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Responsibility Skeptics Should Be More Skeptical

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2023

Aarthy Vaidyanathan
Aarthy Vaidyanathan*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA
*
Email: aarthyv@princeton.edu
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Abstract

Menges (2022) seeks to identify the kind of blame that should be at issue in debates between skeptics and anti-skeptics about responsibility. Menges argues that such blame is constituted by responses that the target has a claim against, and by the blamer’s thought that they have forfeited this claim due to their bad action and state while engaged in that action. I identify a class of blame responses that Menges mistakenly excludes and offer an alternative, more general, account in which the distinctive feature of controversial blame isn’t claim forfeiture, but the defeat of reasons grounded in the target’s interests.

Keywords

moral responsibilityclaim forfeituredefeat of interestsblameblameworthinessskepticism about moral responsibility
Type
Discussion Note
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 95 - 100
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Canadian Journal of Philosophy

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References

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