MONISTPub Date : 2021-03-14DOI: 10.1093/MONIST/ONAA030
Teresa Kuan
{"title":"Vicarious Responsibility and the Problem of ‘Too Much’: Moral Luck from the Perspective of Ordinary Ethics","authors":"Teresa Kuan","doi":"10.1093/MONIST/ONAA030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA030","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper explores vicarious responsibility and circumstantial luck from a first-person perspective, drawing on ethnographic research on parenting in Reform Era China. The paper focuses on how informants drew boundaries between what they could and could not control in raising a child who might thrive in a hypercompetitive society. In doing so, the paper engages the question, “What kind of moral agent do we want?” by proposing that we also ask, “What kind of moral agent do we find?” In contrast to the hypothetical figure of a walled-off agent who must be convinced of the duty to take on responsibilities in a circumstance of moral luck, empirical research finds instead a vulnerable agent who has taken on ‘too much’.","PeriodicalId":47322,"journal":{"name":"MONIST","volume":"104 1","pages":"168-181"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA030","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46307380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MONISTPub Date : 2021-03-14DOI: 10.1093/MONIST/ONAA034
Charlotte Knowles
{"title":"Responsibility in Cases of Structural and Personal Complicity: A Phenomenological Analysis","authors":"Charlotte Knowles","doi":"10.1093/MONIST/ONAA034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA034","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In cases of complicity in one’s own unfreedom and in structural injustice, it initially appears that agents are only vicariously responsible for their complicity because of the roles circumstantial and constitutive luck play in bringing about their complicity. By drawing on work from the phenomenological tradition, this paper rejects this conclusion and argues for a new responsive sense of agency and responsibility in cases of complicity. Highlighting the explanatory role of stubbornness in cases of complicity, it is argued that although agents may only be vicariously responsible for becoming complicit, they can be held more directly responsible for entrenching their complicity. The complicit agent is responsible for their complicity to the extent that they fail to take responsibility for it.","PeriodicalId":47322,"journal":{"name":"MONIST","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47248456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MONISTPub Date : 2021-03-14DOI: 10.1093/MONIST/ONAA033
T. S. Goetze
{"title":"Moral Entanglement: Taking Responsibility and Vicarious Responsibility","authors":"T. S. Goetze","doi":"10.1093/MONIST/ONAA033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA033","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Vicarious responsibility is sometimes analysed by considering the different kinds of agents involved—who is vicariously responsible for the actions of whom? In this paper, I discuss vicarious responsibility from a different angle: in what sense is the vicarious agent responsible? I do this by considering the ways in which one may take responsibility for events caused by another agent or process. I discuss three senses of taking responsibility—accepting fault, assuming obligations, and fulfilling obligations—and the forms of vicarious responsibility that correspond to these. I end by explaining how to judge which sense applies in a given case, based on the degree of (what I call) moral entanglement between the agent and what they should take responsibility for.","PeriodicalId":47322,"journal":{"name":"MONIST","volume":"104 1","pages":"210-223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43826771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MONISTPub Date : 2021-03-14DOI: 10.1093/MONIST/ONAA035
R. Mellor
{"title":"Faces of Vicarious Responsibility","authors":"R. Mellor","doi":"10.1093/MONIST/ONAA035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA035","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper investigates whether responsibility could be borne vicariously. I distinguish between three different senses of responsibility: attributional responsibility, practices of holding people responsible, and substantive responsibility. I argue that it is doubtful both whether attributional responsibility could be borne vicariously, and whether it could be appropriate to hold someone vicariously responsible. However, I suggest that substantive responsibility can genuinely be borne vicariously. Getting clear on these conceptual issues has important implications for how we approach more concrete legal and political questions. More specifically, I argue these abstract arguments can be used to inform views on the common-law doctrine of joint enterprise, and on reparations for historic injustice.","PeriodicalId":47322,"journal":{"name":"MONIST","volume":"104 1","pages":"238-250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA035","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46421224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MONISTPub Date : 2021-03-14DOI: 10.1093/MONIST/ONAA029
L. Radoilska
