Moral Responsibility
Abstract
Beginning in childhood, and continuing throughout our lives, we are immersed in a web of attitudes, evaluations, and practices that are evidence of our deep commitment to moral responsibility. At the same time, we encounter puzzles and perplexities that may encourage a misplaced scepticism about moral responsibility. This Very Short Introduction explores our understanding of moral responsibility and what it involves. Among the various difficulties that we must confront are issues of retribution and punishment, moral education and manipulation, and how to identify and respond to those whose moral competence is impaired or in doubt. The account provided defends an understanding of moral responsibility that begins with a realistic moral psychology and that acknowledges the limits to agential control. No adequate interpretation of moral responsibility can require that the trajectory of our ethical lives is entirely immune to fate and luck. To insist on an ‘idealism’ of this kind would be to invite an implausible and unlivable scepticism about the foundations of moral responsibility. The ‘realist’ alternative offers a more truthful, effective, and humane way of addressing these issues. The picture presented is one that falls in the territory that lies between a consoling optimism and a bleak pessimism about our human ethical predicament.