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Moral Philosophy

Moral Philosophy studies what is right and wrong, and related philosophical issues.

Moral philosophy is the branch of philosophy that contemplates what is right and wrong. It explores the nature of morality and examines how people should live their lives in relation to others.

Moral philosophy has three branches.

One branch, meta-ethics , investigates big picture questions such as, “What is morality?” “What is justice?” “Is there truth?” and “How can I justify my beliefs as better than conflicting beliefs held by others?”

Another branch of moral philosophy is normative ethics . It answers the question of what we ought to do. Normative ethics focuses on providing a framework for deciding what is right and wrong. Three common frameworks are deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics.

The last branch is applied ethics . It addresses specific, practical issues of moral importance such as war and capital punishment. Applied ethics also tackles specific moral challenges that people face daily, such as whether they should lie to help a friend or co-worker.

So, whether our moral focus is big picture questions, a practical framework, or applied to specific dilemmas, moral philosophy can provide the tools we need to examine and live an ethical life.

Related Terms

Consequentialism

Consequentialism is an ethical theory that judges an action’s moral correctness by its consequences.

Deontology is an ethical theory that uses rules to discern the moral course of action.

Hedonism is a form of consequentialism that approves of actions that produce pleasure and avoid pain.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that asserts that right and wrong are best determined by focusing on outcomes of actions and choices.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics is a normative philosophical approach that urges people to live a moral life by cultivating virtuous habits.

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Moral Philosophy

Definition of moral philosophy.

Moral philosophy, often called ethics, is like a compass for right and wrong actions. Imagine you’re at a fork in the road and each direction leads to a different action. Moral philosophy is your guide, helping you figure out which direction to go.

The first simple definition of moral philosophy is this: it’s a set of tools that help us choose the best path when making decisions. This isn’t just about following rules, but it’s about understanding why we feel certain actions are correct and others are not, and how our decisions affect everyone involved.

The second definition is: moral philosophy is about figuring out how to live well together. This means we look at the big picture of what our actions mean and how they can help us create a peaceful world where we treat each other kindly.

Types of Moral Philosophy

There are many ways to think about what is right and wrong. Here are three major types:

Consequentialism : This says that the results of what we do are the most important part. It suggests that if the outcome of our actions is good, then the action was also good. Imagine you bake cookies for a friend who’s feeling down, and it cheers them up. This act is seen as good because it made your friend happy.
Deontology : This one is focused on following rules, without worrying about the outcome. It’s like saying that you should always tell the truth, even if it might hurt someone’s feelings because the rule itself is good and must be respected.
Virtue Ethics: This approach is all about being a good person. It’s not so much about each action or rule, but about whether you’re honest, brave, and kind. When you make a choice, you think about whether it’s helping you become a better person.

Examples of Moral Philosophy

Here are some real-life situations where moral philosophy comes into play:

Consequentialism: If your actions at school lead to everyone getting a longer recess and being happier, consequentialism says that decision was a good one because it led to a great result for many people.
Deontology: Let’s say you find a $20 bill on the ground at school. Deontology would tell you to turn it in to the lost and found, because keeping it would be like stealing, and stealing is against the rules.
Virtue Ethics: When a new student comes to your school and seems alone, if you decide to befriend them because it’s kind and you want to be a friendly person, that’s virtue ethics guiding your choice.

Why is Moral Philosophy Important?

Moral philosophy is vital because it gives us a framework to think about our decisions and their impacts. Imagine tossing a pebble into a pond. The ripples spread far and wide, just like the effects of our choices. By using moral philosophy, we help to ensure the ripples we make in the world spread kindness and fairness, touching our families, friends, and even strangers in positive ways.

For the average person, moral philosophy helps us figure out how to act in tough situations. It’s like a guidebook for living a good life. Let’s say you’re in a group project and someone isn’t doing their part. Moral philosophy can help you decide the best way to handle it, so the project succeeds, and everyone is treated fairly. It helps us build a world where everyone can succeed and be happy.

Origin of Moral Philosophy

Thousands of years ago, smart people from different parts of the world started talking about the right way to live. Think of people like Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, and philosophers in Greece; they all explored life’s big questions and shared their knowledge . Thanks to their early thoughts on ethics, we still learn from their wisdom on how to be good today.

Controversies in Moral Philosophy

People often disagree on some parts of moral philosophy, and here are a few examples:

The fact-value distinction: This is the debate about whether what’s true and what’s important are totally separate, or if they sometimes overlap. Is there a clear-cut difference between hard facts and personal values, or do they influence each other?
Moral relativism vs. moral absolutism : Relativists think that what’s right or wrong changes depending on the situation or culture, while absolutists believe there is one true answer to moral questions, no matter the circumstances.
The role of emotion in moral decision-making: Some people believe that our feelings should lead us when deciding what’s right or wrong, while others argue that clear, logical thinking should guide us instead.

As new challenges arise with things like technology and environmental issues, moral philosophy keeps changing. We have ongoing conversations that help us continue to learn and improve our understanding.

5.1: Moral Philosophy – Concepts and Distinctions

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Before examining some standard theories of morality, it is important to understand basic terms and concepts that belong to the specialized language of ethical studies. The concepts and distinctions presented in this section will be useful for characterizing the major theories of right and wrong we will study in subsequent sections of this unit. The general area of concepts and foundations of ethics explained here is referred to as meta-ethics .

5.1.1 The Language of Ethics

Ethics is about values, what is right and wrong, or better or worse. Ethics makes claims, or judgments, that establish values. Evaluative claims are referred to as normative, or prescriptive, claims . Normative claims tell us, or affirm, what ought to be the case. Prescriptive claims need to be seen in contrast with descriptive claims , which simply tell us, or affirm, what is the case, or at least what is believed to be the case.

For example, this claim is descriptive:, it describes what is the case:

“Low sugar consumption reduces risk of diabetes and heart failure.”

On the other hand, this claim is normative:

“Everyone ought to reduce consumption of sugar.”

This distinction between descriptive and normative (prescriptive) claims applies in everyday discourse in which we all engage. In ethics, however, normative claims have essential significance. A normative claim may, depending upon other considerations, be taken to be a “moral fact.”

Note: Many philosophers agree that the truth of an “is” statement in itself does not infer an “ought” claim. The fact the low sugar consumption leads to better health does not imply, on its own, that everyone should reduce their sugar intake. A good logical argument would require further reasons (premises) to reach the “ought” conclusion/claim. An “ought” claim inferred directly from an “is” statement is referred to as the naturalistic fallacy .

A supplemental resource is available (bottom of page) on the distinction between descriptive and normative claims.

5.1.2 How Are Moral Facts Real?

When we talk about “moral facts” typically we are referring to claims about values, duties, standards for behavior, and other evaluative prescriptions. The following concepts describe the sense in which moral facts are real in terms of:

the degree of universality, or lack thereof, with which the moral claims are held, and
the extent to which moral facts stand independently of other considerations.

Moral Objectivism

The view that moral facts exist, in the sense that they hold for everyone, is called moral (or ethical) objectivism. From the viewpoint of objectivism, moral facts do not merely represent the beliefs of the person making the claim, they are facts of the world. Furthermore, such moral facts/claims have no dependencies on other claims nor do they have any other contingencies.

Moral Subjectivism

Moral (or ethical) subjectivism holds that moral facts are not universal, they exist only in the sense that those who hold them believe them to exist. Such moral facts sometimes serve as useful devices to support practical purposes. According to the viewpoint of subjectivism, moral facts (values, duties, and so forth) are entirely dependent on the beliefs of those who hold them.

Moral Absolutism

Moral absolutism is an objectivist view that there is only one true moral system with specific moral rules (or facts) that always apply, can never be disregarded. At least some rules apply universally, transcending time, culture. and personal belief. Actions of a specific sort are always right (or wrong) independently of any further considerations, including their consequences.

Moral Relativism

Moral relativism is the view that there are no universal standards of moral value, that moral facts, values, and beliefs are relative to individuals or societies that hold them. The rightness of an action depends on the attitude taken toward it by the society or culture of the person doing the action.

Moral relativism as it relates to an individual is a form of ethical subjectivism.
As it relates to a society or culture, moral relativism is referred to as “cultural relativism” and is also subjectivist in that moral facts depend entirely on the beliefs of those who hold them, they are not universal.

Note that some accounts of meta-ethical concepts do not use both “objectivism” and “absolutism” or use them interchangeably. The important relationship to keep in mind is that both objectivism and absolutism stand in contrast to relativism and subjectivism.

Here are several arguments in support of moral relativism. The “objection” following each one is an argument against moral relativism and in favor of moral objectivism.

Objection: “Is” does not imply “ought.” Further, the fact that there are diverse cultural values does not necessarily imply that there are no objective values.
Objection: That we cannot yet justify objective values does not mean that such a foundation could not be developed.
Objection: This entails that we tolerate oppressive systems that are intolerant themselves. Further, this argument seems to confer objective value on “tolerance” and further still, “tolerance” is not the same as “respect.”

Here are some additional arguments against moral relativism:

If values for right and wrong are relative to a specific moral standpoint or culture, anything can be justified, even practices that seem objectively unconscionable.
Ethical relativism would diminish our possibility for making moral judgments of others and other societies. However, we do make moral judgments of others and believe we are justified in making these moral judgments.
Ethical relativism says that moral values are determined by ‘the group’, but it is difficult to determine who ‘the group’ is. Anyone in the “group” who disagrees is immoral.
If people were ethical relativists in practice (that is, if everyone was a ethical subjectivist), there would be moral chaos.

A supplemental resource is available (bottom of page) on moral relativism.

Do you think that there are objective moral values? Or do you believe that all moral values are relative to either cultures or individuals? Include your reasons.

Note: Submit your response to the appropriate Assignments folder.

5.1.3 How Do We Know What is Right?

The question at hand is about moral epistemology. How do we know what is right or wrong? What prompts our moral sentiments, our values, our actions? Are our moral assessments made on a purely rational basis, or do they stem from our emotional nature? There are contemporary philosophers who support each position, but we will return to some “old” friends we met in our unit on epistemology, Immanuel Kant and David Hume. They were hardly on the “same page” when it came to how and if we can know anything at all, and it’s hardly surprising that we find them at odds on what motivates moral choices, how we know what is right.

When we met Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in our study of epistemology, we read passages from his Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic (1783). In that work, he applied a slightly less intricate and perplexing presentation of topics from his masterwork on metaphysics and epistemology, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). His next project involved application of his same rigorous reasoning method to moral philosophy. In 1785, Kant published Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals; it introduced concepts that he expanded subsequently in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). The short excerpts that follow are from Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals.

Recall that Kant’s epistemology required both reason and empirical experience, each in its proper role. Kant believed that human action could be evaluated only by the logical distinctions based in synthetic a priori judgments.

In the following excerpt, Kant explains that a clear understanding of the moral law is not to be found in the empirical world but is a matter of pure reason.

Everyone must admit that if a law is to have moral force, i.e., to be the basis of an obligation, it must carry with it absolute necessity; that, for example, the precept, “Thou shalt not lie,” is not valid for men alone, as if other rational beings had no need to observe it; and so with all the other moral laws properly so called; that, therefore, the basis of obligation must not be sought in the nature of man, or in the circumstances in the world in which he is placed, but a priori simply in the conception of pure reason; and although any other precept which is founded on principles of mere experience may be in certain respects universal, yet in as far as it rests even in the least degree on an empirical basis, perhaps only as to a motive, such a precept, while it may be a practical rule, can never be called a moral law. Thus not only are moral laws with their principles essentially distinguished from every other kind of practical knowledge in which there is anything empirical, but all moral philosophy rests wholly on its pure part.

However, there is some correspondence between the study of natural world and of ethics. Both have an empirical dimension as well as a rational one. When Kant speaks of “anthropology” he refers to the empirical study of human nature.

…there arises the idea of a twofold metaphysic- a metaphysic of nature and a metaphysic of morals. Physics will thus have an empirical and also a rational part. It is the same with Ethics; but here the empirical part might have the special name of practical anthropology, the name morality being appropriated to the rational part.

So, while the nature of moral duty must be sought a priori “in the conception of pure reason,” empirical knowledge of human nature has a supporting role in distinguishing how to apply moral laws and in dealing with “so many inclinations” – the confusing array of emotions, impulses, desires that bombard us and contradict the command of reason. Our emotions (inclinations) are hardly the source of moral knowledge; they interfere with the human capability for practical pure reason.

Thus not only are moral laws with their principles essentially distinguished from every other kind of practical knowledge in which there is anything empirical, but all moral philosophy rests wholly on its pure part.When applied to man, it does not borrow the least thing from the knowledge of man himself (anthropology), but gives laws a priori to him as a rational being. No doubt these laws require a judgment sharpened by experience, in order on the one hand to distinguish in what cases they are applicable, and on the other to procure for them access to the will of the man and effectual influence on conduct; since man is acted on by so many inclinations that, though capable of the idea of a practical pure reason, he is not so easily able to make it effective in concreto in his life.

Kant sees his project on moral law, or “practical reason,” to be a less complicated project than Critique of Pure Reason, his “critical examination of the pure speculative reason, already published.” According to Kant, “moral reasoning can easily be brought to a high degree of correctness and completeness”, whereas speculative reason is “dialectical” – laden with opposing forces. Furthermore, a complete “critique” of practical reason entails “a common principle” that can cover any situation – “for it can ultimately be only one and the same reason which has to be distinguished merely in its application.”

Intending to publish hereafter a metaphysic of morals, I issue in the first instance these fundamental principles. Indeed there is properly no other foundation for it than the critical examination of a pure practical reason; just as that of metaphysics is the critical examination of the pure speculative reason, already published. But in the first place the former is not so absolutely necessary as the latter, because in moral concerns human reason can easily be brought to a high degree of correctness and completeness, even in the commonest understanding, while on the contrary in its theoretic but pure use it is wholly dialectical; and in the second place if the critique of a pure practical Reason is to be complete, it must be possible at the same time to show its identity with the speculative reason in a common principle, for it can ultimately be only one and the same reason which has to be distinguished merely in its application.

In the next section of this unit, we will see where Kant goes with this project and its “common principle” the applies universally. For now, keep in mind that Kant sees moral judgment as a reason-based activity, and that emotions/inclinations diminish our moral judgments. Many philosophers agree that making moral judgments and taking moral actions are rationally contemplated undertakings.

David Hume (1711-1776) , as we learned in our epistemology unit, doubted that the principles of cause and effect and that induction could lead to truth about the natural world. Recall his picture of reason, his version of the distinction between a prior and a posteriori knowledge:

Relations of ideas are beliefs grounded wholly on associations formed within the mind; they are capable of demonstration because they have no external referent.
Matters of fact are beliefs that claim to report the nature of existing things; they are always contingent.

In both his Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) relations-of-ideas and matters-of-fact figure in his position that human agency and moral obligation are best considered as functions of human passions rather than as the dictates of reason. The excerpts that follow are from the Treatise (Book III, Part I, Sections I and II).

If reason were the source of moral sensibility, then either relations of ideas or matters-of-fact would need to be involved:

As the operations of human understanding divide themselves into two kinds, the comparing of ideas, and the inferring of matter of fact; were virtue discovered by the understanding; it must be an object of one of these operations, nor is there any third operation of the understanding. which can discover it.

Relations of ideas involve precision and certainty (as with geometry or algebra) that arise out of pure conceptual thought and logical operations. A relationship between “vice and virtue” cannot be demonstrated in this way.

There has been an opinion very industriously propagated by certain philosophers, that morality is susceptible of demonstration; and though no one has ever been able to advance a single step in those demonstrations; yet it is taken for granted, that this science may be brought to an equal certainty with geometry or algebra. Upon this supposition vice and virtue must consist in some relations; since it is allowed on all hands, that no matter of fact is capable of being demonstrated….. For as you make the very essence of morality to lie in the relations, and as there is no one of these relations but what is applicable… RESEMBLANCE, CONTRARIETY, DEGREES IN QUALITY, and PROPORTIONS IN QUANTITY AND NUMBER; all these relations belong as properly to matter, as to our actions, passions, and volitions. It is unquestionable, therefore, that morality lies not in any of these relations, nor the sense of it in their discovery.

Hume goes on to explain how moral distinctions do not arise from of matters of fact:

Take any action allowed to be vicious: Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but it is the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object.

And so, Hume concludes that moral distinctions are not derived from reason, rather they come from our feelings, or sentiments.

Thus the course of the argument leads us to conclude, that since vice and virtue are not discoverable merely by reason, or the comparison of ideas, it must be by means of some impression or sentiment they occasion, that we are able to mark the difference betwixt them……Morality, therefore, is more properly felt than judged of”

Hume’s view that our moral judgments and actions arise not from our rational capacities but from our emotional nature and sentiments, is contrary to several of the major normative theories we will explore. However, it is interesting to note that some present-day philosophers regard the domain of emotion as a primary source of moral action, and also that work in neuroscience suggests that Hume may have been on the right track.

Economist Jeremy Rifkin provides an absorbing and fast-moving chalk-talk on human empathy, as demonstrated by neuroscience. (10+ minutes) Note: Cartoon depictions of humans are unclothed RSA Animate . [CC-BY-NC-ND]

Optional Video

Trust, morality – and oxytocin? . [CC-BY-NC-ND] Neuro-economist Paul Zak believe he has identified the “moral molecule” in the brain. (16+ minutes)

An additional supplemental video (bottom of page) explores moral judgments and neuroscience even further.

What do you think about the connection between morality and the neurobiology of our brains? Do you think these findings affect arguments for or against ethical relativism?

Note: Post your response in the appropriate Discussion topic.

5.1.4 Psychological Influences

Various psychological characterizations of human nature have had significant influence on views about morality. We will see in this Ethics unit and the next on Social and Political Philosophy that particular conceptions of human nature may be at the center of theories about moral actions of individuals and about ethical interaction among individuals in social communities.

Egoism is the view that by nature we are selfish, that our actions, even our ostensibly generous ones, are motivated by selfish desire. Ethical egoism is the belief that pursuing ones own happiness is the highest moral value, that moral decisions should be guided by self-interest.

Another view of human nature holds that the primary motivation for all of our actions is pleasure. Hedonism is the view that pleasure is the highest or only good worth seeking, that we should, in fact, seek pleasure.

A different take on human nature is that we have innate capacity for benevolence (empathy) toward other people. (Recall the the mirror neurons in the Jeremy Rifkin video.) Altruism is the view that moral decisions should be guided by consideration for the interests and well-being of other people rather than by self-interest.

5.1.5 The Meaning of “Good”

In Ethics, we refer to what is “good” as a general term of approval, for what is of value, for example, a particular action, a quality, a practice, a way of life. Among the aspects of “good” that philosophers discuss is whether a particular thing is valued because it is good in and of itself, or because it leads to some other “good.”

An intrinsic good is something that is good in and of itself, not because of something else that may result from it. In ethics, a “value” possesses intrinsic worth. For example, with hedonism, pleasure is the only intrinsic good, or value. In some normative theories, a particular type of action may possess intrinsic worth, or good.
An instrumental good , on the other hand, is useful for attaining something else that is good. It is instrumental in that it that leads to another good, but it is not good is and of itself. For example, for an egoist, an action such as generosity to others can be seen as an instrumental good if it leads to to self-fulfillment, which is an intrinsic good valued in and of itself by an egoist.

As we look more closely at some major normative theories, the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental good will be among the considerations of interest. Understanding normative theories, also involves these questions:

How do we determine what the right action is?
What are the standards that we use to judge if a particular action is good or bad?

The following normative theories will be addressed:

Deontology (from the Greek for “obligation, or duty”) is concerned rules and motives for actions.
Utilitarianism, a consequentialist theory, is interested in the good outcomes of actions.
Virtue Ethics values actions in terms of what a person of good character would do.

Supplemental Resources

Descriptive and Normative Claims

Fundamentals: Normative and Descriptive Claims . This 4-minute video is a quick review with examples, on the differences between descriptive and normative claims.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP). Moral Relativism . Read section “3. Arguments for Moral Relativism” and section “4. Objections to Moral Relativism.”

Moral Judgment and Neuroscience

The Neuroscience behind Moral Judgments . Alan Alda talks with an MIT neuroscientist about neurological connections with moral judgments. (5+ minutes)

5.1 Moral Philosophy - Concepts and Distinctions. Authored by : Kathy Eldred. Provided by : Pima Community College. License : CC BY: Attribution

Essay on Moral Philosophy

Students are often asked to write an essay on Moral Philosophy in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Moral Philosophy

What is moral philosophy.

Moral philosophy is thinking about what is right and wrong. It’s like a guide for making good choices. People who study this are called philosophers. They ask big questions about how we should live and treat others.

Important Ideas in Moral Philosophy

There are many ideas in moral philosophy. Some say we should act in ways that bring the most happiness. Others believe we should follow strict rules, like always telling the truth, no matter what.

Making Decisions

When we make decisions, moral philosophy can help us choose the best action. It’s not just about following rules, but thinking carefully about how our choices affect others.

Different Cultures, Different Morals

What’s right in one culture might be wrong in another. Moral philosophy helps us understand these differences. It teaches us to be open-minded and respectful to everyone’s views.

Why It Matters

Moral philosophy matters because it shapes our world. It influences laws, schools, and how we get along with each other. It helps us build a world where everyone can live well and happily.

250 Words Essay on Moral Philosophy

Moral philosophy is about thinking hard on what is right and what is wrong. It is like a big map that guides people on how to be good and how to choose the right path in life. This subject asks questions like “What should I do?” and “How should I live?” to help everyone understand how to act well.

Right and Wrong

One big part of moral philosophy is figuring out what is right and what is wrong. It is not always easy, because different people and cultures might have their own ideas. For example, sharing might be seen as good, while stealing is seen as bad. Moral philosophers try to find rules that can apply to everyone, no matter where they are from.

Good Habits

Moral philosophy also talks about virtues, which are good habits. Being honest, brave, and kind are all examples of virtues. These are like muscles – the more you use them, the stronger they get. By practicing good habits, people can become better at being good.

