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Responsibility, Tracing, and Consequences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Andrew C. Khoury
Andrew C. Khoury*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics, Houghton Street, LondonWCA 2AE, UK
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Extract

Some accounts of moral responsibility hold that an agent's responsibility is completely determined by some aspect of the agent's mental life at the time of action. For example, some hold that an agent is responsible if and only if there is an appropriate mesh among the agent's particular psychological elements. It is often objected that the particular features of the agent's mental life to which these theorists appeal (such as a particular structure or mesh) are not necessary for responsibility. This is because there appear to be cases in which an agent acts at an earlier time which causes her to lack the appropriate psychological features at some later time and yet, intuitively, she is responsible at that later time. Instead, it is thought, we must adopt a tracing principle that allows us to account for responsibility in these cases by tracing back from the later consequence to some earlier action. My project here is twofold.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 42 , Issue 3-4 , December 2012 , pp. 187 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

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