Responsibility 5
Law as a Test of Conceptual Strength
In Bernard Williams on Law and Jurisprudence: From Agency and Responsibility to Methodology. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Daniel Peixoto Murata and Julieta Rabanos (eds.). Oxford: Hart. In Press. https://philpapers.org/archive/QUELAA.pdf
Reads Williams’s “What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?” as a radicalization of Austin’s insight that tort law is where the concepts of common sense are truly put on trial. Identifies seven features of tort litigation that subject notions like fault, intention, negligence, and voluntariness to extraordinary pressure. Explains, by contrasting tort law with criminal law, how differences in evidential standards, case profiles, and doctrines of strict liability display both the power and the weak points of our responsibility-tracking concepts.
conceptual engineering, legal philosophy, law, responsibility, Williams, conceptual change
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Moralism as a Dualism in Ethics and Politics
Political Philosophy 1 (2): 432–462. 2024. doi:10.16995/pp.17532
Argues that both moralism in ethics and political moralism originate from a problematic dualism that transforms the useful distinction between the moral and the non-moral into a rigid divide. As the historical comparison with ancient Greek thought shows, this obscures genuine conflicts of values and fails to adequately address complex political realities such as “dirty hands” situations.
ethics, political moralism, realism, conflicts of values, Hume, Bernard Williams
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A Shelter from Luck: The Morality System Reconstructed
In Morality and Agency: Themes from Bernard Williams. András Szigeti and Matthew Talbert (eds.), 184–211. New York: Oxford University Press. 2022. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197626566.003.0009
Offers a synthesis of Williams’s critical remarks on Kantian morality; the key idea is that modern morality strives to shelter life from luck.
agency, ethics, blame, moral luck, morality system, voluntariness
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The Essential Superficiality of the Voluntary and the Moralization of Psychology
Philosophical Studies 179 (5): 1591–1620. 2022. doi:10.1007/s11098-021-01720-2
Argues that the notion of the voluntary is an essentially superficial notion that does important work on the condition that we do not try to metaphysically deepen it, and that attempts to deepen it illustrate a problematic tendency to warp our conception of the mind under pressure from moral aspirations.
history, justice, moral psychology, agency, responsibility, philosophy of action
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The Self-Effacing Functionality of Blame
Philosophical Studies 178 (4): 1361–1379. 2021. doi:10.1007/s11098-020-01479-y
Introduces the concept of “self-effacing functionality” to reconcile two opposing views on blame. While blame serves an important regulatory function, this very functionality requires that it be justified by non-instrumental moral reasons rather than by its functionality. This approach preserves the insights of instrumentalist accounts while vindicating the authority of our moral reasons for blame.
blame, moral psychology, ethics, functionality, normativity, justification
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