Fairness and the Architecture of Responsibility1

Abstract

In this essay, we explore a conception of the nature and structure of responsibility that draws on ideas about moral and criminal responsibility. Though the two sorts of responsibility are not the same, the criminal law reflects central assumptions about moral responsibility, and the two concepts of responsibility have very similar structure. Our conception of responsibility draws on work of philosophers in the compatibilist tradition who focus on the choices of agents who are reasons-responsive and work in criminal jurisprudence that understands responsibility in terms of the choices of agents who have capacities for practical reason and whose situation affords them the fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. We treat these two perspectives as potentially complementary and argue that each can learn things from the other. Specifically, we think that criminal jurisprudence needs a more systematic conception of the capacities for normative competence and that ideas from the reasons-responsive literature