Smith, one of the soldiers, under orders of his superiors, killed the native on the spot. After the war, a special court tried Smith for murder and acquitted him. But no such confidence can be held to exist if such an order is universally known to everybody, including also the accused, to be without any doubt whatever against the law.
They should, therefore, have refused to obey. As they did not do so, they must be punished. The following rule has been suggested for adoption by an international criminal court as most nearly meeting these requirements assuming, of course, that it is supplemented by a sound sentencing policy : The act of a soldier in obedience to a military order of his superior is not justifiable if, when he committed it, he either actually knew or, under the circumstances, had reasonable grounds for knowing that the act ordered is illegal either under the laws and customs of warfare or under the criminal law of his country; and when the two systems clash, the former shall prevail.
The final proviso is included because otherwise the most lawless nations could easily whitewash their soldiers for the most flagrant violations of the law of nations by simply declaring their acts, if done against the enemy, to be always lawful under their own law. He could not be expected to know the law of the enemy nation that prosecutes him. However, the laws and customs of war, as well as the ordinary principles of criminal law, are generally known and applicable in Germany, Japan, and other Axis countries.
While a sovereign nation is free to adopt any legislation it sees fit, the family of civilized nations is not bound to recognize the erratic Nazi laws.
A rule such as that described above can avoid harsh results if the sentencing procedure after conviction makes allowances for the rank of the accused and if his punishment is lessened in certain circumstances, such as the following: he was not entirely a free agent; there was no way for him to know definitely that he was violating the laws and customs of legitimate warfare; the illegal order was obeyed under stress, at a period of great danger, during hostilities, or the like; the command required instant obedience in carrying out an act that could not be postponed.
If these considerations were applied, many ordinary soldiers would get off with nominal or slight punishment, while officers who had more knowledge of the law and greater freedom of action would be punished more severely. The defense of superior orders and supplementary leniency should, however, perhaps not apply to the various private Nazi militias, such as the Elite Guards and Storm Troopers. Even if it should turn out that they had been made part of the German army by law or decree, they clearly do not deserve the usual protection accorded to soldiers.
They originated as private volunteer corps, and at least in a general way their members knew when they enlisted of the crimes that were expected of them.
GI Roundtable Series. Corey Prize Raymond J. Cunningham Prize John H. Klein Prize Waldo G. Marraro Prize George L. Mosse Prize John E.
Palmegiano Prize James A. Schmitt Grant J. Beveridge Award Recipients Albert J. Corey Prize Recipients Raymond J. This latter ability will be impaired or absent in an agent whose real self is the product of pressures such as a traumatic childhood that have distorted her moral vision.
Watson agrees with Wolf that some approaches to responsibility—i. But Watson denies that these attributions constitute a merely superficial form of responsibility assessment. However, Watson agrees with Wolf that the above story of responsibility is incomplete: there is more to responsibility than attributing actions to agents. The moral demands, and potential for adverse treatment, associated with holding others responsible are part of our accountability as opposed to attributability practices, and these features of accountability raise issues of fairness that do not arise in the context of determining whether behavior is attributable to an agent Watson [ ].
There is responsibility-as-attributability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, behavior is properly attributed to her as reflecting morally important features of her self—her virtues and vices, for example. But there is also responsibility-as-accountability, and when an agent satisfies the conditions on this form of responsibility, which requires more than the correct attribution of behavior, she is open to being held accountable for that behavior in the ways that predominantly characterize moral blame.
Attributionists take moral responsibility assessments to be mainly concerned with whether an action or omission, character trait, or belief is attributable to an agent for the purposes of moral assessment, where this usually means that the action or omission, etc. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that contemporary attributionist views are interested only in specifying the conditions for what Watson calls responsibility-as-attributability. See the previous subsection for the distinction between accountability and attributability.
According to attributionism, fulfillment of attributability conditions is sufficient for holding agents accountable for their behavior. This means that attributionism rejects conditions on moral responsibility that would excuse agents if their characters were shaped under adverse conditions Scanlon —85 , or if the thing for which the agent is blamed was not under her control Sher b and , A.
