Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering.

Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? According to reasoning behind the Condorcet Jury Theorem, it might: if individual judges independently track the truth with even modest reliability, this reliability can quickly aggregate as the number of judges goes up. This paper asks whether preconditions for such aggregation hold with respect to folk attributions of responsibility to deterministic scenarios, and whether it has consequences for philosophical method. Section 1 introduces the basic assumptions behind the CJT. Section 2 looks at the distribution of responsibility attributions in recent empirical studies. Section 3 looks at evidence concerning folk reliability, including evidence supporting two error theories for folk compatibilism—the No Matter What and Indeterminist Intrusion hypotheses—and one error theory for folk incompatiblism—the Bypassing hypotheses. It is argued that data undermines the first two error theories and suggests that only a limited class of judgments are subject to the third. Section 4 explains how conditional error theories can change the support of a position without begging the question. Section 5 asks whether the intricacies of the compatibilism question should lead us to deny that the folk are even modestly reliable in their judgments. Section 6 suggests that even if they are, their judgments will often not be independent enough to add much to the judgments of professional philosophers. Section 7 concludes.

When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motivate a related but importantly different answer: What is required for fitting guilt and indignation is that the agent is relevantly implicated in that outcome: that the agent’s morally substandard responsiveness to reasons, or substandard caring, is relevantly involved in a normal explanation of it. This answer, it is further argued, makes sense because when an agent’s substandard caring is so involved, the outcome provides a lesson against such caring, a lesson central to the function of guilt and indignation.

We naturally attribute obligations to groups, and take such obligations to have consequences for the obligations of group members. The threat posed by anthropogenic climate change provides an urgent case. It seems that we, together, have an obligation to prevent climate catastrophe, and that we, as individuals, have an obligation to contribute. However, understood strictly, attributions of obligations to groups might seem illegitimate. On the one hand, the groups in question—the people alive today, say—are rarely fully-fledged moral agents, making it unclear how they can be subjects of obligations. On the other, the attributions can rarely be understood distributively, as concerned with members’ obligations, because obligations to do something require a capacity to do it, and individual members often lack the relevant capacities. Moreover, even if groups can have obligations, it is unclear why that would be relevant for members, exactly because members often lack control over whether group obligations are fulfilled. In previous work, I have argued that a general understanding of individual obligations extends non-mysteriously to irreducibly shared obligations, rendering attributions of obligations to groups legitimate. In this paper, I spell out how the proposed account also helps us understand the relation between individual and shared obligations. Even though few individual human agents have any significant control over whether we will be successful in preventing climate catastrophe, our collective capacity to prevent catastrophe and shared preventative obligation to do so can give rise to significant individual obligations to contribute to its fulfillment.

It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligations can be understood in terms of moral demands on individual group members. It has also been suggested that members of groups can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome. This paper discusses the agency problem and argues that the most promising attempts at solutions understand group obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents.

The studies we report indicate that it is possible to manipulate explicit ascriptions of consciousness by manipulating whether an agent's behavior is deterministically caused. In addition, we explore whether this impact of determinism on consciousness is direct, or whether it is mediated by notions linked to agency - notions like moral responsibility, free will, deliberate choice, and sensitivity to moral reasons. We provide evidence of mediation. This result extends work on attributions of consciousness and their connection to attributions of agency by Adam Arico, Brian Fiala, and Shaun Nichols and supports it against recent criticisms.

Stephanie Collins’ Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of the group, duties to either take steps responsive to the others with a view to the group’s doing what is said to be its duty or to express willingness to do so. In support of the first claim, Collins argues that only groups that can make decisions can bear duties, and that the ability to make decisions requires the relevant sort of decision-making procedure. I suggest that both parts of this argument remain in need of further support. I furthermore argue that Collins’ account of coordination duties gets certain kinds of cases wrong, and suggest that attributions of duties to groups without decision-making procedures are more plausibly understood as attributing shared duties grounded in demands on the group’s members to care about the values at stake.

Al Mele’s Manipulated Agents: A Window to Moral Responsibility (OUP 2019) is an extraordinarily careful and clear little book. A central recurring element is the use of examples of radical value reversals due to manipulation. In this commentary, I discuss the relevance of these examples to a simple quality of will account of blameworthiness without explicit historical conditions. Such an account, I suggest, can fairly straightforwardly explain how value reversals might mitigate blameworthiness. But I also suggest that the intuition that they completely remove blameworthiness should instead be explained away.

Vi tillskriver ofta skyldigheter till grupper av agenter. Det kan tyckas problematiskt, då grupperna inte själva uppfyller vanliga krav på moraliskt agentskap, och då skyldigheterna i fråga inte direkt motsvarar skyldigheter hos gruppens medlemmar. Här argumenterar jag emellertid för att problemet kan lösas om vi förstår gruppers plikter som helt analoga med individuella plikter att göra någonting som bara kan göras som ett resultat av andra, mer basala, göranden. Enligt förslaget så ligger skillnaden mellan individuella plikter gällande sådana "resulterande göranden" och gemensamma plikter enbart i att de mer basala görandena i det senare fallet fördelas på flera agenter.