Choices Matter

Every day, people make choices. Some are small, like what to eat for breakfast, and some are big, like helping a friend in trouble. Moral philosophy teaches that every choice can matter and that thinking about the reasons behind our choices is important.

Why Study Moral Philosophy?

Studying moral philosophy is important because it helps people understand how to make the world a better place. It teaches that what we do affects others and that being good is not just about following rules, but about caring for each other. By learning moral philosophy, students can grow up to make wise, kind choices in life.

500 Words Essay on Moral Philosophy

Moral philosophy is a part of philosophy that asks big questions about what is right and wrong. It is like a guide that helps people decide how to act in a good way. Think of it as a map for behavior, showing us which paths are good to take and which ones we should avoid.

Good vs. Bad

One of the main things moral philosophy looks at is the difference between good and bad actions. For example, sharing your toys with a friend is seen as a good thing because it makes both of you happy. On the other hand, taking something that doesn’t belong to you is considered bad because it can hurt others. Moral philosophy tries to explain why some things are good and others are bad.

Rules and Choices

Moral philosophy also talks about rules that many people agree on, like telling the truth and being fair. These rules can help us make choices that are good for everyone. But sometimes, it’s hard to know what the best choice is. That’s when we have to think carefully and use what we know about right and wrong to decide.

Different Views

People from different places or with different beliefs might have their own ideas about what is right and wrong. This is because what we think is good or bad can be shaped by our families, our friends, and the society we live in. Moral philosophy helps us understand these different views and why people might not always agree.

You might wonder why we need to study moral philosophy. It’s important because it helps us live together peacefully. When we understand what is right and wrong, we can make better choices that help us get along with others. It also makes us think about how our actions affect other people and the world around us.

Thinking for Ourselves

Even though moral philosophy can give us some answers, it also encourages us to think for ourselves. We can learn from others, but in the end, we have to decide what we believe is right. This means asking questions, listening to our hearts, and sometimes even standing up for what we think is good, even if it’s not easy.

Moral philosophy is like a compass that helps us navigate through life’s choices. It’s not just about following rules; it’s about understanding why those rules are there and thinking about how our actions affect others. By learning about moral philosophy, we can grow into thoughtful and caring people who make the world a better place, one good choice at a time.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Happy studying!

5 Is There a Single True Morality?

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Although people appear to be quite evenly divided between moral relativists and moral absolutists, there is a tendency to suppose that the view one takes about relativism is obviously correct and that who takes the opposite view is just denying the plain truth. Some of the disagreement can be traced to methodology and to the attitude one takes about how ethics fits with a scientific conception of the world. Those who take it to be important how one's moral views cohere with science tend to be moral relativists; those who do not take that issue to be all important tend to be moral absolutists.

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Moral Philosophy: The 5 Most Important Ethical Theories

In this article we explore five of the most important ethical theories in moral philosophy.

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We all have beliefs about what is moral and what is immoral. But where do we get those beliefs from and how are they justified? In this article, we look at five of the most important theories in moral philosophy.

Moral Philosophy: Consequentialism

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The keyword in consequentialism is ‘consequence’. Consequentialism is an umbrella term that describes a moral philosophy where the most moral action is that which brings about desirable consequences. According to ‘act consequentialism,’ decisions and actions which bring about the most desirable consequences are the most moral (right) and those that bring about undesirable consequences are immoral (wrong). For example, lying to your significant other could help their self-esteem; in that instance, lying may be moral. However, we cannot always be sure about the ongoing or future effects of our present actions. There may be instances where telling the truth results in better consequences for you both. Because of this, act consequentialism depends on the context.

A question that we could ask about act consequentialism is: how can we make moral decisions without knowing the outcome of those decisions? Perhaps we merely intend to bring about the best possible outcomes, and that is what matters.

Rule consequentialism proposes that we can assess whether an action is moral or immoral according to whether the decision to act abides by certain ‘rules’ that generally lead to positive outcomes. Lying, for example, tends to lead to negative outcomes. Therefore, according to rule consequentialism speaking truthfully is a moral act, even if it results in an undesirable outcome.

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So far we have looked at two types of consequentialism that attempt to secure the best possible outcomes. However, negative consequentialism proposes that we ought to minimize harm rather than try and secure pleasure or the best possible outcome (which may in turn result from minimizing harm). Perhaps the most radical negative consequentialist is David Pearce, who proposes that we ought to eliminate all suffering from the Earth with the aid of technology and drugs. In his self-published memoir, he refers to this idea as the ‘ hedonistic imperative ’.

Problems with consequentialism lie in its subjective nature and its heavy reliance on our ability to predict what will bring about positive consequences.

Liberalism is a moral philosophy that prioritizes human freedom. This philosophy was summarized by the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill :

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

Liberalism is largely a political moral philosophy that aims to prevent governments from interfering with the lives of people, except for when the actions of people harm others. It is associated with civil libertarianism , a type of political thought that promotes civil liberties (individual freedoms). Taboo subjects like sex work and illicit drug use are generally seen to be acceptable forms of behaviour provided they harm no one else.

A problem often raised by critics is that liberalism may be short-sighted. Similar to consequentialism, we can question who is harmed and whether we can be sure of the carry-on effects of our actions and who they may affect.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics takes its name from its emphasis on virtue. According to this moral philosophy, an act is moral if it contributes to a person’s virtuous character. Take stealing, for example:

Case 1: a person with no money steals cigarettes from a tobacconist because they are addicted to smoking.
Case 2: a person with no money steals from a grocery store to feed their friends and neighbors who are hungry.

A virtue ethicist may conclude that in Case 1 the theft that took place was out of desperation and as such cannot contribute to that person’s virtue or character development. However, in Case 2 the thief is stealing for the sake of a greater good, which is to improve the lives of his friends and neighbors. In Case 2 the thief is acting virtuously, whereas in Case 1 the thief only acts to serve their base instincts.

Stoicism is an ancient form of virtue ethics that has seen a rise in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic began. It teaches adherents to critically assess their emotions and their knee-jerk reactions to events in the world and to uphold a virtuous character. If you are to act virtuously one must imagine what a virtuous person might do and then follow their example. Of course, virtue ethics could be potentially vague, given the intricacies of humanity and of the social contexts people live in.

Moral Absolutism

If you believe that stealing is always wrong no matter the circumstances, you may be a moral absolutist. Moral absolutism claims that there are moral facts that never change. The Ten Commandments are an example of moral absolutism, whereby commandments such as ‘do not steal’ are examples of what moral philosophers call ‘divine command theory’. Interestingly, it is precisely this lack of flexibility that could raise problems for moral absolutism.

Take divine command theory, for example. If God is the sole decision-maker about what is moral and immoral, could God change his mind? That is to say, could God make an immoral act moral? Not only does this type of question challenge the omnipotent (all-powerful) characteristic of God , it could have radical implications no matter the answer. For if God can make an immoral act moral we can ask ‘for what reason?’. If that reason happens to be that God simply changed its mind, then all of morality comes from a whim and is without a satisfactory reason. However, if God cannot make an immoral act moral it suggests that even God must abide by moral laws. If that is the case, we can ponder whether God is necessary for morality at all. These are the types of questions that philosophers of religion have tackled for centuries.

Moral Nihilism

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have moral nihilism. Moral nihilism claims that there are no moral facts whatsoever. Some philosophers, like Immanuel Kant , have suggested that if there is no God (or even if there is no idea of God) then there can be no objective basis for morality, although some modern atheists dispute this, such as Sam Harris . Moral nihilism is often associated with moral decay and the downfall of civilization. However, moral nihilism in some way or another finds its way into other moral theories.

One example of a moral philosophy that is arguably nihilistic is moral relativism . Simply put, moral relativism is the view that morality is determined by social convention and is differently understood across cultures and times. According to moral relativists, there is no proper or universal moral code.

painting moral majority sucks richard serra

Another example of moral nihilism can be found in a moral philosophy called non-cognitivism . Moral non-cognitivism states that most (or all) of our moral statements and beliefs are not based on reason. Rather, they are based on preference and personal taste. Take Youtube comments for example. Non-cognitivists would likely suggest that many of the inflammatory remarks that people post about popular social issues are knee-jerk emotional responses that masquerade as moral judgments. Similarly, if you believe that X, Y or Z are moral simply because your parents or community told you so, you may have fallen into the trap of consensus rather than having formed a rational basis for your moral beliefs.

Perhaps the most pertinent question we can ask about moral nihilism is whether it is useful to us. Does knowing that there are no moral facts help us? Perhaps two questions are going on here; 1) is there an appropriate way to act? and 2) do morals exist? Moral nihilism says that there are no moral facts, but there may still be non-moral reasons to behave a certain way, and nihilist theories may help explain this.

The Key Questions of Moral Philosophy

Moral philosophy largely comes in two forms: practical ethics and metaethics. Practical ethics has to do with deciding what is the right course of action in real-life situations. For example, biological ethicists determine how humans or animals should be treated in a scientific study, or how a study involving living things ought to be conducted. Metaethics, on the other hand, is what we have discussed in this article. Metaethics seeks to find a theoretical basis for our morality–what makes something moral or immoral and why .

What is your moral code? Where do you derive your moral beliefs from? On what basis are they justified? These are the questions we should ask as we develop our moral philosophy .

What Is Act Consequentialism?

By Casey Scott MA Philosophy, GDipEd English and Humanities, BA(Hons) Professional & Creative Writing Casey teaches philosophy and culture studies at a leading Australian university. His postgraduate research examined the metaphysics of biological concepts. He is a qualified English teacher with a degree in professional and creative writing and is about to begin his third degree in zoology and animal sciences.

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Essays in Moral Skepticism

Richard Joyce, Essays in Moral Skepticism , Oxford University Press, 2016, 274pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198754879.

Reviewed by Jack Woods, University of Leeds

Richard Joyce is best known for his articulation and defense of the moral error theory, for his particular brand of moral fictionalism, and for his part (along with Sharon Street) in popularizing evolution-based debunking arguments against various moral realisms. This book is proof that these achievements unite into a compelling take on moral thought, talk, and the justification thereof. The collection is divided into three parts, corresponding roughly to these three claims to fame, though the essays often cross these section divisions. The two new contributions are an essay revisiting evolutionary debunking arguments in the light of recent developments and a useful summary introduction to the three themes of the book. Even though eleven of the twelve essays are reprinted, collection in one volume is useful given how much of it was previously published in other volumes and special collections.

The first section, on moral error theory, illustrates the usefulness of collecting this work together. Chapter 1, "Expressivism, Motivational Internalism, and Hume," lays out the relationship between Joyce's error-theory and non-cognitivism. Roughly, his view is that moral judgments have cognitive content, like ordinary judgments about mid-sized dry goods, but our moral assertions nevertheless also express conative non-cognitive content. We might think of this as a V-shaped expressivist view of moral assertion: as a matter of convention, our moral assertions express both cognitive content and non-cognitive content. Truth and falsity apply to the former -- and since there ain't no (instantiated) moral properties, moral assertions are typically false -- whereas our motivational states and much of the function of moral discourse are systematically connected to the latter. It is an initially attractive package since it allows us to (a) maintain the common sense view that moral judgments are to be glossed with non-moral descriptive judgments, while (b) recognizing and, in a sense, legitimating a deep connection between moral assertions and our conative and affective states.

Whether the initial attraction of this package persists on inspection is another question. One of Joyce's central motivations for the expressivist portion of his view is the putative incoherence of a moral assertion that is conjoined with a denial of being in the relevant conative state:

Hitler was evil; but I subscribe to no normative standard that condemns him or his actions.

This, though, doesn't feel incoherent in the same way Moore-paradoxical constructions like:

Nazim Hikmet was a poet revolutionary, but I don't believe he was

do, at least when I force myself to hear "subscribe" in an expressivist-friendly way. I worry that insofar as this example feels incoherent, it is because "subscription to a normative standard" typically indicates belief talk, not expression talk (2014: footnote 16 and objection 6). In its most humdrum usage, we subscribe to theories and views, which is (at least usually) a kind of belief-like endorsement of descriptive content. And "evil" feels pragmatically connected with condemnation -- we usually don't believe people to be evil if we do not condemn their actions. So it is difficult to avoid hearing the above as "Hitler was evil, but I don't believe he was". More generally, I have argued that analogous, but more explicitly non-cognitive constructions simply aren't incoherent in the same way as paradigmatic Moore-paradoxical constructions. This puts pressure on the idea that expression of non-cognitive content is (partially) constitutive of competent moral assertion.

That there is a constitutive connection between moral assertion and cognitive content like belief is rather more plausible (as Joyce notes). Given that:

Hitler was evil, but I don't believe it

is flagrantly incoherent in exactly the same way as ordinary instances of Moore's paradox, expressivists need find room for belief talk. This is a lesson many recent expressivists have taken on board. This situation suggests that motivation for a Joyce-style expressivism/error-theory package will not come from arguments like the above, but rather from careful study of the overall theoretical virtues and vices of the package. As we should expect.

Chapter 2, "Morality, Schmorality," launches an investigation into the functional role of morality on the back of an analysis of whether it's bad to be bad. Joyce argues that if all (reasonable) pretenders to morality turn out to be schmoralities -- if they fail to serve the intended functional role of morality -- then we ought to be error theorists. This raises important questions about the costs of error-theory; after all, we want the functional role of morality served somehow . Joyce suggests that we might turn to a form of fictionalism here, fleshing out the common thought that we ought to carry on with our moral practices even in the wake of widespread error. He tempers this suggestion by arguing that whether or not this is the right path -- whether it is good to pretend to believe in the good -- itself depends on empirical facts about psychological feasibility and pragmatic utility (this theme is revisited later the collection.)

The complementary third chapter, "The Accidental Error Theorist," suggests that many contemporary naturalistic accounts of moral properties slip into error theory unwittingly by potentially inhuman theorizing. That is, they postulate properties which fit reality only under the presumption of implausible restrictions on what kind of beings we are. Response-dependent and sentimentalist accounts posit generic properties, such as a general disposition to feel resentment upon certain coarsely described stimuli, which we probably don't possess. For example, it is extremely implausible that we are always disposed to feel resentment in the face of unkindness; it is somewhat implausible that we are typically disposed to feel it.

Ideal observer theories and contractualist accounts, on the other hand, neglect the fact that we humans come in varieties far askew from the bourgeois moral and doxastic norm theorists in these traditions typically start with. These positions thus tend to either succumb to the temptation to cheat by building a substantive moral constraint into their account or, alternatively, attempt increasingly fraught rationalizations of counterexamples in terms of failures of information or affect. In short, many roads to error theory are paved with empirical plausibility; starting from a compelling analysis of what moral properties are, we may end up accepting it as the correct analysis of moral properties and rejecting that so-analyzed moral properties are ever instantiated.

The final essay of this section, "Metaethical Pluralism", ties these themes all together. Joyce argues that given the widespread disagreement in philosophical accounts of assertion and value, there may be no decisive reason to favor cognitivism over non-cognitivism, nor any decisive reason to favor moral naturalism over moral skepticism. The most compelling aspect of this argument is the explicit attention paid to the payoff between interpretational issues, and context-relative pragmatic concerns. The conclusion, that it might very well be that there is no decisive answer to which view is right and, more importantly, no decisive answer to which view we ought to take, strikes me as compelling. This ecumenism might seem a step back for Joyce, but I don't read it that way.

Rather, I read it as a welcome two-part shift. First, a shift away from the view that we will find sufficient grounds for error theory in explicating our moral thought and talk. Second, a shift towards treating empirical issues, such as psychological tractability and pragmatic payoff, modulated by the standpoint we start from, as an important but not decisive factor in whether we should accept an error theory or a revisionary moral naturalism. The upshot is a type of theoretical maturity: we can go on with which view we like, while recognizing that we do so by making decisions about our concepts which were not already forced. Recognizing that we could have gone another way, we might occasionally usefully flirt with the road not taken.

Turning to the second section, my competence lies entirely with the second pair of essays (chapters 7 and 8), which address moral debunking arguments. Debunking arguments argue for some skeptical position about moral judgments -- they're all false, they're all unjustified, etc. -- on the basis of an explanation of our possession of our moral beliefs that is entirely independent of the truth of our moral judgments. For example, many have argued that telling an evolutionary story about how we came to have the moral beliefs we have somehow undermines taking our moral beliefs to be accurate or justified (Street 2006, Joyce 2006). These two chapters counter the pervasive mistake of thinking that debunking arguments establish a strong version of a moral skepticism absent the addition of substantive epistemological theses which close the gap between the modest skeptical position "Theory T (currently) lacks justification" and the extreme skeptical position "Theory T is unjustifiable."

The discussion is sensible, compelling, and rich. For example, one brief footnote (7 of chapter 7) recaps a back and forth between Joyce and Justin Clarke-Doane while making the crucial point that usefulness-oriented explanations of our beliefs in certain facts, like mathematics, may (and, as I argue in my (forthcoming), typically do) require their truth, immunizing them from debunking skepticism. This chapter strikes me as one of the more important contributions of the volume. It pulls the teeth of a number of confusions about debunking, such as the idea that compelling debunking arguments require specifically evolutionary genealogical premises. It is slightly regrettable that Joyce does not here engage directly with the recent argument that evolutionary premises are the only interesting bit of the current fascination with debunking (Vavova 2014). This, however, is only a minor quibble. I hope this chapter, the only one not previously published, is widely read and thoroughly absorbed.

Chapter 8, "Irrealism and the Genealogy of Morals," continues the project of undermining vulgar takes on debunking skepticism. In particular, it reminds us that we often need to answer substantive epistemological questions, such as "when is it reasonable to move from the absence of evidence to the evidence of absence" in order to move from reasonable premises like "we lack grounds to believe in explanatorily impotent facts" to stronger premises like "we have grounds to disbelieve in explanatorily impotent facts." As Joyce points out, much of the philosophical action concerns these epistemological bridging principles.

The remainder of the essay asks whether we can run skeptical worries, analogous to evolutionary debunking arguments, against non-cognitivist views. The answer, both the right one and Joyce's, seems to be "yes." Drawing on the plausible idea that even conative and affective states like liking and disliking are conditioned by substantive appropriateness conditions, Joyce sketches some prima facie cases where we might undermine these by considerations similar to those deployed by debunkers against moral cognitivists. This seems a fruitful area to be pursued in future work by Joyce and others.

The final section takes up questions about projectivism and fictionalism. It opens with an analysis of the claim, famous from Hume and somewhat developed in Mackie (1977), that we project affective reactions, like our disgust at cruelty, onto the events and agents themselves, treating these psychological reactions as worldly properties. This is analogous to the (slightly) less contentious claim that we project our (psychological) impressions of color onto worldly objects, treating colors as worldly properties. Mackie uses projectivism to support his view that there really are no worldly moral properties, just as we might use color projectivism to support the view that there are no worldly color properties. In both cases the actual support provided by projectivism is nowise clear. A bit of thought shows that both moral and color projectivism are clearly compatible with realism about moral and color properties.

The interesting question is whether there are compelling abductive arguments for moral skepticism that moral projectivism supports. Joyce explores two possibilities, both due to Mackie, and locates the role projectivism plays in each. He finds that Mackie's earlier and more prima facie compelling argument suffers from dialectical sloppiness. It first uses projectivism as a tie-breaker fact arbitrating between conservativism about moral beliefs and conservativism about naturalistic beliefs. It then uses projectivism as itself an argument for the bizarreness of moral properties. But the bizarreness of moral properties is used to support conservativism about naturalistic beliefs. Joyce's reconstruction of Mackie's sloppiness strikes me as plausible, though I wish he had addressed whether we could rejigger Mackie's argument to avoid the circularity.

What Joyce really thinks is that Mackie should have provided empirical support for moral projectivism before using it as a tiebreaker. Chapter 10 explores this, arguing that minimal projectivism, the view that "we experience moral wrongness as an objective feature of the world", can and should be interpreted as an empirical hypothesis. What will come out of testing this hypothesis is an open question, but if we could justify it empirically, we could then feed it back into Mackie's argument above to produce a compelling (though hardly bulletproof) argument for moral skepticism. In this sense, at least, we can answer Joyce's coy closing question about whether minimal moral projectivism is interesting once made empirically tractable: yes, definitely.

The final two essays discuss fictionalism, first moral, then psychological. Joyce has a vivid sense of the limitations and advantages of such views and a wicked eye for where the real problems for them lie. The last essay, which I will not address in depth, claims psychological fictionalism is more problematic than moral fictionalism, but still salvageable. It does excellent work in undermining overly pat "how could we believe it?" arguments against both fictionalism and eliminativism about folk psychology.

Chapter 11, "Moral Fictionalism," develops Joyce's favored brand of fictionalism and defends it from a number of worries. His moral fictionalism is revolutionary (we're not already pretending, but we should start pretending) and game-oriented (we pretend to morally assert, we don't assert of the moral pretense). Fictionalizing is claimed to be a reasonable thing to do in our day-to-day lives when we find ourselves, in our more critical moments, disavowing moral facts. The set-up strikes me as slightly strange, especially given Joyce's claim that the notion of a critical moment doesn't involve significant idealization. Taking our actual critical moments as indicative of what we really believe strikes me as problematic since our critical "classroom" moments are still governed by social pressure and confounds. Years in academia have trained me to not take seminar or classroom discussion as indicative of what people really believe. So I worry about Joyce's starting point, even though I find the general approach reasonable.

There are a number of other immediate worries, such as whether "pretending to assert" is really what we do when we speak as sophisticated skeptics in a vulgar world. I reckon 'no', though I also reckon that Joyce could have said "non-committal assertion in line with and governed by the rules of the moral fiction" instead and avoided this sort of objection. Putting that aside, pretend assertion raises other interesting worries. Contrast pretend promises: pretend promises, insofar as they have uptake, are still promises. We can cross our fingers behind our back all we like, we've still promised, goddamn it. Is pretend assertion likewise still assertion?

