Moral Responsibility

Moral responsibility of the kind at issue here is backward-looking: it has to do with the moral assessment of actions which have occurred or are in progress. It concerns in particular whether the action in question is worthy of moral praise or blame.

For present purposes we shall not attempt to argue for a nuanced account of moral blame­worthiness as such, regarding which there are important controversies in a large literature. Rather, drawing on some relatively clear judgments on examples involving individuals as opposed to groups, we shall adopt a rough working account of moral blameworthiness as such that has some intuitive appeal.⁴

Suppose that Jane has stolen a watch from a store, and that stealing a watch from a store is morally wrong, all else being equal. We might initially blame Jane for stealing the watch. After all, she did something that is morally wrong, all else being equal. Most likely we would cease to blame her for doing so, given some kinds of further information.

Suppose, for instance, that Jane stole the watch because someone threatened to kill her unless she did so. We might then say that she cannot be blamed for stealing the watch. We might feel, indeed, that in the circumstances her stealing the watch was not morally wrong, all things considered.

One way to avoid blame for an action that is morally wrong, all things considered, is to be non-culpably ignorant of its having this character. Thus suppose Jane was brought up in iso­lation to think it morally praiseworthy to steal things without getting caught, at least in the circumstances in question. We might say that Jane cannot be blamed for stealing the watch, though her doing so was morally wrong in the circumstances.

In light of such considerations, we shall adopt the following rough account of moral blame­worthiness for present purposes. One who performs an action is morally to blame for doing so if and only if the following three conditions are met: the action was morally wrong, all else being equal; all else was equal: in particular, one was not coerced into performing the action, and one knew, or was at least in a position to know that the first two conditions were fulfilled.

In this formulation of the account we intend the pronoun “one” to be neutral with respect to the different kinds of entities for whom moral responsibility is possible. More precisely, it allows for the possibility of both individual and collective moral responsibility.

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