Moral Responsibility as a Degree Concept

Eddy and I were talking recently about how difficult it is to find discussions of the degrees of moral responsibility in the contemporary literature. Our thought was that this is due to the way theories of moral responsibility tend to be framed—in terms of the necessary and sufficient conditions—and that this kind of approach doesn’t lend itself easily to viewing responsibility as a degree concept. Take for example Susan Wolf’s discussion of “JoJo,” the tyrant modeled after one of the Hussein sons, who engages in terrible acts of cruelty, torture, and murder. According to the deep self view, he is morally responsible--period. He meets the sufficient conditions. According to Wolf’s “sane deep self view,” Jojo is not morally responsible--period. He does not meet her necessary condition of sanity. There is no in-between option under consideration—i.e. Jojo as morally responsible, deserving blame, but not as much as if he had grown up in a more enlightened environment. This is odd since the in-between option seems like the most intuitive response. In fact, from this armchair I’d wager that in general the folk understand moral responsibility as something that comes in degrees. Our legal system certainly treats it that way.

So two questions:
1. Has there been a wealth of discussion about degrees of moral responsibility that I’m not aware of?
2. To what extent can leading compatibilist and libertarian theories accommodate the view of moral responsibility as a degree concept?

Comments

[Ben]

There is a nice discussion of this on pages 20-22 of this paper:
http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~inoue/Inoue%27s%20Responsibility%20for%20Inequalities.pdf

Also, I don't think responsibility coming in degrees is a problem for necessary and sufficient conditions, since the conditions may come in degrees as well. If sanity, for example, is a necessary condition of responsibility and sanity comes in degrees (which it plausibly does), then it will follow that responsibility comes in degrees as well.

[Robert Bauer]

Thanks for this post, you are addressing exactly my current problems. Take e.g. that the current concepts in socialpsychology on graduated attribution of responsibility is still based on Heiders (1958) "Psychology of Interpersonal Relations" where he discussed five levels of blame: association, causality, foreseeability, intentionality and justifiability. This model has been tested to some prevail with a Guttman-Scale and therefore there is some proof that responsibility in the common population is assigned in degrees. Yet i feel the lack of ethical concepts with a similar gradation.

[Tamler Sommers]

Ben, thanks.

"Also, I don't think responsibility coming in degrees is a problem for necessary and sufficient conditions, since the conditions may come in degrees as well. If sanity, for example, is a necessary condition of responsibility and sanity comes in degrees (which it plausibly does), then it will follow that responsibility comes in degrees as well."

You're right about that in general, but I still wonder if the particular conditions that compatibilists and libertarians propose are as degree friendly as you say. Take the reason-responsiveness condition, for example, or Kane's ultimate responsibility condition. It's not clear how to assess degrees to which those conditions are met. Either they are or they aren't, or at least that's it seems at first glance.

[Tamler Sommers]

Robert, I'm glad you brought up social psychology, it's work in that area that brought this issue to my attention as well. So many of the studies proceed under the assumption that responsibility is a matter of degree. Subjects are asked to judge the responsibility of the offender on a scale of 1-10. And the subjects don't only assign scores of 1 or 10...

[John Fischer]

Nice post. I have never really figured this out, and my views are probably confused, but here goes.

With respect to adults, I tend to think of moral responsibility as "all-or-nothing"; one is either morally responsible or not, but one who is not may approach being morally responsible more closely than others. Where the "degrees" come in is in praiseworthiness and blameworthiness.

But I do think that there is a developmental point here. That is, I think that certain adolescents are partially but not fully responsible, so here I suppose I'm willing to allow for degrees of moral responsibility. I'm not sure how things fit together, but those are the ways I typically have thought about this difficult issue.

[Eddy Nahmias]

John, can you say more about what motivates you to say MR is all or nothing (in adults) and it's just the praiseworthiness and blameworthiness that come in degrees? (I've read what you say, but can't remember it right now.)

