Instrumentalism about moral responsibility revisited

Jefferson, Anneli ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1870-1361 2019. Instrumentalism about moral responsibility revisited. Philosophical Quarterly 69 (276) , pp. 555-573. 10.1093/pq/pqy062

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Abstract

I defend an instrumentalist account of moral responsibility and adopt Manuel Vargas’ idea that our responsibility practices are justified by their effects. However, whereas Vargas gives an independent account of morally responsible agency, on my account, responsible agency is defined as the susceptibility to developing and maintaining moral agency through being held responsible. I show that the instrumentalism I propose can avoid some problems more crude forms of instrumentalism encounter by adopting aspects of Strawsonian accounts. I then show the implications for our understanding of responsibility: my account requires us to adopt a graded notion of responsibility and accept the claim that certain individuals may not be responsible because they are not susceptible to being influenced by our moral responsibility practices. Finally, I discuss whether the account is committed to allowing the instrumentalization of non-responsible individuals in cases where blaming them may benefit others’ moral agency.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Additional Information:	This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0031-8094
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 October 2019
Last Modified:	04 May 2023 23:40
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/126103

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