UC San Diego

I argue for an ahistorical account of moral responsibility. An agent is responsible for her behavior, and is thus a fitting target of reactive attitudes such as praise and blame, if and only if the agent acts while in the possession of the reasons-responsiveness capacities to recognize reasons and to act in accord with the reasons she recognizes. We need not augment this account with conditions tied to the agent’s history, as the account can provide satisfying explanations for cases of culpable incapacity (where the agent is incapacitated because of her prior misbehavior) and of bad history (where the agent’s wrongdoing is the product of having been neglected or mistreated). This ahistorical account of moral responsibility shows us that responsibility is about the sort of agent you are when you act, not about what happened in your past.