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Responsibility and the Demands of Morality: Collected Papers

Online ISBN:
9780191997273
Print ISBN:
9780198893912
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Responsibility and the Demands of Morality: Collected Papers

Kyla Ebels-Duggan (ed.),
Kyla Ebels-Duggan
(ed.)

Professor of Philosophy

Northwestern University
,
USA
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Berislav Marušić (ed.)
Berislav Marušić
(ed.)

Senior Lecturer

University of Edinburgh
,
UK
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Published online:
6 January 2025
Published in print:
23 January 2025
Online ISBN:
9780191997273
Print ISBN:
9780198893912
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Stephen J. White was developing a comprehensive view of responsibility and its limits when his life was tragically cut short. This volume contains his collected papers. White’s view of responsibility spans across ethics, action theory, and interpersonal epistemology. Its core idea is that to be responsible for doing or believing something is to be answerable for why one has done it or why one believes it. And to be responsible for a state of affairs is to be answerable for why things are that way, rather than some other way. White deploys this conception of responsibility to illuminate the notions of autonomy, coercion, shared reasoning, self-prediction, doxastic wronging, and peer disagreement. He also discusses the nature of practical reasoning: he argues against a production-oriented conception of practical reasoning, he delineates the scope of transmission principles in means-ends reasoning, and he identifies a limited role for self-prediction that is subject to an anti-opportunism constraint. The papers form the outline of a deep ethical outlook that takes seriously our personal and collective responsibilities and yet leaves room for personal autonomy both in thought and in action.

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