I'm more inclined to think that both come in degrees. Perhaps degrees of MR can be understood in terms of the degrees to which agents *possess* the relevant capacities (such as the ones involved in rational self-control), and then degrees of praise and blame can be understood in terms of the degrees to which agents have the opportunity to *exercise* those capacities in particular actions. Or something like that.

(Thanks for posting this Tamler! I'd feel gratitude to a high degree if only you possessed any degree at all of true, genuine, real moral responsibility.)

[Joe]

Degree of moral responsibility is sometimes talked about in terms of taking actions under different levels of duress. I've been working on this in relation to compulsive disorders.

[Alan White]

Of course one traditional dimension of degrees of responsibility in law is the temporal proximity of intention to action, and another degree dimension is aggravation--roughly how much one's intention is affected by circumstances beyond one's control. The more that one forms intent prior to action the greater the responsibility (first degree premeditation versus second-degree "in the heat of the moment"), and the more that one forms intent without being influenced by external circumstances the greater the responsibility (unprovoked assault versus injury in the context of mutual agression). Of course these are as I said traditional measures of degress of responsibility, and they need not reflect metaphysical conditions of responsibility. However, in their own respective ways they tend to measure increased responsibility in proportion to being removed from the situation where the intended action is performed, either in terms of temporal distance or epistemic distance.

[John Fischer]

Eddy,

I'm not sure I can say much more. I could easily go either way on this, that is, I don't see any problem (from the point of view of defending my overall theory) with saying that even in adults, moral responsibliity can admit of degrees. But I find it at least somewhat more natural to think of moral responsibility as all or nothing.

Note that "being responsible" in a substantive sense--tending to fulfill one's duties--DOES admit of degrees. That is, some are more "responsible" than others, in this sense of responsibility. One needs to be careful though not to slide from this to a view about moral responsibility in the sense of (say) aptness for the reactive attitudes.

[John Fischer]

Eddy,

I don't know how to defend my tendency to think of moral responsibility as all-or-nothing. I don't think anything depends on it for me; that is, I could as easily go with the "admits of degrees" view.

Note that "substantive responsibility," i.e., being responsible in the sense of tending to fulfill one's duties, DOES admit of degrees. But of course one shouldn't slide from this to a view about moral responsibility in the sense of (say) aptness for the reactive attitudes.

My colleague, Eric Schwitzgebel, had done interesting work defending the view that belief is not all-or-nothing; perhaps one could defend a similar approach for moral responsibility. I would think that that would be a worthwhile project to explore.

[Fritz Warfield]

I don't have especially deep views on these issues but ---

If a necessary condition for something (X) comes in degrees it doesn't *follow* that X comes in degress; it's consistent with X being on/off still. (It's also consistent with X coming in degrees.)

One possibility is that philosophical work has mostly focused on the "whether or not" question for moral responsibility. That is, focusing on conditions necessary or sufficient for *at least some* moral responsibility (or conditions excluding it). This doesn't commit anyone to the view that there's no such thing as more responsible, less responsible, responsible to greater/lesser degree, etc...

[Tamler Sommers]

John,

A variation on Eddy's question: Can you say more about the principles in your theory that allow for adolescents to partially morally responsible? How is it that those principles don't apply to adults as well?

Fritz,

I agree that the focus of the debate has been on whether any MR at all is possible (or compatible with determinism). And that's obviously an important starting point. But it seems that only the skeptic should be comfortable with it as a stopping point. If moral responsibility is naturally understood as coming in degrees, then shouldn't a complete non-skeptical theory of MR have something to say about how those degrees are measured--how person A can be more or less MR than person B for performing the same act?

