Moral Responsibility For Actions Research Articles

Legal responsibility of a private notary

The legal responsibility of a notary is in its essence an important element of the legal regulation of public relations in the field of notarial activities, which is manifested in the purposeful influence of the state on the behavior of notaries through legal means. The purpose of this article is to formulate the concept and outline the characteristics of the main types of legal liability of a private notary. The legal liability of private notaries is proposed to be understood as a set of legal coercive restrictions provided by law and the suffering of subjects of private notarial activity of personal, organizational and property nature for the committed offense. At the same time, it is emphasized that the legal responsibility of a notary as a structural element of his legal status consists not only in the application of appropriate coercive measures against him for an offense (retrospective aspect), but also in his awareness of his responsibility for proper performance (prospective aspect). It is noted that the components of the system of legal liability of a private notary are its types, namely: civil (professional), criminal, administrative and disciplinary. It is emphasized that the institution of legal liability of private notaries should be considered not only as a guarantee of lawful and conscientious performance of their duties, a means of protecting the legitimate interests of the state and citizens related to the provision of notarial services, but also as a regime of private notaries. procedural relations arising from the application of coercive measures by the state to them. It is established that the legal responsibility of a private notary is complex, and provides for the imposition on him not only the actual legal responsibility, but also moral responsibility for actions before the state and society. The limits of legal liability of private notaries depend on the type of such liability. The administrative nature of the notary’s activity and his performance of actions on behalf of the state allows to draw a conclusion about the tortious nature of the notary’s liability for violation of the established procedure for performing notarial acts.

Historical Moral Responsibility and Manipulation via Deletion

In discussions on moral responsibility for actions, a commonly discussed case is one in which an agent is manipulated into performing some action. On some views, such agents lack responsibility for those actions partly because they issue from attitudes that were acquired in an inappropriate way. In this paper, it is argued that such views are in need of revision. After introducing a new problematic case of a manipulated agent, revisions are offered for specific views. The paper concludes with a discussion of the views in a broader context, as well as some potential implications of the revisions.

Keeping It Simple: Rethinking Abilities and Moral Responsibility

AbstractMoral responsibility requires that we are in control of what we do. Many contemporary accounts of responsibility cash out this control in terms of abilities and hold that the relevant abilities are strong abilities, like general abilities. This paper raises a problem for strong abilities views: an agent can plausibly be morally responsible for an action or omission, despite lacking any strong abilities to do the relevant thing. It then offers a way forward for ability‐based views, arguing that very weak abilities can form the basis of moral responsibility for both actions and omissions.

Semicompatibilism and Moral Responsibility for Actions and Omissions: In Defence of Symmetrical Requirements

ABSTRACT Although convinced by Frankfurt-style cases that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise, semicompatibilists have not wanted to accept a parallel claim about moral responsibility for omissions, and so they have accepted asymmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and for omissions. In previous work, I have presented a challenge to various attempts at defending this asymmetry. My view is that semicompatibilists should give up these defences and instead adopt symmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and omissions, and in this paper I highlight three advantages of doing so: first, it avoids a strange implication of the truth of determinism; second, it allows for a principled reply to Philip Swenson’s recent ‘No Principled Difference Argument’; third, it provides a reason to reject a crucial inference rule invoked by Peter van Inwagen’s ‘Direct Argument’ for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism.

Moral Responsibility for Actions and Omissions: The Asymmetry Thesis Rejected

There is an important contemporary debate in moral responsibility about whether the following asymmetry thesis is true: moral responsibility for actions does not require alternative possibilities but moral responsibility for omissions does. In this paper, we do two things. First, we consider and reject a recent argument against the asymmetry thesis, contending that the argument fails because it rests on a false view about the metaphysics of omissions. Second, we develop and defend a new argument against the asymmetry thesis, one that avoids the problem with the first argument by not resting on any assumptions about what omissions are metaphysically.

