UC San Diego

In this dissertation I argue that philosophical theorizing about moral responsibility has not paid sufficient attention to the epistemic dimensions of our practices of responsibility. This dissertation asks how we pursue justification and agreement about moral responsibility in our actual social practices, and, finding those pursuits often less than ideal, further asks how we ought to do so. In chapter one I seek to vindicate these claims by reviewing the extant moral responsibility literature, pointing out at various junctures what I call “paths not taken” and “epistemic lacunae.” In chapter two I engage with work in contemporary social, cognitive, and moral psychology to sketch a picture of how we actually pursue judgments about responsibility, psychologically speaking. With this “ping-pong” model in hand, I identify some particularly common and robust “epistemic disruptors” that undermine our ability to hold one another responsible in the ways which philosophical theories often imagine.

In particular, I focus on the way in which blame judgments are susceptible to these disruptions. Given this set up, chapters three and four of the dissertation deal with some practical upshots for the ethics of blame. In chapter three I argue for introducing the norm of Powerful Restraint, which suggests that in contexts where there are large gaps in social power, the powerful should refrain from blaming downward. In chapter four I further motivate this kind of revisionism and asymmetry, focusing on the ways in which our currently constituted practices of responsibility intersect with issues in the contemporary literatures on pragmatic encroachment and cultivated ignorance.