[Tim Scanlon]

I think that discussion of this issue could benefit from distinguishing more clearly between responsibility and blameworthiness. The two are obviously different, since a person can be responsible for something that is praiseworthy. Blameworthiness clearly comes in degrees (or, as I would prefer to say, blame takes different forms.) This seems to be what is being discussed in the social psychology literature cited in Robert Bauer's post. But it is a separate question whether responsibility comes in degrees, or how much of the variability in blameworthiness is best explained as variability in responsibility. One poster mentions duress. I think, although others may disagree, that except perhaps in very extreme cases, duress affects blameworthiness rather than responsibility. So, for example, a bank employee may merit praise for giving the robber the money, and even overcoming fear to calmly accompany the armed and threatening robber into the vault. Ergo, I would say, he or she must be responsible for doing this, despite the high degree of coercion.

What to day about various kinds of mental defect is of course a further difficult question, but here again I would favor seeing these mainly as affecting the kind of blame that can be appropriate rather than responsibility.

I realize that these are controversial claims with which others may disagree, My main point is just that the distinction needs to be noted, so that it is clear what we are disagreeing about.

[Fritz Warfield]

Tamler,

Without a doubt if moral responsibiliy comes in degrees a full non-eliminativist theory of it will need to answer the questions you ask and more. The same for a degreed theory of blame/praise.

On the first question in the original post: for serious discussion of this I think you'll need to search the legal / philosophy of law literature more than the action literature; and the questions addressed there won't always match up perfectly with our questions here. I'd also suggest a look at the collective responsibilty literature that is more a part of ethics than philosophy of action and is largely (and oddly) disconnected from discussions of collective agency that have been receiving increased attention in philosophy of action.

One the second question in the original post: looks to me that the issues are cross-cutting and that both normal compatibiilists and incompatibilists (about determinism and moral responsibilty) can take on the degreed view, if they need to do so.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Remember the thread "Degrees of Freedom"? I am a believer that responsibility comes in degrees, and we had some discussion about that concept waaaay back in '04.

Holy crap. Have we been at this that long?

Here's the URL: http://gfp.typepad.com/the_garden_of_forking_pat/2004/10/degrees_of_free.html.

[David Hodgson]

In criminal law, at the stage of deciding whether a person is guilty of a crime, the answer to the question of responsibility generally does not admit of degrees. A child under a certain age is not responsible, a person who satisfies the test for insanity is not, a person compelled to commit the crime under sufficient duress is not, and so on.

At the stage of determining punishment, there can be consideration of degrees of responsibility, that has regard to to such things as intellectual ability, abuse in childhood, and so on, and also to such things as pressure not sufficient to amount to duress excluding responsibility.

There are exceptions to what I've said about the first stage. In some jurisdictions, there is a defence of diminished responsibility in relation to murder, to the effect that if by reason of mental abnormality a person's responsibility for conduct is substantially diminished the verdict should be the lesser crime of manslaughter. Another example is the defence of provocation, which also reduces murder to manslaughter

[Randy Clarke]

There's a good discussion of degrees of culpability and laudability in Michael Zimmerman's AN ESSAY ON MORAL RESPONSIBILITY.

[Sven Nyholm]

Tim argues that we should distinguish the claim that responsibility comes in degrees from the claim that blameworthiness comes in degrees. And, he adds that it is also not clear how much of the variability in blameworthiness is best explained as variability in responsibility. John says that, as he intuitively sees things, responsibility is an all-or-nothing matter. It seems to me that we can appeal to the kind of view that John defends in defending the idea, questioned by Tim, that variability in blameworthiness can be explained with reference to variability in responsibility.

Here's the idea: on John's kind of view, to be morally responsible for one's actions it must be (roughly) that these actions to spring from reasons-responsive mechanisms. Well, there is a difference in how sophisticated our abilities to discern and respond to different kinds of reasons are. For example, we can imagine people who understand and respond to what Steve Darwall calls Moorean or agent-neutral reasons but who doesn't understand/respond to what he calls second-personal reasons. We can also imagine people who can respond to personal, self-interested reasons, but who are not sensitive to the same degree, or perhaps to any degree, to impersonal reasons. These people seem to lack moral capacities others have.

