Overview

There must be some connection between our deontic notions, rightness and wrongness, and our responsibility notions, praise- and blameworthiness. Yet traditional approaches to each set of concepts tend to take the other set for granted. This book takes an integrated approach to these questions, drawing on both ethics and responsibility theory, and thereby illuminating both sets of concepts. Elinor Mason describes this as 'normative responsibility theory': the primary aim is not to give an account of the conditions of agency, but to give an account of what sort of wrong action makes blame fitting. She presents a pluralistic view of both obligation and blameworthiness, identifying three different ways to be blameworthy, corresponding to different ways of acting wrongly. First, ordinary blameworthiness is essentially connected to subjective wrongness, to acting wrongly by one's own lights. Subjective obligation, and ordinary blame, apply only to those who are within our moral community, who understand and share our value system. By contrast, detached blame can apply even when the agent is outside our moral community, and has no sense that her act is morally wrong. In detached blame, the blame rather than the blameworthiness is fundamental. Finally, agents can take responsibility for some inadvertent wrongs, and thus become responsible. This third sort of blameworthiness, 'extended blameworthiness', applies when the agent understands the objective wrongness of her act, but has no bad will. In such cases, the social context may be such that the agent should take responsibility, and accept ordinary blame from the wronged party.

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9780198833604

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Reviews

Elinor Mason has written a short, absorbing book on blameworthiness and responsibility. It is deeply engaged with the current literature, but not in a way that detracts from the overall story Mason has to tell. What's more important, the book seems to get things roughly right - that is, it seems to describe what we do when we blame people: no small feat for a practice so messy and complicated as blaming. * Chad Flanders, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *

Elinor Mason has written a short, absorbing book on blameworthiness and responsibility. It is deeply engaged with the current literature, but not in a way that detracts from the overall story Mason has to tell. What's more important, the book seems to get things roughly right - that is, it seems to describe what we do when we blame people: no small feat for a practice so messy and complicated as blaming. * Chad Flanders, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews * I think anyone with a serious philosophical interest in praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and their relationship to the deontic concepts of right and wrong would find Mason's book to be an excellent resource and there can be little doubt that her work will be influential in normative ethics for many years to come. * Rich Holmes, Metapsychology *

Author Information

Elinor Mason is Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She works on a wide range of issues in ethics, moral responsibility, and feminist philosophy.

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