Attributionists reject these conditions on responsibility because morally and interpersonally significant behavior is attributable to agents that do not fulfill them, and such attributions are taken to be sufficient for an agent to be open to the responses involved in holding agents accountable for their behavior.
Attributionists have also argued that blame may profitably be understood as a form of moral protest Hieronymi , A. Smith , Talbert ; part of the appeal of this move is that moral protests may be legitimate in cases in which the above conditions are not met. Several objections have been posed to attributionism. Some argue that attributionists are wrong to reject the conditions on responsibility mentioned in the last paragraph Levy , ; Shoemaker , a; Watson It has also been argued that the attributionist account of blame is too close to mere negative appraisal Levy ; Wallace 80—1; Watson In addition, Scanlon has been criticized for failing to take negative emotions such as resentment to be central to the phenomenon of blame Wallace , Wolf ; a similar criticism would apply to Sher a.
However, A. JoJo was raised by an evil dictator, and as a result he became the same sort of sadistic tyrant that his father was. As an adult, JoJo is happy to be the sort of person that he is, and he is moved by precisely the desires e. Part of what motivates this conclusion is the thought that it can be unreasonable to expect morally-impaired agents to avoid wrongful behavior, and that it is therefore unfair to expose these agents to the harm of moral blame on account of their wrongdoing.
For detailed development of the moral competence requirement on responsibility in terms of considerations of fairness, see R. The moral competence condition on responsibility can also be motivated by the suggestion that impaired agents are not able to commit wrongs that have the sort of moral significance to which blame would be an appropriate response. The basic idea here is that, while morally-impaired agents can fail to show appropriate respect for others, these failures do not necessarily constitute the kind of flouting of moral norms that grounds blame Watson [ ].
In other words, a failure to respect others, is not always an instance of blame-grounding disrespect for others, since the latter but not the former requires the ability to comprehend the norms that one violates Levy , Shoemaker Considerations about moral competence play an important role in the recent trend of conversational theories of responsibility, which construe elements of our responsibility practices as morally-expressive moves in an ongoing moral conversation.
The thought here is that to fruitfully and fully participate in such a conversation, one must have some degree of competence in the moral language of that conversation. Several prominent versions of the conversational approach develop P. Jay Wallace argues, similarly, that since responsibility practices are internal to moral relationships that are. For additional defenses and articulations of the conversational approach to responsibility, see Stephen Darwall , Miranda Fricker , and Colleen Macnamara Impairments of moral competence come in degrees.
However, at the far end of the spectrum, we encounter more globally and thoroughly impaired figures such as the psychopath.
In philosophical treatments, the psychopath is typically presented as an agent who, while retaining other psychological capacities, is entirely—or as nearly so as possible—incapable of responding appropriately to moral considerations.
This is something of a philosophical construct since real-life psychopathy admits of varying degrees of impairment, corresponding to higher or lower scores on diagnostic measures. And still others have argued that even those who are fully impaired for moral understanding are open to blame as long as they possess broader rational competencies Scanlon —; Talbert This section introduces contemporary skepticism about moral responsibility by way of discussions of several topics that have broad relevance for thinking about responsibility.
If moral responsibility requires free will, and free will involves access to alternatives in a way that is not compatible with determinism, then it would follow from the truth of determinism that no one is ever morally responsible. The skeptical positions discussed below are generally of this sort: the skeptical conclusions they advocate do not depend on the truth of determinism. Is there such a thing as moral luck? Consider a would-be assassin who shoots at her target, aiming to kill, but fails to do so only because her bullet is deflected by a passing bird.
It seems that such a would-be assassin has good moral outcome luck that is, good moral luck in the outcome of her behavior. One might think, in addition, that the would-be assassin is less blameworthy than a successful assassin with whom she is otherwise identical, and that the reason for this is just that the successful assassin intentionally killed someone while the unsuccessful assassin as a result of good moral luck did not.