We now have a way of explaining the intuition that responsibility comes in degrees based on the reasons-responsiveness view: the more sophisticated our abilities to understand and respond to different types of reasons---or, alternatively, the better we are at understanding and being moved by different kinds of judgments about reasons---the more responsible we are for our actions. Intuitively, if somebody is not very sensitive to some kind of reasons that somebody else generally is responsive to, then the latter of these two people is more responsible than the former for responding, or failing to respond, to these reasons.

What do people think of this idea?

(I didn't read all the posts above carefully, so forgive me if somebody already brought up this type of idea above.)

[John Fischer]

Sven,

Thanks for your very thoughtful post. I think the view you suggest is worthy of further consideration, and, perhaps, development. It fits well with Eric Schwitzgebel's account of belief, according to which belief admits of degrees (partial belief), and is not an all-or-nothing matter. So, on this account, belief involves a set of dispositions, and an individual can have some without having others in the selected set (or "stereotype"). In such a case, the individual would partly believe the relevant proposition.

Perhaps moral responsibility involves a set of capacities for reasons-responsiveness. As you point out, one can have some without others, and thus one might be partly morally responsible.

An interesting example would be the psychopath, who presumably has the capacity to respond to various kinds of reasons, but does not have the capacity to grasp specifically moral reasons. He or she would thus be partly responsible. On the view of responsibility that would be parallel to Schwitzgebel's account of belief, we would have an illuminating approach to the psychopath, I think.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Thanks to everyone for the helpful thoughts.
Mark, I had entirely forgotten my long-ago post on this topic. We are getting old!

Rather than responding to the interesting ideas of Sven, John, David, Fritz, and Tim, I'll just add another point.

What strikes me as a bit strange about the way the traditional debate gets played out is this: Libertarians in general seem to be arguing for minimal free will, whereas compatibilists often argue for maximal free will. That is, libertarians look for a necessary condition involving indeterminism and, having found it, tend to be done (though, of course, they may then add that various conditions advanced by compatibilists are also necessary). And compatibilists often look for a set of sufficient conditions that are often quite stringent because the goal is to show that satisfying them should be considered enough to have free will *even without* the indeterminist condition required by libertarians. But having advanced these conditions, compatibilists often say little about whether humans actually satisfy them (or how often or to what degree).

By focusing on the metaphysical compatibility question, both sides seem to neglect some (more interesting?) follow up questions: OK, supposing the compatibilist conditions are sufficient--how often and when do humans actually satisfy them? Or supposing libertarian conditions are necessary, how often and when do humans actually satisfy them (plus any other conditions libertarians require)?

Of course, I am overgeneralizing, since people in the debate do address these questions some (but not enough). And I have not even mentioned skeptics, but they generally argue that no matter how much you bulk up the compatibilist conditions or add the libertarian conditions, we have no FW or MR at all, so they also neglect the questions about how much of the "next best thing" (which they all admit is still valuable) we actually have and when we have it.

[Sven Nyholm]

Thanks for your response, John.

Yes, psychopaths are certainly interesting here. One interesting question is whether, because psychopaths are not responsive to the kinds of moral reasons that normal people are responsive to, do they not fully understand what we mean in calling these acts wrong. That would surely make them less responsible than those of us who more fully understand judgments about wrongness.

Suppose that, as my teacher here at Michigan Allan Gibbard claims, judging that something is wrong partly amounts to judging that guilt and shame should be felt by those who act in this way and/or that others are warranted in feeling resentment towards those who act in such a way. If some psychopath is unable to feel guilt and shame, because he does not have the full range of human emotions, then surely he cannot be responsive to or understand reasons to feel these ways about possible actions he could perform. If he cannot understand such reasons, and judging that something is wrong at least partly involves judging there to be reasons to feel these moral sentiments in relation to such acts, then this psychopath cannot understand the wrongness of these acts.