The answer depends on whether we take assertion to be publicly governed (like promises) or not. Joyce writes suggestively that we need not take moral fictionalists, when fictionalizing, as liars or, alternatively, we could take them as blameless. I would have liked to see Joyce's take on whether we have asserted at all, in the sense of being committed to what we have said, when we pretend assert. After all, few of us are fictionalists, and rare perverse linguistic intentions don't typically determine meaning or commitment.

Joyce closes by asking whether it is in our interest to be moral fictionalists. This, like so many of the questions Joyce raises, is largely an empirical cum psychological question. And one that Joyce suggests might be answered by a focus on the role of particular unexamined moral beliefs (precommitments) in reinforcing useful behavioral patterns. Our "precommitment" to morality might help stave off weakness of will, for example. This strikes me as plausible, not only for moral fictionalists, but also for various forms of moral conventionalism. One final worry is whether Joyce has overly narrowed his focus by treating eliminativism and fictionalism as the only responses to moral error theory. Moving to a small-m moral conventionalism (or relativism, if you prefer) once we've seen that our moral beliefs don't track objective reality strikes me as equi-reasonable. It is not clear that we would lose much of the desired effect on our behavior since, after all, formal norms like those of etiquette also stave off weakness of will: they're certainly "real", we're precommited to them, and yet we hardly pretend they're objective in the way suggested by moral fictionalism.

As any review that closes on a list of questions like this indicates, Joyce's book is an interesting, occasionally frustrating, massively stimulating read. The delicate contours of moral error theory, skepticisms, and related territory are mapped out here better than anywhere else. Moreover, Joyce does not skip the hard questions, while being unafraid to leave the reader hungry for more answers. It would be good reading for anyone with a passing interest. It is essential reading for anyone with anything more. Even though the essays are largely previously published, they mesh together into a cloud of views, questions, lunges and dodges that are best read together. This volume is a rare and welcome case of a collection of an author's previous work being much more than the sum of its parts.

Joyce, Richard (2006). The Evolution of Morality . MIT Press.

Mackie, J. L. (1977). Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong . Penguin Books.

Street, Sharon (2006). "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value." Philosophical Studies 127 (1): 109-166.

Vavova, Katia (2014). "Debunking Evolutionary Debunking." Oxford Studies in Metaethics 9: 76-101.

Woods, Jack (2014). "Expressivism and Moore's Paradox." Philosophers' Imprint 14 (5): 1-12.

Woods, Jack (2016). "Mathematics, Morality, and Self‐Effacement." Noûs 50 (4).

On moral equivalence

Original Paper
Published: 15 February 2021
Volume 1 , article number 64 , ( 2021 )

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This paper studies the concept of moral equivalence as a form of comparative evaluation that involves two distinct types of argument that depend upon a specific point of comparison. I particularly focus upon the moral equivalence of beliefs and how the determination of the equivalence of beliefs involves factual considerations. I then use this discussion to explore claims concerning false equivalence before ending with a consideration of the implications of moral equivalence as regards the role of truth in political deliberation.

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Introduction

What is moral equivalence? The question arises partially as a result of current popular discourse, where the phrase “moral equivalence” occurs with some regularity in the media along with its corollary, “false equivalence.” Although it is tempting to regard such phrases as journalistic license, such a conclusion is hasty since it assumes that the meaning of these phrases is self-evident, as if what constitutes the moral dimensions of equivalence or the truthfulness of an equivalence statement were obvious. Yet when one wonders what is “moral equivalence”—or what actually constitutes “false equivalence”—one begins to realize that there is more to the matter than literary flourishes. That there is a paucity of research upon the topic underscores the need to investigate the issue further, for the dearth of secondary research specifically addressing the notion of moral equivalence highlights how little attention has actually been given to its conceptualization. The earliest recurring use of the term arises in the context of Cold War debates about foreign policy as regards the disparagement of liberal democracies by equating them with authoritarian regimes (Kirkpatrick 1984 , 1985 , 1986 ). Unfortunately such discussions show little interest in clarifying the concept of moral equivalence itself, since they are primarily concerned with the issue of defending the United States from its critics (c.f. Davis and Lynn-Jones 1987 ; Nye 1985 ; Rubinstein 1985 ). Rather than explore the conditions that delineate moral equivalence, there is the presumption that such conditions are obvious. That subsequent scholarship has done little to extend our understanding of what constitutes moral equivalence only compounds the problem, for the presumption that the concept is self-evident continues to be the starting point for most studies. Footnote 1 One cannot help but be dissatisfied with this situation, for the precise determination of what moral equivalence is remains unspecified.

To articulate the concept of moral equivalence satisfactorily one must begin with the acknowledgment that it is not self-evident. Reflection upon the notion of moral equivalence evokes substantive considerations about the structure of comparative judgment and moral evaluation. That is, a fuller consideration of moral equivalence opens the door to further thought about how comparative evaluation functions morally. While the initial mention of the phrase occurs in debates about foreign policy, further thought upon the subject reveals a concept that illuminates more fundamental aspects of moral evaluation than previous research indicates. Therefore, my discussion will proceed as follows. First, I will begin by conceptualizing moral equivalence as a form of comparative evaluation that involves two distinct types of argument with regard to specific points of comparison. I will particularly focus upon the moral equivalence of beliefs and how the determination of the equivalence of beliefs depends upon factual considerations. I will next use this discussion to explore claims concerning false equivalence in the second part of my paper. As I will argue, statements concerning false equivalence rely upon truth claims involving factual considerations. Facts provide the criteria by which we distinguish genuine instances of moral equivalence from those of false equivalence. I will then end my study with a consideration of the implications of moral equivalence as regards the more general role of comparative judgment for moral evaluation, as well as the significance of truth claims for political deliberation. My final position will be that constructivist approaches to truth are insufficient for clarifying moral equivalence, and that the insights of ethical naturalism are necessary to grasp the concept fully. With this in mind, I will now begin.

The concept of moral equivalence

The determination of moral equivalence is an act of comparative judgment. Conceptually, this means that moral equivalence is the outcome of a comparison whose formal features delineate the boundaries within which a claim of equivalence falls. But while the formal features of comparison provide the boundaries for claims of moral equivalence, they alone do not establish the equivalence. To establish equivalence fully requires a point of comparison that provides the content for the evaluation. So while moral equivalence may fall within certain formal boundaries as a matter of comparative judgment, it unfolds in reference to a specific point of comparison whose content renders determinate the claim of equivalence. This combination of the formal boundaries of comparison with a specific point of comparison is what ultimately constitutes the concept of moral equivalence. Thus, the preliminary definition of moral equivalence is: two options are morally equivalent when they are the same in regards to a specific point of comparison. Footnote 2 I will refine this definition as the discussion proceeds.

The two primary ways to determine moral equivalence involve arguments that either affirm a congruence of the options being compared or deny that there are meaningful differences between them. Regarding the first type of argument—call it the Same As argument ( SA )—a particular quality is attributed to both options: x is the same as y as regards p , where p is something both x and y possess. The second type of argument—which can be termed the No Difference argument ( ND )—holds that there are no significant differences between the options being compared. Formally, ND arguments resemble SA arguments: x is no different than y , as regards p . However, the actual arguments used to prove that there are no differences between the comparative options are substantially different than the ones used to prove that the options are the same. Rather than simply ascribe a quality to both options and argue for equivalence, ND arguments attempt to dispel claims that the options have meaningful differences. Such differences are said to preclude equivalence because of the dissimilarity they entail for the options. In effect, the differences supposedly render the options incomparable, and this precludes any claim of moral equivalence. To overcome this, ND arguments must acknowledge the purported differences and show that they do not exclude a comparison of the options. A rudimentary way to think about the difference between SA and ND arguments is to observe that they have different starting points, where the former begins by positing a shared quality while the latter begins by taking up dissimilarities. Both, however, end with a justification of moral equivalence.

As noted, the comparison of options that generates a claim of moral equivalence is always in reference to a specific point of comparison. When it is said that ‘ x is morally equivalent to y ’ the clarification of such a statement involves something other than x or y that justifies the equivalence. This is the equivalence point . An implication of this is that the comparison that leads to a moral equivalence claim is not the sort of comparison where the equivalence is self-evident. While it is tempting to regard moral equivalence as a type of comparison where the equivalence is immediately obvious, I believe this is mistaken. It is the case that every claim that ‘ x is morally equivalent to y ’ remains open to the question: why are they morally equivalent? There is no way to answer this without referring to a point of comparison that serves to justify the claim of equivalence. Any assertion of moral equivalence remains open to a call for clarification that necessitates the articulation of an equivalence point. Thus, the determination of the equivalence point is crucial for moral equivalence arguments.

Three things suggest themselves as appropriate candidates for the role of an equivalence point in the case of moral equivalence: beliefs, acts, and the consequences of acts. When moral equivalence claims are made, it is usually in reference to the beliefs individuals hold, or what they do, or the consequences of what they do, might do, or have done. For present purposes, I will confine my study to a consideration of beliefs as equivalence points. There are recent discussions—such as those concerning intersectionality in the pursuit of social justice—which might be interestingly illuminated by an examination of how beliefs serve as the basis for moral equivalence. There are also important debates—such as about income inequality and the distribution of wealth, ways of addressing climate change, and modes of health care provision—that involve disputants distinguishing themselves in terms of their moral beliefs. And then there are controversies—such as the aftermath of the events of 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia—that are best analyzed by reference to the moral equivalence of beliefs. It therefore seems reasonable to focus upon how beliefs can serve as equivalence points with the assumption that what is said about beliefs can potentially be extended to acts and their consequences.

A belief is composed of three components: an individual’s attitude; the facts that ostensibly ground that attitude; and the reasons that relate those facts to the attitude. To believe something is to have an attitude that affirms or accepts the reasons for the belief according to the facts of the matter. Footnote 3 I understand a fact as a type of description. Facts are often denoted by phrases such as ‘It is a fact that …’ or ‘The fact of the matter is …,’ where the rest of the statement specifies what the fact is. Footnote 4 Such statements are ostensive, as they point to an object, event, or state of affairs, and informative, as they provide the content of that object, event, or state of affairs. Here lies the significance of direct references, for such uses of the term ‘fact’ involves singling something out and then providing a description of it. As Popper puts it, facts are ‘reality pinned down by descriptive statements’ (Popper 2002 ). Footnote 5 Undoubtedly these descriptions play an important role in deliberation, as the use of facts in the context of a discussion is frequently to justify one’s position by providing evidence for it. What needs to be noted is that the justificatory role of facts highlights their normative features. To accept a fact is to accept its descriptive content, and thus have a reason to hold the belief the fact grounds. However, although a fact contains a description that gives a reason for a belief, it can still be rejected. A factual description is not causal, as it indicates something that should be believed but cannot guarantee it will be believed. In other words, one can understand the description that a fact offers without accepting it as a reason for a belief. Thus, the possibility of disputes over facts and what follows from them.

With this understanding of what facts are, it is a straightforward matter to conceptualize them in terms of moral beliefs. Moral beliefs are those beliefs that reflect an individual’s acceptance of certain facts about well-being. Footnote 6 Such facts are both descriptive and normative, which is to say, contain a description of well-being that gives the individual a reason to accept that account. In the words of Putnam, facts are ‘entangled’ (Putnam 2002 ). Accounts of virtue, principles, or ends can all be understood as factual from this perspective, as each provides a description of some sort that is meant to steer behavior in ways conducive to well-being, if the description is accepted. Thus, the description provides normative content for the individual who accepts it. To insist that facts are solely descriptions without normative import is to undercut their justificatory role in deliberation, both in terms of the formation of beliefs and in terms of social discourse, and does not seem to account adequately for the way facts are used in either moral or non-moral contexts. Contra Hume, the boundary between matters of fact and matters of value is porous, as particular factual descriptions within the context of moral deliberation orient one toward certain conclusions. That one can resist those conclusions highlights the explicitly normative dimension of facts as descriptions that serve a justificatory role in deliberation. And this is so for moral deliberation and the determination of moral beliefs.

Regarding the determination of moral equivalence, the descriptions facts provide are the subjects of equivalence points. As seen, beliefs are composed of three parts: an individual’s attitude, the reasons for the attitude, and the facts that are the basis for the reasons. Of the three, the relation between facts and reasons is most important, for attributing moral equivalence primarily to an individual’s attitude can be misleading. To say, for example, that liberalism and Nazism are morally equivalent because both liberals and Nazis accept the reasons given by their respective ideologies may be plausible—both may be genuinely committed to their positions—but it leaves untouched the content of the beliefs. The latter consideration seems much more significant for determining moral equivalence, and helps explain why the immediate impulse is to reject a claim of moral equivalence between liberalism and Nazism. It is the content of the beliefs which is ultimately being compared, and the equivalence, in this instance, is rejected because of that content. To establish equivalence in a meaningful way, the impetus is to determine what it is that each believes, not simply that they believe it. The description facts provide, which are expressed in terms of reasons an individual accepts, are what give this information.

If the descriptions facts provide become the means to determine moral equivalence, then it seems easy to specify when two beliefs are equivalent: they share the same factual content. However, such a conclusion is slightly simplistic. What needs to be accounted for are the sorts of arguments used to establish equivalence—the SA and ND arguments mentioned previously—and how the equivalence point informs such arguments. It is one thing to argue that two positions are the same with regard to a particular factual claim, and another to argue that they are no different with regard to a particular factual claim. With the former, the equivalence point serves as an umbrella that covers both positions, while with the latter, the equivalence point serves as a trump that overcomes everything else. This broadly clarifies why SA and ND arguments need to be distinguished, for although each generates a conclusion of moral equivalence, they do so differently. The insights and limits of both types of arguments become clear when this difference between them is kept in mind.

In the case of SA arguments, the equivalence point provides a direct means to determine equivalence. Either the respective beliefs contain the factual content the equivalence point encompasses or they do not. Given the entangled nature of facts, there are three ways equivalence might encompass different beliefs: descriptively, normatively, or both descriptively and normatively. Of these, equivalence seems possible to establish only in terms of the descriptive content of a fact, or in terms of both the description and normativity of a fact. Some beliefs about discrimination, for example, can be morally equivalent insofar as they describe the form of discrimination, but regard the normative implications of the description differently. Such might be the case, for example, with Marxist or liberal feminists, who both appraise the situation of wage inequality for women but offer different responses. Similarly, other beliefs about discrimination may be morally equivalent both descriptively and normatively, such as those that hold that structural features adversely impact people across multiple dimensions, such as gender, race, sexual orientation, and age. Arguments about intersectionality often highlight how diverse individuals who are so impacted can find common cause by working together to achieve systemic change as a response. But while such abbreviated examples indicate how moral equivalence can be determined when different moral positions share factual content in terms of descriptive, or descriptive and normative, content, it does not seem possible to do the same solely on the basis of the normative content of a fact. The normativity of a fact is generated by its descriptive content; without such content, there can be no normative dimension to discern. Even if it were possible to articulate normativity without a corresponding description, the result would not be something classifiable as factual as I understand the term. So I will leave aside this possibility. In the case of SA arguments, it is more plausible to say that moral equivalence rests upon an equivalence point defined in terms of shared factual content that is primarily descriptive or descriptive and normative.

Let me explore all of this more closely by examining the previous examples further. In each example, the issue of discrimination is raised. However, the equivalence point is not ‘discrimination’ per se. Rather, it is discrimination understood as ‘the fact that women are paid less than men’ or ‘the fact that structural barriers impede individuals based on gender/race/sexual orientation/age.’ There is specific content to the claim of discrimination, and this content relates to a particular description of the situation. Such a description provides the basis for comparing the beliefs for purposes of determining equivalence. In the first case, the equivalence point grounds the moral equivalence primarily through the description: Marxist and liberal feminists similarly affirm the descriptive content of the fact that women experience unequal pay. The normative dimension is disputed, as one group would hold that free markets cannot overcome the deficiency while the other group would argue that they can. Given the non-causal nature of normativity, the different normative responses to the fact of discrimination are unproblematic, at least for the determination of moral equivalence. That one finds the Marxist view compelling while another finds the liberal position convincing is less a matter of the determination of moral equivalence, and more a matter of considerations that direct attention to other matters. In some cases, divergent views about the normativity of agreed upon factual descriptions is to be expected. That different belief systems can accept the same factual descriptions as well as acknowledge that something ought to be done, but then substantively differ over what that should specifically be, does not in itself undercut the possibility of establishing moral equivalence. As will be seen in the following section, differences over the descriptions themselves prove much more problematic.

Regarding the second case, the combination of the descriptive and normative content of the fact contributes to the establishment of moral equivalence. That particular actors appraise a situation as discriminatory because of systemic biases and converge on the same normative response becomes the basis for the determination of moral equivalence. For example, the fact that employers routinely utilize practices that are adverse across dimensions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and age, gives each of these groups a reason to respond in a similar way, such as through legal challenges in court. Similarly, the fact that policing efforts have frequently involved profiling people of color and members of the LBQT community gives both a reason to resort to public protests and demonstrations. In these sorts of instances, moral equivalence is not confined to a shared description, but also involves a shared normative appraisal. Such cases are arguably the least controversial instances of moral equivalence since the equivalence covers both descriptive and normative considerations.

With ND arguments, the situation takes a different shape. In the case of ND arguments, the focus is upon providing arguments for equivalence that overcome the apparent incomparability of different moral beliefs. The assumption underlying the incomparability is that different sets of moral beliefs rely upon different assumptions and invoke different arguments, and this is taken to preclude comparison between them. Arguments about the incommensurability of values often take this line and hold that values and the bearers of value are incomparable. Such positions generally assert that incommensurability, understood as the lack of an architectonic standard that encompasses all options, entails incomparability, something that calls into questions the ability to decide rationally between different goods. The implication is that choices are an act of will, not reason, since reason cannot provide a standard by which to judge. Individuals therefore ‘plump’ for their own position, something that introduces a degree of subjectivity or arbitrariness to their decisions (e.g., Raz 1997 ). Whatever the merits of such arguments, I do not think they convey what is meant by moral equivalence. The main reason to doubt the relevance of arguments from incommensurability turns upon the purported relation of incommensurability and incomparability. Incommensurability may obtain between different moral beliefs, but this neither precludes the possibility of comparing them nor entails that such comparisons are fundamentally irrational. The possibility that comparative choices can be made without resorting to a commensurative measure is a genuine possibility, as is the possibility that such choices are rationally justifiable. Indeed, I take the determination of moral equivalence according to ND arguments to embody just this type of comparison. A brief example should clarify this.

Critics of contemporary liberalism often focus upon its ‘atomistic’ account of the individual, claiming that liberals such as Rawls conceptualize the individual as prior to society, with interests that are determined by ends personally selected, rather than socially set (e.g., Okin 1989 ; Sandel 1982 ; Taylor 1985 ; Williams 2005 ). Young, in particular, criticizes such a view for misconceiving the ‘internal relations[s] among persons … relevant to considerations of justice’ (Young 1990 , p. 18). As an alternative to such a view of the individual, she argues that individuals are social beings whose identity is constituted by the affinity groups to which they belong. Thus, someone’s interests and ends are determined partially by their social identity as given by their group, and partially by the interaction of their group with other groups. Young’s position is diametrically opposed to that of Rawls, as she explicitly rejects his view of the individual who can be conceived apart from society and proposes an alternative vision of justice that takes the socially situated person as her starting point (Young 1991, pp. 15–33). It is therefore easy to conclude that Rawls and Young’s accounts are not only incommensurable but also incomparable, as his liberal individualism seemingly has nothing in common with her vision of identity politics. However, such a conclusion would be incorrect, as it overlooks an equivalence point that can serve as the basis for a ND argument, this being the issue of self-respect. For Rawls, self-respect relates to the sense that one’s life has value, and that one’s goals are worth pursuing, while for Young it relates to the affirmation of one’s identity such that a person no longer judges themselves by criteria imposed by others (Rawls 1971, pp. 386–391; Young 1991, pp. 165–166). Despite their different positions—which needs to be accounted for—each not only takes self-respect to be a constitutive component of justice, they both consider it part of their description of what it means to be a person. Thus it is arguable that the views of Rawls and Young are morally equivalent, as there is no difference between their beliefs as regards the importance of self-respect.

One thing needs to be noted at this point. Although the preceding example is meant to indicate how comparisons can meaningfully proceed in a situation of incommensurability, it is clear that the conclusion concerning the moral equivalence of Rawls and Young’s views can be rephrased such that ‘same as’ replaces ‘no different.’ This should come as no surprise, for as mentioned earlier, SA and ND arguments both lead to the conclusion of moral equivalence, and this gives the appearance that they are synonymous in some way. But synonymy between the arguments should not obscure how different they can be. As seen previously, SA arguments primarily invoke similar factual content and take that to be proof of the equivalence. This is not the case with ND arguments. Ordinarily, the phrase ‘is no different than’ comes during the course of a discussion where differences are being stressed. Typically, such discussions require that time be taken to rule out the respects in which the positions differ if one wants to claim equivalence. Thus, what needs stressing is how ND arguments arise in a discursive context that places less emphasis upon shared beliefs than upon differences or even marginalizes the prospect of there actually being shared beliefs. That is, the recourse to a ND argument rather than a SA argument is a function of the larger discussion within which the claim of moral equivalence is made. In those instances, the discussion is such that the differences between moral positions have been emphasized to the point that seeing the positions as equivalent is problematic, if not impossible. It is easy to imagine how in the wake of the recession of 2008 many would dismiss the suggestion that Marxism and neo-liberalism are morally equivalent. To make the claim fully one would need to consider the things that had been said that purportedly distinguish the two to the exclusion of moral equivalence, and then make an argument that addresses these differences as well as justifies the equivalence. In this respect, ND arguments are potentially more complex, as they involve issues that SA arguments do not.

