Negligence and Social Self-Governance

Abstract

Self-control can involve more than just impulse inhibition. For some notions of self-control, especially those concerned with moral responsibility, sensitivity to reasons is the idea central to self-control. For these accounts, it is not obvious how to capture the idea that people are responsible for negligence and other instances of apparently non-volitional culpability. One blames people for failing to take into account some important moral consideration in deciding what to do, for failing to remember some commitment, and for failing to recognize situationally relevant things. This chapter proposes an account of this broader notion of self-control, one that solves the problem of control in non-volitional culpability cases, and that retains the idea that people in such cases could have complied with the demands of morality.