Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a forum for outstanding new work in an area of vigorous and broad-ranging debate in philosophy and beyond. What is involved in human action? Can philosophy and science illuminate debate about free will? How should we answer questions about responsibility for action?

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes, investigating such questions as: · What does it mean to be an agent? · What is the nature of moral responsibility? Of criminal responsibility? What is the relation between moral and criminal responsibility (if any)? · What is the relation between responsibility and the metaphysical issues of determinism and free will? · What do various psychological disorders tell us about agency and responsibility? · How do moral agents develop? How does this developmental story bear on questions about the nature of moral judgment and responsibility? · What do the results from neuroscience imply (if anything) for our questions about agency and responsibility? OSAR thus straddles the areas of moral philosophy and philosophy of action, but also draws from a diverse range of cross-disciplinary sources, including moral psychology, psychology proper (including experimental and developmental), philosophy of psychology, philosophy of law, legal theory, metaphysics, neuroscience, neuroethics, political philosophy, and more. It is unified by its focus on who we are as deliberators and (inter)actors, embodied practical agents negotiating (sometimes unsuccessfully) a world of moral and legal norms.

OSAR is a forum for outstanding new work in an area of vigorous and broad-ranging debate in philosophy and beyond. What is involved in human action? Can philosophy and science illuminate debate about free will? How should we answer questions about responsibility for action? This volume focuses on non-ideal agency and responsibility.

Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes, investigating such questions as: - What does it mean to be an agent? - What is the nature of moral responsibility? Of criminal responsibility? What is the relation between moral and criminal responsibility (if any)? - What is the relation between responsibility and the metaphysical issues of determinism and free will? - What do various psychological disorders tell us about agency and responsibility? - How do moral agents develop? How does this developmental story bear on questions about the nature of moral judgment and responsibility? - What do the results from neuroscience imply (if anything) for our questions about agency and responsibility? OSAR thus straddles the areas of moral philosophy and philosophy of action, but also draws from a diverse range of cross-disciplinary sources, including moral psychology, psychology proper (including experimental and developmental), philosophy of psychology, philosophy of law, legal theory, metaphysics, neuroscience, neuroethics, political philosophy, and more. It is unified by its focus on who we are as deliberators and (inter)actors, embodied practical agents negotiating (sometimes unsuccessfully) a world of moral and legal norms.

Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of willand compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness of will and self-control are possible is of great practical significance.Taking the problem of weakness of will as her starting point, Jeanette Kennett builds an admirably comprehensive and integrated account of moral agency which gives a central place to the capacity for self-control. Her account of the exercise and limits of self-control vindicates the common-sensedistinction between weakness of will and compulsion and so underwrites our ordinary allocations of moral responsibility. She addresses with clarity and insight a range of important topics in moral psychology, such as the nature of valuing and desiring, conceptions of virtue, moral conflict, andthe varieties of recklessness (here characterised as culpable bad judgement) - and does so in terms which make their relations to each other and to the challenges of real life obvious. Agency and Responsibility concludes by testing the accounts developed of self-control, moral failure, and moralresponsibility against the hard cases provided by acts of extreme evil.

This book develops the foundations of an ethics of mind by investigating the responsibility that is presupposed by the requirements of rationality that govern our attitudes. It thereby connects the most recent research on responsibility and rationality in a unifying dialectic. How can we be responsible for our attitudes if we cannot normally choose what we believe, desire, feel, and intend? This problem has received much attention during the last decades, both in epistemology and ethics. Yet, its connections to discussions about reasons and rationality have been largely overlooked. The book has five main goals. First, it reinterprets the problem of responsibility for attitudes as a problem about the normativity of rationality. Second, it connects substantive and structural rationality by drawing on debates about responsibility. Third, it supports recent accounts of the normativity of rationality by explicitly defending the view that epistemic reasons and other ‘right‐kind’ reasons are genuine normative reasons, and it does so by drawing on recent discussions about epistemic blame. Fourth, it breaks the stalemate between rationalist and voluntarist accounts of mental responsibility by proposing a hybrid view. Finally, it argues that being irrational can warrant moral blame, thus revealing an unnoticed normative force of rational requirements. Responsibility for Rationality is an original and essential resource for scholars and advanced students interested in connecting strands of normative theory within epistemology, metaethics, and moral psychology.

In Responsibility & Desert, Michael McKenna defends a theory of moral responsibility that explains the relationship between a wrongdoer and those who blame or punish on analogy with a conversation between speakers of a shared language. In central cases, blame functions like a conversational reply to another whose act bears a meaning revealing the morally objectionable quality of her will. But such blaming responses can be harmful. McKenna defends the thesis that they can nevertheless be justified in terms of desert, and he resists several criticisms of desert-based justifications for blame and punishment.