That the discursive context matters for distinguishing ND arguments from SA arguments draws attention to a final issue that concerns the role of the equivalence point. As seen, the equivalence point provides the basis for the comparison that justifies a claim of equivalence. Yet how does one select an equivalence point? In keeping with what has been said, the context is what counts. Claims of equivalence generally arise during the course of discussions that invite comparisons. Whether the equivalence point is one that satisfies a SA argument or ND argument will turn upon the larger context of the discussion itself, and how that discussion has unfolded in a way that generates an argument about moral equivalence. As a result, there is a degree of arbitrariness that attends the determination of moral equivalence, something which implies that the determination of moral equivalence is somewhat subjective. Because the equivalence point is determined by the immediate context of discussion, its selection will seemingly reflect whatever comparison a given interlocutor wants. Such a possibility seems ineradicable for the determination of moral equivalence as I conceptualize it. However, there is one limit to how arbitrary an equivalence point can be, and this limit is set by its factual content. As will be seen in the next section, factual descriptions which are untrue cannot ground a claim of moral equivalence and serve as the basis for distinguishing false equivalences. While it is the case that there is broad latitude in the selection of an equivalence point, it is not the case that every equivalence point suitably determines moral equivalence. Facts matter. How they matter serves as a means for conceptually distinguishing moral equivalence from false equivalence. Yet before I turn to these issues let me conclude this section with a restatement of the definition of moral equivalence. A more precise definition of moral equivalence is: options are morally equivalent when two or more sets of beliefs are either the same as or no different than one another in regards to their factual content as determined by a specific point of comparison . This definition expresses the complexity of moral equivalence, as well as draws attention to the core components of the concept. It therefore renders more explicit a type of claim that is otherwise easy to treat as self-evident. What such explicitness leads to will be the subject of the remaining sections of the essay.

The issue of false equivalence

Claims of false equivalence can be no less puzzling than claims of moral equivalence. What exactly does it mean to say that a statement asserts a false equivalence? Is it that the particular claim of moral equivalence is false? Or is there something about the two options such that any claim of equivalence is false? If the former is what is meant, then it might be possible to reformulate the claim of moral equivalence so that it is true—perhaps by selecting a different equivalence point or using different arguments. If the latter is what is meant, then it is necessary to clarify the sources that preclude any claim of moral equivalence. It seems certain that there are times when a claim of moral equivalence is rejected as false not because of a weak equivalence point or poor arguments, but because something about the content of the options precludes comparison. Such, for example, is the case with President Trump’s statement that there were ‘very fine people on both sides’ of the 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. The rejection of his statement as a false equivalence is not because it involved a poorly chosen point of comparison—that if he’d compared both sides according to something other than ‘fine people’ the moral equivalence would have held true. Rather, the rejection of his statement turns upon the status of the options themselves, in particular that the beliefs of white supremacists cannot ground an argument for moral equivalence with those of the counter-protesters. Such a judgment of false equivalence raises deeper issues than the narrower judgment that a particular claim of moral equivalence is false. It seems, then, that the clarification of false equivalence requires distinguishing the different senses of the concept and how it applies.

Let me start with the more limited claims of false equivalence. The issue here is that such claims are not meant to suggest that there is no possible moral equivalence at all. Rather, such claims primarily refer to the particular judgment itself. As noted, the objection can be in terms of the equivalence point, which is thought to be incorrect in light of the broader discussion, or it can be in terms of the arguments that are used to defend the equivalence point. For example, such might be the case regarding a claim that asserts a moral equivalence between beliefs about the use of tobacco and cannabis. To an argument that there is no difference between tobacco and cannabis regarding their harmful effects, one might reply that this is a false equivalence, since studies have shown that cannabis has some medicinal value whereas tobacco does not. However, it may prove to be the case that the harmful effects of cannabis are morally equivalent to those of tobacco when cannabis is consumed by vaping rather than cigarettes. Or the two might be morally equivalent when one considers their environmental impact: the cultivation of each requires the use of powerful pesticides, something that is detrimental to the broader ecosystem. The point is that while the initial claim of moral equivalence between tobacco and cannabis is a false equivalence, they might still be found to be morally equivalent depending on how the supporting arguments are revised (a shift from the harmful effects of cigarettes to those of vaping) or a new equivalence point (environmental consequences). That is, the conclusion of false equivalence regarding the initial argument does not preclude a reconsideration of it which where the purported moral equivalence might hold true.

The more difficult cases are those that involve stronger claims of false equivalence. Here, there is a judgment that something about the options precludes comparing them in terms of equivalence. The issue is that the factual content of one of the options undercuts the option’s viability for an equivalence comparison. In particular, the descriptive content of a fact is found to be untrue, and this extends to the belief that the fact is taken to justify. Two things draw together at this point: the nature of the description and the issue of reference. That the two are logically distinct is clear when one reflects upon the case of fiction; a fictional description does not necessarily require a direct reference to anything else. A description of a dragon does not require that there be dragons. Yet with factual descriptions, the situation is different. As noted earlier, factual descriptions are ostensive. This indicates that factual descriptions point to something beyond the description itself and signals that they depend upon a form of direct reference at some level. Although there may not need to be actual dragons to describe a dragon in a story, a factual description necessarily requires that there be something corresponding to the description. If not, the ‘fact’ is not actually a fact, while the belief that depends upon it is unjustified. Thus, the role of reference is important here, for if the description ultimately refers to something that is untrue, then the fact will be untrue. Yet how does one know that a factual description is correct? Matters concerning the content of factual descriptions, as well as their social dimensions, become pertinent at this point. Formally speaking, factual descriptions are descriptions with ostension and depend upon theoretical edifices that are intersubjective. The combination of these two issues—ostension and intersubjectivity—provides the means to determine whether or not a factual description is true.

As regards the issue of ostension, I have said that facts are descriptions that point to something. There are two ways to understand how facts provide such descriptions: empirically or propositionally. Empirically, the idea is that facts point to a world that is external to the individual and thereby provide the material upon which theories are built. From this perspective, factual descriptions depend upon sensory impressions, as the senses are the means to experience external objects. Similarly, factual descriptions can be regarded as true or untrue depending on whether or not they accord with what the senses determine. For example, such seems to be the account of facts that underlies Ayer’s views about verification, wherein a statement of fact can be considered true to the extent it ultimately can be verified by observation (Ayer 1952 ). That methods of observation may fail to verify the certainty of factual claims weakens a strictly empirical account of facts, as does the recognition that some facts (like those concerning history) do not directly depend upon the senses to be proven true. Thus arises the alternative view of facts—the propositional account—where factual descriptions are taken to be less about the correspondence between a statement and the external world and more about the relations of propositions. Wittgenstein’s statement that facts are ‘states of affairs’ seemingly treats facts in this way, as ‘states of affairs’ refers to the relations between statements about things (Wittgenstein 2001 ). The significance of Wittgenstein’s insight is that it leads to a consideration of how facts arise within the context of theories, something that directs attention to their intersubjective nature.

To speak of facts as being ‘intersubjective’ is to highlight how they not only point to an external reality but demarcate a theory whose proponents share a particular position. Thus, the affirmation of certain facts reflects a disposition to participate in a given theoretical discourse: one signals an acceptance of the descriptions and beliefs of a given theory and thereby becomes a participant in the discourse of that theory (c.f. Quine 1960). For present purposes, what is important is that the descriptions one accepts are those also accepted by other members of a discursive community. Confirmation of a factual description is not given solely by an ostension that corresponds to an external world, but by an ostension that others affirm. In other words, factual descriptions are those whose ostension is publicly grounded. This then provides the basis by which individuals may debate, criticize, refine, and accept the beliefs such descriptions are thought to entail. When a factual claim is made, others then have the opportunity to investigate it. What are accepted as facts are ostensive claims that others generally agree upon. In this regard, consistency combines with correspondence as the main means of testing factual descriptions: are the factual claims consistent with what is commonly held to correspond to reality? If so, then they are accepted—if not, they are rejected.

So far as the determination of the stronger form of false equivalence goes, the ground for such judgments turns upon the intersubjectively affirmed ostensions of factual descriptions. The issue here is how the descriptions underlying one set of beliefs are untrue, and how this renders the comparison ‘false.’ Because the factual descriptions are untrue, the beliefs they ground are taken as untrue as well. Thus, the falsity of the factual descriptions disqualifies the related set of beliefs as potential options of an equivalence comparison. Simply enough, individuals are not disposed to acknowledge those ostensive descriptions that are demonstrably untrue, and similarly unwilling to countenance a comparison that places false moral claims on a level with true ones. The resistance stems from the truth content of the moral beliefs, for which one set of beliefs is judged lacking. This, I believe, captures the rejection of Trump’s statement about Charlottesville, for the beliefs of the white supremacists are grounded upon untrue factual descriptions. Whether it is the purported moral superiority of Caucasians or the claim of an unfolding genocide against Caucasians within the United States, the factual basis of their beliefs is falsifiable. The outrage that Trump’s comment sparked was more than an emotional outburst at a provocative claim; it was a stronger refusal to admit that the beliefs of one side qualify as genuinely true beliefs. Hence, the rejection of his statement as a false equivalence is best understood as a denial that one side had legitimate standing as set of moral beliefs. Similarly, the beliefs of the anti-vaccination movement cannot justify claims of moral equivalence, as the factual basis for the anti-vaccination position has been proven to be untrue. As with the statement concerning protesters in Charlottesville, the facts of the matter decisively preclude the determination of moral equivalence for any comparison between ‘anti-vaxxers’ and proponents of vaccinations.

Yet at this point it seems plausible to ask: if the ostension of factual descriptions are intersubjective, does this not mean that there are a variety of epistemic communities, each with its own set of factually grounded beliefs? If so, does this not introduce into the discussion a version of epistemic relativism—where all perspectives are true—that defeats any attempt to determine false equivalence? I do not believe so, for it is the interplay between the ostension and intersubjective elements of factual descriptions that comprise their being termed a ‘fact,’ not simply their intersubjectivity. To highlight one while ignoring the other is to provide an account of facts that distorts what they are, and although the interaction between the two can be difficult to specify precisely, it remains possible to provide a general sense of how they work together. While it is true that different groups often justify their beliefs according to different factual claims, it does not logically follow that every description actually warrants being called a ‘fact,’ no matter how many individuals say that it is. Similarly, a diversity of epistemic communities does not preclude convergence upon a particular factual description, and it might actually be the case that such convergence is necessitated by the ostensive content of a given description. For an example of these things, consider the recent presidential election in the United States. President Trump said that widespread fraud was the cause of his defeat and repeated certain claims circulating on the internet as evidence of this, including allegations that millions of mail-in ballots had been cast illegally. Such claims were parroted by many of his more fervent supporters—including his lawyers—who thought they were evidence that the election results should be overturned. For them, these claims were ‘facts’ and can certainly be said to have met the intersubjective condition of factual descriptions as I have laid it out. Should they not be regarded as ‘true?’ I think not, for the ostensive content of these claims was falsifiable, hence they exhibited anything but factual descriptions. Journalists, judges, the Department of Justice, and state electoral boards each repudiated Trump’s allegations because they did not describe anything that had actually occurred or existed. Put differently, the purported ‘facts’ did not refer to reality. What is also notable about this is how each of these actors used different techniques to disprove Trump’s claims: the methods of investigative journalism were not the same as those used in courts regarding permissible evidence, while the analysis of the Department of Justice differed from that of state-level audits of the vote. The point is that while each can be said to be a distinct group with its own criteria of what counts as a fact, each nevertheless converged on the same conclusion for primarily the same reason, this being that the claims offered by Trump lacked ostensive content. To paraphrase Justice Bibas (who helped preside over one of the court cases), simply saying something is a fact does not make it so. Footnote 7 Instead, it is the combination of the ostension and intersubjective elements together that qualify factual descriptions as true. While different groups often refer to different descriptions to justify their beliefs, it is clear that something more than the intersubjective affirmation of a description is necessary for a fact to qualify as true. As Quine intimates, there is an ‘objective pull’ that makes itself known in ‘intersubjectively conspicuous circumstances,’ and this helps overcome the tendency to epistemic relativism (Quine 1960). I will say more about what else is required in the next section, but for now I will simply suggest that there are boundaries to what can be called a fact, and these boundaries refer to things external to the individual or whatever group they might belong to. It is this that allows one to discriminate a diversity of descriptions that are suitable for equivalence claims from those that are not. Footnote 8

At this point, some further questions arise given the consequences of the stronger form of false equivalence. As familiarity with the examples mentioned suggests, those subject to the claim of false equivalence often will not concede that their beliefs rest upon an untrue factual foundation. How then does false equivalence relate to matters of disputation and disagreement? And what are the more general implications of false equivalence for comparative judgment? That some would deny a judgment of false equivalence when it goes against their personal beliefs may indicate that the stronger form of false equivalence expresses nothing but a subjective evaluation. It is easy to see, from this perspective, how a judgment of false equivalence might actually fuel disagreement between individuals, as those subject to a negative assessment of false equivalence reject its conclusions. As undesirable as such a consequence is for anyone concerned with the relation of moral belief to truth, it is a potentially unavoidable outcome. If someone refuses to countenance arguments that demonstrate the falsity of their beliefs, then there is not much another person can do as a matter of further deliberation. A stubborn refusal to acknowledge that one’s beliefs are incorrect is ultimately a problem that debates about moral and false equivalence cannot rectify, as an obstinate inability to admit error renders futile further argumentation. To this extent, the limits of claims of moral or false equivalence as I have set them out become clear. For there are those who will not accept either the evidence of their senses or the testimony of the community within which they are a part, no matter how false their beliefs are proven to be.

Regarding the implications of the stronger form of false equivalence more generally, here the issue is how a judgment of false equivalence entails a form of incomparability. As noted, the stronger form of false equivalence disqualifies one of the two options for purposes of comparison because of its reliance upon untrue factual descriptions. The significance of this can be drawn out by comparing it to what has been characterized as ‘emphatic incomparability,’ where options are judged as incomparable because one is valued so much more than the other (Chang 2002 ; Griffin 1997 ). Emphatic incomparability focuses upon the intrinsic features of the options themselves, one of which is regarded as immeasurably greater than the other. The loss of a loved one, for example, cannot compare to the pain of stubbing one’s toe, while joy that attends the birth of a child is incomparable to that of the pleasure of finding a good parking space. The assumption underlying emphatic incomparability is that one of the options so far exceeds the other that incomparability results. What needs noting, however, is how emphatic incomparability reaffirms the intrinsic features of the options. Stubbing one’s toe does hurt, just in way that cannot compare with the loss of a loved one. So too finding a good parking space can be pleasurable, but not in any way that compares with the birth of one’s child. Indeed, emphatic incomparability does not touch upon the veracity of the options at all; it merely holds that one is exceedingly greater than the other. This is not the form of incomparability that follows the determination of false equivalence. Here, the incomparability results from the falsity of one of the options. The inquiry into the factual content of the positions leads to the determination that one of them is grounded upon untrue descriptions, and this undermines the position as a whole. Incomparability in this instance does not leave things as they were, with the constitutive features of the options left untouched. Instead, incomparability results from a judgment of the options’ constitutive features that finds one of the options fully lacking. Where the emphatic form of incomparability does not necessarily call into question the characteristics of the options it applies to, the strong form of false equivalence does. In this, the implications of the stronger form of false equivalence depart notably from what otherwise appears to be a similar phenomenon.

Moral equivalence, truth, and comparative judgment

My argument thus far is that facts are descriptions taken as true, and that they consequently justify our beliefs. The significance of this is that claims of moral and false equivalence ultimately involve judgments of these facts that turn upon their truth content. This is potentially problematic, as some do not take a concept of truth to be essential to settling certain questions of political debate. Such is the case, for example, with Rawls, who disavows any reliance upon the concept of truth in Political Liberalism . Rawls’ position turns upon his reception of constructivism, whereby our view of the world is constituted by theories or practices that we assemble and connect ourselves (Rawls 2005 ). Two of the most influential forms of constructivism—Kantian and Political—tend to share the basic assumption that human beings are the source of the criteria used for moral judgment, although each provides different ways of explaining this. Footnote 9 Both grant individuals the central role in forging the conditions of moral evaluation through an account of practical reason and what it supposedly entails. However, Kantian constructivism is taken to involve metaphysical claims that Political constructivism attempts to avoid (e.g., Korsgaard 1996 ). Indeed, according to Rawls, the scope of Political constructivism is limited to the ‘political values that characterize the political’ (Rawls 2005 ). Where Kantian constructivism makes stronger claims about the order of moral value—particularly as regards the foundational role of autonomy—Political constructivism ‘pass[es] over what this foundation might be’ (Rawls 2005 ). Yet no matter which form constructivism takes, it attributes agency to individuals in the determination of truth and morality. In essence, judgments concerning truth and morality reflect criteria we ourselves fashion and have control over. While there is much to constructivist views that I find sympathetic, I find constructivist accounts of practical reason neither fully convincing nor entirely accurate regarding truth and its relation to morality. Thus, for this final section, I will draw out what I take to be some of the further implications of moral equivalence as I have presented it.

As seen from my discussion, comparative judgment plays a substantive role in certain types of moral evaluation. From this perspective, there are particular situations where understanding moral decision-making as the application of principles misconstrues the choice one faces. Rather than making a decision based on what principles are thought to entail, the choice depends upon a consideration of the options relative to one another. Such considerations can be stated in superlative terms (e.g., better/worse, greater than/less than, larger/smaller) or in terms of similarity (e.g., same as/different than). The thing to note here is that the form of reasoning involved in comparative judgment is not one that follows the form of practical reason that Kantian or Political constructivism do. Rather than stipulating certain concepts that are taken to be inseparably a part of practical reasoning—such as autonomy—and then deducing from them further concepts or principles, comparative judgment proceeds differently. The difference is this: the decision is grounded in the particular features of the options as regards the situation that prompts the comparison. Such a form of decision-making ties the choice to its context in a very direct way, something that obviates any criticism that comparative judgment is too abstract or detached from experience.

The contextual nature of comparative evaluation foregrounds the complexity of comparative judgment. Comparisons are made in reference to the options or objects being compared, and the final judgment must take the features of each into account. Although one may compare according to a principle—or rule that serves the role of a metric—the features of the objects and the context of the comparison help determine the suitability of its application. One does not apply a principle for purposes of comparative evaluation without it being appropriate for that comparison. While it is possible to argue that a principle determines the options of comparison, it is hard to see how this can be defended without falling into circularity: the principle selects the options of comparison according to the principle itself. At some point, it becomes clear that something beyond the principle needs to be taken into consideration for the comparison to be fully intelligible. To this extent, the context of the comparison is especially significant, as the context helps to generate the reasons for the comparison. In the case of moral equivalence, context is provided partially by the equivalence point and partially by the fact that the comparison is a specifically moral comparison. Regarding the context provided by the equivalence point, given that the determination of moral equivalence involves a comparison of the factual content that helps to justify beliefs, there is a potential touchpoint with the world external to those beliefs. Our beliefs are held about things, and these beliefs cannot be explained away as being solely mental states without inviting solipsism. Indeed, part of the way we determine whether or not a belief is valid—as opposed to a neurosis or psychosis—is by judging how well it seems to accord with the world. The descriptive content of the belief—what I have termed its factual content—becomes part of the basis for establishing whether or not it is true. In the case of moral equivalence, the object of our beliefs partially consists of what the facts give us reason to believe about what is moral. More specifically, our beliefs are based upon descriptions about the well-being of ourselves and others. Here arise the particularly moral considerations of judgments of moral equivalence, as the equivalence point is one that encompasses the relevant sorts of beliefs, ones which contain factual descriptions that are morally pertinent.

That factual descriptions have moral significance is one of the points that more fully clarifies the implications of moral equivalence and comparative judgment. As I have indicated previously, facts have normative import for beliefs, and this is the case for moral beliefs as well as non-moral ones. The significance of this for my discussion is that the factual descriptions that are morally pertinent refer to objects or options external to the individual. The potential controversy here is that such a statement suggests that my account of moral equivalence depends upon a form of ethical naturalism. As I understand ethical naturalism, it involves an account of nature in which nature has a morally normative dimension. Ethical naturalism lends itself to criticism since the idea that nature is ‘morally loaded,’ as it were, seems suspect. I have already indicated why I do not find such concerns compelling, for the sharp discrimination between fact and value that underlies them does not stand up upon scrutiny. Again, I take facts and values to be entangled, and their entanglement subverts the fact/value dichotomy. Given this, ethical naturalism remains a plausible position, and in the case of moral equivalence helps clarify some of its key features. What it particularly illuminates is how facts can be understood as ostensive descriptions of an external world that guide our moral beliefs. Let me explain.

Ethical naturalism tends to hold that moral properties are related to natural ones, and that this relation is determined by how moral predicates are found to match with natural ones through a process of direct reference and semantics. According to Brink, ethical naturalism regards moral properties as constituted by natural ones much as a sculpted statue is constituted by its material. As he explains it, one speaks of a ‘bronze statue’ without claiming an identity of meaning between ‘statue’ and ‘bronze.’ Rather, the constitution of the statue in bronze allows us to distinguish both the statue qua statue and its material, while the meaningfulness of the term ‘bronze statue’ requires referring to both (Brink 2001 ). Thus, the direct reference is to the statue which is made of bronze, while the semantic meaning draws upon our familiarity with the terms in light of that reference. Such familiarity highlights the social dimension of moral terms, as the semantic meaning arises within the context of a community of speakers. Obviously, this opens the door to constructivist views about how social meaning is constituted by individuals, but the point I want to emphasize is how such meaning ultimately points to something beyond individuals. No matter how much agency individuals may have in fashioning the theories or concepts used to understand the world, such things derive their fullest meaning insofar as they accurately refer to the world. Even Rawls concedes this point when he states, ‘[n]o constructive views … say that the facts that are relevant in practical reasoning and judgment are constructed’ (Rawls 2005 ). Indeed, Searle makes a similar concession in The Social Construction of Reality when he says, ‘the whole point of having the notion of a “fact” is to have a notion for that which stands outside the statement but which makes it true …’ (Searle 1995 ). Such admissions are significant, for they underscore the boundaries of constructivist approaches while intimating the importance of an approach that is sensitive to the features of ethical naturalism. If facts are relevant to how practical reason constructs its account of the world, as Rawls and Searle claim, then the suggestion is that practical reason responds to the world as much as assembles it. This pushes the focus toward reflection upon what the natural world actually is, or, put differently, pushes the focus toward reflection upon the way moral terms refer.

