Abstract
In Responsibility Matters, Peter French embraces a deflationary view of moral responsibility’s nature: It amounts to nothing more than a collection of practices. We might be able to offer some general and illuminating insights about it, but we will not find out anything metaphysically distinctive about the world. Nor will we discover anything about moral responsibility required by our nature as practical reasoners. Hence, no substantive theory will be true to the metaphysical facts or the norms of living as practical agents. Moreover, when we tend to these practices, we will find some basic strategies for negotiating the Responsibility Barter Game, a game whose aim is for accountable agents to avoid bearing the burdens of being held to account for various outcomes. In this essay, I will assess French’s view and resist him while advancing my own conversational theory of moral responsibility.
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Notes
- 1.
French weds his thesis to a further Davidsonian thesis about act-identity. For instance, in the case of Davidson’s the act that is the turning on of the light is identical with the one that is the unintended alerting of the burglar. I am sympathetic, but it seems to me that it is not essential to French’s thesis. Even if the alerting of the burglar is a different act than the flipping of the switch, it remains true that one counts as an act only insofar as there is some act or other (the same or different) that is intended and the two are suitably related in some way. I’ll set this detail aside in the remainder of this paper.
- 2.
To avoid any misimpression, let me be clear. It is consistent with these considerations that there might be important theoretical work to do about some aspect of moral responsibility, like a freedom condition. Once such a condition is identified, it is open to important philosophical work. Likewise, suppose that the scope of responsibility includes obligations. A theory of obligation is not ruled out. But this would be to engage in philosophical theorizing about some element with which responsibility is concerned, just as French deploys work in the theory of action. What is at issue here has to do with a theory about moral responsibility’s nature and norms as such. I am indebted to Ish Haji for raising a worry here.
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Acknowledgements
I am honored to be included in this festschrift for Peter French. I was Peter’s student in an NEH Summer Seminar for College Professors in 1995, held in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the outskirts of Boulder, CO. It was an experience I still recall fondly. Peter’s work in the seminar and my experience with several of the other seminarians, especially Ish Haji and Marina Oshana, proved to be invaluable to me as my career unfolded. From that time with Peter and long afterwards, Peter was extremely kind to me, often offering me support and advice in facing some very hard professional challenges. He was, of course, also an excellent source of philosophical insight. I am very much indebted to him, and I would like to thank him sincerely for his kindness, wisdom, and generosity. I hope this essay honors him as he deserves.
For helpful comments on this paper, I would like to thank Ish Haji, Paul Russell, David Shoemaker, and Brandon Warmke. I would also like to thank Zachary Goldberg for editing this volume and inviting me to contribute to it.
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McKenna, M. (2017). Theories of Moral Responsibility and the Responsibility Barter Game. In: Goldberg, Z. (eds) Reflections on Ethics and Responsibility. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50359-2_5
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