NUMERO DE VECES POR SEMANA

Early in this essay, I argued that accounts of attributability are beholden to ethical theories of the justification of the reactive attitudes, and not the other way around. One might reasonably wonder, then, what kind of conception of attributability my understanding of the ethics of blame generates.

Because my understanding of the ethics of blame is rule-based, the responsible self that emerges will be the self that is subject to social rules. On this basis, we can rule out as non-responsible anyone who cannot be part of a rule-governed moral community. Animals, infants, psychopaths, and others who cannot understand and/or comply with moral demands, for example, do not, per my view, have

“responsible selves.” This question of the bounds of responsible selfhood in general, of what membership in a moral community requires, is an important one, but I will not address it any further here.

The focus of this work has been the conditions of responsibility for individual actions. According to my theory, how must a member of a moral community be connected to her action such that she may be liable to blame on its basis? I have argued that blameworthiness requires the violation of a good social rule. As such, questions of attributability will be settled by the kind of behavior required for rules violations, and moral rules, as we have seen, sometimes respond to the wide agency of shallow selves.148 Still, it isn’t as though we can make no progress; surely the blameworthy actions of others are not attributable to me!

The question of attributability is not insignificant, but it should be divorced from the conventional search for the conditions of moral responsibility. If my analysis of blameworthiness is correct, all we need from a notion of attributability is a way to distinguish between one person and another. Responsibility theory has traditionally been more ambitious. Likely because of the residual effects of the concern with the metaphysics of free will, responsibility theory has understood blameworthiness roughly as one’s liability to punishment by an all-knowing god, rather than as a fundamentally interpersonal construct

148 _{Contrast this understanding of the self with the self that could be the proper target of God’s eternal punishment.}

That “self” is deep, expressed only in the controlled action of a radically free will, and as narrow as, to use Nagel’s phrase, an “extensionless point.” See: Nagel, T. (1979). Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 35.

shaped by the norms of personal relationships. As a result, it has felt a need to connect blameworthy action to the soul, a requirement we can ease if we embrace the social understanding of blame I have endorsed here.

In fact, the desire to interpret attributability as anything beyond the commonsense notion

expressed by phrases such as “I did it,” “I caused it,” or “It was me,” is what got responsibility theory into trouble, causing theorists to reject truths about action ownership that seem obvious to everyone but responsibility theorists. Was there ever a doubt in any non-philosopher’s mind, for example, that Blair Walsh was the one who missed that consequential kick, or that it was the protagonist of Force Majeure who ditched his family? Even Williams’s unlucky lorry driver knows that running over the child is attributable to him in some meaningful sense. Whatever relationship between agent and action is required for the lorry driver to be justified in feeling that he is connected to that horrible episode in a way that others are not is enough for blame. Once that threshold, however it is ultimately spelled out, is crossed, all of the interesting questions will fall where they belong, squarely in the domain of the ethics of reactive response.

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