The expression of obligation in student academic writing (original) (raw)
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Chapter 5: Commitment and responsibility
The aim of this Chapter is to explore the relation between normative and empirical expectations, and attributions of responsibility. As I argued in Chapters 3 and 4, social commitments give rise to both types of expectations. On the one hand, social commitments are fulfilled on a regular basis, and this regularity creates empirical expectations about what agents will do. On the other hand, social commitments create social obligations, which are normative (or justificatory) reasons for actions that are socially acquired and acknowledged. By becoming socially committed, agents create normative expectations, and acknowledge being the target of such expectations. These expectations refer to what the agents should do. Responsibility is a very broad concept. Moral and legal philosophy have provided many different definitions of what responsibility is, as well as different set of criteria an agent has to meet in order to be held responsible. The claim I will defend here is that responsibility can be understood in a non‑moral and non‑legal sense, as a relation between an agent and an outcome to another agent, who attributes responsibility. This relation is basically explanatory: an agent is responsible for an outcome if it is possible to explain the outcome in terms of the agent's authorship. The structure of this Chapter is as follows. Section 5.1 analyses different concepts of responsibility, and argues for a normative notion of responsibility as attributability which precedes moral or legal responsibility. In Section 5.2, I examine two traditional criteria for attributing responsibility. Intuitively, an agent can only be responsible for what she has caused; I will present an overview of some problems related to causal responsibility. Then, I move to analysing the criteria regarding the agent's capabilities, both external (freedom conditions) and internal (self‑control and reason‑responsiveness). In the Section 5.3, I will present a contrastive account of causal explanations. The practice of asking and giving explanations is contextual to the background assumptions against which the explanation is required. I will argue that empirical and normative expectations play a fundamental role in explaining the causal relevance given to agents. I finally examine the relation between explanation and justification of action through the distinction between exemptions and excuses.
The Distinction Between Justifying and Requiring: Nothing to Fear
This chapter collects a number of arguments for a robust distinction between the justifying weight and requiring weight of a given normative practical reason. It then presents a new form of argument for such a distinction: a demonstration that it is already latent in the very different accounts of such reasons supported by Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star, T. M. Scanlon, and Joseph Raz. That the justifying/requiring distinction shows up in views that are so different in other ways – views that, moreover, did not set out explicitly set out to capture or even allow for it – suggests that it is a genuine feature of the practical normative domain. The chapter also shows how a more explicit recognition of a robust justifying/requiring distinction would provide important benefits for proponents of all three views. This too provides some reason to accept it.
Routledge Handbook of Responsibility , 2023
Men and women from different cultures around the world often behave in ways that are characteristic of their sex. Social constructivists attribute gender-typical behaviors to socialization alone, while others attribute them to evolutionary factors. The first question this raises is whether the choice of scientific explanation makes any difference to how we should hold each other responsible for our actions. Second, gender-typical behavior may result in self-harm, or harm to others. Should that make a difference to whether we hold individuals responsible? These two questions concern, respectively, the origins and the consequences of certain actions. We also need to ask whether the origin that matters is not the scientific origin but rather whether the behavior originates from individuals honoring or neglecting their moral duties, for example, to their offspring. Regarding consequences, perhaps we should attend to whether holding individuals responsible for certain behaviors has better consequences than not doing so. The paper also explains how behaviors that are statistically correlated with one sex may lead some retributivists and deterrence theorists to opposite conclusions.