Premium
Keeping It Simple: Rethinking Abilities and Moral Responsibility
Author(s) -
Metz Joseph
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
pacific philosophical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.914
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1468-0114
pISSN - 0279-0750
DOI - 10.1111/papq.12323
Subject(s) - moral responsibility , action (physics) , control (management) , simple (philosophy) , psychology , epistemology , moral disengagement , social psychology , sociology , philosophy , economics , management , physics , quantum mechanics
Moral responsibility requires that we are in control of what we do. Many contemporary accounts of responsibility cash out this control in terms of abilities and hold that the relevant abilities are strong abilities, like general abilities. This paper raises a problem for strong abilities views: an agent can plausibly be morally responsible for an action or omission, despite lacking any strong abilities to do the relevant thing. It then offers a way forward for ability‐based views, arguing that very weak abilities can form the basis of moral responsibility for both actions and omissions .