Moral responsibility for actions and omissions: a new challenge to the asymmetry thesis

This paper presents a new challenge to the thesis that moral responsibility for an omission requires the ability to do the omitted action, whereas moral responsibility for an action does not require the ability to do otherwise than that action. Call this the asymmetry thesis. The challenge arises from the possibility of cases in which an omission is identical to an action. In certain of such cases, the asymmetry thesis leads to a contradiction. The challenge is then extended to recent variations of the asymmetry thesis defended by John Martin Fischer and Carolina Sartorio. Finally, a possible objection to the challenge is addressed.

What is the role of individual accountability in patient safety? A multi-site ethnographic study.

An enduring debate concerns how responsibility for patient safety should be distributed between organisational systems and individual professionals. Though rule‐based, calculus‐like approaches intended to support a ‘just culture’ have become popular, they perpetuate an asocial and atomised account. In this article, we use insights from practice theory – which sees organisational phenomena as accomplished in everyday actions, with individual agency and structural conditions as a mutually constitutive, dynamic duality – along with contributions from the political science and ethics literature as a starting point for analysis. Presenting ethnographic data from five hospitals, three in one high‐income country and two in low‐income countries, we offer an empirically informed, normative rethinking of the role of personal accountability, identifying the collective nature of the healthcare enterprise and the extent to which patient safety depends on contributions from many hands. We show that moral responsibility for actions and behaviours is an irreducible element of professional practice, but that individuals are not somehow ‘outside’ and separate from ‘systems’: they create, modify and are subject to the social forces that are an inescapable feature of any organisational system; each element acts on the other. Our work illustrates starkly the structuring effects of the broader institutional and socioeconomic context on opportunities to ‘be good’. These findings imply that one of the key responsibilities of organisations and wider institutions in relation to patient safety is the fostering of the conditions of moral community.

Preserving the Good Elements in Punishment and Avoiding a Purely Therapeutic Approach: An Outline

The question is how properly to constrain the state’s use of violence to control crime. My argument here starts from the assumption that there is no moral responsibility for action, that retribution is not justified, and that as a consequence no one deserves to be punished. At the same time I want to avoid the conclusion that Pereboom and others believe follows from those assumptions, that the only justifiable alternative for a criminal justice system is a forward-looking preventive approach focused on danger, one that depends upon therapy when it works and preventive detention when it does not. There is something important about punishment, something that has to be preserved in a decent society. I think, for reasons discussed in the work of thinkers like Herbert Morris and C.S. Lewis, that something very much like punishment, what punishment would be without retribution, is called for. Still, it isn’t punishment itself that has to be preserved; I am persuaded that punishment just is retribution, and if retribution is not justified then punishment is not justified. The project, then, will be to find something that preserves what is good about punishment without entangling it with the notions of retribution and desert. What follows is an outline of the project.

Moral Responsibility and Motivational Mechanisms

This paper provides a discussion and defense of a recent formulation of the idea that moral responsibility for actions depends on the capacity to respond to reasons. This formulation appears in several publications by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, where the authors argue that moral responsibility involves a kind of control over one’s actions which they call “guidance control.” This kind of control does not require an agent’s ability to do something different from what he actually does, but instead requires only that the actual process leading to the action be responsive in some suitable way to the reasons that the agent has for acting. After summarizing this view, I offer the following two innovations to the authors’ view: I argue that the level of control required for moral responsibility (which I call “regular reasons-responsiveness”) is much stronger than what the author’s view allows for; and 2) I give a common-sense account of the kinds of motivational mechanism relevant to moral responsibility. Given these innovations, I show that this kind of view allows us to easily answer some counterexamples that appear in the current literature on moral responsibility.

