How We Blame: A Theory of Moral Responsibility

This book presents a naturalistic account of moral responsibility that is neutral on the metaphysics of free will. It engages with empirical literature in experimental philosophy and psychology and draws on real-life case studies to illuminate the author’s theory of moral responsibility.

The author argues that agency requires an understanding of moral responsibility attributions, which requires that one understands one’s intentional states and those of others. Further, she argues that a justified attribution of moral responsibility involves justified attributions of intentional states and justified perceptions of norm violations. This claim is novel because when moral responsibility is indexed to a particular onlooker, the discussion becomes one about whether a blamer is justified in attributing moral responsibility to the blamed. Another distinctive feature of the author’s account is that it makes room for cultural variability in our justifications of moral responsibility; those in different cultures may have different norms or expectations of one another. The first part of the book argues for a theoretical account of agency and moral responsibility while making distinctions between those and one’s theory of punishment. While justified attributions are interpersonal, theories of punishment are institutional and societal in nature. The second part of the book goes into the literature from empirical psychology and experimental philosophy on the nature of moral responsibility.

How We Blame will appeal to philosophers and psychologists interested in the issue of moral responsibility.