Moral Responsibility and Character Formation

Abstract

Freedom-determinism compatibilism says a deed is correctly censurable if and only if it flows from a bad character, irrespective of what caused that character. In the relevant sense, the doer could have done otherwise whenever with a better character s/he would have. But commonsense considers that unavoidable early brutalizing experiences can at least mitigate blame. The reconciliation is that when a partly formed bad character causes early choices productive of a more fully formed character which leads then to subsequent misdeeds, blame for them is augmented on account of that, but it is not thus augmented if the early brutalization was instead unavoidable. Properly viewed, the case is one, not of reduced blame, but just of unaugmented blame.