On the Incompatibility of Reductionism with Respect to Laws and Causation with Moral Responsibility for Action

On the Incompatibility of Reductionism with Respect to Laws and Causation with Moral Responsibility for Action

Moral responsibility for actions: epistemic and freedom conditions

Two questions guide this article. First, according to Fischer and Ravizza (jointly and otherwise), what epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for performing an action A are not also requirements for freely performing A? Second, how much progress have they made on this front? The article's main moral is for philosophers who believe that there are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing that are not requirements for freely A-ing because they assume that Fischer (on his own or otherwise) has shown that this is so. In showing that this assumption is false, I reopen an important question for these philosophers: How are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing related to requirements for freely A-ing? This is an interesting question in its own right, of course.

The anachronism of moral individualism and the responsibility of extended agency

Recent social theory has departed from methodological individualism’s explanation of action according to the motives and dispositions of human individuals in favor of explanation in terms of broader agencies consisting of both human and nonhuman elements described as cyborgs, actor-networks, extended agencies, or distributed cognition. This paper proposes that moral responsibility for action also be vested in extended agencies. It advances a consequentialist view of responsibility that takes moral responsibility to be a species of causal responsibility, and it answers objections that might be raised on the basis of intentions and deserts.

Precis of Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility

The leading idea of our theory of moral responsibility is that responsibility is associated with control. But we contend that there are two distinct kinds of control. Regulative control involves alternative possibilities: it is a kind of dual power of free action. In contrast, guidance control does not, by its nature, involve alternative possibilities. Whereas typically it might be thought that regulative and guidance control go together, the Frankfurt-type cases show that they are separate and distinct sorts of control. And, whereas typically it is thought that moral responsibility requires regulative control, we claim that moral responsibility-for actions, omissions, and consequences-simply requires guidance control.' Thus, although we do not believe that moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities, we preserve the traditional association of moral responsibility with control. But what, exactly, does guidance control consist in? On our view, guidance control should be understood in terms of two elements: the agent's ownership of the mechanism that actually issues in the relevant behavior, and the reasons-responsiveness of that mechanism. So, for example, an agent is morally responsible for an action, on our account, to the extent that this action issues from the agent's own, reasons-responsive mechanism. We contend that individuals make certain kinds of mechanisms their own by taking responsibility for them. (When we speak of taking responsibility for a kind of mechanism, we understand this as shorthand for taking responsibility for behavior that issues from that kind of mechanism.) It is useful to distinguish two kinds of context in which an agent might take responsibility for the kind of mechanism that leads to his behavior. The typical case is one

Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility

Acknowledgements 1. Moral responsibility: the concepts and challenges 2. Moral responsibility for actions: weak reasons-responsiveness 3. Moral responsibility for actions: moderate reasons-responsiveness 4. Responsibility for consequences 5. Responsibility for omissions 6. The direct argument for incompatibilism 7. Responsibility and history 8. Taking responsibility 9. Conclusion Bibliography.

Responsibility, control, and omissions

Previously, I have argued that moral responsibility for actions is associated with guidance control. This sort of control does not necessarily involve the freedom to do otherwise. In this paper I extend the view to apply to omissions. That is, moral responsibility for an omission is associated with guidance control of that omission. This helps to provide a systematic, unified account of moral responsibility.