There are many things that can be the subject of what moral terms refer to. Mental states, historical customs, individual character, habituated behavior, socio-economic class, gender, and the conditions of rational reflection can all serve to provide the content of moral terminology. What I want to highlight, however, is how each of these potential subjects of reference depends upon descriptive language that is factual as I understand it. For instance, virtue ethics and expressivist approaches contain descriptions of character that are normative in intent, while rationalist and decision theories do the same with their accounts of reason, and feminist and historical approaches do so as well with their view of the person as an embedded being. The point of noting this is to clarify how moral theories utilize concepts that refer, at some point, to the empirically given world, and that these references contain descriptions that are taken as empirically true. For example, we are rational agents—we are gendered beings—we are the products of custom and tradition. Yet each of these statements not only articulates a starting assumption for a particular position; it also contains a description of the world that proves to be morally normative. Thus, as rational actors we not only do, but should maximize our preferences—as gendered beings we not only do, but should attend to our bodily integrity—as historically embedded beings we not only do, but should act according to received tradition. The description carries with it a morally normative proposition that it is not meant to be divorced from. Decision theorists do not describe individuals as rational actors for the purpose of prescribing irrational action—feminists do not describe individuals as gendered beings for the purpose of neglecting gender—historicists do not describe individuals as historically embedded so that they ignore tradition. The power of the description lies in how its content supposedly reflects the world, and how this combines with its normative vision. Accordingly, moral descriptions are evaluated both for how accurately they do reflect the world, as well as for whether their normative implications consistently follow.

Here lies the insight of ethical naturalism: it highlights the fact that our moral discourse cannot dispense with references to the world, which means that our moral discourse must contain factual descriptions that are not only normatively significant, but also accurate. At this point, the importance of the notion of truth arises, for factual descriptions that refer accurately to what they describe provide a measure of determining what is morally correct. Descriptions that do not accurately refer to what they describe—factual descriptions which are false or untrue—discredit the moral beliefs they supposedly ground. In this way, truth has an intrinsic role to play in moral reasoning, one that requires that moral beliefs be responsive to the world. Although it is undeniably the case that individuals have agency in articulating the descriptions used to refer to the world, it also remains the case that the truth of such descriptions is not independent of the accuracy of their reference. We cannot simply believe whatever we wish to believe without falling into error. Similarly, we cannot specify moral beliefs that are descriptively and normatively adrift from the world without also falling into error. No matter how much agency we have in constructing or assembling our moral theories, they must describe the world we experience correctly; otherwise, they will fail to guide us normatively. To the extent, then, that moral and false equivalence involve claims of truth, sensitivity to the issues raised by ethical naturalism is requisite to their assertion. And, to the extent that moral and false equivalence are also tied to comparative judgment, it is important to explore more fully how comparative judgment functions within the context of moral evaluation. As I have indicated, comparative judgment enjoins a different set of issues regarding moral reasoning than those frequently found in discussions concerning constructivism, and these issues require a fuller recognition of not just the limits of constructivist views, but of the various ways moral evaluation proceeds.

The study of moral equivalence invites reflection upon a variety of issues, ranging from the role of comparative judgment in moral evaluation to the relation of truth in moral deliberation. As I have argued, central to these reflections are factual descriptions, as facts have a role to play in the determination of moral beliefs, and moral beliefs are the subject of moral equivalence as I have investigated it. It remains to be seen how moral equivalence might apply to acts and their consequences, but I do not think that an account of moral equivalence in terms of acts or consequences will depart too far from what I have said here. For acts will undoubtedly have ties to facts, insofar as acts unfold in relation to an external world, the description of which is what facts contain. Similarly, it seems to me, for the consequences of actions. What this suggests is that new attention needs to be given to what facts are, and how they relate to morality. Upon deeper inquiry, the traditional claim that a logical distinction exists between facts and values, and that this distinction entails some sort of insurmountable chasm between the two, does not seem to withstand scrutiny. At least as I conceptualize it, moral equivalence provides one means of thinking more fully about these issues.

Moral equivalence also invites extended consideration of another view of practical reason, one that is less procedural, or derivative of the so-called rationalist approaches that are inspired by the thought of Kant. While some work has been done on the significance of comparative judgment for moral evaluation, as I have noted, much of that work has been confined to issues of value incommensurability. As should be clear at this point, there is another form of comparative judgment that is also morally pertinent, one that focuses upon determining similarities and differences. The suggestion here is twofold: first, that comparative judgment plays a larger role in moral evaluation than commonly thought, and second, that comparative judgment is itself more complex than ordinarily realized. A much fuller exposition of the role of comparative judgment would take up these issues more completely than I have attempted here and provide a more precise account of how the different forms of comparative judgment relate to one another.

Ultimately, that moral equivalence might serve as a vehicle to consider more deeply the role of facts in moral deliberation, as well as the significance of comparative judgment, indicates the importance of getting clear on what claims of moral equivalence involve. As seen, there are significant issues at stake when a claim of moral equivalence is made, and these issues deserve exploration. Although others might provide a different interpretation of the subjects raised here, I believe my account offers a suitable starting point for the investigation of an extraordinarily rich constellation of ideas. At the very least, I have shown that there is more to the matter of moral equivalence than what might be commonly thought, and that whatever the concept of moral equivalence can be said to be, it undeniably warrants closer attention.

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The term ‘moral equivalence’ occurs in passing mention across a variety of fields, including not only international relations but also public health, bioethics, and food production. However, perusal of essays wherein ‘moral equivalence’ is mentioned reveals an abbreviated treatment of the concept. The absence of a deep-dive study into the concept of moral equivalence is truly striking, and serves as a justification for what I will attempt here. For a sample of how the term is usually treated, see: Hamilton ( 2004 ), Hershenov ( 2008 ), Lichtenberg ( 1982 ), Melvern ( 2018 ) and Trauger and Andrew ( 2013 ).

By ‘option’ I mean the things selected for comparison to establish equivalence. While ‘option’ may be a somewhat vague term, it seems more suitable for my argument than other terms such as ‘object,’ which suggests an actual physical thing, or ‘subject,’ which is even more ambiguous, suggesting as it does either a person (such as the ‘subject’ of a medical study) or the connotation of broad fields of study (such as the ‘subject of history’). Some degree of vagueness is unfortunately unavoidable for the provision of a general definition, but as should become clear from my discussion, ‘option’ is the term that best fits my discussion. As will be seen, some degree of choice underlies the selection of what is being compared, and ‘option’ seems to best express this.

This is in keeping with the standard philosophical account of what a belief is, which characterizes a belief as having three components: propositional content that can be assessed as either true or false , and as justified or unjustified . According to the standard account, the propositional content of a belief ultimately depends upon the facts upon which it is based, which provide the means to assess it as true or false. See: Boghossian ( 2006 ).

Of course there are more types of phrases concerning facts than these two, which I have chosen simply to illustrate the issue. I do not think, however, that other formulations involving the use of the term ‘fact’ (or ‘facts’) will be different than what my account indicates.

Compare: Anscombe (1958) , Armstrong (2004), Austin (1979) , Baylis (1948) , Engels (2002) , Kratzer (2002) , Russell (1965) , and Searle (1995) .

For present purposes, I understand ‘moral’ to refer to those beliefs, acts, and consequences that are self- or other-regarding, and possess a normative dimension. What particularly distinguishes such beliefs, acts, and consequences as moral, and grounds their normativity, are their ties to an account of well-being. Such a view of what ‘moral’ means potentially relates it to human capacities or capabilities, and can have the aim of encouraging the development of those capacities. More, these capacities allow for a consideration of virtue and vice, as well as the use of reason. There may be other ways of delineating what ‘moral’ means, but for present purposes the above is how I will use the term. I believe it is broad enough to capture the diversity of particular moral beliefs and acts that are evident in the world, and suitable for the purpose of clarifying the concept of moral equivalence.

The actual statement was: ‘But calling an election unfair does not make it so.’ ( Trump v Boockvar 2020).

If the concern is the logical issue of self-contradiction (that I cannot claim that facts are intersubjectively determined and then critique those whose facts differ from mine without contradicting myself), then the fear is misplaced. It remains possible to say that different groups articulate beliefs with regard to different facts, while parsing these facts to determine whether or not they correspond to anything real. It would only be a logical contradiction if I claimed that facts were completely determined intersubjectively and yet still insisted that some beliefs are erroneous. But as should be clear, this is not the claim I am making. The determination of facts is not a binary choice between either ‘correspondence to reality’ or ‘intersubjectively agreed upon descriptions,’ but some combination of the two that is a bit more blurry around the boundaries than we might want. Nevertheless, despite such blurriness, we seem able to specify well enough when something is a fact and when it is not. It is indisputably the case that sometimes people hold erroneous beliefs based upon mistaken descriptions. Someone in the medieval period who believed in a geocentric universe did not have a set of facts that are as true as those of a heliocentric conception; they had a set of erroneous beliefs grounded upon an incorrect description of the world. Similarly, someone who believes in white supremacy does not hold views that are as true as those who reject racism, but a set of deeply mistaken beliefs grounded upon very incorrect factual descriptions. Facts are open to interpretation and we do debate about their significance—but not every description qualifies as a fact. Some descriptions are simply wrong, consisting of misdescriptions, errors, or lies. The ostensive content of the description—that facts refer to something beyond their intersubjective affirmation—is part of what allows is to make such judgments.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mark Brawley, James Devine, Loralea Michaelis, and Matthew Palynchuck for their comments during conversations in which I discussed some of the issues in this paper.

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Ferrell, J. On moral equivalence. SN Soc Sci 1 , 64 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00070-4

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Moral Responsibility

Making judgments about whether a person is morally responsible for her behavior, and holding others and ourselves responsible for actions and the consequences of actions, is a fundamental and familiar part of our moral practices and our interpersonal relationships.

The judgment that a person is morally responsible for her behavior involves—at least to a first approximation—attributing certain powers and capacities to that person, and viewing her behavior as arising (in the right way) from the fact that the person has, and has exercised, these powers and capacities. Whatever the correct account of the powers and capacities at issue (and canvassing different accounts is the task of this entry), their possession qualifies an agent as morally responsible in a general sense: that is, as one who may be morally responsible for particular exercises of agency. Normal adult human beings may possess the powers and capacities in question, and non-human animals, very young children, and those suffering from severe developmental disabilities or dementia (to give a few examples) are generally taken to lack them.

To hold someone responsible involves—again, to a first approximation—responding to that person in ways that are made appropriate by the judgment that she is morally responsible. These responses often constitute instances of moral praise or moral blame (though there may be reason to allow for morally responsible behavior that is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy: see McKenna 2012: 16–17 and M. Zimmerman 1988: 61–62). Blame is a response that may follow on the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is wrong or bad, and praise is a response that may follow on the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is right or good.

It should be noted at the outset that the above schema, while useful, may be misleading in certain respects. For one thing, it suggests a correspondence and symmetry between praise and blame that may not exist. The two are certainly asymmetrical insofar as the attention given to blame far exceeds that given to praise. One reason for this is that blameworthiness, unlike praiseworthiness, is often taken to involve liability to a sanction. Thus, articulating the conditions of blameworthiness may seem to theorists the more pressing matter. Perhaps for related reasons, there is a richer language for expressing blame than praise (Watson 1996 [2004: 283]), and “blame” finds its way into idioms for which there is no ready parallel employing “praise”: compare “ S is to blame for x ” and “ S is to praise for x ”. Note, as well, that “holding responsible” is itself not a neutral expression: it typically arises in blaming contexts (Watson 1996 [2004: 284]). Additionally, there may be asymmetries in the contexts in which praise and blame are appropriate: private blame is a more familiar phenomenon than private praise (Coates & Tognazzini 2013a), and while minor wrongs may reasonably earn blame, minimally decent behavior often seems insufficient for praise (see Eshleman 2014 for this and other differences between praise and blame). Finally, the widespread assumption that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are at least symmetrical in terms of the capacities they require has also been questioned (Nelkin 2008, 2011; Wolf 1980, 1990). Like most work on moral responsibility, this entry will tend to focus on the negative side of the phenomenon; for more, see the entry on blame .

A few other general observations about the concept of moral responsibility are in order before introducing particular conceptions of it. In everyday speech, one often hears references to people’s “moral responsibility” where the point is to indicate that a person has some duty or obligation—some responsibility —to which that person is required, by some standard, to attend. In this sense, we say, for example, that a lawyer has a responsibility (to behave in certain ways, according to certain standards) to his client. This entry, however, is concerned not with accounts that specify people’s responsibilities in the sense of duties and obligations, but rather with accounts of whether a person bears the right relation to her own actions, and their consequences, so as to be properly held accountable for them. (Unfortunately, this entry does not include discussion of some important topics related to moral responsibility, such as responsibility for omissions (see Clarke 2014, Fischer & Ravizza 1998, and Nelkin & Rickless 2017a) or collective responsibility (see the entry on collective responsibility and Volumes 30 and 38 of Midwest Studies in Philosophy ).

Moral responsibility should also be distinguished from causal responsibility. Causation is a complicated topic, but it is often fairly clear that a person is causally responsible for—that is, she is the (or a) salient cause of—some occurrence or outcome. However, the powers and capacities that are required for moral responsibility are not identical with an agent’s causal powers, so we cannot infer moral responsibility from an assignment of causal responsibility. Young children, for example, can cause outcomes while failing to fulfill the requirements for general moral responsibility, in which case it will not be appropriate to judge them morally responsible for, or to hold them morally responsible for, the outcomes for which they may be causally responsible. And even generally morally responsible agents may explain or defend their behavior in ways that call into question their moral responsibility for outcomes for which they are causally responsible. Suppose that S causes an explosion by flipping a switch: the fact that S had no reason to expect such a consequence from flipping the switch might call into question his moral responsibility (or at least his blameworthiness) for the explosion without altering his causal contribution to it. Having distinguished different senses of responsibility, unless otherwise indicated, “responsibility” will refer to “moral responsibility” (in the sense defined here) throughout the rest of this entry.

Until fairly recently, the bulk of philosophical work on moral responsibility was conducted in the context of debates about free will, which largely concerned the various ways that (various sorts of) determinism might threaten free will and moral responsibility. A largely unquestioned assumption was that free will is required for moral responsibility, and the central questions had to do with the ingredients of free will and with whether their possession was compatible with determinism. Recently, however, the literature on moral responsibility has addressed issues that are of interest independently of worries about determinism. Much of this entry will deal with these latter aspects of the moral responsibility debate. However, it will be useful to begin with issues at the intersection of concerns about free will and moral responsibility.

1. Freedom, Responsibility, and Determinism

2.1 forward-looking accounts, 2.2.1 “freedom and resentment”, 2.2.2 criticisms of strawson’s approach, 2.3 reasons-responsiveness views, 3.1.1 attributability versus accountability, 3.1.2 attributionism, 3.1.3 answerability, 3.2.1 the moral competence condition on responsibility, 3.2.2 conversational approaches to responsibility, 3.2.3 psychopathy, 3.3.1 moral luck, 3.3.2 ultimate responsibility, 3.3.3 personal history and manipulation, 3.3.4 the epistemic condition on responsibility, other internet resources, related entries.

How is the responsible agent related to her actions; what power does she exercise over them? One (partial) answer is that the relevant power is a form of control, and, in particular, a form of control such that the agent could have done otherwise than to perform the action in question. This captures one commonsense notion of free will, and one of the central issues in debates about free will has been about whether possession of it (free will, in the ability-to-do-otherwise sense) is compatible with causal determinism (or with, for example, divine foreknowledge—see the entry on foreknowledge and free will ).

If causal determinism is true, then the occurrence of any event (including events involving human deliberation, choice, and action) that does in fact occur was made inevitable by—because it was causally necessitated by—the facts about the past (and the laws of nature) prior to the occurrence of the event. Under these conditions, the facts about the present, and about the future, are uniquely fixed by the facts about the past (and about the laws of nature): given these earlier facts, the present and the future can unfold in only one way. For more, see the entry on causal determinism .

If possession of free will requires an ability to act otherwise than one in fact does, then it is fairly easy to see why free will has often been regarded as incompatible with causal determinism. One way of getting at this incompatibilist worry is to focus on the way in which performance of a given action should be up to an agent if he has the sort of free will required for moral responsibility. As the influential Consequence Argument has it (Ginet 1966; van Inwagen 1983: 55–105; Wiggins 1973), the truth of determinism seems to entail that an agent’s actions are not up to him since they are the unavoidable consequences of things over which the agent lacks control. Here is an informal summary of this argument from Peter van Inwagen’s important book, An Essay on Free Will (1983):

If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us. (1983: 16)

For an important argument that suggests that the Consequence Argument conflates different senses in which the laws of nature are not up to us, see David Lewis (1981). For more on incompatibilism and incompatibilist arguments, see the entries on free will , arguments for incompatibilism , and incompatibilist (nondeterministic) theories of free will , as well as Randolph Clarke (2003).

Compatibilists maintain that free will (and/or moral responsibility) is possible even in a deterministic universe. Versions of compatibilism have been defended since ancient times. For example, the Stoics—Chryssipus, in particular—argued that the truth of determinism does not entail that human actions are entirely explained by factors external to agents; thus, human actions are not necessarily explained in a way that is incompatible with praise and blame (see Bobzien 1998 and Salles 2005 for Stoic views on freedom and determinism). Similarly, philosophers in the Modern period (such as Hobbes and Hume) distinguished the general way in which our actions are necessitated if determinism is true from the specific instances of necessity sometimes imposed on us by everyday constraints on our behavior (e.g., physical impediments that make it impossible to act as we choose). The difference is that the necessity involved in determinism is compatible with agents acting as they choose to act: even if S ’s behavior is causally determined, it may be behavior that she chooses to perform. And perhaps the ability that matters for free will (and responsibility) is just the ability to act as one chooses, which seems to require only the absence of external constraints (and not the absence of determinism).

This compatibilist tradition was carried into the twentieth century by logical positivists such A. J. Ayer (1954) and Moritz Schlick (1930 [1966]). Here is how Schlick expressed the central compatibilist insight in 1930 (drawing, in particular, on Hume):

Freedom means the opposite of compulsion; a man is free if he does not act under compulsion , and he is compelled or unfree when he is hindered from without…when he is locked up, or chained, or when someone forces him at the point of a gun to do what otherwise he would not do. (1930 [1966: 59])

Since deterministic causal pressures do not always force one to “do what otherwise he would not do”, freedom—at least of the sort specified by Schlick—is compatible with determinism.

A closely related compatibilist strategy, influential in the early and mid-twentieth century, was to offer a conditional analysis of the ability to do otherwise (Ayer 1954, Hobart 1934, Moore 1912; for earlier expressions, see Hobbes 1654 and Hume 1748). As just noted, even if determinism is true, agents may often act as they choose, and it is equally compatible with determinism that an agent who performed act A (on the basis of his choice to do so) might have performed a different action on the condition that (contrary to what actually happened) she had chosen to perform the other action. Even if a person’s actual behavior is causally determined by the actual past, it may be that if the past had been suitably different (e.g., if the person’s desires, intentions, choices, etc. had been different), then she would have acted differently. And perhaps this is all that the ability to do otherwise comes to: one can do otherwise if it is true that if one had chosen to do otherwise, then one would have done otherwise.

However, this compatibilist picture is open to serious objections. First, it might be granted that an ability to act as one sees fit is valuable, and perhaps related to the type of freedom at issue in the free will debate, but it does not follow that this is all that possession of free will comes to. A person who has certain desires as a result of indoctrination, brainwashing, or psychopathology may act as he chooses, but his free will and moral responsibility may still be called into question. (For more on the relevance of such factors, see §3.2 and §3.3.3 .) More specifically, the conditional analysis is open to the following sort of counterexample. It might be true that an agent who performs act A would have omitted A if she had so chosen, but it might also be true that the agent in question suffers from an overwhelming compulsion to perform act A . The conditional analysis suggests that the agent in question retains the ability to do otherwise than A , but, given her compulsion, it seems clear that she lacks this ability (Broad 1934, Chisholm 1964, Lehrer 1968, van Inwagen 1983). More generally, incompatibilists are likely to be dissatisfied with the conditional analysis since it fails to give an account of an ability that agents can have, right here and right now, to either perform or omit an action while holding everything about the here and now, and about the past, fixed.

Despite the above objections, the compatibilist project described so far has had significant lasting influence. As will be seen below, the fact that determined agents can act as they see fit is still an important inspiration for compatibilists, as is the fact that determined agents may have acted differently in counterfactual circumstances. For more, see the entry on compatibilism . For recent accounts related to (and improving upon) early compatibilist approaches, see Michael Fara (2008), Michael Smith (2003), and Kadri Vihvelin (2004), and for criticism of these accounts, see Randolph Clarke (2009).

Another influential trend in compatibilism has been to argue that moral responsibility does not require an ability to do otherwise. If this is right, then determinism would not threaten responsibility by ruling out access to behavioral alternatives (though determinism might threaten responsibility in other ways: see van Inwagen 1983: 182–88 and Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 151–168). In a very influential 1969 paper, Harry Frankfurt offers examples meant to show that an agent can be morally responsible for an action even if he could not have done otherwise. Versions of these examples are often called Frankfurt cases or Frankfurt examples . In the basic form of the example, an agent, Jones, considers a certain action. Another agent, Black, would like to see Jones perform this action and, if necessary, Black can make Jones perform it through some type of intervention in Jones’s deliberative process. However, as things transpire, Black does not intervene in Jones’s decision making since he can see that Jones will perform the action on his own and for his own reasons. Black does not intervene to ensure Jones’s action, but he could have, and he would have, had Jones showed some sign that he would not perform the action on his own. Therefore, Jones could not have done otherwise , yet he seems responsible for his behavior. After all, given Black’s non-intervention, Jones’s action is a perfectly ordinary bit of voluntary behavior.

