Responsibility from the Margins

David Shoemaker presents an original, pluralistic theory of the nature of responsibility, built out of the different kinds of emotional responses people tend to have to the expressions of different kinds of quality of will. The approach is motivated by the ambivalent reactions had to several real-life agents on the margins of our moral responsibility communities, including those with clinical depression, Alzheimer's dementia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychopathy, autism, and intellectual disabilities. Shoemaker develops and defends a tripartite theory of responsibility, with attributability being about quality of character, answerability being about quality of judgment, and accountability being about quality of regard. Armed with crucial empirical details, Shoemaker then investigates the predictions of the theory for each specific type of marginal agent, as well as what practical advice the theory might imply for their caregivers and loved ones."David Shoemaker presents an original, pluralistic theory of the nature of responsibility, built out of the different kinds of emotional responses people tend to have to the expressions of different kinds of quality of will. The approach is motivated by the ambivalent reactions had to several real-life agents on the margins of our moral responsibility communities, including those with clinical depression, Alzheimer's dementia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychopathy, autism, and intellectual disabilities. Shoemaker develops and defends a tripartite theory of responsibility, with attributability being about quality of character, answerability being about quality of judgment, and accountability being about quality of regard. Armed with crucial empirical details, Shoemaker then investigates the predictions of the theory for each specific type of marginal agent, as well as what practical advice the theory might imply for their caregivers and loved ones.

David Shoemaker is Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Murphy Institute at Tulane University. He is the author of numerous articles on agency and moral responsibility, normative and applied ethics, and personal identity, and he is the general editor of the series Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility.