Abstract

Distributing Responsibility

Highlights

  • A widespread view in moral, legal, and political philosophy, as well as in public discourse, is that responsibility makes a difference to the fair allocation or distribution of things that are valuable or disvaluable independently of responsibility

  • A person’s responsibility for wrongful actions, imprudent actions, prudent actions, good actions, supererogatory actions, and so on, is itself influenced by social structures and choices

  • Philosophy & Public Affairs relationship between welfare or resources on the one hand and responsibility on the other—in distributive justice, there is at least some pressure to allocate welfare or resources to those who are responsible for wrongdoing, and away from those who are responsible for good deeds

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Summary

What Is responsibility?

Grasping the idea that responsibility can be allocated or distributed involves understanding responsibility. People are normally responsible for what they do intentionally, voluntarily, recklessly, negligently, and so on One reason for these assumptions is that I have compatibilist sympathies, as do most people who write about responsibility, including those who are concerned with the role of responsibility in matters of justice. A person is responsible for her conduct because her acts are caused by certain agential facts—what I will just call “the relevant agential facts.”. Strawson’s essay, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), did a great deal to stimulate interest in this idea Prominent defenders of this approach include Gary Watson, Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays (Oxford: OUP, 2004); Thomas M. Inevitable that she acted as she did given the state of the world prior to her birth, and the physical laws that apply to it

The Social Dependence of Responsibility in the Real World
The Value and Disvalue of Responsibility
Cleaning Up
Responsibility for Wrongdoing Is Worse for Us
From Value to Justice
Respect for Autonomy
Responsibility and Other Interests
Counterbalancing Responsibility
Intrapersonal Tradeoffs
Responsibility and Judgment
Extra Options
Natural and Social Causes
VIII. Why Distributive Justice Is not the Whole Story
Incompatibilism to the Rescue?
Conclusion
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