This, if true, would explain why he is not fully morally responsible, and would do so by appealing to how the psychopath is unable to understand or respond to certain kinds of reasons. But, as was pointed out, surely there are lots of other kinds of reasons the psychopath can understand, such as self-interested reasons etc, and this could ground some degree of responsibility here. So, there are, we could conclude, certain reactive attitudes that would be appropriate to take towards the actions of a psychopath, but blame or resentment might not be among them. And the reason, again, would be that the psychopath is unable to understand the kinds of reasons we associate with its being fitting to blame or resent somebody for acting in some way.

[Tamler Sommers]

Thanks for all the really interesting comments. I've been traveling so I haven't been able to participate as much as I'd like. Mark, thanks for bringing Eddy's 2004 post up. I see there's a certain vow I haven't lived up to. Those were the days.

Like Eddy I won't try to add anything to most of what's been said. But I would like to ask something that struck me as surprising. All of a sudden, everyone seems to be treating moral responsibility and blameworthiness as two clearly distinct concepts, as if we've been doing that all along. But my sense has been that the type of moral responsibility we all argue about is essentially linked to blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Specifically, blameworthy just means morally responsible for something bad (and praiseworthy means MR for something good). When did these two concepts come apart? How do they come apart? Can you be blameworthy for an act but not MR for it? Can you be MR for a morally wrong act but not blameworthy for it?

(I'm aware that moral responsibility in general can mean a lot of things, like moral obligation etc. My point is that the type of MR at issue in the debate, I thought, was the one that was linked to blameworthiness and praiseworthiness in the sense described above.)

[Tamler Sommers]

Whoops. Somehow I missed Prof. Scanlon's post on this very question. I'm not following the distinction that's being proposed though. When Prof. Scanlon (I'd ask if I could call you Tim but worry I'd sound too much like Sarah Palin) writes..

"I think, although others may disagree, that except perhaps in very extreme cases, duress affects blameworthiness rather than responsibility."

...my thought was that the sense of responsibility here is closely linked to "causal responsibility" which we distinguish from moral responsibility already. But then:

"So, for example, a bank employee may merit praise for giving the robber the money, and even overcoming fear to calmly accompany the armed and threatening robber into the vault. Ergo, I would say, he or she must be responsible for doing this, despite the high degree of coercion."

Here the implication is that praiseworthiness entails responsibility, which is how I thought MR was interpreted before this question came up. So I'm thoroughly confused. Is the point that blameworthiness and moral responsibilty come apart in a way that praiseworthiness and MR do not?

[Tim Scanlon]

Tamler--

Call me Tim.

The way I see it, being morally responsible for something is a precondition for being liable to either praise or blame for it, and the fact that someone is responsible in this sense for something leaves it open which response is appropriate--whether praise, or blame, or perhaps neither, if the thing in question is morally neutral. The point of my comment was to suggest that (at least on this way of looking at things, which seems to me to make the most sense) blameworthiness might come in degrees even though responsibility was an on/off matter. So examples showing that blameworthiness varied would not show that responsibility did. Of course, it is also possible, on this view, that both responsibility and blamewothiness come in degrees, or varieties. So then there would be a question whether a given condition (say duress) affected the one or the other.

I hope this helps to clarify what I was saying.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Tamler,

How we define moral responsibility is at the crux of the question of whether it can admit of degrees. For instance, Fischer defines moral responsibility in terms of bridging the gap to make an agent a suitable candidate for reactive attitudes.

That is why he is inclined to see it in binary terms. Other who follow suit are free to say things like "although he is morally responsible, he is not blameworthy." They would say that moral responsibility is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for blame/praiseworthiness. (For instance, they might, like Joseph Campbell, want to add an epistemic condition for blame/praiseworthiness.)

While I tend to think that responsibility does admit of degrees, I also tend to think of responsibility primarily in terms of desert. So, the disagreement about whether responsibility comes in degrees may be largely semantic (in some cases).

[Mark Smeltzer]

Tamler,

First off, sorry for the double post.