There are questions about whether Frankfurt’s example really shows that Jones is morally responsible even though he couldn’t have done otherwise. For one thing, it may not be clear that Jones really couldn’t have done otherwise: while he performed the action on his own, there was the alternative that he perform the action due to some intervention on Black’s part, and not on his own. Furthermore, though he did not do so, Jones might have given Black some indication that he would not perform the action in question. Alternatively, an objection might be framed by asking how Black could be certain that Jones would or would not perform the action on his own. There seems to be a dilemma here. Perhaps determinism obtains in the universe of the example, and Black sees some sign that indicates the presence of factors that causally ensure that Jones will behave in a particular way. But in this case, incompatibilists are unlikely to grant that Jones is morally responsible if they think that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. On the other hand, perhaps determinism is not true in the universe of the example, but then it is not clear that the example excludes alternatives for Jones: if Jones’s behavior isn’t causally determined, then perhaps he can do otherwise. For objections to Frankfurt’s original example along these lines, see Carl Ginet (1996) and David Widerker (1995); for defenses of Frankfurt, see John M. Fischer (1994: 131–159; 2002; 2010); and for refined versions of Frankfurt’s example, meant to clearly deny Jones access to alternatives, see Alfred Mele and David Robb (1998), David Hunt (2000), and Derk Pereboom (2000; 2001: 18–28).

In response to criticisms such as the above, Frankfurt has said that his example was intended mainly to draw attention to the fact “that making an action unavoidable is not the same thing as bringing it about that the action is performed” (2006: 340; emphasis in original). In particular, while determinism may make an agent’s action unavoidable, it does not follow that the agent acts as he does only because determinism is true: it may also be true that he acts as he does because he wants to and because he sees reasons in favor of so acting. The point of his original example, Frankfurt suggests, was to draw attention to the significance that the actual causes of an agent’s behavior (such as her reasons and desires) can have independently of whether the agent might have done something else. Frankfurt concludes that “[w]hen a person acts for reasons of his own…the question of whether he could have done something else instead is quite irrelevant” for the purposes of assessing responsibility (2006: 340). A focus on the actual causes that lead to behavior, as well as investigation into when an agent can be said to act on her own reasons, has characterized a great deal of work on responsibility since Frankfurt’s essay (see §2.3 and §3.3.3 ).

2. Some Approaches to Moral Responsibility

This section discusses three important approaches to responsibility. Additional perspectives (attributionism, conversational theories, mesh or structural accounts, skeptical accounts, etc.) are introduced in more or less detail in the discussions of contemporary debates below.

Forward-looking approaches to moral responsibility justify responsibility practices by focusing on the beneficial consequences that can be obtained by engaging in these practices. This approach was influential in the earlier parts of the twentieth century (as well as before), had fallen out of favor by the closing decades of that century, and has recently been the subject of renewed interest.

Forward-looking perspectives tend to emphasize one of the central points discussed in the previous section: an agent’s being subject to determinism does not entail that he is subject to constraints that force him to act independently of his choices. If this is true, then, regardless of the truth of determinism, it may be useful to offer certain incentives to agents—to praise and blame them and generally to treat them as responsible—in order to encourage them to make certain choices and thus to secure positive behavioral outcomes.

According to some articulations of the forward-looking approach, to be a responsible agent is simply to be an agent whose motives, choices, and behavior can be shaped in this way. Thus, Moritz Schlick argued that

The question of who is responsible is the question concerning the correct point of application of the motive …. in this its meaning is completely exhausted; behind it lurks no mysterious connection between transgression and requital…. It is a matter only of knowing who is to be punished or rewarded, in order that punishment and reward function as such—be able to achieve their goal. (1930 [1966: 61]; emphasis in original)

And, according to Schlick, the goals of punishment and reward have nothing to do with the past: the idea that punishment “is a natural retaliation for past wrong, ought no longer to be defended in cultivated society” (1930 [1966: 60]; emphasis in original). Instead, punishment ought to be

concerned only with the institution of causes, of motives of conduct…. Analogously, in the case of reward we are concerned with an incentive. (1930 [1966: 60]; emphasis in original)

J. J. C. Smart (1961) also defended a well-known, forward-looking approach to moral responsibility in the mid-twentieth century. Smart claimed that to blame someone for a piece of behavior is simply to assess the behavior negatively (to “dispraise” it, in Smart’s terminology) while simultaneously ascribing responsibility for the behavior to the agent. And, for Smart, an ascription of responsibility merely involves taking an agent to be such that he would have omitted the behavior if he had been provided with a motive to do so. Whatever sanctions may follow on an ascription of responsibility are administered with eye to giving an agent motives to refrain from such behavior in the future.

Smart’s general approach has its contemporary defenders (Arneson 2003), but many have found it lacking in important ways. For one thing, as R. Jay Wallace notes, an approach like Smart’s “leaves out the underlying attitudinal aspect of moral blame” (Wallace 1996: 56, emphasis in original; see the next subsection for more on blaming attitudes). According to Wallace, the attitudes involved in blame are “backward-looking and focused on the individual agent who has done something morally wrong” (Wallace 1996: 56). But a forward-looking approach, with its focus on bringing about desirable outcomes

is not directed exclusively toward the individual agent who has done something morally wrong, but takes account of anyone else who is susceptible to being influenced by our responses. (Wallace 1996: 56; emphasis added)

In exceptional cases, a focus on beneficial outcomes may provide grounds for treating as blameworthy those who are known to be innocent (Smart 1973). This last feature of (some) forward-looking approaches has led to particularly strong criticism.

Recent efforts have been made to develop partially forward-looking accounts of responsibility that evade some of the criticisms mentioned above. These (somewhat revisionary) accounts justify our responsibility practices by appeal to their suitability for fostering moral agency and the acquisition of capacities required for such agency. Most notable in this regard is Manuel Vargas’s “agency cultivation model” of responsibility (2013; also see Jefferson 2019 and McGeer 2015). Recent conversational accounts of responsibility ( §3.2.2 ) also have an important forward-looking component insofar as they regard those with whom one might have fruitful moral interactions as candidates for responsibility. Some responsibility skeptics have also emphasized the forward-looking benefits of certain responsibility practices. For example, Derk Pereboom—who rejects desert-based blame—has argued that some conventional blaming practices can be maintained (even after ordinary notions of blameworthiness have been left behind) insofar as these practices are grounded in “non-desert invoking moral desiderata” such as “protection of potential victims, reconciliation to relationships both personal and with the moral community more generally, and moral formation” (2014: 134; also see Caruso 2016, Levy 2012, and Milam 2016). In contrast to some of the forward-looking approaches described above, Pereboom (2017) proposes that only those agents who have in fact acted immorally should be open to forward-aiming blaming practices. (For more on skepticism about responsibility, see §3.3 and the entry on skepticism about moral responsibility .)

2.2 The Reactive Attitudes Approach

P. F. Strawson’s 1962 paper, “Freedom and Resentment”, is a touchstone for much of the work on moral responsibility that followed it, especially the work of compatibilists. Strawson’s aim was to chart a course between incompatibilist accounts committed to a free will requirement on responsibility, and forward-looking compatibilist accounts that did not, in Strawson’s view, appropriately acknowledge and account for the interpersonal significance of the affective component of our responsibility practices. In contrast with forward-looking accounts such as J. J. C. Smart’s and Moritz Schlick’s ( §2.1 ), Strawson focuses directly on the emotions—the reactive attitudes—that play a fundamental role in our practices of holding one another responsible. Strawson’s suggestion is that attending to the logic of these emotional responses yields an account of what it is to be open to praise and blame that need not invoke the incompatibilist’s conception of free will. Indeed, Strawson’s view has been interpreted as suggesting that no metaphysical facts beyond our praising and blaming practices are needed to ground these practices.

Part of the novelty of Strawson’s approach is its emphasis on the “importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings” (1962 [1993: 48]) and on

how much it matters to us, whether the actions of other people…reflect attitudes towards us of goodwill, affection, or esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other. (1962 [1993: 49])

For Strawson, our practices of holding others responsible are largely responses to these things: that is, “to the quality of others’ wills towards us” (1962 [1993: 56]).

To get a sense of the importance of quality of will for our interpersonal relations, note the difference in your response to one who injures you accidentally as compared to how you respond to one who does you the same injury out of “contemptuous disregard” or “a malevolent wish to injure [you]” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 49]). The second case is likely to arouse a type and intensity of resentment that would not be (appropriately) felt in the first case. Corresponding points may be made about positive responses such as gratitude: you would likely not have the same feelings of gratitude toward a person who benefits you accidentally as you would toward one who does so out of concern for your welfare. The focus here is on personal reactive attitudes directed toward another on one’s own behalf, but Strawson also discusses “sympathetic or vicarious” attitudes felt on behalf of others, and “self-reactive attitudes” that an agent may direct toward herself (1962 [1993: 56–7]).

On Strawson’s view, the tendency to respond with relevant reactive attitudes to displays of good or ill will implicates a demand for moral respect and due regard. Indeed, for Strawson, “[t]he making of the demand is the proneness to such attitudes”, and the attitudes themselves are the “correlates of the moral demand in the case where the demand is felt to be disregarded” (1962 [1993: 63]; emphasis in original). Thus, among the circumstances that mollify a person’s (negative) reactive attitudes, are those which show that—despite initial appearances—the demand for due regard has not been ignored or flouted. When someone explains that the injury she caused you was entirely unforeseen and accidental, she indicates that her regard for your welfare was not insufficient and that she is therefore not an appropriate target for the negative attitudes involved in moral blame.

Note that the agent who excuses herself from blame in the above way is not calling into question her status as a generally responsible agent: she is still open to the demand for due regard and liable, in principle, to reactive responses. Other agents, however, may be inapt targets for blame and the reactive emotions precisely because they are not legitimate targets of a demand for regard. In these cases, an agent is not excused from blame, he is exempted from it: it is not that his behavior is discovered to have been non-malicious, but rather that he is seen to be one of whom better behavior cannot reasonably be demanded. (The widely-used terminology in which the above contrast is drawn—“excuses” versus “exemptions”—is due to Watson 1987 [2004]).

For Strawson, the most important group of exempt agents includes those who are, at least for a time, significantly impaired for normal interpersonal relationships. These agents may be children, or psychologically impaired like the “schizophrenic”; they may exhibit “purely compulsive behaviour”, or their minds may have “been systematically perverted” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 51]). Alternatively, exempt agents may simply be “wholly lacking…in moral sense” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 58]), perhaps because they suffered from “peculiarly unfortunate…formative circumstances” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 52]). These agents are not candidates for the range of emotional responses involved in our personal relationships because they do not participate in these relationships in the right way for such responses to be sensibly applied to them. Rather than taking up interpersonally-engaged attitudes (that presuppose a demand for respect) toward exempt agents, we instead take an objective attitude toward them. The exempt agent is not regarded “as a morally responsible agent…as a member of the moral community” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 59]); though he may be regarded as “an object of social policy” and as something “to be managed or handled or cured or trained” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 52]).

Strawson’s perspective has an important compatibilist upshot. We may be able, in limited circumstances, to take up a detached, objective perspective on the behavior of normal (that is, non-exempt) agents. But Strawson argues that we cannot take up with this perspective permanently, and certainly not on the basis of discovering that determinism is true:

The human commitment to participation in ordinary interpersonal relationships is, I think, too thoroughgoing and deeply rooted for us to take seriously the thought that a general theoretical conviction [e.g., about the truth of determinism] might so change our world that, in it, there were no longer any such things as interpersonal relationships as we normally understand them; and being involved in inter-personal relationships…precisely is being exposed to the range of reactive attitudes and feelings that is in question. (1962 [1993: 54])

More specifically, the truth of determinism would not show that human beings generally occupy excusing or exempting conditions that would make the attitudes involved in holding one another responsible inappropriate. It would not follow from the truth of determinism, for example, “that anyone who caused an injury either was quite simply ignorant of causing it or had acceptably overriding reasons for” doing so (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 53]; emphasis in original); nor would it follow (from the truth of determinism)

that nobody knows what he’s doing or that everybody’s behaviour is unintelligible in terms of conscious purposes or that everybody lives in a world of delusion or that nobody has a moral sense. (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 59])

Various objections have been raised regarding P. F. Strawson’s general theoretical approach to moral responsibility, his assumptions about human psychology and sociality, and his arguments for the compatibility of determinism and responsibility.

As noted in the previous subsection, Strawson argues that learning that determinism is true would not raise general concerns about our responsibility practices. This is because the truth of determinism would not show that human beings are generally abnormal in a way that would call into question their openness to the reactive attitudes: “it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not itself self-contradictory that abnormality is the universal condition” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 54]). In reply, it has been noted that while the truth of determinism might not suggest universal abnormality, it might well show that normal human beings are morally incapacitated in a way that is relevant to our responsibility practices (Russell 1992: 298–301). Strawson’s assumptions that we are too deeply and naturally committed to our reactive-attitude-involving practices to give them up, and that doing so would irreparably distort our moral lives, have also been criticized (Nelkin 2011: 42–45; G. Strawson 1986: 84–120; Watson 1987 [2004: 255–258]).

A different sort of objection emphasizes the response-dependence of Strawson’s account: that is, the way it explains an agent’s responsibility in terms of the moral responses that characterize a given community’s responsibility practices, rather than in terms of independent facts about whether the agent is responsible. This feature of Strawson’s approach invites a reading that may seem paradoxical:

In Strawson’s view, there is no such independent notion of responsibility that explains the propriety of the reactive attitudes. The explanatory priority is the other way around: It is not that we hold people responsible because they are responsible; rather, the idea ( our idea) that we are responsible is to be understood by the practice, which itself is not a matter of holding some propositions to be true, but of expressing our concerns and demands about our treatment of one another. (Watson 1987 [2004: 222]; emphasis in original; see Bennett 1980 for a related, non-cognitivist interpretation of Strawson’s approach)

Strawson’s approach would be particularly problematic if, as the above reading might suggest, it entails that a group’s responsibility practices are—as they stand and however they stand—beyond criticism simply because they are that group’s practices (Fischer & Ravizza 1993a: 18).

But there is something to be said from the other side of the debate. It may seem obvious that people are appropriately held responsible only if there are independent facts about their responsibility. But on reflection—and following R. Jay Wallace’s (1996) influential Strawsonian approach—it may be difficult “to make sense of the idea of a prior and thoroughly independent realm of moral responsibility facts” that is separate from our practices and yet to which our practices must answer (1996: 88). For Wallace, giving up on practice-independent responsibility facts doesn’t mean giving up on facts about responsibility; rather, “we must interpret the relevant facts [about responsibility] as somehow dependent on our practices of holding people responsible” (1996: 89). Such an interpretation requires an investigation into our practices, and what emerges most conspicuously, for Wallace, from this investigation is the degree to which our responsibility practices are organized around a fundamental commitment to fairness (1996: 101). Wallace develops this commitment to fairness, and to norms of fairness, into an account of the conditions under which people are appropriately held morally responsible for their behavior (1996: 103–109). (For a more recent defense of the response-dependent approach to responsibility, see Shoemaker 2017b; for criticism of such approaches, see Todd 2016.)

As noted in §1 , one of the lasting influences of Harry Frankfurt’s defense of compatibilism was to draw attention to the actual causes of agents’ behavior, and particularly to whether an agent—even a causally determined agent—acted for her own reasons. Reasons-responsiveness approaches to responsibility have been particularly attentive to these issues. These approaches ground responsibility by reference to agents’ capacities for being appropriately sensitive to the rational considerations that bear on their actions. Interpreted broadly, reasons-responsiveness approaches include a diverse collection of views, such as David Brink and Dana Nelkin (2013), John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998), Ishtiyaque Haji (1998), Michael McKenna (2013), Dana Nelkin (2011), Carolina Sartorio (2016), R. Jay Wallace (1996), and Susan Wolf (1990). Fischer and Ravizza’s Responsibility and Control (1998), which builds on Fischer (1994), offers the most influential articulation of the reasons-responsiveness approach.

Fischer and Ravizza begin with a distinction between regulative control and guidance control. Regulative control involves the possession of a dual power: “the power freely to do some act A , and the power freely to do something else instead” (1998: 31). Guidance control, on the other hand, does not require access to alternatives: it is manifested when an agent guides her behavior in a particular direction (and regardless of whether it was open to her to guide her behavior in a different direction). Since Fischer and Ravizza take Frankfurt cases ( §1 ) to show that access to behavioral alternatives is not necessary for moral responsibility, they conclude that “the sort of control necessarily associated with moral responsibility for action is guidance control ” and not regulative control (1998: 33; emphasis in original).

A number of factors can undermine guidance control. If a person’s behavior is brought about by hypnosis, brainwashing, or genuinely irresistible urges, then that person may not be morally responsible for her behavior since she does not reflectively guide it in the way required for responsibility (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 35). More specifically, an agent in the above circumstances is not likely to be responsible because he “is not responsive to reasons—his behavior would be the same, no matter what reasons there were” (1998: 37). Thus, Fischer and Ravizza characterize possession of guidance control as (partially) dependent on responsiveness to reasons. In particular, guidance control depends on whether the psychological mechanism that issues in an agent’s behavior is responsive to reasons. (Guidance control also requires that an agent owns the mechanism on which she acts. According to Fischer and Ravizza, this requires placing historical conditions on responsibility; see §3.3.3 .)

Fischer and Ravizza’s focus on mechanisms is motivated by the following reasoning. In a Frankfurt case, an agent is responsible for an action even though his so acting is ensured by external factors. But the presence of these external factors means that the agent in a Frankfurt case would have acted the same no matter what reasons he was confronted with, which suggests that the responsible agent in a Frankfurt scenario is not responsive to reasons. This is a problem for Fischer and Ravizza’s claim that guidance control, and thus reasons-responsiveness, is necessary for responsibility. Fischer and Ravizza’s solution is to argue that while the agent in a Frankfurt case may not be responsive to reasons, the agent’s mechanism—“the process that leads to the relevant upshot [i.e., the agent’s action]”—may well be responsive to reasons (1998: 38). In other words, the agent’s generally-specified psychological mechanism might have responded (under counterfactual conditions) to considerations in favor of omitting the action that the agent actually performed (and that he was guaranteed to perform, regardless of reasons, since he was in a Frankfurt-type scenario).

Fischer and Ravizza thus arrive at the following provisional conclusion: “relatively clear cases of moral responsibility”—that is, those in which an agent is not hypnotized, etc.—are distinguished by the fact that “an agent exhibits guidance control of an action insofar as the mechanism that actually issues in the action is his own, reasons-responsive mechanism” (1998: 39). But how responsive to reasons does an agent’s mechanism need to be for that agent to have the type of control over his behavior associated with moral responsibility? A strongly reasons-responsive mechanism would both recognize and respond to any sufficient reason to act otherwise (1998: 41). (In Fischer and Ravizza’s terminology, such a mechanism is strongly “receptive” and “reactive” to reasons). But strong reasons-responsiveness cannot be required for guidance control since many intuitively responsible agents—i.e., many garden variety wrongdoers—fail to attend to sufficient reasons to do otherwise. On the other hand, weak reasons-responsiveness is not enough for guidance control. An agent with a weakly reasons-responsive mechanism will respond appropriately to some sufficient reason to do otherwise, but the pattern of responsiveness revealed in the agent’s behavior might be too arbitrary for the agent to be credited with the kind of control required for responsibility. A person’s pattern of responsiveness to reasons would likely seem erratic in the relevant way if, for example, she would forego purchasing a ticket to a basketball game if it cost one thousand dollars, but not if it cost two thousand dollars (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 66).

Fischer and Ravizza settle on moderate reasons responsiveness as the sort that is most germane to guidance control (1998: 69–85). A psychological mechanism that is moderately responsive to reasons exhibits regularity with respect to its receptivity to reasons: that is, it exhibits “an understandable pattern of (actual and hypothetical) reasons-receptivity” (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 71; emphasis in original). Such a pattern will indicate that an agent understands “how reasons fit together” and that, for example, “acceptance of one reason as sufficient implies that a stronger reason must also be sufficient” (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 71). (In addition, a pattern of regular receptivity to reasons will include receptivity to a range of moral considerations (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 77). This will rule out attributing moral responsibility to non-moral agents; see Todd and Tognazzini 2008 for criticism of Fischer and Ravizza’s articulation of this condition.) However, a moderately responsive mechanism may be only weakly reactive to reasons since, as Fischer and Ravizza put it (somewhat mysteriously), “reactivity is all of piece” such

that if an agent’s mechanism reacts to some incentive to…[do otherwise], this shows that the mechanism can react to any incentive to do otherwise. (1998: 73; emphasis in original)

Fischer and Ravizza’s account has generated a great deal of attention and criticism. Some critics focus on the contrast (just noted) between the conditions they impose on receptivity to reasons and those they impose on reactivity to reasons (McKenna 2005, Mele 2006a, Watson 2001). Additionally, many are dissatisfied with Fischer and Ravizza’s presentation of their account in terms of the powers of mechanisms as opposed to agents. This has led some authors to develop agent-based reasons-responsiveness accounts that address the concerns that led Fischer and Ravizza to their mechanism-based approach (Brink & Nelkin 2013, McKenna 2013, Sartorio 2016).

3. Contemporary Debates

3.1 the “faces” of responsibility.

