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Brink analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. He argues that an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused, and that responsibility consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities, and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities.
List of contents
- 1: Prolegomena
- 2: The Reactive Attitudes and Responsibility
- 3: The Fair Opportunity Conception of Responsibility
- 4: Fair Opportunity, Capacities, and Possibilities
- 5: Fair Opportunity and History
- 6: Blame, Punishment, and Predominant Retributivism
- 7: The Nature and Significance of Culpability
- 8: Affirmative Defenses: Principles and Puzzles
- 9: Structural Injustice and Fair Opportunity
- 10: Situationism and Fair Opportunity
- 11: Incompetence, Psychopathy, and Fair Opportunity
- 12: Immaturity and Fair Opportunity
- 13: Addiction and Fair Opportunity
- 14: Battered Persons, Provocation, and Fair Opportunity
- 15: Partial Responsibility and Excuse
About the author
David O. Brink, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
David O. Brink is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His research is in ethical theory, history of ethics, moral psychology, and jurisprudence. He is the author of Moral Realism and The Foundations of Ethics (CUP 1989), Perfectionism and the Common Good (OUP 2003), and Mill's Progressive Principles (OUP 2013). He received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science from the University of Minnesota (1980) and a PhD in Philosophy from Cornell University (1984). He served as Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University and as Assistant and Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining UC San Diego in 1994. He gave the 2013 Lindley Lecture.
Summary
Brink analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. He argues that an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused, and that responsibility consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities, and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities.