I thought I should add that many accept an asymmetry between blame and praise, and espouse that blame has additional requirements that praise does not have. Most of these thinkers would be happy to say "if S is responsible for P and P is a praiseworthy action, then S is praiseworthy for P." Regarding the same kind of statement about blame ("if S is responsible for P and P is a blameworthy action, then S is blameworthy for P"), they offer cases to attempt to show that additional condition(s) are required.

I tend to part from the pack here in two ways: 1) I tend to think that people generally praise too readily, and 2) I tend to think that people generally blame too readily. I prefer a fuller notion of what "responsible" means on both fronts so that there is at least a valiant attempt to treat responsibility as a sufficient condition for desert.

I may one day relent, but for now I have a desire to gird the use of those simple responsibility statements, even if the analysis of responsibility admits of further sub-distinctions that admit of degrees and even if the likely outcome is that some level of social reform is in order. (In other words, I am not content to sit on the fence with Kip and offer a descriptive account of responsibility.)

[Tamler Sommers]

Tim,

Yes, that clarifies the position for me I think. There's still the question of whether someone can be MR for doing something morally wrong, yet not be blameworthy for it. Under my interpretation of moral responsibility, that wouldn't be possible.

As far as the degree concept could work on your view, would this be an example? Bill and Gary both decide to rob a gas station. They meet various compatibilist conditions and so are both morally responsible for the robbery. But Bill is doing it in order to buy baby food and diapers for his newborn baby, whereas Gary is doing it out of greed and for the pure thrill of the crime. So although they're both morally responsible for the act, Gary is more blameworthy for it than Bill.

That makes a lot of sense to me actually.

Mark, thanks. You write:

That is why [Fishcer] is inclined to see it in binary terms. Other who follow suit are free to say things like "although he is morally responsible, he is not blameworthy." They would say that moral responsibility is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for blame/praiseworthiness.

Can you give an example of someone who is MR for a bad or morally wrong action but not blameworthy for it?

One other thought on this topic. On the blameworthiness comes in degrees view, does the spectrum cover how much blame the person should receive or rather how WORTHY the person is of any amount of blame. I've always interpreted blameworthiness in the latter fashion which is why I connect it more closely with MR. Murderes receive more blame than tax cheats, but that doesn't necessarily mean that blameworthiness comes in degrees.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Tamler,

If we put the emphasis on the last syllable (viz., "worthy"), I think we'll find that it falls back into to Fischer's view. Remember, Fischer believes that an agent that is MR for P is a suitable candidate for the reactive attitudes regarding P. In simple terms, it means that the agent is something-worthy for P.

If we say that MR is that which makes an agent X-worthy for P, then I think we've definitely set up a binary situation. However, when we look at the whole picture, and try to figure out what X stands for with respect to P, we'll have to consider the casual history that led to the action, the agent's motives, the agent's beliefs, etc. And then finally there's a distinction between X-worthiness and an agent's right to treat an X-worthy agent X-ly.

Moreover, I think there are situations where an agent can be MR for an action, and observers will have a hard time saying whether the agent is blameworthy or praiseworthy for the action (there can even be staunch disagreement), and it seems like it can land somewhere in the middle too. Some of this disagreement is bound to be due to metaethical disagreements, but it seems like there are some cases that will still be very difficult to call. Consider this case:

Two small girls fall off the pier and land in the ocean when their parents aren't looking. Luckily the lifeguard is watching, and he dives in to save them. However, the tide is carrying one of the girls out to sea and the other is being pushed toward the pillars that sustain the pier. The lifeguard has to make a decision to swim toward one of the girls.

On Fischer's view, it seems that the lifeguard is MR for saving one girl and MR for letting the other girl drown (since the lifeguard is acting on his own MRR mechanism in this case) -- assuming that MR is transitive on Fischer's view (viz., MR(A & B) = MR(A) & MR(B)). At the very least, the lifeguard is MR for "swimming toward one girl and not the other" if MR is not transistive (while there is a case to be made against the general transitivity of non-responsiblity, it seems to me that responsibility is generally transitive). Regardless, I do not believe that the lifeguard deserves blame for the girl who drowns, but rather deserves only praise for the girl that survives.

