Abstract
Many philosophers think that a necessary condition on moral blameworthiness is that the wrongdoer can reasonably be expected to avoid the action for which she is blamed. Those who think so assume as a matter of course that the expectations at issue here are normative expectations that contrast with the non-normative or predictive expectations we form concerning the probable conduct of others, and they believe, or at least assume, that there is a clear-cut distinction between the two. In this paper I put this widespread assumption under scrutiny and argue that it’s mistaken: although predictive and normative expectations are indeed distinct, there is no sharp separation between them. On the contrary, predictive expectations can have a substantial bearing on normative expectations in two related ways: they can recalibrate what is reasonable to expect of agents when responsibility attributions are at stake and they can help to uncover previously undetected excusing conditions. I illustrate my claims with the famous bystander effect from social psychology and show that it yields predictive expectations that affect normative expectations in these two ways.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The list of philosophers who endorse the reasonable expectation criterion on blameworthiness is endless. For many of them it seems to be an axiom for thinking about moral responsibility (cf. Fricker 2010: 165) and so they invoke it almost in passing. Philosophers who make more conscious and sustained use of this criterion include Greenspan (1987), Smith (1990), Rosen (2003), FitzPatrick (2008, 2017), Levy (2009), Kelly (2013), Smith (2017), and Goldberg (2018). Other philosophers appeal instead to fair or reasonable opportunities to avoid wrongdoing as a condition on blameworthiness (e.g., Wallace 1994; Watson 2004; Brink and Nelkin 2013; Franklin 2013; Nelkin 2016) but, as we will see, reasonable expectations and fair opportunities are closely related. Philosophers who explicitly reject the reasonable expectation criterion on blameworthiness are rarer to find. A clear example is Talbert (2013), but many self-expression theorists implicitly reject this criterion as well. See for instance Scanlon (1998: 288), Hieronymi (2004), and Sripada (2016: 1223–5).
For the distinction between these two kinds of expectations, see for example Schoeman (1987: 305–6, 308), Wallace (1994: 20–1), Doris (2002: 135), Gardner (2007: 124), Sher (2009: 107–8), Talbert (2013: 231, n.10), Clarke (2014: 180–1), A. Smith (2017: 45–6), FitzPatrick (2017: 29), Wieland (2017: 5, n. 7), Mason and Wilson (2017: 91–2), Goldberg (2018: 65–6, 181–2), and Murray and Vargas (2018: 11). All these philosophers appeal as a matter of course to the distinction between normative and non-normative expectations without giving a thought as to how they might be related. The present paper remedies this lack.
Many philosophers now disagree with Watson’s remarks that the reactive attitudes are a distinctive mark of accountability vis-à-vis attributability and that these attitudes are essentially punitive. See for example Hieronymi (2004) and Talbert (2012). Thanks to an anonymous referee for reminding me of this point.
See for instance Hart (1968), Glover (1970), Wolf (1990), Moore (1990), Wallace (1994), Nelkin (2011), Brink and Nelkin (2013), and Franklin (2013). Although Wallace (1994: ch. 7) argues that a concern with fairness regarding the agent’s capacity to comply with moral demands shouldn’t be equated with a principle of avoidability, he concedes that his account of blameworthiness can be phrased in terms of reasonable opportunities to avoid blame and sanctions (199). On his view, however, reasonable opportunities involve the possession of general rather than specific abilities to do the right thing.
Wallace (1994: ch. 7) argues that possession of the capacities for “reflective self-control” is necessary for blameworthiness but denies that the situation’s being apt for their exercise—or, in Wallace’s terms, an opportunity to exercise one’s general abilities—is also required. See footnote 4 above.
Notice that REC isn’t an instance of the “ought implies can” (OIC) principle (cf. Fricker 2010: 165). It’s easy to show why not: if the “can” in OIC were the “can” connected to fairness of opportunity, the distinction between wrongdoing and blameworthiness would collapse and as a result the category of excuses (i.e., of blameless wrongdoing) would disappear. Here’s why: if in a given situation an agent lacks a fair opportunity to refrain from performing a wrong action, then on the proposed interpretation of OIC it would follow that she can’t refrain from performing it, which in turn would entail that she wasn’t under an obligation to refrain since she couldn’t have complied with it. But this would mean that she didn’t commit wrongdoing after all, since no obligation would have been breached. This can’t be right: when an agent lacks a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing she is thereby excused (see Sect. 5 below), which implies that she did commit wrongdoing but, due to this lack, she isn’t blameworthy for it. This suggests that a concern with fairness is essential to blameworthiness but not to obligation (Graham 2011: 367). For more on this point, see footnotes 29, 45, and 46 below.
