerable, age-old dilemma concerning responsibility distils to this: if either determinism is true or it is not true, we lack "responsibility-grounding" control. Either determinism is true or it is not true. So, we lack responsibility-grounding control. Deprived of such control, no one is ever morally responsible for anything. A number of the freshly-minted essays in this collection address aspects of this dilemma. (...) Responding to the horn that determinism undermines the freedom that responsibility (or moral obligation) requires, the freedom to do otherwise, some papers in this collection debate the merits of Frankfurt-style examples that purport to show that one can be responsible despite lacking alternatives. Responding to the horn that indeterminism implies luck or randomness, other papers discuss the strengths or shortcomings of libertarian free will or control. Also included in this collection are essays on the freedom requirements of moral obligation, forgiveness and free will, a "desert-free" conception of free will, and vicarious legal and moral responsibility. This chapter points to the importance of the topics discussed in the volume and interesting arguments worth noting. (shrink)

Architecture has a marked influence on ethical perception. Ethical perception, in turn, has a pronounced influence on what we are morally responsible for, our decisions, choices, intentional omissions, and overt actions, for instance. It thus stands to reason that architecture bears saliently on moral responsibility. If we now introduce a widely accepted premise that one of the fundamental aims of education is to see that our children turn into morally responsible agents, we can further infer that architecture has an influence (...) on educating for moral responsibility. Our primary aims in this paper are, first, to uncover associations between architecture and ethical perception, on the one hand, and moral.. (shrink)

There are no moral obligations: either it is determined in advance what we will do, or it is not. But any action not in our control cannot be obligatory for us. Hence, regardless of whether our actions are determined to occur, nothing is obligatory. This conclusion has important implications for conceptions of moral responsibility and free will.

Frankfurt examples invite controversy over whether the pertinent agent in these examples lacks the specific ability to do otherwise, and whether what she does can be obligatory or permissible. We develop an account of ability that implies that this agent does not have the specific ability to refrain from performing the germane action. The account also undergirds a view of obligation that entails that it is morally required or prohibited for an agent to perform an action only if she has (...) the specific ability to do, and to do otherwise than, perform it. Therefore, in Frankfurt examples, it is neither obligatory nor impermissible for the relevant agent to do what she does. (shrink)

John Lemos defends an indeterministic weightings model of libertarian free will that is a variant of event-causal libertarian views. Many argue that these views are susceptible to the luck problem: an agent’s directly free choices are too luck infected for the agent to be morally responsible for them. The weightings model supposedly escapes this problem largely because in this model an agent’s reasons for choices do not come with pre-established values. Rather, an agent performs intentional acts of weighting that contribute (...) to the value she assigns to her reasons. Decisions that are consequences of weightings are, thus, under the agent’s control and not subject to luck. In a recent paper, I argued that despite its weighting component, Lemos’s model succumbs to the luck problem. Lemos rejoins that my criticisms are based on misunderstandings and confusions. I deflect the charge of misperception and explain why the weightings model remains susceptible to the luck problem. (shrink)

Scenarios featuring surreptitious psychological manipulation are invoked to motivate the view that love is historical in that how one acquires elements deemed essential to love can affect whether one indeed loves another or the value of the sort of love one displays. I argue that love’s historicity helps to unearth its freedom requirements. These requirements render love fragile insofar as lack of free agency compromises love, lovable behavior, or relationships of love.

