John Doris, Joshua Knobe, and Robert L. Woolfolk

John Doris, Joshua Knobe, and Robert L. Woolfolk, "Variantism about Responsibility", draft, comments welcome.

The method of philosophy is, to a considerable extent, the method of cases, and nowhere is this more evident than in the literature on moral responsibility. The progress of philosophy is, as numerous observers have noted, afflicted with uncertainty, and this too is abundantly evident in the responsibility literature. One leading contributor – himself an ingenious practitioner of cases – warns of “dialectical stalemate” (Fischer 1994: 83-5; cf. Vargas 2004: 218); the major theoretical competitors, various versions of compatiblism and incompatiblism, are firmly entrenched, but hotly disputed. We contend that the methodological and substantive conditions of the responsibility literature are related. The method of cases is unlikely to provide unequivocal support for any of the orthodox philosophical contenders, because people’s responses across a diversity of cases will frequently manifest variation precluding a theoretically uniform result. However, a closer look at the method and its yield suggests the possibility of an illuminating departure from orthodoxy. In what follows, we present this departure for preliminary inspection, as we begin to articulate a view we call variantism about responsibility.