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Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a forum for outstanding new work in an area of vigorous and broad-ranging debate in philosophy and beyond. What is involved in human action? Can philosophy and science illuminate debate about free will? How should we answer questions about responsibility for action?.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a forum for outstanding new work in an area of vigorous and broad-ranging debate in philosophy and beyond. What is involved in human action? Can philosophy and science illuminate debate about free will? How should we answer questions about responsibility for action?.

Abstract:Some moral responsibility theorists think that certain agents (like psychopaths) can be morally responsible—and morally criticizable—for their actions and attitudes even though they lack any competence in grasping or responding to moral norms (a blindness to moral reasons that is typically called "normative incompetence" or, more accurately, "moral incompetence"). In this essay, I provide a new argument against these theorists by exploring the intersection between two normative domains, the funny and the moral. There are, it turns out, interesting and significant ways that properties from each domain bear on reasons to respond in the other, and so there are interesting and significant ways in which people's responses to cruel jokes or insult humor may be criticizable. I then survey various personality and psychological impairments that seem to undercut criticizability in this intersecting domain. Learning about these people and their impairments yields a wealth of information about what true normative competence actually requires, as well as why competence of the specifically moral variety really is required for moral criticizability.

AbstractOne of P. F. Strawson's suggestions in "Freedom and Resentment" was that there might be an elegant theory of moral responsibility that accounted for all of our responsibility responses (our "reactive attitudes," in his words) in a way that also explained why we get off the hook from those responses. Such a theory would appeal exclusively toquality of will: when we react with any of a variety of responsibility responses to someone, we are responding to the quality of her will with respect to us, and when we let her off the hook (either for her action or with respect to her qua agent), we are doing so in virtue of her lacking the capacity for the relevant quality of will. Strawson's own attempt to put forward such a view fails, for reasons Gary Watson has given, but several other theorists have advanced their own, more developed,Pure Quality of Willtheories in recent years (including Scanlon, Arpaly, and McKenna). Specifically, there have been three distinct interpretations of "will" defended in the literature, yielding three different possible targets of our responsibility responses: quality ofcharacter, quality ofjudgment, or quality ofregard.My first task in this essay will be to show that none of these theories individually can captureallof our responsibility responses, given our deeply ambivalent responses to several marginal cases (e.g., psychopathy, clinical depression, Alzheimer's dementia). One reaction to this fact might be to abandon the quality of will approach altogether. Another, more plausible, reaction is to develop a pluralistic account of responsibility, one that admits three noncompeting conceptions of responsibility, each of which emphasizes one of the three different qualities of will as the target of a distinct subset of our responsibility responses. On this pluralistic approach, marginal agents might be responsible on some conceptions, but not responsible on others. In the bulk of the paper, I discuss each of the relevant subsets of responsibility responses, the different qualities of will they target, what the capacities for the three qualities of will are, and how the pluralistic qualities of will approach could account for our ambivalence in the marginal cases.