For important recent defenses of moral luck, see Hanna and Hartman Of course, the successful assassin is responsible for something killing a person for which the unsuccessful assassin is not, but it might be possible to argue that both are morally responsible—and presumably blameworthy— to the same degree insofar as it was true of both of them that they aimed to kill, and that they did so for the same reasons and with the same degree of commitment toward bringing about that outcome see M.
Zimmerman and for this influential perspective. But now consider a different would-be assassin who does not even try to kill anyone, but only because his circumstances did not favor this option.
This would-be assassin is willing to kill under favorable circumstances and so he may seem to have had good circumstantial moral luck since he was not in those circumstances. Perhaps the degree of responsibility attributed to the successful and unsuccessful assassins described above depends not so much on the fact that they both tried to kill as on the fact that they were both willing to kill; in this case, the would-be assassin just introduced may share their degree of responsibility since he shares their willingness to kill.
But an account that focuses on how agents would be willing to act under counterfactual circumstances is likely to generate unintuitive conclusions about responsibility since many agents who are typically judged blameless might willingly perform terrible actions under the right circumstances. Another approach to luck holds that it is inimical to moral responsibility in a way that generally undermines responsibility ascriptions. If this is right, then perhaps,.
Nagel [ 37]. See Russell for a compatibilist account that is led to a variety of pessimism, though not skepticism, on the basis of the concerns about moral luck just described. The argument begins by noting that an agent makes the choices she does because of certain facts about the way she is: for example, the facts about what seems choiceworthy to her. But if this is true, then, in order to be responsible for her subsequent choices, perhaps an agent also needs to be responsible for the facts about what seems choiceworthy to her.
But how can one be responsible for these prior facts about herself? But this prior choice would itself be something for which the agent is responsible only if the agent is also responsible for the fact that that prior choice seemed choiceworthy to her.
And now we must explain how the agent can be responsible for this additional prior fact about herself, which will require positing another choice by the agent, and the responsibility for that choice will also have to be secured, which will require explaining why it seemed choiceworthy to her, and so on.
Only self-creating agents could be fully responsible for their own tendencies to exercise their powers of choice as they do, but self-creation is impossible, so no one is every truly or ultimately morally responsible for their behavior.
A number of replies to this argument and the argument from constitutive moral luck are possible. Perhaps what is needed is not literal self-creation, but simply an ability to enact changes in oneself so as to acquire responsibility for the self that results from these changes Clarke Roughly in this Aristotelian vein, Robert Kane offers a detailed incompatibilist account of how we can secure ultimate responsibility for our actions and Since these undetermined choices will have no sufficient causes, there is no relevant prior cause for which the agent must be responsible, so there is no regress problem Kane 15—16; see Pereboom 47—50 for criticism of Kane on this point.
In such cases, if a person sees reasons in favor of either choice that he might make, and the choice that he makes is undetermined, then whichever choice he makes will have been chosen for his own reasons. According to Kane, when an agent makes this kind of choice, he shapes his character, and since his choice is not determined by prior causal factors, he is responsible for it and for the character it shapes and for the character-determined choices that he makes in the future.
For approaches along these lines, see Dworkin ; Frankfurt , ; Neely ; and Watson But suppose that both addicts are capable of taking higher-order perspectives on their first-order desires, and suppose that they take different higher-order perspectives. The willing addict endorses and identifies with his addictive desire. The willing addict has a kind of freedom that the unwilling addict lacks: they may both be bound to take the drug to which they are addicted, but insofar as the willing addict is moved by a desire that he endorses, he acts freely in a way that the unwilling addict does not Frankfurt In other words, when ascending through the orders of desires, why stop at any particular point, why not think that appeal to a still higher order is always necessary to reveal where an agent stands?
Fischer and Ravizza argue that. For work on the general significance of personal histories for responsibility, see Christman , Vargas , and D. Zimmerman Several examples and arguments featuring the sort of manipulation that worried Fischer and Ravizza have played important roles in the recent literature on responsibility. After the manipulation, Beth is capable of reflecting on her new values, and when she does so, she endorses them enthusiastically.
