Responsibility and Desert

In Responsibility & Desert, Michael McKenna defends a theory of moral responsibility that explains the relationship between a wrongdoer and those who blame or punish on analogy with a conversation between speakers of a shared language. In central cases, blame functions like a conversational reply to another whose act bears a meaning revealing the morally objectionable quality of her will. But such blaming responses can be harmful. McKenna defends the thesis that they can nevertheless be justified in terms of desert, and he resists several criticisms of desert-based justifications for blame and punishment.

List of contents

• Chapter 1: Introduction


• Part I The View


• Chapter 2: Directed Blame and Conversation


• Chapter 3: Basically Deserved Blame and Its Value1


• Chapter 4: Punishment and the Value of Deserved Suffering


• Part II Clarifications and Further Developments


• Chapter 5: The Free Will Debate and Basic Desert


• Chapter 6: Fittingness as a Pitiful Intellectualist Trinket?


• Chapter 7: Guilt and Self-Blame


• Part III Interrogating the Proposal


• Chapter 8: The Attenuated Role of the Hostile Emotions


• Chapter 9: Power, Social Inequities, and the Conversational Theory


• Chapter 10: Wimpy Retributivism and the Promise of Moral Influence Theories


• Chapter 11: Conclusion

Product details

• Authors: Michael Mckenna, Michael (Professor of Philosophy Mckenna, McKenna Michael
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 26.01.2025
• EAN: 9780197679968
• ISBN: 978-0-19-767996-8
• No. of pages: 336
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; PHILOSOPHY / Social, PHILOSOPHY / Political, PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy, PHILOSOPHY / Metaphysics, Social & political philosophy, Ethics & moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology, Philosophy: metaphysics and ontology, Ethics and moral philosophy