The Sense of Responsibility Worth Worrying About

At the heart of the project The Sense of Responsibility Worth Worrying About is a thesis called responsibility skepticism. It holds that there is good reason to doubt that in our world people are morally responsible for their actions. This position is taken to support the normative position that certain aspects of our blame practices are unjust. The goal of the project is to clarify what this discussion should be about: What should skeptics mean when they speak of responsibility or unjust blame? And how should one understand the property of being morally responsible when trying to refute skeptical arguments? The central hypothesis of the project is that the notion of moral claim forfeiture should play an important role in the discussion of responsibility skepticism: skeptics should be understood as saying that, according to them, no person in our world forfeits moral claims simply because he or she willfully and knowingly commits an offense. Defenders of moral responsibility should deny exactly this positionthis is the proposal to be elaborated in the project.

A question discussed in philosophy is whether people can be morally responsible for their actions. For instance, some philosophers believe that no human being has free will - for example, because our world is completely determined or because a divine being already knows what we are going to do and we therefore cannot help but do it. However, they take free will to be necessary for us to be responsible for our actions. One problem for the discussion of this line of thought is that it is not clear what "morally responsible" is supposed to mean here. This is precisely where the research project The Sense of Responsibility Worth Worrying About comes in. It asks: What exactly are we to understand by "moral responsibility" when we discuss whether people have free will and can be responsible? The project developed the Claim Forfeiture View, according to which responsibility means that people forfeit their claims against certain blame reactions through morally questionable actions. In other words, if we are morally responsible in the relevant sense and perform a problematic action, then, according to the basic idea, we cannot complain if others treat us worse than before by blaming us. If we do something problematic but don't have free will, then, the idea goes, we can always complain when others react to us in a certain blaming way. The project also has practical applications, for example in AI ethics. One essay argued that AI systems can be morally responsible for their actions in an important sense. In addition, the idea was presented that it sometimes makes sense to blame AI systems. Other essays examine methodological differences in responsibility research as well as the relationship between blame and forgiveness. A doctoral thesis is dedicated to the relation between blame and praise and argues, among other things, that it can be appropriate to blame and praise people for the same action. Based on these considerations, the Salzburg Ethics Group is now working on a follow-up project. At the heart of it is the question of how we should think about praiseworthy actions if we believe that no human being has free will and is morally responsible. That's what the project "Skepticism about Praiseworthiness" is about.