The scope and the grounds of responsibility

New Criminal Law Review

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 91-118

  Tadros, Victor ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43549093520     PISSN: 19334192     EISSN: 19334206     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/nclr.2008.11.1.91     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (41)

1. For a rich Kantian exploration. see Christine M. Korsgaard. The Sources of Normativity (Onora O'Neill ed., 1996).
2. For two examples, see Peter Cane, Responsibility in Law and Morality (2002)
3. William Wilsonm Central Issues in Criminal Theory (2002).
4. See Victor Tadros, Criminal Responsibility chs. 1-2 (2005).
5. Although perhaps as Alfred Mele suggests, we should keep all possibilities that defend our pratices open at this stage. See Alfred R. Mele, Free Will and Luck (2006).
6. Tadros, supra note 3, chs.1-2.
7. For some libertarian strategies to combat this concern, see Mele, supra note 4.
8. Mele also raises some concerns for compatibilists, but these concerns seem less powerful to me. See id. ch. 7.
9. Harry G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (1988).
10. See Gary Watson, Free Agency, in Agency and Answerability 13 (2004)
11. R. Jay Wallace, Caring, Reflexivity and the Structure of Volition, in Normativity and the Will 190 (2006).
12. See, for example, James David Velleman, What Happens When Someone Acts?, in The Possibility of Practical Reason 123 (2000).
13. For discussion, see John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility chs. 7-8 (1998)
14. Alfred R. Mele Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy ch. 9 (1995)
15. Mele, supra note 4, ch-7.
16. R.A. Duff, Answering for Crime, 106 Proc. Aristotelian Soc'y 85, 101-03 (2006).
17. I use the term accident in the restricted sense of a harm causing action for which I bear no fault.
18. Jeannette Kennett, Agency and Responsibility: A Common-Sense Moral Psychology (2001).
19. Fischer & Ravizza, supra note 10, at 12.
20. See, e.g., H.L.A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law 214-15 (1968).
21. This distinction is, I think, more or less fundamental to the terrain that philosophers of moral responsibility wish to explore, but it is rarely explored in much depth. For example, Fischer and Ravizza use the distinction to mark out the realm that they are exploring at the beginning of Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, one of the leading accounts of moral responsibility See Fischer & Ravizza, supra note 10. But they do little to explore the boundaries of the two ideas or what they have in common. They move very quickly to associate the realm of moral responsibility which they are considering to that where punishment and resentment are at issue. But, as will already be clear, there are many responses short of punishment and responsibility that appear to be appropriate to a range of conduct beyond the realm that they consider.
22. For further investigation of the relationship between scientific and legal accounts of causation that complicate this picture somewhat, see Tadros, supra note 3, ch.6.
23. For an extended defense of this claim, see Tadros, supra note 3, ch.6.
24. See John Gardner, The Mark of Responsibility, 23 Oxford J. Legal Stud. 157 (2003)
25. Tadros, supra note 3, ch. 1.
26. It is interesting to note here that the French citizen does appropriately say sorry for what has happened. But that should not be thought an apology of course.
27. I was encouraged to think about this issue during a seminar given at Edinburgh by Scott Veitch.
28. For a brief, terminologically confusing, but interesting exploration of this kind of responsibility, and the potential dangers of overestimating its significance, see Hannah Arendt, Collective Responsibility, in Responsibility and Judgment 147 (Jerome Kohn ed., 2003).
29. This is the Rawlsian method that Fischer and Ravizza claim to use. See Fischer & Ravizza, supra note 10 at 10-11.
30. Tadros, supra note 3, chs.1, 5.
31. Cane, supra note 2.
32. See Peter Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, in Free Will 72 (Gary Watson ed., 2d ed. 2003).
33. For development of the idea in the light of concerns about it, see Gary Watson, Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme, in Agency and Answerability, supra note 9, at 219
34. R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (1994)
35. Tadros, supra note 3, ch. 1.
36. Sometimes the term role responsibility is used instead of prospective responsibility, but because I don't think that prospective responsibility is exclusively role based, I prefer the latter term.
37. See also Samuel Scheffler, Relationships and Responsibilities, in Boundaries and Allegiances: Problem of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought 97 (2001).
38. See Tadros, supra note 3, ch. 3.
39. For further investigation, see id. chs. 3, 9, 11, 13.
40. This is also the case with tort law, as note above.
41. See also id. ch. 3.