Philosophers who discuss normative expectations usually locate their normativity exclusively in the obligations or demands they embody, overlooking the role played by considerations of fairness. See for example A. Smith (2017: 46) and Goldberg (2018: 65–6). By contrast, Greenspan (1987: 72) comes close—but not all the way (cf. 73, n.12)—to recognizing both aspects of the normativity of normative expectations.
See footnotes 9 above and 45 below for explanation.
An exception is Smith (1990), but the relation between predictive and normative expectations she describes is very different from the one explored here. Her main claim is that regularities of behavior, and their associated predictive expectations, sometimes give rise to moral obligations to behave in certain ways.
It’s important to emphasize that this isn’t the only place where the alleged sharp distinction between normative and predictive expectations plays a central role. For example, when responding to Rosen’s (2003) argument that blameless moral ignorance fully exculpates because it isn’t reasonable to expect agents to refrain from performing actions they see as permissible, both Clarke (2014: 180–1) and Goldberg (2018: 181–2) appeal to this distinction. They argue that what they call “epistemic expectations” are, in Clarke’s words, plainly irrelevant for normative expectations.
Nelkin (2005) identifies several different threats that situationism might pose to moral responsibility, but she doesn’t mention the one I address here.
Sher does make this point, but not in relation to the situationist evidence.
See also Amaya and Doris (2015: 263).
I take the notion of “quality of opportunity” from Nelkin (2016).
In the next section I defend the claim that the presence of other people makes it significantly difficult to recognize pertinent reasons in these situations and I also explain what kind of difficulty is involved and why is relevant for responsibility ascriptions. As both Bradford (2017) and Guerrero (2017) correctly argue, not every instance of difficulty mitigates blame.
Franklin (2013: 490) and Nelkin (2016: 371–2) come the closest to explicitly endorsing REC-s. Nelkin also claims that blameworthiness covaries with difficulty and with quality of opportunity (374). This isn’t incompatible with REC-s, since in my view (as in Nelkin’s and, presumably, in Franklin’s) quality of opportunity is a component of normative expectations and difficulty is a key determinant of quality of opportunity. On the other hand, Coates and Swenson (2013) and Herdova and Kearns (2017) claim that blameworthiness covaries with reasons-responsiveness. Again, this can be accommodated by REC-s, given that reasons-responsiveness pertains to the agential capacities component of the fair opportunity standard.
What counts as a high base rate of non-helping behavior? To answer this question, I don’t need to get into thorny issues about how to determine which statistical results count as high or low. All I need is to point out that, by the lights of commonsense morality, which doesn’t recognize the relevance of apparently trivial situational factors (such as the presence of other people) for responsibility attributions, the systematic finding that helping behavior is affected by them entails that the proportion of non-helpers in these experiments is indeed high.
Objection: What make us realize the potency of situational factors, and thus what partly justifies the adjustment of normative expectations, are the base rates of non-helping behavior observed in the experiments, not the predictive expectations grounded on them. Response: Base rates and predictive expectations are the backward-looking and forward-looking sides of the same coin. Base rates come from the observed behavior of subjects in the experiments, while predictive expectations project those observed patterns into the future. So we can say something like: “The fact that some people behaved in this way in the past, and that some of them will behave similarly in the future, makes it less reasonable to expect (in the normative sense) of people in these situations to act rightly, once we also have a relevant explanation for these regularities.” Thus, it’s appropriate to claim that predictive expectations, and not only base rates, partly justify the adjustment of normative expectations.
Thanks to Dana Nelkin for urging me to clarify this point.
Doris (2007: 481) agrees: “surely it is partly because most people yield under torture that it seems unfair to hold victims liable for failing to resist it.” Notice that this passage is hard to reconcile with Doris’ claim quoted above to the effect that “What is needed are standards for ‘reasonable expectations’ regarding resistance [of situational pressures] that don’t depend on actual frequencies of resistance” (2002: 135).
Vincent (2011: 322) makes a similar point regarding scientific findings in general, although she is concerned with the realm of legal rather than moral responsibility.