{"title":"Circumstance, Answerability, and Luck","authors":"L. Radoilska","doi":"10.1093/MONIST/ONAA029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA029","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper identifies a distinctive kind of moral luck, deep circumstantial luck, and then explores its effects on moral responsibility. A key feature of the phenomenon is that it is recurrent rather than one-off. It also affects agents across a wide range of situations making it difficult to detect. Deeply unlucky agents are subject to unfavourable moral assessments through no fault of their own both in specific cases and when they try to respond to such initial assessments. In this respect, deep circumstantial luck takes the form of a normative burden that grows over time. A process-oriented conception of moral responsibility as answerability is proposed to explain this phenomenon and highlight its implications for rethinking vicarious responsibility.","PeriodicalId":47322,"journal":{"name":"MONIST","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46769038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MONISTPub Date : 2021-03-14DOI: 10.1093/MONIST/ONAA028
N. Lacey, H. Pickard
{"title":"Why Standing to Blame May Be Lost but Authority to Hold Accountable Retained: Criminal Law as a Regulative Public Institution","authors":"N. Lacey, H. Pickard","doi":"10.1093/MONIST/ONAA028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA028","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Moral and legal philosophy are too entangled: moral philosophy is prone to model interpersonal moral relationships on a juridical image, and legal philosophy often proceeds as if the criminal law is an institutional reflection of juridically imagined interpersonal moral relationships. This article challenges this alignment and in so doing argues that the function of the criminal law lies not fundamentally in moral blame, but in regulation of harmful conduct. The upshot is that, in contrast to interpersonal relationships, the criminal law cannot lose its standing to blame through institutional analogues of hypocrisy, complicity, and meddling. Rather, certain forms of structural and severe historical and contemporary injustice point to the question of the overall legitimacy of state authority.","PeriodicalId":47322,"journal":{"name":"MONIST","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44919199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MONISTPub Date : 2021-03-14DOI: 10.1093/MONIST/ONAA036
Nora Heinzelmann
{"title":"Compensation and Moral Luck","authors":"Nora Heinzelmann","doi":"10.1093/MONIST/ONAA036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA036","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In some vicarious cases of compensation, an agent seems obligated to compensate for a harm they did not inflict. This raises the problem that obligations for compensation may arise out of circumstantial luck. That is, an agent may owe compensation for a harm that was outside their control. Addressing this issue, I identify five conditions for compensation from the literature: causal engagement, proxy, ill-gotten gains, constitution, and affiliation. I argue that only two of them specify genuine and irreducible grounds for compensation, and that factors determining the agent’s obligations may be beyond their control. However, I suggest that this is unproblematic. There is thus no problem of circumstantial moral luck for compensation.","PeriodicalId":47322,"journal":{"name":"MONIST","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42577594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MONISTPub Date : 2021-01-19DOI: 10.1093/MONIST/ONAA021
Don Garrett
{"title":"Monism, Spinoza’s Way","authors":"Don Garrett","doi":"10.1093/MONIST/ONAA021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA021","url":null,"abstract":"Monism, characterized by Jonathan Schaffer as the thesis that the cosmos is the one and only basic actual concrete object, has been the subject of a great deal of recent interest. Spinoza is often taken, rightly, to be an important forebear. This article seeks to explain the distinctive content and basis of Spinoza’s monistic metaphysics and to compare it to contemporary Monism. It then argues that although Spinoza’s monistic metaphysics is not strictly a version of Monism as defined, it has a number of theoretical advantages that make central aspects of it worthy of serious consideration.","PeriodicalId":47322,"journal":{"name":"MONIST","volume":"104 1","pages":"38-59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48931123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
MONISTPub Date : 2021-01-19DOI: 10.1093/MONIST/ONAA020
Matthew Bisconti
{"title":"John Heil’s General Ontology","authors":"Matthew Bisconti","doi":"10.1093/MONIST/ONAA020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA020","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A categorial dualist, John Heil includes substance and property in his ontology. But in his case for dualism, there are pressures to drop substance or property and endorse monism, as well as pressures to include both. Rather than defend monism or dualism, I introduce a distinction. If a category is a kind of entities, then substance is the only category. If an accounting of categories is to include property, then property must enter not as a kind of entities but (to coin a term) a kind of aspects of reality. The distinction is worth deploying for two main reasons. First, it makes plain an important difference between substances and properties, which categorial dualism obscures. Second, the distinction reduces puzzlement about whether and how to include relation in an accounting of categories.","PeriodicalId":47322,"journal":{"name":"MONIST","volume":"104 1","pages":"28-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/MONIST/ONAA020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41987687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}