PHI 214: Seminar in Ethics,Fall 2012 UCD, Recent Work on Moral Responsibility
M. Oshana
SYLLABUS
Course description:
1. An analysis of the concept of moral responsibility—of what moral responsibility means—begins with an exploration of the meaning and content of responsibility ascriptions: When we judge a person to be morally responsible for her choices or actions, what are we expressing by that judgment? Are we, for example, saying just that the agent is accountable in the sense that she owes us an explanation? Are we expressing an attitude that we think is the appropriate reaction to take toward persons in such situations? Are we claiming that the agent is praise/blameworthy in some respect? And what view of a person, and of a person’s “moral self” does this judgment require us to adopt?
2. We will focus on the epistemic component of responsible agency. What kind of moral knowledge is assumed of responsible agents? What requirements of rationality or “right-reason” are necessary for moral responsibility? Is a theory of morally responsible agency that incorporates substantive and objective (or “external”) standards of rationality, unduly exclusionary?
Requirements:
1. Each student must meet with me no later than week seven to select a research topic for the seminar. These meetings will take approximately one-half hour. This project will culminate in a term paper.
2. Each student must provide me with a working bibliography and an outline of his/her research projectby week eight.
3. Each member of the seminar will be expected to give a presentation of his/her project, and to lead a discussion on the subject. The student must provide a handout of the presentation to the class.
4. Each student must meet with me during week nine to discuss the status of his/her research paper.
5. Students will write a term paper of about 15 pages in length. Papers are due on final exam week. I do not make it a policy to give incompletes.
Texts: The book by Fischer, Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas is available in paperback on Amazon. It is required, so please buy it. Many of the papers are available through JSTOR (the electronic database accessible through the UCD library). Those that are not will be available on SmartSite.
Schedule (in rough order of discussion timeline):
Oct. 1, Oct. 4:
Marina Oshana, “Ascriptions of Responsibility,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 34, No. 1, January, 1997, pp. 71-83. Reprinted in John Martin Fischer, ed., Free Will: Critical Concepts in Philosophy (Routledge, June 2005). Reprinted in Carl Wellman, ed., and Lawrence C. Becker, series ed., Rights and Duties (Ethical Investigations), (Routledge, June, 2002).
Peter Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 48 (1962), pp. 1-25. Reprinted in John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, eds., Perspectives on Moral Responsibility, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 45-66.
R. Jay Wallace, “Reason and Responsibility,” in Garrett Cullity and BerysGaut, eds., Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 321-344. Reprinted as Chapter 6 of Wallace, Normativity and the Will,Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
Optional: Gary Watson, “Responsibility and the Limits Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme,” reprinted in Watson, Agency and Answerability (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 219 -259.
Oct. 11, Oct 18:
Gary Watson, “Two Faces of Responsibility,” reprinted in Agency and Answerability (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 260-288.
Angela Smith, “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: In Defense of a Unified Account,” Ethics 122 (April 2012): 575-589.
David Shoemaker, “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility,” Ethics, Vol. 121, No. 3 (April 2011), pp. 602-632.
Oct. 25:
Harry Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,”The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 3(Dec. 1969), 829-39, and
______, “Coercion and Moral Responsibility,” in Ted Honderich, ed., Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). Both reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About, (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Nov. 1, 8, 15:
John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, DerkPereboom, and Manuel Vargas, Four Views on Free Will (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).
Nov. 29: Student presentations of term paper proposals
Dec. 6:
P.S. Greenspan, “Responsible Psychopaths,” PhiIosophical Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2003. [Cancel- student presentations]
Optional: Angela Smith, “Control, Responsibility, and Moral Assessment,” Philosophical Studies 138 (3): 367 – 392 (2008). [Cancel- student presentations]
Matthew Talbert, “Blame and Responsiveness to Moral Reasons: Are Psychopaths Blameworthy?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 89 (2008), pp. 516 –535.
Gary Watson, “The Trouble with Psychopaths,” in Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar, and Samuel Freeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). [Cancel- student presentations]
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