An anonymous referee suggests that predictive expectations can sometimes afford justifications rather than excuses since, according to the referee, just as empirical data can affect our views about the fairness of opportunities they can also affect our views about the appropriate content of the moral demands themselves. And if we come to think that a certain moral demand isn’t appropriate, then people who violate that (putative) demand won’t have done anything wrong after all and therefore will have a justification for their conduct rather than an excuse. Another way to put the point is that (in the referee’s words) “we might come to rethink demands that proved to be too difficult to live up to. So it seems possible for at least some findings about predictive expectations to recalibrate normative expectations by revising moral demands rather than responsibility.” The referee further argues that the principle “Ought implies can” (OIC) can be recruited to support this suggestion, since its kernel is precisely the idea that obligation is sensitive to difficulty. I don’t quite agree with the referee’s suggestion, however, for two reasons. First, as I pointed out in footnote 9 above, REC is less tightly linked to the OIC principle than the referee’s suggestion seems to imply. Second, as I argue in Sect. 6 (and in footnotes 45 and 46 below), the proper response to empirical evidence about non-compliance isn’t to weaken moral demands but to see to it that the “moral ecology” changes in such a way that compliance is made more likely.
See for instance Gardner (2007), Kelly (2013), Franklin (2013), Brink and Nelkin (2013), and Wieland (2017: 5). According to an alternative view, the essential characteristic of excuses is that they indicate the absence of ill will on the part of an agent who (apparently) committed wrongdoing. See Strawson (1962/2003) and Wallace (1994: Ch. 5).
Here I follow Brink and Nelkin’s (2013: 291) suggestion to classify as excuses all conditions that block the attribution of blame to an agent regardless of whether they affect reasons-responsive capacities or situational aptness, thus erasing the usual distinction between conditions that exempt and conditions that excuse from responsibility (cf. Wallace 1994: Chs. 5 and 6). For the contrary view, according to which excuses pertain exclusively to the situational element of the fair opportunity standard, see Franklin (2013).
I argue below that this critical point is variably set for different excusing conditions.
One may object that pluralistic ignorance doesn’t really amount to blameless ignorance because: (i) it isn’t clear it involves genuine ignorance at all as opposed to simply falling prey to social pressures for conformity (judging in the same way everyone apparently does); and (ii) even if it does involve genuine ignorance, it isn’t clear it’s blameless given that bystanders normally possess sufficient evidence for discovering the true nature of the situation and given that they can do things to overcome pernicious group effects, such as paying greater attention to the available evidence and exercising greater independence of judgment. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this couple of objections.) In response to the first worry, there is convincing evidence that the social interpretative process that causes bystanders to modify their construal of the situation does leave at least some of them in a state of ignorance (understood as unawareness of relevant considerations) rather than producing in them some sort of motivational conflict of the sort observed in, for instance, Asch’s (1951) classic experiments, where some subjects who yielded to the majority judgment were perfectly aware what the correct answer was (involving comparisons of lines of different lengths) but failed to voice their conviction due to social pressures for conformity. The evidence in question comes from a behavioral proxy that was employed by Latané and Darley to distinguish those subjects who remained passive because they experienced some sort of motivational conflict (due to diffusion of responsibility or fear of embarrassment) from those who did so because they were truly unaware that their help was needed: while the former looked emotionally aroused during the postexperimental interviews, the latter appeared relaxed and assured (Latané and Darley 1970: 111–2; see also Darley and Batson 1973: 108). I address the second worry in the body of the text below (see the discussion about difficulty) and in footnote 38.
To avoid misunderstandings, my claim isn’t that when people in groups fail to react appropriately to an emergency we should always grant them an excuse. For one, some of them may have failed to do so because of diffusion of responsibility, and I haven’t said anything about whether the latter exculpates. Second, even if some did fall prey to pluralistic ignorance, they might have been under an obligation to do something to avoid it (see Sect. 6 below). Finally, there is the epistemic difficulty of determining, for any given unresponsive bystander, whether her unresponsiveness is wholly explained by blameless pluralistic ignorance. Therefore, my claim is only that, when unresponsiveness is thus explained, the agent should be granted a (perhaps only partial) excuse. A further worry might be that this epistemic difficulty is insurmountable because we lack any reliable method for ascertaining whether a particular instance of unresponsiveness was due to pluralistic ignorance instead of diffusion of responsibility. However, as I pointed out in the previous footnote, we do have such a method.
Herdova and Kearns (2017: 170) and Herdova (2016: 67–9) accept that some of the factors studied in the situationist experiments diminish responsibility because they render agents less reasons-responsive and “thus act as somewhat of an excusing factor” (Herdova and Kearns 2017: 170), but deny that they fully exculpate because some degree of reasons-responsiveness or control is typically retained. However, my claim that pluralistic ignorance can significantly (even fully) exculpate doesn’t entail that either reasons-responsiveness or control is completely eradicated. Rather, my point is that, in a specific situation and regarding certain reasons for action, a situationist factor can degrade the quality of the agent’s opportunity to avoid wrongdoing up to the point where she’s blameless for a specific bit of wrongdoing, regardless of whether she still counts as a reasons-responsive (and thus in control) agent by, for instance, Fischer and Ravizza’s (1998) standards (which Herdova and Kearns endorse).
Nelkin (2016) also mentions sacrifice as a component of difficulty, but of course the sense in which it’s difficult for people in groups to react appropriately to an emergency isn’t that it would require great sacrifice on their part to do so, at least not in the situations studied by Latané and Darley.
See Guerrero (2017) for the contrast between “effort-related difficulty in performing” and “difficulty in trying.”.
Even if, as an anonymous referee did, we insisted that unresponsive bystanders can do things to come to a better appreciation of the situation (such as paying more attention to available evidence or exerting more independence of judgment), it still wouldn’t follow that their ignorance is culpable. One usual standard for establishing culpable ignorance is precisely whether the agent can reasonably be expected to take certain measures for avoiding or overcoming her unawareness of relevant considerations (Rudy-Hiller 2017), and what I’m claiming is precisely that this standard isn’t met in the cases under discussion given that the social interpretative process driving the bystander effect undermines the quality of opportunity for recognizing that there is something amiss with one’s construal of the situation and thus that one must take certain corrective actions. This isn’t to say that agents are helpless to deal with the bystander effect, but one thing that seems required for reliably doing so—and for agents to be culpable for failing to overcome it—is knowledge of its existence (see Sect. 6 below).
There is a tight link between REC-s and the notion of control, since the avoidability of wrongdoing invoked in REC-s is naturally construed as requiring agential control. Not any old way of being able to avoid wrongdoing is relevant for assessments of blameworthiness.
So Bradford (2017: 195) is mistaken when she asserts that “It is only when a certain amount of effort has been expended that difficulty can in some circumstances shape blameworthiness.” Even if agents in these situations expend no effort at all in trying to be aware of relevant considerations, the difficulty involved can, for the reasons explained in the text, be exculpatory (to some degree at least).
Criminogenic environments—environments that due to their social and material features considerably raise the propensity of agents to commit criminal wrongdoing—provide a different source of predictive expectations that can recalibrate normative expectations. I explore the significance of criminogenic environments for responsibility assessments in work in progress.
I adopted this interpretation because it’s the most natural one, although I concede that the point merits further discussion. Vargas (2013b) argues that situationist factors oftentimes do (locally) degrade reasons-responsive capacities, while Herdova and Kearns (2017: 176–8) and McKenna and Warmke (2017: 20) think that the evidence doesn’t warrant this conclusion.
And, as Guerrero (2017) shows, there are in fact different kinds of difficulty relevant for evaluating the ignorance excuse, and not all of them are exculpatory to the same degree.
See footnote 23 above for a remark about what counts as a high base rate in the context of this discussion.
Here’s why. If the “ought implies can” principle is correct, then one of the things that subverts an obligation is the agent’s incapacity to fulfill it, i.e., the fact that she can’t comply with it. However, as I pointed out in footnote 9 above, the “can” operative in this principle isn’t the “fair opportunity ‘can’” but rather what we might call the “bare opportunity ‘can’”. Since arguably the evidence on the bystander effect affects only the former but leaves the latter untouched (this evidence certainly doesn’t show that people in groups are literally unable to respond appropriately to an emergency), it follows that it doesn’t show that the obligation to provide assistance is subverted in this kind of situations. See next footnote for more on this point.