The Pro-Life Maternal-Fetal Medicine Physician A Problem of Integrity

During the course of professional practice, health care providers may find themselves in situations where they are called upon to perform actions that they cannot in good conscience do, or to omit actions that conscience dictates. Conscientious objection in such cases may be understood as motivated by a concern for one's integrity, but integrity is a complex concept and there are different ways of interpreting its requirements so as to yield different answers to the question of what sorts of actions are or are not consistent with the preservation of one's integrity. In this paper, we will focus on a particular problem of integrity that arises for certain medical specialists. The problem is whether or how a physician with pro-life, antiabortion views can maintain personal integrity in the practice of maternal-fetal medicine. To what extent, we will ask, can individual with strong pro-life religious or moral convictions do the work that specialists in maternal-fetal medicine typically do without betraying these convictions? If the job of the maternal-fetal medicine physician is to help women and their fetuses with high-risk pregnancies, and if as part of this care women do and should have the option of terminating their pregnancy, should individual with pro-life views enter the field in the first place? Now it may seem self-evident to some what the answer should be: individual who is profoundly opposed to abortion on moral or religious grounds cannot be a maternal-fetal medicine specialist without losing his or her integrity, and only through self-deception or the like could such a person think otherwise. But while we believe that attempts to reconcile these personal convictions with professional practice are open to question, we do not think that the failure of this project is a foregone conclusion. A number of reconciliation strategies are possible, and at least some of these warrant careful attention. We will explore five such strategies in the course of this paper: the I'm only providing information strategy, the foreseeing versus intending strategy, the Better me than someone else strategy, the preventing unnecessary abortions strategy, and last and perhaps most promisingly, the harmonization of values strategy. We believe that physician integrity is a value of fundamental importance in the practice of medicine.[1] Although as professionals, physicians naturally identify with, feel responsible for, and take pride in the proficiency, skill, and technique with which they perform medical tests and administer treatments, these functions are not value free or value neutral. Physicians have moral responsibility for actions, recommendations, and counseling offered to patients. If the physician were only to attend to the technical aspects of professional behavior, he or she would be no more than an engineer, a plumber making repairs, connecting tubes and flushing out clogged systems, with no questions asked.[2] This is a deeply unsatisfying and disturbing conception of the physician's role, for even if the doctor could refrain from bringing moral and other values to bear on the assessment of professional activities, this would hardly absolve the physician of moral responsibility for those activities. Moreover, by dissociating from personal values in this way - at least those values that reflect what one takes to be most important - one only succeeds in creating deep divisions within the self. If the physician has moral responsibility for actions and recommendations to patients, how can we expect professional practice to require the physician to set aside deeply held religious or moral convictions in the conduct of professional life? It would constitute assault on physician integrity to require moral accountability and yet insist on value neutrality. To be sure, the possession of integrity by physicians still leaves much room for the moral criticism of their characters and actions. But integrity is not for this reason a matter of no moral consequence, and forcing physicians to act against their values and principles is deeply problematic. …

The Eudemian Ethics on Knowledge and Voluntary Action

In this paper I wish to explain and critically assess the Eudemian Ethics' account of the role of knowledge in voluntary action. As we shall see, the account we find there has a number of shortcomings, and I will also attempt to make improvements in Aristotle's theory which do not do too much violence to his original position. The understanding of Aristotle's views on the conditions for voluntary action in the Eudemian Ethics (hereafter EE) is central to the understanding of its account of moral responsibility for actions, for EE identifies the class of actions for which an agent is responsible with the class of actions which are voluntary. Unfortunately, this identification is a source of serious difficulties in EE's explanation of voluntariness. I will use the notion of 'moral responsibility' in such a way that when an agent performs an action for which he is morally responsible, then if the action is good he and it are morally praiseworthy, and if the action is bad then he and it are morally blameworthy. But many actions for which I am morally responsible are morally indifferent, e.g. my action of squeezing my toes while writing the previous sentence. I will assume that Aristotle believes that when an agent is in this way subject to praise and blame his action is one for which the agent is morally responsible.'

Wybrane konsekwencje trafu moralnego dla etyki, koncepcji społecznych i religijnych

The article presents the issue of moral luck and some of its consequences for the philosophy of law, social justice, political responsibility and some religious concepts. Recognition of the role of moral luck undermines the use of the concept of moral responsibility, guilt and merit. The consequences of recognizing that this challenge is justifi ed, reach those areas. They postulate, for example, the need to compensate social or property inequalities, insofar as they depend on the luck. Similarly, in the Christian concept of salvation as dependent off the will of God and man, there is the problem of the impact of luck. Release from moral responsibility for actions under the infl uence of luck, also puts into question the responsibility of politicians, whose decisions are often made in the absence of certainty.