Moral Responsibility and the Social Dynamics of Power and Oppression

Abstract

This chapter argues that moral responsibility theorists who take seriously the social scaffolding of agency and the interpersonal dynamics at the heart of our practices need to pay more sustained attention to the effects of social power and oppression. David Shoemaker’s tripartite distinction between attributability, answerability, and accountability is used to develop this argument. The aim of Shoemaker’s distinction is to explicate how impairments of capacity with respect to one or more of these dimensions affect agents’ eligibility for moral responsibility ascriptions. In this chapter the tripartite distinction is used to tease out the various ways that moral responsibility ascriptions and practices are entangled with social dynamics of power, thereby affecting persons’ statuses as morally responsible agents. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of the argument for Strawsonian theories and justifications.