However, the parents of the girl that drowned may feel strong resentment toward the lifeguard for choosing to save the other girl (and the lifeguard might feel a strong sense of guilt for not saving her), and it is hard to blame them for those feelings. I want to say that the parents of the girl who drowned are wrong to blame the lifeguard and even if they are MR for their resentment, I find it hard to blame them for feeling that way.

Even if we can't say that the lifeguard is strictly praiseworthy or blameworthy, this case is compatible with Fischer's binary view that the lifeguard is something-worthy.

I believe that the degreed nature of responsibility lies in resolving the meaning of X in X-worthy within responsibility ascriptions with respect to specific acts.

[Patricia Greenspan]

I'm just catching up with this thread now. I've suggested here and there (in application to psychopaths and compulsives; also in a critical piece on Frankfurt's view) that responsibility comes in degrees corresponding to degrees of freedom. I grant Tim's point that evidence of variation in degree of blameworthiness isn't sufficient to establish the point about responsibility. Sven's suggestion of variation in degree of reasons-responsiveness sounds promising, but I'd add that there might be variation, not just in the *types* of reasons to which a given agent can respond, but also in *how* responsive he is -- e.g., how readily he'd respond, or with what difficulty, since it can be psychologically harder for some agents to respond to certain reasons than others. Perhaps some forms of duress might in that way affect degree of responsibility.

[Patricia Greenspan]

P.S. (in answer to Tamler's initial queries): I believe that Michael Corrado in law and philosophy also has argued in favor of degrees. Incidentally, Frankfurt's comment on the piece I wrote on his work was that his view was probably too "brittle" (as he put it) to accommodate degrees.

[Sven Nyholm]

Thanks, Patricia, for your comment on my previous comments. Here's a short response:

While I am inclined to agree with Patricia that a view that takes degrees of responsibility to be explained in terms of degrees of reasons-responsiveness should take into account not only what kinds of reasons agents are responsive to but also degrees of responsiveness to these reasons, I think the following question is worth keeping in mind.

Suppose somebody is generally responsive to some kind of reasons, for example Darwallian second-personal reasons, but that this person doesn’t find it intuitive to count some of the things we judge to be reasons of this sort as reason-giving. This person, suppose, doesn’t find the moral claims of somebody of a different race to issue legitimate demands on him: he doesn’t find it obvious that we should treat people of other races as moral equals, which means that the wishes of somebody of a different race doesn't, on this person's view, issue legitimate demands on him. Does this mean that our imagined man is less responsible for his racist treatment of this person than somebody who is responsive to the moral claims, not only of those of his or her own race, but to everyone’s moral claims, no matter what the color of their skin is?

I am inclined to say that, because this racist is otherwise responsive to reasons to respect other people’s wishes, his insensitivity to these kinds of reasons when they arise from the wishes of people of other races does not make him less responsible for the actions which this insensitivity results in.

That being said, I do also share Patricia’s intuition that responsiveness to different kinds of reasons is not the only thing we need to appeal to. I therefore suspect that we need to come up with some quite subtle account of just how degrees of reasons-responsiveness should relate to degrees of responsibility.

[Anibal]

I´m not specially keen in what the relevant literature in philosophical agency have to say about the concept of responsibility as a degree concept, but in normal ecological situations humans only has a dimensional access to responsibility.

Responsibility is not an all or none phenomena, nor a monolithical capacity but dimensional capacity with degrees.

An i think this is the right strategy to approach responsibility from a realistic perspective.

I would like to say in reference to our "circadian rhythms" that we express responsibility rhythms: a.k.a. we are more responsible for early morning activities than late activities, more responsible at the begining of the week than late...

[Patricia Greenspan]

Sven -- What I had in mind was psychological variations in the *ability* to respond to certain reasons, rather than just the tendency to do so. But you're right that some account would be needed, particularly to satisfy soft determinists.