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Responsibility and the Problem of So-Called Marginal Agents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2020

LARISA SVIRSKY Open the ORCID record for LARISA SVIRSKY [Opens in a new window]
LARISA SVIRSKY*
Affiliation:
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITYlarisa.svirsky@gmail.com
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Abstract

Philosophical views of responsibility often identify responsible agency with capacities such as rationality and self-control. Yet in ordinary life, we frequently hold individuals responsible who are deficient in these capacities, such as children or people with mental illness. The existing literature that addresses these cases has suggested that we merely pretend to hold these agents responsible or that they are responsible to a diminished degree. In this paper, I demonstrate that neither of these approaches is satisfactory, and I offer an alternative focused on the role relationships play in determining whether it is appropriate to hold someone responsible. I argue that relationships are sources of normative expectations about how parties in that relationship ought to behave and that we can be responsible in virtue of being subject to these norms. This is so not only for those who are impaired or immature, but for all of us.

Keywords

responsibilitymarginal agencyrelationshipsnorms
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 246 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2020

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Footnotes

Thanks to Joshua Blanchard, Owen Flanagan, Jonathan Knutzen, Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco, Doug MacLean, Ram Neta, and especially Susan Wolf for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to audiences at University of Pennsylvania and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society as well as to the editors and an anonymous reviewer for this journal.

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