Conclusion

This chapter summarizes the main arguments of the book. The book defends pluralism about rightness and wrongness and about praise and blameworthiness. A central sort of blameworthiness, ordinary blameworthiness, is correlated with a sort of wrong action, subjectively wrong action. This account of ordinary blameworthiness focuses on a particular quality of will, and requires that the agent knows what she is doing, at least broadly. However, other sorts of wrong action may not be blameworthy at all (may be excused), or may be blameworthy only in a more detached way, where the focus is not on what the wrongdoer’s quality of will is, but on the point of view of the blamer. Finally, the book defends an extension of ordinary blameworthiness to cases where someone does something wrong inadvertently.