Reasons‐responsiveness, control and the negligence puzzle

A longstanding puzzle about moral responsibility for negligence arises from three plausible yet jointly inconsistent theses: (i) an agent can, in certain circumstances, be morally responsible for some outcome O, even if her behavior with respect to O is negligent (i.e., even if she never adverted to the possibility that the behavior might result in O), (ii) an agent can be morally responsible for O only if she has some control over O, (iii) if an agent acts negligently with respect to O, then she has no control over O. This paper is in two parts. First, I argue that reasons‐responsiveness models of moral responsibility can be applied naturally to negligence scenarios; indeed, agents are intuitively responsible for the outcomes of their negligent behavior just when they meet the conditions for responsibility given by the best reason‐responsiveness theories. Second, if the reasons‐responsiveness conditions are applicable to negligence scenarios then one of two things follows: either agents can have direct control over outcomes they never adverted to, or reasons‐responsiveness is not a condition of control but of something else connected to moral responsibility. Each possibility would be important in its own right—and each can solve the negligence puzzle.