Let me sketch a tentative explanation of why even very strong predictive expectations about wrong behavior don’t generally subvert moral obligations nor morality’s action-guiding function. Our moral obligations, and the moral code they embody, are the product of a very long and ongoing process in which human beings negotiate the conditions for living together. The obligations we currently accept are, so to speak, the settled findings in this arduous process of collective scrutiny. Thus it makes sense that, upon discovering that certain conditions make it very hard for ordinary people to fulfill certain obligations (thus affecting the fair opportunity “can”), the rational response is to try to scaffold their agency for them to be able (i.e., have a fair opportunity) to fulfill those obligations rather than immediately rethinking the appropriateness of the latter. This isn’t to say that we never come to reconsider certain moral demands, but this isn’t due to empirical findings about how often people fail to comply with them but rather to normative considerations such as, for instance, that a putative demand is inconsistent with other basic moral convictions we endorse. Think, for instance, how putative moral obligations related to sexual propriety have lost ground to foundational moral convictions about autonomy and respect for non-harmful individual choices.
For very useful written comments on a previous version of this paper I’d like to thank Dana Nelkin, an anonymous referee for another journal, and two anonymous referees for this journal. Thanks also to Daniel Drucker for helpful suggestions. This work was supported by a UNAM-PAPIIT grant IA400318.
References
Amaya, S., & Doris, J. (2015). No excuses: Performance mistakes in morality. In J. Clausen & N. Levy (Eds.), Handbook of neuroethics (pp. 253–272). Dordrecht: Springer.
Arpaly, N., & Schroeder, T. (2014). In praise of desire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Asch, S. (1951). Effects of group pressures upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership, and men (pp. 177–190). Pittsburgh: Carnegie Press.
Björnsson, G. (2017). “Explaining Away Epistemic Skepticism about Culpability”, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility (Vol. 4, pp. 141–162). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bradford, G. (2017). Hard to KNOW. In P. Robichaud & J. Wieland (Eds.), Responsibility: The epistemic condition (pp. 180–198). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brink, D. (2013). Situationism, responsibility, and fair opportunity. Social Philosophy and Policy, 30(1–2), 121–149.
Brink, D. (2018). Partial responsibility and excuse. In H. Hurd (Ed.), Moral puzzles and legal perplexities: Essays on the influence of Larry Alexander (pp. 39–59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brink, D., & Nelkin, D. (2013). “Fairness and the Architecture of Responsibility”, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, (Vol. 1, pp. 284–314). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clarke, R. (2014). Omissions: Agency, metaphysics, and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coates, J., & Swenson, P. (2013). Reasons-responsiveness and degrees of responsibility. Philosophical Studies, 165, 629–645.
Darley, J., & Batson, D. (1973). From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27(1), 100–108.
Doris, J. (2002). Lack of character: Personality and moral behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Doris, J. (2007). Out of character: On the psychology of excuses in the criminal law. In H. LaFollette (Ed.), Ethics in practice (3rd ed., pp. 474–484). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Evans, R. (1980). The making of social psychology. New York: Gardner Press.
Fischer, J., & Ravizza, M. (1998). Responsibility and control: A theory of moral responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fischer, P., et al. (2011). The bystander-effect: A meta-analytic review of bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies. Psychological Bulletin, 137(4), 517–537.
Fitzpatrick, W. (2008). Moral responsibility and normative ignorance: Answering a new skeptical challenge. Ethics, 118(4), 589–613.
Fitzpatrick, W. (2017). Unwitting wrongdoing, reasonable expectations, and blameworthiness. In P. Robichaud & J. Wieland (Eds.), Responsibility: The epistemic condition (pp. 29–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Franklin, C. (2013). A theory of the normative force of pleas. Philosophical Studies, 163, 479–502.
Fricker, M. (2010). The relativism of blame and Williams’s relativism of distance. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 84, 151–177.
Gardner, J. (2007). The gist of excuses. Offences and defences: Selected essays in the philosophy of criminal law (pp. 121–140). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Glover, J. (1970). Responsibility. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Goldberg, S. (2018). To the best of our knowledge: social expectations and epistemic normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Graham, P. A. (2011). ‘Ought’ and ability. Philosophical review, 120(3), 337–382.
Greenspan, P. (1987). Unfreedom and responsibility. In F. Schoeman (Ed.), Responsibility, character and the emotions (pp. 63–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Guerrero, A. (2017). Intellectual difficulty and moral responsibility. In P. Robichaud & J. Wieland (Eds.), Responsibility: The epistemic condition (pp. 199–218). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haji, I. (1997). An epistemic dimension of blameworthiness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57(3), 523–544.
Hart, H. L. A. (1968). Negligence, Mens Rea, and criminal responsibility. Punishment and responsibility (pp. 136–157). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Herdova, M. (2016). What you don’t know Can hurt you: Situationism, conscious awareness, and control. Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics, 4(1), 45–71.
