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Moral Responsibility and Political Freedom*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Bernard Williams
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Extract

In the phrase “moral responsibility”, the term “moral” can register two different ideas. On the one hand, it may introduce a particular field of application and a corresponding class of consequences, which are informal and social rather than formal and supported by force. Used in this way, “moral responsibility” is distinguished from legal responsibility. A quite different use of the term is involved when “moral” is introduced to imply a certain basis of assessment, one that places particular emphasis on the voluntary. In this sense, moral responsibility can be proposed as a basis of assessment even when what is in question is legal responsibility, for instance in relation to the criminal law.

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Articles
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The Cambridge Law Journal , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 1997 , pp. 96 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge Law Journal and Contributors 1997

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References

1 , Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley 1993), chapter 3.Google Scholar

2 It is illustrated in Shame and Necessity by the contrast between two agents in Homer: Telemachus, who carelessly left a door open, and Agamemnon, who took Briseis away from Achilles, and indeed meant to do so, but was (he later claims) in a strange state of mind when he did so.

3 Moore, , Act and Crime: The Philosophy of Action and its implications for Criminal Law (Oxford 1993), pp. 253 seq.Google Scholar For a discussion of this and related views of Moore's see the symposium in 142 University of Pennsylvania Law Review (1994), pp. 1443–1840.

4 The voluntaristic version. Retribution is not necessarily confined to the voluntary: see below, p. 100.

5 Hart, , Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law (Oxford 1968), esp. ch. 2.Google Scholar

6 I am grateful to Antony Duff for making this point in the discussion of the Aquinas Lecture.

7 “Turn him round with regard to values” is Robert Nozick's phrase in Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Harvard 1984), at pp. 363 seq.Google Scholar For further comment on the present lines, see “Nietzsche's minimalist moral psychology”, European Journal of Philosophy 1.1 (1993), reprinted in Williams, Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge 1995).

8 Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Basic Books 1974), p. 225.