According to event-causal modest libertarian accounts of free action, the sort of control an agent requires to perform free actions consists in the action’s being nondeviantly and indeterministically caused by apt reasons of the agent. It has been argued that these modest views succumb to a problem of luck because they imply that, given exactly the same past up to the time of action, and the same laws of nature, at this time the agent could have performed a different action, (...) or no action at all. Hence, it appears that whatever the agent does at this time as a result of indeterministic deliberation is a matter of freedom- or responsibility-undermining luck. In this paper, I argue that neither Robert Kane’s variant of modest libertarianism, which combines a form of non-traditional agent causation with indeterministic event causation, nor John Lemos’ weightings variant, in which agents perform intentional acts of assigning weights to their reasons, circumvents the luck objection. (shrink)

In Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility, Alfred Mele invokes radical reversal cases in which one agent is covertly manipulated to be just like another agent in relevant respects to defend a version of the following “externalist” thesis: how agents acquire their springs of action, such as desires and beliefs, bears on whether they are morally responsible for their actions. I assess proposed rationales for the crucial verdict that agents in such cases are not responsible for their germane actions. (...) I argue for the superiority of Mele’s rationale and propose that these cases also support accepting an externalist constraint on other normative appraisals, such as those of practical rationality. Key words: Moral obligation; practical rationality; radical reversal cases; ultimate origination; zygote argument. (shrink)

Frankfurt examples attempt to establish that a person can be morally responsible, morally blameworthy, for instance, for doing something despite not being able to do otherwise, as long as the conditions that render him unable to do otherwise play no role in bringing about what he does.Harry Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 66 . A more cautious manner of arguing would be to assume only that it is not demonstrated that the agent is not (...) morally responsible. See, e.g., John M. Fischer, “Recent Work on Moral Responsibility,” Ethics, Vol. 110 ; Ishtiyaque Haji and Michael McKenna, “Defending Frankfurt’s Argument in Deterministic Contexts: A Reply to Palmer,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 103 ; and Ishtiyaque Haji and Michael McKenna, “Dialectical Delicacies in the Debate about Freedom and Alternative Possibilities,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 101 . But for present purposes, we can work with the stro .. (shrink)

I assess Robert Kane's view that global Frankfurt-type cases don't show that freedom to do otherwise is never required for moral responsibility. I first adumbrate Kane's indeterminist account of free will.This will help us grasp Kane's notion of ultimate responsibility, and his claim that in a global Frankfurt-type case, the counterfactual intervener could not control all of the relevant agent's actions in the Frankfurt manner, and some of those actions would be such that the agent could have done otherwise. Appealing (...) to considerations of responsibility and luck, I then show that the global cases survive Kane's objections. (shrink)

I address three issues in this paper: first, just as many have thought that there is a requirement of alternative possibilities for the truth of judgments of moral responsibility, is there reason to think that the truth of judgments of intrinsic value also presupposes our having alternatives? Second, if there is this sort of requirement for the truth of judgments of intrinsic value, is there an analogous requirement for the truth of judgments of moral obligation on the supposition that obligation (...) supervenes on goodness? Third, if the truth of judgments of intrinsic value and those of moral obligation do presuppose our having access to alternatives, what should be said about whether determinism imperils the truth of such judgments? I defend an affirmative answer to the first question, a more guarded answer to the second, and a yet more restrained answer to the third. (shrink)

The problem of luck is advanced and defended against libertarian theories of responsibility-enabling ability. An outline of an account of ability is articulated to explore some features of the sort of ability moral responsibility requires. The account vindicates the luck objection and suggests a novel puzzle: Libertarianism is structurally barred from answering the problem of luck because responsibility requires, but inherently lacks, an explanation from reason states to actions that preserves reliability of connection between responsibility-grounding reasons-sensitivity and action.

Key elements of Randolph Clarke's libertarian account of freedom that requires both agent-causation and non-deterministic event-causation in the production of free action is assessed with an eye toward determining whether agent-causal accounts can accommodate the truth of judgments of moral obligation.