Do our responsibility practices accommodate distinct forms of moral responsibility? Are there different senses in which people may be morally responsible for their behavior? Contemporary interest in these possibilities has its roots in a debate between Susan Wolf and Gary Watson. Among other things, Wolf’s important 1990 book, Freedom Within Reason , offers a critical discussion of “Real Self” theories of responsibility. According to these views, a person is responsible for behavior that is attributable to her real self, and

an agent’s behavior is attributable to the agent’s real self…if she is at liberty (or able) both to govern her behavior on the basis of her will and to govern her will on the basis of her valuational system. (Wolf 1990: 33)

The basic idea is that a responsible agent is not simply moved by her strongest desires, but also, in some way, approves of, or stands behind, the desires that move her because they are governed by her values or because they are endorsed by higher-order desires. Wolf’s central example of a Real Self view is Watson’s (1975). In an important and closely related earlier paper, Wolf (1987) characterizes Watson (1975), Harry Frankfurt (1971), and Charles Taylor (1976) as offering “deep self views”. For more on real-self/deep-self views, see §3.3.3 ; for a recent presentation of a real-self view, see Chandra Sripada (2016).

According to Wolf, one point in favor of Real Self views is that they explain why people acting under the influence of hypnosis or compulsive desires are often not responsible (1990: 33). Since these agents are typically unable, under these conditions, to govern their behavior on the basis of their valuational systems, they are alienated from their actions in a way that undermines responsibility. But, for Wolf, it is a mark against Real Self views that they tend to be silent on the topic of how agents come to have the selves that they do. An agent’s real self might, for example, be the product of a traumatic upbringing, and Wolf argues that this would give us reason to question the “agent’s responsibility for her real self” and thus her responsibility for the present behavior that issues from that self (1990: 37; emphasis in original). For an important account of an agent with such an upbringing, see Wolf’s (1987) fictional example of JoJo (and see Watson 1987 [2004] for a related discussion of the convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris). For discussion of JoJo in this entry, see §3.2.1 , and for general discussion of the relevance of personal history for present responsibility see §3.3.3 .

Wolf suggests that when a person’s real self is the product of serious childhood trauma (or related factors), then that person is potentially responsible for her behavior only in a superficial sense that merely attributes bad actions to the agent’s real self (1990: 37–40). However, Wolf argues that ascriptions of moral responsibility go deeper than such attributions can reach:

When…we consider an individual worthy of blame or of praise, we are not merely judging the moral quality of the event with which the individual is so intimately associated; we are judging the moral quality of the individual herself in some more focused, noninstrumental, and seemingly more serious way. (1990: 41)

This deeper form of assessment—assessment in terms of “deep responsibility” (Wolf 1990: 41)—requires more than that an agent is “able to form her actions on the basis of her values”, it also requires that “she is able to form her values on the basis of what is True and Good” (Wolf 1990: 75). This latter ability will be impaired or absent in an agent whose real self is the product of pressures (such as a traumatic childhood) that have distorted her moral vision. (For the relevance of moral vision, or “moral competence”, for responsibility, see §3.2 .)

In “Two Faces of Responsibility” (1996 [2004]), Gary Watson responds to Wolf. Watson agrees with Wolf that some approaches to responsibility—i.e., self-disclosure views (a phrase Watson borrows from Benson 1987)—focus narrowly on whether behavior is attributable to an agent. But Watson denies that these attributions constitute a merely superficial form of responsibility assessment. After all, behavior that is attributable to an agent—in the sense, for example, of issuing from her valuational system—often discloses something interpersonally and morally significant about the agent’s “fundamental evaluative orientation” (Watson 1996 [2004: 271]). Thus, ascriptions of responsibility in this responsibility-as-attributability sense are “central to ethical life and ethical appraisal” (Watson 1996 [2004: 263]).

However, Watson agrees with Wolf that the above story of responsibility is incomplete: there is more to responsibility than attributing actions to agents. In addition, we hold agents responsible for their behavior, which “is not just a matter of the relation of an individual to her behavior” (Watson 1996 [2004: 262]). When we hold responsible, we also “demand (require) certain conduct from one another and respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson 1996 [2004: 262]). The moral demands, and potential for adverse treatment, associated with holding others responsible are part of our accountability (as opposed to attributability) practices, and these features of accountability raise issues of fairness that do not arise in the context of determining whether behavior is attributable to an agent (Watson 1996 [2004: 273]). Therefore, conditions may apply to accountability that do not apply to attributability: for example, perhaps “accountability blame” should be—as Wolf suggested—moderated in the case of an agent whose “squalid circumstances made it overwhelmingly difficult to develop a respect for the standards to which we would hold him accountable” (Watson 1996 [2004: 281]).

There are, then, two forms, or “faces”, of responsibility on Watson’s account. There is responsibility-as-attributability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, behavior is properly attributed to her as reflecting morally important features of her self—her virtues and vices, for example. But there is also responsibility-as-accountability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, which requires more than the correct attribution of behavior, she is open to being held accountable for that behavior in the ways that predominantly characterize moral blame.

It has become common for the views of several authors to be described (with varying degrees of accuracy) as instances of “attributionism”; see Neil Levy (2005) for the first use of this term. These authors include Robert Adams (1985), Nomy Arpaly (2003), Pamela Hieronymi (2004), T. M. Scanlon (1998, 2008), George Sher (2006a, 2006b, 2009), Angela Smith (2005, 2008), and Matthew Talbert (2012, 2013). Attributionists take moral responsibility assessments to be mainly concerned with whether an action (or omission, character trait, or belief) is attributable to an agent for the purposes of moral assessment, where this usually means that the action (or omission, etc.) reflects the agent’s “judgment sensitive attitudes” (Scanlon 1998), “evaluative judgments” (A. Smith 2005), or, more generally, her “moral personality” (Hieronymi 2008).

Attributionism resembles the self-disclosure views mentioned by Watson (see the previous subsection) insofar as both focus on the way that a responsible agent’s behavior discloses interpersonally and morally significant features of the agent’s self. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that contemporary attributionist views are interested only in specifying the conditions for what Watson calls responsibility-as-attributability. In fact, attributionists typically take themselves to be giving conditions for holding agents responsible in Watson’s accountability sense. (See the previous subsection for the distinction between accountability and attributability.)

According to attributionism, fulfillment of attributability conditions is sufficient for holding agents accountable for their behavior. This means that attributionism rejects conditions on moral responsibility that would excuse agents if their characters were shaped under adverse conditions (Scanlon 1998: 278–85), or if the thing for which the agent is blamed was not under her control (Sher 2006b and 2009, A. Smith 2005), or if the agent can’t be expected to recognize the moral status of her behavior (Scanlon 1998: 287–290; Talbert 2012). Attributionists reject these conditions on responsibility because morally and interpersonally significant behavior is attributable to agents that do not fulfill them, and such attributions are taken to be sufficient for an agent to be open to the responses involved in holding agents accountable for their behavior. Attributionists have also argued that blame may profitably be understood as a form of moral protest (Hieronymi 2001, A. Smith 2013, Talbert 2012); part of the appeal of this move is that moral protests may be legitimate in cases in which the above conditions are not met.

Several objections have been posed to attributionism. Some argue that attributionists are wrong to reject the conditions on responsibility mentioned in the last paragraph (Levy 2005, 2011; Shoemaker 2011, 2015a; Watson 2011). It has also been argued that the attributionist account of blame is too close to mere negative appraisal (Levy 2005; Wallace 1996: 80–1; Watson 2002). In addition, Scanlon (2008) has been criticized for failing to take negative emotions such as resentment to be central to the phenomenon of blame (Wallace 2011, Wolf 2011; a similar criticism would apply to Sher 2006a).

Building on the distinction between attributability and accountability ( §3.1.1 ), David Shoemaker (2011 and 2015a) has introduced a third form of responsibility: answerability. On Shoemaker’s view, attributability-responsibility assessments respond to facts about an agent’s character, accountability-responsibility responds to an agent’s degree of regard for others, and answerability-responsibility responds to an agent’s evaluative judgments. However, A. Smith (2015) and Hieronymi (2008 and 2014) use “answerability” to refer to a view more like the attributionist perspective described in the previous subsection, and Pereboom (2014) has used the term to indicate a form of responsibility more congenial to responsibility skeptics.

3.2 Moral Competence

The possibility that moral competence—the ability to recognize and respond to moral considerations—is a condition on moral responsibility has been suggested at several points above ( §2.2.1 , §2.2.2 , §2.3 , §3.1.1 , §3.1.2 ). Susan Wolf’s (1987) fictional story of “JoJo” is one of the best-known illustrations of this proposal. JoJo was raised by an evil dictator, and as a result he became the same sort of sadistic tyrant that his father was. As an adult, JoJo is happy to be the sort of person that he is, and he is moved by precisely the desires (e.g., to imprison, torture, and execute his subjects) that he wants to be moved by. Thus, JoJo fulfills important conditions on responsibility ( §3.1.1 , §3.3.3 ), however, Wolf argues that it may be unfair to hold him responsible for his bad behavior.

JoJo’s upbringing plays an important role in Wolf’s argument, but only because it left JoJo unable to fully appreciate the wrongfulness of his behavior. Thus, it is JoJo’s impaired moral competence that does the real excusing work, and similar conclusions of non-responsibility should be drawn about all those whom we think “could not help but be mistaken about their [bad] values”, if possession of these values impairs their ability to tell right from wrong (Wolf 1987: 57).

Many others join Wolf in arguing that impaired moral competence (perhaps on account of one’s upbringing or other environmental factors) undermines one’s moral responsibility (Benson 2001, Doris & Murphy 2007, Fischer & Ravizza 1998, Fricker 2010, Levy 2003, Russell 1995 and 2004, Wallace 1996, Watson 1987 [2004]). Part of what motivates this conclusion is the thought that it can be unreasonable to expect morally-impaired agents to avoid wrongful behavior, and that it is therefore unfair to expose these agents to the harm of moral blame on account of their wrongdoing. For detailed development of the moral competence requirement on responsibility in terms of considerations of fairness, see R. Jay Wallace (1996); also see Erin Kelly (2013), Neil Levy (2009), and Gary Watson (1987 [2004]). For rejection of the claim that blame is unfair in the case of the morally-impaired agent, see several of the defenders of attributionism mentioned in §3.1.2 (particularly Hieronymi 2004, Scanlon 1998, and Talbert 2012)

The moral competence condition on responsibility can also be motivated by the suggestion that impaired agents are not able to commit wrongs that have the sort of moral significance to which blame would be an appropriate response. The basic idea here is that, while morally-impaired agents can fail to show appropriate respect for others, these failures do not necessarily constitute the kind of flouting of moral norms that grounds blame (Watson 1987 [2004: 234]). In other words, a failure to respect others, is not always an instance of blame-grounding disrespect for others, since the latter (but not the former) requires the ability to comprehend the norms that one violates (Levy 2007, Shoemaker 2011).

Considerations about moral competence play an important role in the recent trend of conversational theories of responsibility, which construe elements of our responsibility practices as morally-expressive moves in an ongoing moral conversation. The thought here is that to fruitfully (and fully) participate in such a conversation, one must have some degree of competence in the (moral) language of that conversation.

Several prominent versions of the conversational approach develop P. F. Strawson’s suggestion ( §2.2.1 ) that the negative reactive attitudes involved in blame are expressions of a demand for moral regard from other agents. Gary Watson argues that a demand “presumes”, as a condition on the intelligibility of expressing it, “understanding on the part of the object of the demand” (1987 [2004: 230]). Therefore, since, “[t]he reactive attitudes are incipiently forms of communication”, they are intelligibly expressed “only on the assumption that the other can comprehend the message”, and since the message is a moral one, “blaming and praising those with diminished moral understanding loses its ‘point,’” at least in a certain sense (Watson 1987 [2004: 230]; see Watson 2011 for a modification of this proposal). R. Jay Wallace argues, similarly, that since responsibility practices are internal to moral relationships that are

defined by the successful exchange of moral criticism and justification…. it will be reasonable to hold accountable only someone who is at least a candidate for this kind of exchange of criticism and justification. (1996: 164)

Michael McKenna’s Conversation and Responsibility (2012) offers the most developed conversational analysis of responsibility. For McKenna, the “moral responsibility exchange” occurs in stages: an initial “moral contribution” of morally salient behavior; the “moral address” of, e.g., blame that responds to the moral contribution; the “moral account” in which the first contributor responds to moral address with, e.g., apology; and so on (2012: 89). Like Wallace and Watson, McKenna notes the way in which a morally impaired agent will find it difficult “to appreciate the challenges put to her by those who hold [her] morally responsible”, but he also argues that a suitably impaired agent cannot even make the first move in a moral conversation (2012: 78). Thus, the morally impaired agent’s responsibility is called into question not only because she is unable to respond appropriately to moral demands, but also because “she is incapable of acting from a will with a moral quality that could be a candidate for assessment from the standpoint of holding responsible” (McKenna 2012: 78). This point is related to Neil Levy’s and David Shoemaker’s contention, noted in the previous subsection, that impairments of moral competence can leave an agent unable to harbor and express the type of ill will or lack of regard to which blame responds. By contrast, Watson (2011), seems to allow that significant moral impairment is compatible with the ability to perform blame-relevant wrongdoing, even if such impairment undermines the wrongdoer’s moral accountability for her actions.

For another important account of responsibility in broadly conversational terms, see Shoemaker’s discussion of the sort of moral anger involved in holding others accountable for their behavior (2015a: 87–117). For additional defenses and articulations of the conversational approach to responsibility, see Stephen Darwall (2006), Miranda Fricker (2016), and Colleen Macnamara (2015).

Impairments of moral competence come in degrees. Susan Wolf’s JoJo ( §3.2.1 ) has localized impairments of the capacity to recognize and respond to moral considerations, but it is not clear that he is entirely immune to moral considerations. However, at the far end of the spectrum, we encounter more globally and thoroughly impaired figures such as the psychopath. In philosophical treatments, the psychopath is typically presented as an agent who, while retaining other psychological capacities, is entirely—or as nearly so as possible—incapable of responding appropriately to moral considerations. (This is something of a philosophical construct since real-life psychopathy admits of varying degrees of impairment, corresponding to higher or lower scores on diagnostic measures.)

One interesting question is whether the psychopath’s inability—or at least consistent failure—to respond appropriately to moral incentives is primarily the result of a motivational rather than cognitive failure: does the psychopath in some way know what morality requires and simply not care? If a positive answer is given to this last question (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 76–81; Nichols 2002), then it seems likely that the psychopath could be responsible for at least some of his bad behavior. And some have argued that even if psychopathy is primarily a cognitive impairment, it may still be the case that psychopaths possess a sufficient capacity for distinguishing right and wrong—or that they possess sufficient related capacities—to be held responsible, at least to some extent and in certain ways (Glannon 1997, Greenspan 2003, Maibom 2008, Shoemaker 2014, Vargas & Nichols 2007). On the other hand, many believe that the psychopath’s capacity for grasping moral considerations is too superficial to sustain responsibility (Kennett 2019; Levy 2007; Nelkin 2015; Wallace 1996: 177–78; Watson 2011; see Mason 2017 for the claim that the relevant deficiency is one of moral knowledge rather than moral capacity). And still others have argued that even those who are fully impaired for moral understanding are open to blame as long as they possess broader rational competencies (Scanlon 1998: 287–290; Talbert 2014). However, the psychopath’s possession of these broader competencies has been called into question (Fine & Kennett 2004, Greenspan 2003, Litton 2010).

3.3 Skepticism and Related Topics

This section introduces contemporary skepticism about moral responsibility by way of discussions of several topics that have broad relevance for thinking about responsibility.

If moral responsibility requires free will, and free will involves access to alternatives in a way that is not compatible with determinism, then it would follow from the truth of determinism that no one is ever morally responsible. The above reasoning, and the skeptical conclusion it reaches, is endorsed by the hard determinist perspective on free will and responsibility, which was defended historically by Spinoza and d’Holbach (among others) and, more recently, by Ted Honderich (2002). But given that determinism may well be false, contemporary skeptics about moral responsibility more often pursue a hard incompatibilist line of argument according to which the kind of free will required for desert-based (as opposed to forward-looking, see §2.1 ) moral responsibility is incompatible with the truth or falsity of determinism (Pereboom 2001, 2014). The skeptical positions discussed below are generally of this sort: the skeptical conclusions they advocate do not depend on the truth of determinism.

According to Thomas Nagel, a person is subject to moral luck if factors that are not under that person’s control affect the moral assessments to which he is open (Nagel 1976 [1979]; also see Williams 1976 [1981] and the entry on moral luck .)

Is there such a thing as moral luck? More specifically, can luck affect a person’s moral responsibility? Consider a would-be assassin who shoots at her target, aiming to kill, but fails to do so only because her bullet is deflected by a passing bird. It seems that such a would-be assassin has good moral outcome luck (that is, good moral luck in the outcome of her behavior). Because of factors beyond her control, the would-be assassin’s moral record is better than it would have been: in particular, she is not a killer and is not morally responsible for causing anyone’s death. One might think, in addition, that the would-be assassin is less blameworthy than a successful assassin with whom she is otherwise identical, and that the reason for this is just that the successful assassin intentionally killed someone while the unsuccessful assassin (as a result of good moral luck) did not. (For important recent defenses of moral luck, see Hanna 2014 and Hartman 2017.)

On the other hand, one might think that if the two assassins just mentioned are identical in terms of their values, goals, intentions, and motivations, then the addition of a bit of luck to the unsuccessful assassin’s story cannot ground a deep contrast between these two agents in terms of their moral responsibility. One way to sustain this position is to argue that moral responsibility is a function solely of internal features of agents, such as their motives and intentions (Khoury 2018; also see Enoch & Marmor 2007 for some of the main arguments against moral luck). Of course, the successful assassin is responsible for something (killing a person) for which the unsuccessful assassin is not, but it might be possible to argue that both are morally responsible—and presumably blameworthy— to the same degree insofar as it was true of both of them that they aimed to kill, and that they did so for the same reasons and with the same degree of commitment toward bringing about that outcome (see M. Zimmerman 2002 and 2015 for this influential perspective).

But now consider a different would-be assassin who does not even try to kill anyone, but only because his circumstances did not favor this option. This would-be assassin is willing to kill under favorable circumstances (and so he may seem to have had good circumstantial moral luck since he was not in those circumstances). Perhaps the degree of responsibility attributed to the successful and unsuccessful assassins described above depends not so much on the fact that they both tried to kill as on the fact that they were both willing to kill; in this case, the would-be assassin just introduced may share their degree of responsibility since he shares their willingness to kill. But an account that focuses on how agents would be willing to act under counterfactual circumstances is likely to generate unintuitive conclusions about responsibility since many agents who are typically judged blameless might willingly perform terrible actions under the right circumstances. (M. Zimmerman 2002 and 2015 does not shy away from this consequence, but criticisms of his efforts to reject moral luck—Hanna 2014, Hartman 2017—have made much of it; see Peels 2015 for a position that is related to Zimmerman’s but that may avoid the unintuitive consequence just mentioned.)

Another approach to luck holds that it is inimical to moral responsibility in a way that generally undermines responsibility ascriptions. To see the motivation for this skeptical position, consider constitutive moral luck: that is, luck in how one is constituted in terms of the “inclinations, capacities, and temperament” one finds within oneself (Nagel 1976 [1979: 28]). Facts about a person’s inclinations, capacities, and temperament explain much—if not all—of that person’s behavior, and if the facts that explain why a person acts as she does are a result of good or bad luck, then perhaps it is unfair to hold her responsible for that behavior. As Nagel notes, once the full sweep of the various kinds of luck comes into view, “[t]he area of genuine agency” may seem to shrink to nothing since our actions and their consequences “result from the combined influence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the agent’s control” (1976 [1979: 35]). If this is right, then perhaps,

nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a…sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised. (Nagel 1976 [1979: 37])

The above quotations notwithstanding, Nagel himself doesn’t fully embrace a skeptical conclusion about responsibility on grounds of moral luck, but others have done so, most notably, Neil Levy (2011). According to Levy’s “hard luck view”, the encompassing nature of moral luck means “that there are no desert-entailing differences between moral agents” (2011: 10). Of course, there are differences between agents in terms of their characters and the good or bad actions and outcomes that they produce, but Levy’s point is that, given the influence of luck in generating these differences, they don’t provide a sound basis for differential treatment of people in terms of moral praise and blame. (See Russell 2017 for a compatibilist account that is led to a variety of pessimism, though not skepticism, on the basis of the concerns about moral luck just described.)

Another important skeptical argument—related to the observations about constitutive moral luck in the previous subsection—is Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument, which concludes that “we cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions” (1994: 5). (Since the argument targets “ultimate” moral responsibility, it does not necessarily exclude other forms, such as forward-looking responsibility ( §2.1 ) and, on some understandings, responsibility-as-attributability ( §3.1.1 ).) The argument begins by noting that an agent makes the choices she does because of certain facts about the way she is: for example, the facts about what seems choiceworthy to her. But if this is true, then, in order to be responsible for her subsequent choices, perhaps an agent also needs to be responsible for the facts about what seems choiceworthy to her. But how can one be responsible for these prior facts about herself? Wouldn’t this require a prior choice on the part of the agent, one that resulted in her present dispositions to see certain ends and means as choiceworthy? But this prior choice would itself be something for which the agent is responsible only if the agent is also responsible for the fact that that prior choice seemed choiceworthy to her. And now we must explain how the agent can be responsible for this additional prior fact about herself, which will require positing another choice by the agent, and the responsibility for that choice will also have to be secured, which will require explaining why it seemed choiceworthy to her, and so on. A regress looms here, and Strawson claims that it cannot be stopped except by positing an initial act of self-creation on the responsible agent’s part (1994: 5, 15). Only self-creating agents could be fully responsible for their own tendencies to exercise their powers of choice as they do, but self-creation is impossible, so no one is every truly or ultimately morally responsible for their behavior.