Herdova, M., & Kearns, S. (2017). This is a tricky situation: Situationism and reasons-responsiveness. Journal of Ethics, 21, 151–183.
Hieronymi, P. (2004). The force and fairness of blame. Philosophical Perspectives, 18, 115–148.
Kelly, E. (2013). What is an excuse? In J. Coates & N. Tognazzini (Eds.), Blame: Its nature and norms (pp. 244–262). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latané, B., & Darley, J. (1970). The unresponsive bystander: Why doesn’t he help?. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts.
Latané, B., & Nida, S. (1981). Ten years of research on group size and helping. Psychological Bulletin, 89(2), 308–324.
Levy, N. (2009). Culpable ignorance and moral responsibility: A reply to FitzPatrick. Ethics, 119(4), 729–741.
Mason, E., & Wilson, A. (2017). Vice, blameworthiness, and cultural ignorance. In P. Robichaud & J. Wieland (Eds.), Responsibility: The epistemic condition (pp. 82–100). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McKenna, M. (2012). Conversation and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McKenna, M., & Warmke, B. (2017). Does situationism threaten free will and moral responsibility? Journal of Moral Philosophy, 14(6), 1–36.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority. New York: Harper and Row.
Moore, M. (1990). Choice, character, and excuse. Social Philosophy and Policy, 7(2), 29–58.
Murray, S., & Vargas, M. (2018). Vigilance and control. Philosophical Studies. Early online. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1208-2.
Nelkin, D. (2005). Freedom, responsibility and the challenge of situationism. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 29, 181–206.
Nelkin, D. (2011). Making sense of freedom and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nelkin, D. (2016). Difficulty and degrees of moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Nous, 50(2), 356–378.
Rosen, G. (2003). Culpability and ignorance. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103, 61–84.
Rudy-Hiller, F. (2017). A capacitarian account of culpable ignorance. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 98(S1), 398–426.
Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What we owe to each other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schoeman, F. (1987). Statistical norms and moral attributions. In F. Schoeman (Ed.), Responsibility, character and the emotions (pp. 287–315). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sher, G. (2009). Who knew? Responsibility without awareness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Smith, A. (2017). Unconscious omissions, reasonable expectations, and responsibility. In D. Nelkin & S. Rickless (Eds.), The ethics and law of omissions (pp. 36–61). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, P. (1990). Contemplating failure: The importance of unconscious omission. Philosophical Studies, 59(2), 159–176.
Sripada, C. (2016). Self-expression: A deep self theory of moral responsibility. Philosophical Studies, 173(5), 1203–1232.
Strawson, P. (1962/2003). Freedom and resentment. In G. Watson (Ed.), Free will (pp. 72–93). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Talbert, M. (2012). Moral competence, moral blame, and protest. Journal of Ethics, 16(1), 89–109.
Talbert, M. (2013). Unwitting wrongdoers and the role of moral disagreement in blame. Oxford studies in agency and responsibility (Vol. 1, pp. 225–244). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Talbert, M. (2017). Omission and attribution error. In D. Nelkin & S. Rickless (Eds.), The ethics and law of omissions (pp. 17–35). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tierney, H. (2019). Quality of reasons and degrees of responsibility. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2018.1550795.
Vargas, M. (2013a). Building better beings: A theory of moral responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vargas, M. (2013b). Situationism and moral responsibility: Free will in fragments. In A. Clark, J. Kiverstein, & T. Vierkant (Eds.), Decomposing the will (pp. 325–350). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vincent, N. (2011). Legal responsibility adjudication and the normative authority of the mind sciences. Philosophical Explorations, 14(3), 315–331.
Wallace, J. (1994). Responsibility and the moral sentiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Watson, G. (2004). Two faces of responsibility. Agency and answerability (pp. 260–288). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wieland, J. (2017). Introduction. In P. Robichaud & J. Wieland (Eds.), Responsibility: The epistemic condition (pp. 1–28). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolf, S. (1990). Freedom within reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zimmerman, M. J. (1997). A plea for accuses. American Philosophical Quarterly, 34(2), 229–243.
Acknowledgements
Funding was provided by Direccion General Personal Academico, UNAM (Grant No. IA400318).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rudy-Hiller, F. Reasonable expectations, moral responsibility, and empirical data. Philos Stud 177, 2945–2968 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01354-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01354-5