Certain cases emphatically motivate the view that personal autonomy — autonomy as self-government — is a necessary condition of moral blameworthiness. The cases, that is, suggest that one cannot be morally blameworthy for performing an action unless one is autonomous with respect to that action, or one is autonomous with respect to the motivational underpinnings that figure in the etiology of the action. Here is a typical, fanciful example. Unbeknownst to Bond, a minute electronic device has been implanted in his (...) brain. Maxine can use the device to induce desires or intentions in Bond without her electronic manipulations being ‘felt’ or detected by Bond. Suppose Maxine implants in Bond a powerful desire to kill Oskar, a distant associate of Bond, together with the belief that the desire is irresistible. Though the electronically induced desire is not in fact irresistible, Bond could resist it only with a great deal of difficulty and only at the expense of suffering considerable psychological damage; Bond, to his astonishment, acts on this desire and does away with Oskar. This case is one in which Bond, it appears, is not morally blameworthy for killing Oskar. According to one strand of thought, the judgment that Bond is not blameworthy rests squarely on the view that Bond acts on a desire that is not truly his own;1 Bond is not his own master with respect to the implanted desire that causes him to kill Oskar. (shrink)

It has been argued that all compatibilist accounts of free action and moral responsibility succumb to the manipulation problem: evil neurologists or their like may manipulate an agent, in the absence of the agent's awareness of being so manipulated, so that when the agent performs an action, requirements of the compatibilist contender at issue are satisfied. But intuitively, the agent is not responsible for the action. We propose that the manipulation problem be construed as a problem of deviance. In troubling (...) cases of manipulation, psychological elements such as desires and beliefs, among other things, are acquired via causal routes that are deviant relative to causal routes deemed normal or baseline. We develop and defend rudiments of a baseline that is acceptable independently of whether one has compatibilist or incompatibilist leanings. (shrink)

I first adumbrate pertinent aspectsof Robert Kane''s libertarian theory of free choice oraction and an objection of luck that has been levelledagainst the theory. I then consider Kane''s recentresponses to this objection. To meet these responses,I argue that the view that undetermined choices (ofthe sort implied by Kane''s theory) are a matter ofluck is associated with a view about actionexplanation, to wit: when Jones does A and hisdoing of A is undetermined, and when hiscounterpart, Jones*, in the nearest possibleworld in (...) which the past and the laws are held constantuntil the moment of choice does B instead, thereis no explanation (deterministic or indeterministic)of the difference in outcome – Jones''s A-ing butJones*''s B-ing – in terms of prior reasonsor motives of either agent. Absence of such anexplanation is one crucial factor that underliesthe charge that Jones''s A-ing and Jones*''sB-ing are matters of luck. I argue that thissort of luck is incompatible with responsibility. (shrink)

I argue that emotional sensitivity (or insensitivity) has a marked negative influence on ethical perception. Diminished capacities of ethical perception, in turn, mitigate what we are morally responsible for while lack of such capacities may altogether eradicate responsibility. Impairment in ethical perception affects responsibility by affecting either recognition of or reactivity to moral reasons. It follows that emotional insensitivity (together with its attendant impairment in ethical perception) bears saliently on moral responsibility. Since one distinguishing mark of the psychopath is emotional (...) insensitivity, emotional insensitivity and the resulting impairment in moral perception either excuses the psychopath from moral culpability or moderates the degree to which he is culpable. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 4, Page 799-811, August 2022.

Few, including moral and political philosophers, economists, and sociologists, would deny the importance of the reactive attitudes such as forgiveness, guilt, repentance, gratitude, and indignation in our lives. Echoing Hume, Peter Strawson, for example, suggests that a number of these attitudes are required to sustain good interpersonal relationships or personal integrity. Much more strikingly, like Hume, Strawson argues that the moral sentiments constitute the very framework within which issues of freedom and responsibility arise. For these and other reasons, in much (...) of this paper, I shall take it for granted that we value these attitudes or sentiments, and we do so insofar as we believe that they have legitimate grounds. A world with these attitudes or sentiments but without rational grounds for them would be a world deprived of something deemed morally valuable. (shrink)

Semi-compatibilism regarding responsibility is the position according to which determinism is compatible with moral responsibility quite apart from whether determinism rules out the sort of freedom that involves access to alternative possibilities. I motivate the view that whether or not semi-compat..