A number of replies to this argument (and the argument from constitutive moral luck) are possible. One might simply deny that how a person came to be the way she is matters for present responsibility: perhaps all we need to know in order to judge a person’s present responsibility are facts about her present constitution and about how that constitution is related to the person’s present behavior. (For views like this, see the discussion of attributionism ( §3.1.2 ) and the discussion of non-historical accounts of responsibility in the next subsection). Alternatively, one might think that while personal history matters for moral responsibility, Strawson’s argument sets the bar too high, requiring too much historical control over one’s constitution (see Fischer 2006; for a reply, see Levy 2011: 5). Perhaps what is needed is not literal self-creation, but simply an ability to enact changes in oneself so as to acquire responsibility for the self that results from these changes (Clarke 2005). A picture along these lines can be found in Aristotle’s suggestion that one can be responsible for being a careless person if one’s present state of carelessness is the result of earlier choices that one made (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics ; see also Michele Moody-Adams 1990).

Roughly in this Aristotelian vein, Robert Kane offers a detailed incompatibilist account of how we can secure ultimate responsibility for our actions (1996 and 2007). On Kane’s view, for an agent

to be ultimately responsible for [a] choice, the agent must be at least in part responsible by virtue of choices or actions voluntarily performed in the past for having the character and motives he or she now has. (2007: 14; emphasis in original)

This position may appear to be open to the regress concerns presented in Galen Strawson’s argument above. But Kane thinks a regress is avoided in cases in which a person’s character-forming choices are undetermined. Since these undetermined choices will have no sufficient causes, there is no relevant prior cause for which the agent must be responsible, so there is no regress problem (Kane 2007: 15–16; see Pereboom 2001: 47–50 for criticism of Kane on this point.)

Of particular interest to Kane are potential character-forming choices that occur “when we are torn between competing visions of what we should do or become” (2007: 26). In such cases, if a person sees reasons in favor of either choice that he might make, and the choice that he makes is undetermined, then whichever choice he makes will have been chosen for his own reasons. According to Kane, when an agent makes this kind of choice, he shapes his character, and since his choice is not determined by prior causal factors, he is responsible for it and for the character it shapes and for the character-determined choices that he makes in the future.

Kane’s approach is an important instance of those incompatibilist theories that attempt to explain how free will, while requiring indeterminism, could clearly be at home in the natural world as we know it (also see Balaguer 2010, Ekstrom 2000, and Franklin 2018). (This is as opposed to agent-causal accounts of free will—Chisholm 1964, O’Connor 2000—that invoke a type of causal power that is less easily naturalized). However, many have argued that any account like Kane’s, which inserts an indeterministic link in the causal chain leading to action, actually reduces an agent’s control over an action or at least leaves it unclear why such an insertion would increase agential control over actions as compared to a deterministic story of action (Hobart 1934; Levy 2011: 41–83; Pereboom 2014: 31–49; van Inwagen 1983: 126–52; Watson 1999).

Accounts such as Neil Levy’s (2011) and Galen Strawson’s (1994), described in the two preceding subsections, assume that the facts about the way a person came to be the way she is are relevant for determining her present responsibility. But non-historical views, such as attributionism ( §3.1.2 ) and the views that Susan Wolf calls “Real Self” theories ( §3.1.1 ), reject this contention. Real Self accounts are sometimes referred to as “structural” or “hierarchical” theories, and John M. Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998: 184–187) have called them “mesh” theories. By whatever name, the basic idea is that an agent is morally responsible insofar as her will has the right sort of structure: in particular, there needs to be a mesh or fit between the desires that actually move the agent and her values, or between the desires that move her and her higher-order desires, the latter of which are the agent’s reflective preferences about which desires should move her. (For approaches along these lines, see Dworkin 1970; Frankfurt 1971, 1987; Neely 1974; and Watson 1975.)

Harry Frankfurt’s comparison between a willing drug addict and an unwilling addict illustrates important features of his version of the structural approach to responsibility. Both of Frankfurt’s addicts have desires to take the drug to which they are addicted, and the nature of their addictions is such that both addicts will ultimately act to fulfill their first-order addictive desire. But suppose that both addicts are capable of taking higher-order perspectives on their first-order desires, and suppose that they take different higher-order perspectives. The willing addict endorses and identifies with his addictive desire. The unwilling addict, on the other hand, repudiates his addictive desire to such an extent that, when it ends up being effective, Frankfurt says that this addict is “helplessly violated by his own desires” (1971: 12). The willing addict has a kind of freedom that the unwilling addict lacks: they may both be bound to take the drug to which they are addicted, but insofar as the willing addict is moved by a desire that he endorses, he acts freely in a way that the unwilling addict does not (Frankfurt 1971: 19). A related conclusion about responsibility may be drawn: perhaps the unwilling addict’s desire is alien to him in such a way that his responsibility for acting on it is called into question (for a recent defense of this conclusion, see Sripada 2017).

One objection to Frankfurt’s view goes like this. His account seems to assume that the addicts’ higher-order desires have the authority to speak for them—they reveal (or constitute) the agent’s “real self”, to use Wolf’s language (1990). But if higher-order desires are invoked out of a concern that an agent’s first-order desires may not stem from his real self, why won’t the same worry recur with respect to higher-order desires as well? In other words, when ascending through the orders of desires, why stop at any particular point, why not think that appeal to a still higher order is always necessary to reveal where an agent stands? (See Watson (1975) for an objection along these lines, which partly motivates Watson—in his articulation of a structural approach—to focus on whether an agent’s desires conform with her values , rather than with her higher-order desires).

And even if one agrees with Frankfurt (or Watson) about the structural elements required for responsibility, one might wonder how an agent’s will came to have its particular structure. Thus, an important type of objection to Frankfurt’s view notes that the relevant structure might have been put in place by factors that intuitively undermine responsibility, in which case the presence of the relevant structure is not itself sufficient for responsibility (Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 196–201; Locke 1975; Slote 1980). Fischer and Ravizza argue that

[i]f the mesh [between higher- and lower-order desires] were produced by…brainwashing or subliminal advertising…we would not hold the agent morally responsible for his behavior

because the psychological mechanism that produced the behavior would not be, “in an important intuitive sense, the agent’s own ” (1998: 197; emphasis in original). In response to this type of worry, Fischer and Ravizza argue that responsibility has an important historical component, which they attempt to capture with their account of how agents can “take responsibility” for the psychological mechanisms that produces their behavior (1998: 207–239). (For criticism of Fischer and Ravizza’s account of taking responsibility, see Levy 2011: 103–106 and Pereboom 2001: 120–22; for quite different accounts of taking responsibility, see Enoch 2012; Mason 2019: 179–207; and Wolf 2001. For work on the general significance of personal histories for responsibility, see Christman 1991, Vargas 2006, and D. Zimmerman 2003.)

Part of Fischer and Ravizza’s motivation for developing their account of “taking responsibility” was to ensure that agents who have been manipulated in certain ways do not turn out to be responsible on their view. Several examples and arguments featuring the sort of manipulation that worried Fischer and Ravizza have played important roles in the recent literature on responsibility. One of these is Alfred Mele’s Beth/Ann example (1995, 2006b), which emphasizes the difficulties faced by accounts of responsibility that eschew historical conditions. In the example, Ann has acquired her preferences and values in the normal way, but Beth is manipulated by a team of neuroscientists so that she now has preferences and values that are identical to Ann’s. After the manipulation, Beth is capable of reflecting on her new values, and when she does so, she endorses them enthusiastically. But whereas we might normally take such an endorsement to be a sign of the sort of self-governance associated with responsibility, Mele suggests that Beth, unlike Ann, exhibits merely “ersatz self-government” since Beth’s new values where imposed on her (1995: 155). And if certain kinds of personal histories similarly undermine an agent’s ability to genuinely or authentically govern her behavior, then agents with these histories will not be morally responsible. (For replies to Mele and general insights into manipulation cases, see Arpaly 2003, King 2013, McKenna 2004, and Todd 2011; for discussion of issues about personal identity that arise in manipulation cases, see Khoury 2013, Matheson 2014, Shoemaker 2012)

Now one can take a hard line in Beth’s case (McKenna 2004). Such a stance might involve noting that while Beth acquired her new values in a strange way (and in a way that involved moral wrongs done to her), everyone acquires their values in ways that are not fully under their control. Indeed, following Galen Strawson’s line of argument (1994), described in §3.3.2 , it might be noted that no one has ultimate control over their values, and even if normal agents have some capacity to address and alter their values, the dispositional factors that govern how this capacity is used are ultimately the result of factors beyond agents’ control. So perhaps it is not as clear as it might first appear that Beth is distinguished from normal agents in terms of her powers of self-governance and her moral responsibility for her behavior. But this reasoning can cut both ways: instead of showing that Beth is assimilated into the class of normal, responsible agents, it might show that normal agents are assimilated into the class of non-responsible agents like Beth. Derk Pereboom’s four-case argument employs a maneuver along these lines (1995, 2001, 2007, 2014).

Pereboom’s argument presents Professor Plum in four different scenarios. In each scenario, Plum kills Ms. White while satisfying the conditions on desert-involving moral responsibility most often proposed by compatibilists (and described in earlier sections of this entry): Plum kills White because he wants to, and while this desire is in keeping with Plum’s character, it is not irresistible; Plum also endorses his desire to kill White from a higher-order volitional perspective; finally, Plum is generally morally competent, and the process of deliberation that leads to his decision to kill White is appropriately responsive to reasons.

In Case 1, Plum is “created by neuroscientists, who…manipulate him directly through the use of radio-like technology” (Pereboom 2001: 112). These scientists cause Plum’s reasoning to take a certain (reasons-responsive) path that culminates in Plum concluding that the self-serving reasons in favor of killing White outweigh the reasons in favor of not doing so. Pereboom believes that in such a case Plum is clearly not responsible for killing White since his behavior was determined by the actions of the neuroscientists. In Cases 2 and 3, Plum is causally determined to undertake the same reasoning process as in Case 1, but in Case 2 Plum is merely programmed to do so by neuroscientists (rather than having been created by them), and in Case 3 Plum’s reasoning is the result of socio-cultural influences that determine his character. In Case 4, Plum is just a normal human being in a causally deterministic universe, and he decides to kill White in the same way as in the previous cases.

Pereboom claims that there is no relevant difference between Cases 1, 2, and 3 such that our judgments about Plum’s responsibility should be different in these three cases. Furthermore, the reason that Plum is not responsible in these cases seems to be that, in each case, his behavior is causally determined by forces beyond his control (Pereboom 2001: 116). But then we should conclude that Plum is not responsible in Case 4 (since causal determinism is the defining feature of that case). And since, in Case 4, Plum is just a normal human being in a causally deterministic universe, the conclusion we draw about him should extend to all other normal persons in causally deterministic universes. (For an important, related manipulation argument, see Mele’s “zygote argument” in Mele 1995, 2006b, and 2008.)

Pereboom’s argument has inspired a number of objections. For example, it could be argued that in Case 1, the manipulation to which Plum is subject undermines his responsibility for some reason besides the fact that the manipulation causally determines his behavior, which would stop the generalization from Case 1 to the subsequent cases (Fischer 2004, Mele 2005, Demetriou 2010; for a response to this line of argument, see Matheson 2016; Pereboom addresses this concern in his 2014 presentation of the argument; also see Shabo 2010). Alternatively, it might be argued, on compatibilist grounds, that Plum is responsible in Case 4, and this conclusion might be extended to the earlier cases since Plum fulfills the same compatibilist-friendly conditions on responsibility in those cases (McKenna 2008).

The four-case argument attempts to show that if determinism is true, then we cannot be the sources of our actions in the way required for moral responsibility. It is, therefore, an argument for incompatibilism rather than for skepticism about moral responsibility. But, in combination with Pereboom’s argument that we lack the sort of free will required for responsibility even if determinism is false (2001: 38–88; 2014: 30–70), the four-case argument has emerged as an important part of a detailed and influential skeptical perspective. For other skeptical accounts, see Caruso (2016), Smilansky (2000), Waller (2011); also see the entry on skepticism about moral responsibility .

There has been a recent surge in interest in the epistemic, or knowledge, condition on responsibility (as opposed to the freedom or control condition that is at the center of the free will debate). In this context, the following epistemic argument for skepticism about responsibility has been developed. (In certain structural respects, the argument resembles Galen Strawson’s skeptical argument discussed in §3.3.2 .)

Sometimes agents act in ignorance of the likely bad consequences of their actions, and sometimes their ignorance excuses them from blame for so acting. But in other cases, an agent’s ignorance might not excuse him. How can we distinguish the cases where ignorance excuses from those in which it does not? One proposal is that ignorance fails to excuse when the ignorance is itself something for which an agent might be blamed. And one proposal for when ignorance is blameworthy is that it issues from a blameworthy benighting act in which an agent culpably impairs, or fails to improve, his own epistemic position (H. Smith 1983). In such a case, the agent’s ignorance seems to be his own fault, so it cannot be appealed to in order to excuse the agent.

But when is a benighting act blameworthy? Several philosophers have suggested that we are culpable for benighting acts only when we engage in them knowing that we are doing so and knowing that we should not do so (Levy 2011, Rosen 2004, M. Zimmerman 1997). Ultimately, the suggestion is that ignorance for which one is blameworthy, and that leads to blameworthy unwitting wrongdoing, has its source in knowing wrongful behavior. Thus, if someone unwittingly does something wrong, then that person will be blameworthy only if we can explain his lack of knowledge (his “unwittingness”) by reference to something else that he knowingly did wrong.

Consider an example from Gideon Rosen (2004) in which a surgeon orders her patient to be transfused with the wrong type of blood, and suppose that the surgeon was unaware that she was making this mistake. According to Rosen, the surgeon will be blameworthy for harming her patient only if she is blameworthy for being ignorant about the patient’s blood type when she requests the transfusion, and she will be blameworthy for this only if her ignorance stems from some instance in which the surgeon knowingly failed to do something that she ought to have done to avoid her later ignorance. It won’t, for example, be enough that the surgeon’s ignorance is explained by her failure to doublecheck the patient’s medical records. In order to ground blame, this omission on the surgeon’s part must itself have been culpable, which requires that the surgeon knew that this omission was wrong. And if the surgeon wasn’t aware that she was committing a wrongful omission (when she failed to doublecheck her patient’s medical records), then this failure of knowledge on the surgeon’s part must be explained by some prior culpable—that is, knowing—act or omission. In the end, for Rosen,

the only possible locus of original responsibility [for a later unwitting act] is an akratic act …. a knowing sin. (2004: 307; emphasis in original)

Similarly, Michael Zimmerman argues that

all culpability can be traced to culpability that involves lack of ignorance, that is, that involves a belief on the agent’s part that he or she is doing something morally wrong. (1997: 418)

The above reasoning may apply not just to cases in which a person is unaware of the consequences of her action, but also to cases in which a person is unaware of the moral status of her behavior. A slaveowner, for example, might think that slaveholding is permissible, and so, on the account considered here, he will be blameworthy only if he is culpable for his ignorance about the moral status of slavery, which will require, for example, that he ignored evidence about its moral status while knowing that this is something he should not do (Rosen 2003 and 2004).

These reflections can give rise to a couple forms of skepticism about moral responsibility (and particularly about blameworthiness). First, we might come to endorse a form of epistemic skepticism on the grounds that we rarely have insight into whether a wrongdoer was akratic—that is, was a knowing wrongdoer—at some suitable point in the etiology of a given action (Rosen 2004). Alternatively, or in addition, one might endorse a more substantive form of skepticism on the grounds that a great many normal wrongdoers don’t exhibit the sort of knowing wrongdoing supposedly required for responsibility. In other words, perhaps very many wrongdoers don’t know that they are wrongdoers and their ignorance on this score is not their fault since it doesn’t arise from an appropriate earlier instance of knowing wrongdoing. In this case, very many ordinary wrongdoers may fail to be morally responsible for their behavior. (For skeptical suggestions along these lines, see M. Zimmerman 1997 and Levy 2011.)

There is more to the epistemic dimension of responsibility than what is contained in the above skeptical argument, but the argument does bring out a lot of what is of interest in this domain. For one thing, it prominently relies on a tracing strategy. This strategy is used, for example, in accounts that feature a person who does not, at the time of action, fulfill control or knowledge conditions on responsibility, but who nonetheless seems morally responsible for her behavior. In such a case, the agent’s responsibility may be grounded in the fact that her failure to fulfill certain conditions on responsibility is traceable to earlier actions undertaken by the agent when she did fulfill these conditions. For example, a person may be so intoxicated that she lacks control over, or awareness of, her behavior, and yet it may still be appropriate to hold her responsible for her intoxicated behavior insofar as she freely took steps to intoxicate herself. The tracing strategy plays an important role in many accounts of responsibility (see, e.g., Fischer & Ravizza 1998: 49–51), but it has also been subjected to important criticisms (see Vargas 2005; for a reply see Fischer and Tognazzini 2009; for more on tracing, see Khoury 2012, King 2014, Shabo 2015, and Timpe 2011).

Various strategies for rejecting the above skeptical argument also illustrate stances one can take on the relevance of knowledge for responsibility. These strategies typically involve rejecting the claim that knowing wrongdoing is fundamental to blameworthiness. For example, it might be argued that it is often morally reckless to perform actions when one is merely uncertain whether they are wrong, and that this recklessness is sufficient for blameworthiness (see Guerrero 2007; also see Nelkin & Rickless 2017b and Robichaud 2014). Another strategy would be to argue that blameworthiness can be grounded in cases of morally ignorant wrongdoing if it is reasonable to expect the wrongdoer to have avoided her moral ignorance, and particularly if her ignorance is itself caused by the agent’s own epistemic and moral vices (FitzPatrick 2008 and 2017). Relatedly, it might be argued that one who is unaware that he does wrong is blameworthy if he possessed relevant capacities for avoiding his failure of awareness; this approach may be particularly promising in cases in which an agent’s lack of moral awareness stems from a failure to remember her moral duties (Clarke 2014, 2017 and Sher 2006b, 2009; also see Rudy-Hiller 2017). Finally, it might simply be claimed that morally ignorant wrongdoers can harbor, and express through their behavior, objectionable attitudes or qualities of will that suffice for blameworthiness (Arpaly 2003, Björnsson 2017, Harman 2011, Mason 2015, Talbert 2013). This approach may be most promising in cases in which a wrongdoer is aware of the material outcomes of her conduct but unaware of the fact that she does wrong in bringing about those outcomes.

For more, see the entry on the epistemic condition for moral responsibility .

The special issues of Midwest Studies in Philosophy cited in the Introduction are Volume 30 (2006) and Volume 38 (2014), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Flickers of Freedom (multiple contributors, coordinated by Thomas Nadelhoffer, closed 9 February 2017, archive version)
Eshleman, Andrew, “Moral Responsibility”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/moral-responsibility/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]

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The topic of this entry is not—at least directly—moral theory; rather, it is the definition of morality.Moral theories are large and complex things; definitions are not. The question of the definition of morality is the question of identifying the target of moral theorizing. Identifying this target enables us to see different moral theories as attempting to capture the very same thing.
PDF Ethics: Definition, moral philosophy, nature of moral judgments and
Philosophy literally means love of wisdom, from the Greek words. philia meaning love or friendship and. sophia meaning wisdom. The following three areas of philosophy will be our major concern: epistemology (the study of knowledge) Metaphysics (the study of the nature of reality) Ethics (the study of morality) Aesthetics (the study of values in ...
The Definition of Morality
The term "morality" can be used either. descriptively to refer to a code of conduct put forward by a society or, some other group, such as a religion, or. accepted by an individual for her own behavior or. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.
Essays in Moral Skepticism
Chapter 11, "Moral Fictionalism," develops Joyce's favored brand of fictionalism and defends it from a number of worries. His moral fictionalism is revolutionary (we're not already pretending, but we should start pretending) and game-oriented (we pretend to morally assert, we don't assert of the moral pretense). Fictionalizing is claimed to be ...
On moral equivalence
This definition expresses the complexity of moral equivalence, as well as draws attention to the core components of the concept. It therefore renders more explicit a type of claim that is otherwise easy to treat as self-evident. What such explicitness leads to will be the subject of the remaining sections of the essay.
Moral Responsibility
Moral Responsibility. Making judgments about whether a person is morally responsible for her behavior, and holding others and ourselves responsible for actions and the consequences of actions, is a fundamental and familiar part of our moral practices and our interpersonal relationships.
Congratulations to Benjamin Hause, who successfully defended his
Congratulations to Brenden Kost, who successfully defended his master's thesis, "Symmetry without Skepticism: Compromising with Rosen on Moral Ignorance and Responsibility." Congratulations to Christina Karabiyik, who successfully defended her master's thesis, "In Defense of Longstanding Anger."

Moral Philosophy

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Consequentialism

Utilitarianism

Virtue Ethics

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Moral Philosophy

Types of Moral Philosophy

Examples of Moral Philosophy

Why is Moral Philosophy Important?

Origin of Moral Philosophy

Controversies in Moral Philosophy

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5.1: Moral Philosophy – Concepts and Distinctions

5.1.1 The Language of Ethics

5.1.2 How Are Moral Facts Real?

Moral Objectivism

Moral Subjectivism

Moral Absolutism

5.1.3 How Do We Know What is Right?

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5.1.4 Psychological Influences

5.1.5 The Meaning of “Good”

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Essay on Moral Philosophy

100 Words Essay on Moral Philosophy

Important Ideas in Moral Philosophy

Making Decisions

Different Cultures, Different Morals

Why It Matters

250 Words Essay on Moral Philosophy

Right and Wrong

Good Habits

Choices Matter

Why Study Moral Philosophy?

500 Words Essay on Moral Philosophy

Good vs. Bad

Rules and Choices

Different Views

Thinking for Ourselves

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5 Is There a Single True Morality?

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Moral Philosophy: The 5 Most Important Ethical Theories

Moral Philosophy: Consequentialism

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Virtue Ethics

Moral Absolutism

Moral Nihilism

The Key Questions of Moral Philosophy

What Is Act Consequentialism?

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Introduction

The concept of moral equivalence

The issue of false equivalence

Moral equivalence, truth, and comparative judgment

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