Conclusion
Summary
We have come a long way in this book, probably too long a way for a book of this length. Even with all the business I decided to omit (free will, insanity, politics), moral responsibility is still a hugely rich and variegated concept, with so many implications for our understanding of what it means to live a human life. Or at least, that is what I hoped to show. I began with what has been of most interest to philosophers and lawyers, namely the individual's responsibility for a discrete act, and the various ways that others can evaluate and respond to that responsibility. I then moved on to this broader notion of prospective responsibility for a patient, a stranger and, more abstractly, for a situation and for one's life. I believe that the concept is still sufficiently unified to write a single book on it, and that many of the components of retrospective responsibility are, upon closer examination, relevant to the prospective orientation. But in order to see the unity, one first has to challenge some dominant metaphysical assumptions shared by both philosophers and laypeople alike: for example, the pastness of the past, the self-contained nature of the individual's mental life, and the discreteness of choice. All of these challenges could only be adumbrated, and would need more elaborate defence.
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- Information
- Moral Responsibility , pp. 195 - 196Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013