Action and Responsibility

Abstract

Taylor’s conclusion is breath-takingly simple. The concept of moral responsibility should, like the concept of witchcraft, be given up because it has implications which are either senseless or false or not believed in even by those who profess to believe in them — or all three. And his argument is equally simple: moral responsibility entails moral wrongdoing; moral wrongdoing entails a law which forbids the conduct in question; a law requires a law-giver; there is no moral law-giver, (the so-called Moral Law being nothing but the ghost of God’s commands sitting crowned upon the grave thereof). From these premises it does indeed follow that there is no such thing as moral responsibility. So the concept of moral responsibility must go, and with it — since we would have no occasion to speak of moral agents if there were no moral responsibility — goes the concept of a moral agent. But I do not think it can really be as simple as that — nor, I suspect does Taylor. So I shall take his paper to be not so much a proof of the vacuity of the concept of moral responsibility as an invitation to us to make coherent sense of it.