Moral Praise and Moral Performance
Many discussions of moral responsibility are focused on cases where the prior agency of the persons held responsible can safely be presupposed. Yet some attributions of moral responsibility involve states of affairs where there is no obviously relevant prior exercise of agency on the part of the persons held responsible. Do such attributions of responsibility make sense, or are they based on a mistaken understanding of moral agency that fails to respect the nature and value of personal autonomy?
Some of my work in this area has been focused on the idea of circumstantial luck and vicarious responsibility, on which topic I co-edited a special issue of The Monist in 2021. I have also been working on a series of papers in which I pursue the issue of circumstantial luck in the context of moral appraisals of individual moral agency. One of these papers, entitled 'Moral Luck and Moral Performance', was published in The European Journal of Philosophy in 2020. A draft of this paper can be downloaded below.
Much of my current work is focused on gaining a better understanding of the ethics of moral praise. One of the guiding targets of this work is the curious but historically influential claim that apt moral praise is a symptom of moral imperfection and would not play a significant part in a truly excellent life.
Many discussions of moral responsibility are focused on cases where the prior agency of the persons held responsible can safely be presupposed. Yet some attributions of moral responsibility involve states of affairs where there is no obviously relevant prior exercise of agency on the part of the persons held responsible. Do such attributions of responsibility make sense, or are they based on a mistaken understanding of moral agency that fails to respect the nature and value of personal autonomy?
Some of my work in this area has been focused on the idea of circumstantial luck and vicarious responsibility, on which topic I co-edited a special issue of The Monist in 2021. I have also been working on a series of papers in which I pursue the issue of circumstantial luck in the context of moral appraisals of individual moral agency. One of these papers, entitled 'Moral Luck and Moral Performance', was published in The European Journal of Philosophy in 2020. A draft of this paper can be downloaded below.
Much of my current work is focused on gaining a better understanding of the ethics of moral praise. One of the guiding targets of this work is the curious but historically influential claim that apt moral praise is a symptom of moral imperfection and would not play a significant part in a truly excellent life.
| luckfinal2020p.pdf |