For replies to Mele and general insights into manipulation cases, see Arpaly , King , McKenna , and Todd ; for discussion of issues about personal identity that arise in manipulation cases, see Khoury , Matheson , Shoemaker Such a stance might involve noting that while Beth acquired her new values in a strange way and in a way that involved moral wrongs done to her , everyone acquires their values in ways that are not fully under their control.
So perhaps it is not as clear as it might first appear that Beth is distinguished from normal agents in terms of her powers of self-governance and her moral responsibility for her behavior. But this reasoning can cut both ways: instead of showing that Beth is assimilated into the class of normal, responsible agents, it might show that normal agents are assimilated into the class of non-responsible agents like Beth. In each scenario, Plum kills Ms.
Pereboom believes that in such a case Plum is clearly not responsible for killing White since his behavior was determined by the actions of the neuroscientists.
In Case 4, Plum is just a normal human being in a causally deterministic universe, and he decides to kill White in the same way as in the previous cases. Furthermore, the reason that Plum is not responsible in these cases seems to be that, in each case, his behavior is causally determined by forces beyond his control Pereboom But then we should conclude that Plum is not responsible in Case 4 since causal determinism is the defining feature of that case. And since, in Case 4, Plum is just a normal human being in a causally deterministic universe, the conclusion we draw about him should extend to all other normal persons in causally deterministic universes.
For example, it could be argued that in Case 1, the manipulation to which Plum is subject undermines his responsibility for some reason besides the fact that the manipulation causally determines his behavior, which would stop the generalization from Case 1 to the subsequent cases Fischer , Mele , Demetriou ; for a response to this line of argument, see Matheson ; Pereboom addresses this concern in his presentation of the argument; also see Shabo Alternatively, it might be argued, on compatibilist grounds, that Plum is responsible in Case 4, and this conclusion might be extended to the earlier cases since Plum fulfills the same compatibilist-friendly conditions on responsibility in those cases McKenna The four-case argument attempts to show that if determinism is true, then we cannot be the sources of our actions in the way required for moral responsibility.
It is, therefore, an argument for incompatibilism rather than for skepticism about moral responsibility. For other skeptical accounts, see Caruso , Smilansky , Waller ; also see the entry on skepticism about moral responsibility.
There has been a recent surge in interest in the epistemic, or knowledge, condition on responsibility as opposed to the freedom or control condition that is at the center of the free will debate. In this context, the following epistemic argument for skepticism about responsibility has been developed. Sometimes agents act in ignorance of the likely bad consequences of their actions, and sometimes their ignorance excuses them from blame for so acting.
How can we distinguish the cases where ignorance excuses from those in which it does not? One proposal is that ignorance fails to excuse when the ignorance is itself something for which an agent might be blamed. And one proposal for when ignorance is blameworthy is that it issues from a blameworthy benighting act in which an agent culpably impairs, or fails to improve, his own epistemic position H.
Smith But when is a benighting act blameworthy? Several philosophers have suggested that we are culpable for benighting acts only when we engage in them knowing that we are doing so and knowing that we should not do so Levy , Rosen , M. Ultimately, the suggestion is that ignorance for which one is blameworthy, and that leads to blameworthy unwitting wrongdoing, has its source in knowing wrongful behavior. Consider an example from Gideon Rosen in which a surgeon orders her patient to be transfused with the wrong type of blood, and suppose that the surgeon was unaware that she was making this mistake.
In the end, for Rosen,. The above reasoning may apply not just to cases in which a person is unaware of the consequences of her action, but also to cases in which a person is unaware of the moral status of her behavior. A slaveowner, for example, might think that slaveholding is permissible, and so, on the account considered here, he will be blameworthy only if he is culpable for his ignorance about the moral status of slavery, which will require, for example, that he ignored evidence about its moral status while knowing that this is something he should not do Rosen and These reflections can give rise to a couple forms of skepticism about moral responsibility and particularly about blameworthiness.
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