In chapter 2, Myers introduces the conception of morality as a cooperative undertaking to promote the overall good on terms fair to everyone involved. Fair promotion of the overall good, he argues, requires impartial beneficence to be restrained by prerogatives and restrictions. The rationale for prerogatives turns, ultimately, on the premise that promoting the overall good fairly must account for the fact that we inevitably have values other than our concern for impartial beneficence. It would be unfair, because too demanding, (...) to require people fully to subordinate these competing values to their goal of promoting overall goodness. For “acting in ways that are true to all one’s values is an important ideal of individual behaviour” and so must be given some play. Fairness, then, requires balancing one’s concern to promote the overall good with one’s concern to be faithful to the other values that apply to one. Myers favors a “no-harm” version of prerogatives that allows people to give their own interests and desires a disproportionate weight only in cases where advancing their own ends would prevent them from giving aid to others. (shrink)

The author first argues against the view that an agent is morally blameworthy for performing an action only if it is morally wrong for that agent to perform that action. The author then proposes a replacement for this view whose gist is summarized in the principle: an agent S is morally blameworthy for performing action A only if S has the belief that it is wrong for her to do A and this belief plays an appropriate role in S’s Aing. (...) He focuses on explicating the role an agent’s belief that a prospective action, A, of hers is wrong must play in the production of her A-ing in order that she be blameworthy for A-ing. Towards this end, the author makes use of cases involving akrasia and self-deception. (shrink)

Practical reasons, roughly, are reasons to have our desires and goals, and to do what might secure these goals. I argue for the view that lack of freedom to do otherwise undermines the truth of judgments of practical reason. Thus, assuming that determinism expunges alternative possibilities, determinism undercuts the truth of such judgments. I propose, in addition, that if practical reason is associated with various values in a specified way, then determinism precludes such values owing to determinism's imperiling practical reason.

I defend the view that if one ought (morally) always to do the best one can, there cannot be a wrong action one cannot avoid performing for which one is morally responsible. I also argue that there cannot be a wrong action to which there are no alternative possibilities for which an agent is morally responsible if the thesis that ought' implies can' is true. My argument against a fully general principle of alternative possibilities does have implications, which I briefly (...) discuss, for conditions that must be satisfied if a person is to be blameworthy for performing actions. (shrink)

Determinism is the thesis that ‘there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future.’ When various compatibilists discuss determinism and moral responsibility, they champion the view that although determinism is inconsistent with freedom to do otherwise, it is nevertheless consistent with responsibility. Determinism, then, does not, in the view of these compatibilists, threaten one sort of moral appraisal — the sort we make, for example, when we say that someone is blameworthy for some deed. Call moral deontic normative statuses (...) like those of being morally right, wrong, or obligatory, ‘moral anchors.’ A key objective of this paper is to show that even if compatibilists can secure moral responsibility against the threat of determinism, possibly, by establishing that freedom to do otherwise is not the right sort of freedom required for responsibility, they will not be able to secure the very anchors of morality by any similar line of reasoning. Specifically, I argue that if certain principles of moral obligation are true, nothing can be morally right, wrong, or obligatory in a world in which we lack alternative possibilities. Thus, whereas unfreedom to do otherwise may be compatible with responsibility, it is incompatible with moral anchorage. (shrink)

This paper revisits the issue of whether responsibility is essentially historical. Roughly, the leading question here is this: Do ways in which we can acquire pertinent antecedents of action, such as beliefs, desires, and values, have an essential bearing on whether we are responsible for actions that are suitably related to these antecedents? I argue, first, that Michael McKenna’s interesting case for nonhistoricism is indecisive, and, second, his brand of modest historicism, while highly insightful, yields results concerning responsibility that ought (...) to be resisted. I conclude by motivating a hybrid view: it implies that responsibility does not require that one have a past, but should one have a past, it must be a past of a certain sort. (shrink)